Are Mac safe from Big Brother?

can macs detect and prevent monitoring programs like this?

it just seems scary to me if i leave my macbook in an office for a coffee only to have someone monitor my IMs from then on without me knowing.

Am sure there are. However, I don't think a program like that could be installed without an admin password. So who has access to your admin password?

bobtomay said:

Am sure there are. However, I don't think a program like that could be installed without an admin password. So who has access to your admin password?

Click to expand...

forgot about that. thanks.

but lets assume another scenario...... your employer has installed it..... does OS X have the same weakness as windows in allowing something like this to work without one knowing?

If it's not your computer, wouldn't be doing "anything" on it, that you are not willing for "anyone" to know.

If you are only doing what you should be doing on a computer supplied by your work place, then you have nothing to fear. If you are doing things you shouldn't be doing, why? Save it for when you are on your own time and on your own computer.

There are other ways of monitoring what people are doing on their Macs (or any computers really). Where I work, we log all traffic on the network for security purposes and review the logs on a regular basis. That being said, we tend to treat our employees as adults and allow all traffic through (web, ftp, bittorrent streaming audio/video). Example, yes we do see some porn traffic come through our network and it is against company policy, however the only thing that is done about it is it is flagged in the the network traffic logs with an alert that says, and I kid you not "Score!!!!!...get the lotion!!" We realize that sometimes illegitmate traffic gets through and as long as it is not excesive we don't really care. This policy seems to have worked and employees don't feel like Big Brother is watching them (really, we have bigger things to worry about other than some downloaded mp3 or some topless wallpaper that gets downloaded). In the end, the employees are treated like the adults they are and respect the company policy and we respect their privacy as much as we can

So, to finish this post, while you may or maynot have something installed on your machine, and it may or maynot work, your system administrators maybe watching your traffic and where it is going/coming. Hopefully you have a liberal policy at work that YOU do not take advantage of. If you have to ask the question, you are probably doing something that you shouldn't be doing in the first place.

Cheers

Cheers

agreed with GroovyLinuxGuy

they don't have to install anything on your computer (mac or pc) to monitor how the company's own network is being utilized. of course, most likely, unless you give them a reason to worry or to want to get rid of you, they're either not looking actively at any given person or going to do anything about it if usage is not extraordinary.