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Re: Mathematica 8 + OS X + McAfee = trouble; help?

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  • Subject: [mg124612] Re: Mathematica 8 + OS X + McAfee = trouble; help?
  • From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
  • Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:30:37 -0500 (EST)
  • Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com

On 1/25/12 at 7:09 AM, janos at lobb.com (J=C3=A1nos L=C3=B6bb) wrote:

>Me, as a newbie, I do not use McAfee.   On the Mac it is absolutely
>unnecessary.

This is worded a bit strongly. There are a few (very few)
instances of malware that can impact Mac users. But, these all
seem to currently require some lack of care on the part of the
user before they can cause problems. If you restrict
installation of software to say just what is available from the
Mac App store then there will be no need for a something like
McAfee for you.

However, it is still a good idea to have an antivirus program
available even if you never encounter malware that can impact a
Mac if for no other reason but to avoid passing on malware to
colleagues and others using PCs.

>I never used any antivirus program on any Mac in my life, starting
>from MacPlus to my nice MacBookPro.

I've been using Macs since the days when a Mac II running OS 6
was considered a top of the line machine. I can only recall two
instances of encountering malware (both prior to OS X) and
easily corrected without antivirus software. But I still make
use of antivirus software. But I do not have it configured to
run in the background automatically checking downloads.

Instead, I simply drag anything I download that has executable
code to the antivirus icon for the software in the dock prior to
installing it. This verifies the software is not malware and
safe to install without impacting performance of other software
such as Mathematica. It takes very little effort on my part to
do this.




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