14 DAY TRIAL // There will always be debates regarding whether or not Macs are 100% reliable, as far as security is concerned. However, Apple itself can tell you that isn't so. Otherwise, why would the company hire the former director of security architecture at OLPC (One Laptop per Child)?
According to several reports, Ivan Krstić (known for his work on Bitfrost) has joined Apple in what is undoubtedly an attempt to solidify the security for Mac OS X. Krstić's Bitfrost is an application that isolates every program on a computer using separate environments, thus preventing any of them from damaging the system. He has one year of experience with MIT and other research projects.
“I spent much of the last year devoted to my own research,” Krstić writes on his blog. “I spun down various commitments, and took up a few others: I joined the advisory board for the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization, became a member of the technical working group for Harvard Berkman’s StopBadware, and joined the Security Response Team for Python, my programming language of choice,” he reveals. (the full post is available here).
Speaking of his new role at Apple, Krstić adds that, “... I have — at long last — found my new adventure. After a great deal of deliberation, I moved to California and joined the local fruit vendor. Today was my first day on the job, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.”
Apple has been doing some heavy recruiting lately, snagging IBM's Mark Papermaster for his 25 years of product and technology experience (he now leads the iPod and iPhone engineering teams at Apple), and “stealing” Microsoft's Xbox Senior Director of Strategy, Richard Teversham. Evidence that Apple is seriously considering 3G hardware in a new portable Mac has also been found in a job posting that the company later pulled.