Re: [MacPerl] MacPerl and Hosts

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 10.44 +0100 2000.02.15, mjm wrote:
>Chris nandor wrote some months ago that MacPerl is not a secure enought
>solution on MacOS.

I don't think I said anything about security.  Just performance.  Mac OS is
in many ways more secure than any other mainstream OS.  It has a few
problems, but nothing like the problems Windows and Unix have with
security, just by virtue of the fact that you can't log in and take over a
Mac (unless special software is installed to make that possible).

>It's maybe the explanation of a MasOS server not allowing to run MacPerl.

No, it is problably either 1. unfamiliarity with MacPerl or 2. familiarity
with MacPerl.  :)  That is, a lot of people don't want to install stuff
they don't know about.  Still others know that MacPerl is powerful and
allowing arbitrary CGIs to run can be dangerous; I could easily crash your
machine with a MacPerl program.  Others probably know that MacPerl just is
not very good with CGI handling any substantial load.

Well, that does bring up a couple of security issue though: I can crash
your machine with a MacPerl CGI, but probably not as easily on a Unix box
with a perl CGI, because on Unix I would not have permissions to do certain
things, and because Unix has better memory handling and multitasking.  But
none of this has to do with MacPerl, just any type of program written using
a powerful language and run under Mac OS.

Put another way: Mac OS is less secure from the inside, but more secure
from the outside.

-- 
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

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