Okay, so as a platform the Mac's been taking some dings on the security front lately. The ID3 tag vulnerability wasn't major, but it apparently it started the ball rolling. The Word 2004 Trojan wasn't even a Mac OS X breach, but rather a raw social engineering exploit; that didn't make it any less dangerous, of course. And it was the Help Viewer flaw that finally wrenched the Mac platform into the realm of critical security holes allowing remote parties to execute arbitrary code, the land where Microsoft hangs out at least twice a month. If that wasn't embarrassing enough, Apple's fix didn't actually, um, fix things, and as of right now we're still waiting for a patch that works.

All of this has surely forced you to endure some smug gloating from various Windows-using cronies who are cackling with glee over what they see as proof positive that the Mac isn't any safer than Windows is these days. And yes, we're fully aware of just how annoying that can be, but buck up, Buckaroo, because we're here to tell you that those Windows apologists are wrong.

Seriously, think about it for a second; did anyone report damage of any sort arising from the Help Viewer hole? We've looked, but we can't find a single instance whereby someone got hit by an actual malicious web page; there were dozens of harmless sample exploits, but not one bona fide victim to be found. Meanwhile, Wintel users recently had to run around trying to eradicate all traces of Sasser, the auto-spreading worm of the month; the most energy any of us spent on the Help Viewer thingy was trying to decide between RCDefaultApp and Paranoid Android.

Here, chew on this: faithful viewer Frank Davis forwarded us a Enterprise Security Today article which reports that Microsoft plans to blow a huge wad of cash on trying to tighten up security in Windows. How huge a wad? Try $300 million huge. And while a flaw that allows people to run local scripts on your system by sending you a URL is a serious hole that needs to be plugged, an operating system so swiss-cheesed that you need to spend well over a quarter of a billion dollars getting your customers to install a Service Pack that addresses the more glaring problems (a Service Pack that isn't slated to ship until fall, no less) is a catastrophe massive enough to affect the tides.

Still not convinced? Then consider this one: faithful viewer xylouris pointed out a Symantec Security Response (via Lockergnome) that describes W64.Rugrat.3344, the "first known virus for 64-bit Windows." The thing is, 64-bit Windows isn't even out yet! Granted, there's a Customer Preview version, but still, we're having a hard time accepting that the Mac platform is just as unsafe as Windows when those guys are dealing with viruses for operating system versions that haven't even technically shipped yet. So go gloat over that for a while.

And relax a little! Sheesh.