As usual anti-mac trolls love to jump on the bandwagon and bash the platform with one of the best security track records running.
Neither of these things should be surprising to anyone, and hopefully the antimalware situation on OS X will improve before progressively more insidious Mac viruses are released.
I don't think antimalware is anything I'd ever want to run on a computer I control. Unfortunately, I think we're being pushed into a world where all applications are vetted and purchased through a trusted marketplace, eliminating this vector.
Why not? I mean this as an honest question.
EDIT: If you're concerned about performance or system resources, try a PC with MSE sometime, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how unobtrusive good antimalware can be.
On your comment: > the proper solution is to have better security on the machine.
Strongly disagree; if you look at this MacDefender issue, there is no flaw in OSX that is causing infection, users are installing it on their own accord. But what anti-malware/virus software can do here is warn or prevent the user from installing this in the first place, as it should detect the virus/malware signature.
This is why you need it even if the underlying OS is secure, to try protect users from themselves.
I run several things on both Windows and Mac. The Mac version feels a lot faster. If I shut off all the virus stuff the windows stuff is still slower but not as dramatic. It depends on what the code does, obviously. Any disk or network read/writes take a hit so if you're doing a lot of those it really adds up.
>Strongly disagree; if you look at this MacDefender issue, there is no flaw in OSX that is causing infection, users are installing it on their own accord.
The solution to this is what Apple has already started doing: provide just one place for these kinds of people to get software. Just buy it in the App store. That is the proper approach to "protect users from themselves", not put a 20-30% performance penalty on all Macs.
I agree with you on the App Store front, think it will help to reduce viruses/malware (I think Windows 8 app store will be a huge win too), but it's unlikely that an app store will be the sole place to get software for some time to come. So until it's impossible to manually install software off the internet, I think we're going to need anti-malware/virus software.
I am totally on board with the fact that there are some programs that do this - Norton's suite of anti-malware programs is basically regarded as malware itself. And it even comes preinstalled on a lot of computers.
But other programs work without a hitch.
Flashblock (or AdBlock/Ad Muncher/NoScript) also slows down my browser, but I can't be annoyed at an infinitesimal allocation of my resources to the extension.
This, for a product which hasn't found a single thing on any of my machines. Ever. It's great that they offer it, but it has been worthless for my use.
Mac OS X 10.6 has virus detection built into the OS. Only a couple of viruses are detected because, oddly enough, that's all that have been found. Again, "viruses" not "trojans".
Most "anti-virus" software is worse than malware on its own -- it slows down the computer it's used on. Microsoft Windows, out of the box, will shut down your computer without asking you, quitting out of applications on the way. This, again, is exactly the kind of thing malware does.
It is impossible for any operating system to prevent trojans. As long as the person at the keyboard has admin access, no matter how convoluted the process, they can install whatever malicious program they want.
The only defense is education and awareness.
Have you forgotten that Darwin is by and large derived from BSD? Apple is standing on the shoulders of giants with this one.
I find it ironic that Bott's fear mongering is leading the naive to download shady anti-virus software that is actually adware. These articles are really just contributing to the problem by misinforming people. Ed Bott is the equivalent of Glen Beck.