Story: A worm belies Apple's perfection

Posted by: Anonymous (Friday 5 November 2004, 3:49 PM)

Quote:
"We know this all too well. Last week saw one of the first malware exploits for OS X. As good journalism demands, we called Apple for a statement. Apple really couldn't be bothered – a week after the story broke, it roused itself from contemplation of its own gorgeousness (or whatever it is that Apple's PR does all day) to say 'not a problem'. Not what the rest of the world thinks..."

"As good journalism demands" is particularly laughable in the context of this article and the one you link to wrt to "Opener". You state in that prior article that "Opener is blighting OS X" yet this is pure, unadulterated hyperbole, or put another way - complete bullshit. There hasn't been any instance of this blighting anything other than the misinformed, misguided, poorly written articles about this malware since its discovery and we poor unfortunates that have been exposed to said rubbish. ZDNet's are proving to be no exception. Apple is partially right to infer that this is not a problem (but that isn't actually what they "said" at all... that is something you are putting in the mouths of Apple - yet another example of your bad journalism in practice). It isn't as of yet. It may well be in the future, but as it stands this Opener is more a proof of concept that is effectively harmless. When you state "Not what the rest of the world thinks" what you actually mean is "not what the journalists with either an axe to grind or an obvious high degree of ignorance of their subject think". Why? Because the rest of the world see Opener for what it is - disturbing, but NOT A PROBLEM; a wake up call, but NOT A PROBLEM; a reminder that no OS is perfect and vigilance is important, but NOT IN AND OF ITSELF A PROBLEM.

FWIW, the first "malware" of similar ilk to Opener to be released on OS X was the iTunes installer mistakenly issued by Apple themselves - the one which wiped people's hard drives if they had a space in the name. This was many years ago now, so this form of exploit (a unix shell script that can do a great deal of harm to the OS if executed) has been known about for a long, long time. Especially so as it is a *NIX issue at root.

You claim that you listen to your readers in Talk Back? Utter nonsense - last weeks article still says "blighting" even though it was pointed out that this is completely, totally, utterly untrue. Well, try listening to this instead... stop writing such shoddy articles and get your bloody facts straight before you do... This reader gives you zero out of five apple's until you do.