I use John Gruber’s embedded software on a daily basis, and his lucid Mac nerdery is often really helpful. But his most recent arguments about why OS X has fewer security problems than Windows are nothing short of a form of class war:
Windows is like a bad neighborhood, strewn with litter, mysterious odors, panhandlers, and untold dozens of petty annoyances… The Mac is like a good neighborhood, where the streets are clean and the crime rate low. You don’t need bars on your windows in a good neighborhood; you don’t need anti-virus software on the Mac.
This appallingly phobic “good neighbourhood”, “bad neighbourhood” rhetoric, and his additional use of terms like “zero tolerance”, crystallise the war on the poor as the figure of “security” itself. Protecting oneself from malicious data loss = gated communities in cyberspace. Isn’t there a better way to talk about operating system security?
