Security and MSN Messenger Clients

altacleets

Hi I'm new to Mac ownership, just got my PB yesterday. I wanted to download one of the MSN Messenger protocol clients so I can chat with my parents who are hopless PC users. But I'm nervous about possible security exploits in anything that has to do with MS. Is it safe to use these programs or do they open ports allowing people to medle with my computer?

mr. me

Quote:

Originally posted by altacleets

Hi I'm new to Mac ownership, just got my PB yesterday. I wanted to download one of the MSN Messenger protocol clients so I can chat with my parents who are hopless PC users. But I'm nervous about possible security exploits in anything that has to do with MS. Is it safe to use these programs or do they open ports allowing people to medle with my computer?

Please don't download MSN Messenger. If you do, it won't hurt your Mac.

gene clean

Download AdiumX. It has everything MSN Messenger (on a Mac) has, and then some.

altacleets

I've checked out AdiumX and a couple of other's web sites but didn't find any discusion of security issues. Obviously they must open some port and I was wondering how secure they are. Since from what I've heard the only "viruses" that have been able to penetrate OS X came through MS Excell. I guess I'm wondering does anyone have any feelings about MS's chat protocol (is it as shoddy as the rest of their work).



Thanks for your replies so far.



P.S. Mr. Me Don't worry I avoid MS products I've already got OpenOffice running on X11 (One of the first things I downloaded).

gene clean

I'm not sure how secure AdiumX is in general, but I know that for MSN connections, they use libgaim [a library from GAIM - a popular Linux IM client), and GAIM is known to be pretty safe.