Um, have you ever seen a WinXP box with anything but 'allow all' for every permission on every file? Running with everything as administrator? Simply having a permissions model is not enough if it's never used. If OSX had everything chmod 777 by default then it would be equivalent to WinXP.

Yeah actually, I have.

Unfortunately it let you boot from FAT which doesn't have permissions. But if it was using NTFS you would have non writable system files by default.

>Windows XP has the NT security model

Which it enforced badly, since the user was 99% of times the "full blown do anything without any password" administrator.

Are you sure you are not thinking of the Windows XP that exists in your mind? Because the one I used had permissions and never forced you to log in as admin.

If you had said Windows 98 there would be no argument, but XP had real permissions and real accounts.

I used to set up XP machines with restricted accounts for family members. They could not write to just any path. They would need to call me to install stuff. They still got malware. Hence, the existence and enforcement of file permissions: not the only factor, not by far. (You'd also be naive to think privilege escalation bugs don't exist or haven't existed in OS X as well.)

>Are you sure you are not thinking of the Windows XP that exists in your mind?

No, I'm describing the Windows XP that existed in practice in the real world.

That it "had" accounts and permissions is besides the point. Most people didn't have "restricted accounts" but full blown admin ones, and they could install anything without any "sudo" style mechanism.

What I still read here is a ridiculous claim that Unix permissions prevent viruses (https://www.google.com/search?q=os+x+privilege+escalation -- to say nothing about the damage that can be done just compromising the local user) and a clear demonstration that you don't know how Windows security works. When confronted with counterpoints you just say something along the lines of "I never knew about that so I must have been right all along."

>What I still read here is a ridiculous claim that Unix permissions prevent viruses

Not ridiculous, scientific. Perhaps you can't think straight. The fact that you can write viruses taking advantage of mechanisms such as buffer overflows to create privilege escalation, doesn't mean that permissions don't prevent the kind of viruses which are based on simple copy propagation. You know, like all the popular viruses back in the DOS, early Windows, Amiga, Atari etc era.

And I don't really appreciate the strawman you resorted to use (using "unix permissions prevent viruses" as if I said they make them impossible, instead of prevent certain classes of them).

>When confronted with counterpoints you just say something along the lines of "I never knew about that so I must have been right all along."

Are you kidding me? What counterpoints? I know everything you said about Windows XP. How about actually quoting what I said (it's just above your comment), instead of putting strawmans in quotes and pretending it was mine?

FACTS: Windows XP has a default admin account. Most people had full permissions to install and touch anything, and nether bothered, neither did the OS nagged them, to create a restricted account. Heck, the admin account even had empty password in most installations (as was the default).

That you could set up restricted accounts and permissions doesn't mean a thing. And I never said that I didn't know about them (another strawman you had to resort to) -- I said they were irrelevant because most users didn't use them and the OS didn't force you to.