Macintosh OS X

Macintosh OS X has fully integrated support for its own Airport card.

Airport cards are really 802.11b wireless networking interface cards,

fully compatible with other brands of WLANs for the PC or Linux. These

cards may have a different name, but they have the exact same problems

as described in the Windows world. Since Airport is really just

another method of 802.11b WLAN, security is still a major problem.

Airport wireless networks must evolve to deal with new security

threats just as much as Windows did. Mac OS X has integrated support

for automatic updates, and Apple is also very good about putting out

automatic security updates to ensure that your operating system is protected

against new threats that come out all the time.

Macintosh automatic update is somewhat less invasive than its

Microsoft counterpart. The operating system is fully configurable to

check on a schedule that you set to see if updates are available. You

have the option to deny these updates if you choose. Just like Windows,

automatic update can even be turned off, but you must actually change

the settings to disable it.

The Mac OS X operating system does offer the same type of stability

and security that you would find in other UNIX-based systems, so this

platform will most likely evolve to implement more security measures to

authenticate users trying to log into the network and make sure that

they really are who they say.