Apples are forbidden fruit

I read an article today on a ZDNet blog about how Apple Computer orchestrated a smear campaign on the web, and to a lesser degree in the national media, aimed at two computer researchers and the company they worked for. The actual person behind it, according to George Ou, the author of the blog, was Lynn Fox, an Apple PR director. Apparently in an attempt to dissemble in the face of growing technical problems, Fox tried to blame a glitch in the Apple OS that allowed certain forms of wireless hacking into Apples on the two researchers that happened to first describe it.

In fact even months later Apple continued to claim that there were no vulnerabilities in Mac OS X. However, possibly in retaliation for the unfair attack on the two researchers, David Maynor and Jon "Johnny Cache" Ellch, the security research community responded to Apple's behavior with the MoAB (Month of Apple Bugs) and released a flood of zero-day exploits without giving Apple any notification.

In case you're interested, George Ou, the Technical Director of TechRepublic, is a former IT consultant specializing in Servers, Microsoft, Cisco, Switches, Routers and all sorts of other stuff that makes the eyes of boys light up and girls glaze over. His blog is quite interesting. 3 weeks ago he posted about making your own computer in the very accurately titled post "Build a great PC on a budget with these parts and procedures". I didn't think it was still cost effective to build your own PC but this post opened my eyes. Neat, huh?

I know Apple Computers are considered "better" and certainly enjoy a superior aesthetic design but I find it annoying when the claim to be unassailable from hackers arises. Apple "enjoys" such a small slice of the PC pie that there's little incentive for anyone to hack the Apple OS. Same story behind the early seeming immunity from hacking of the Firefox browser. Of course as market share rose, the number of problems did also. Vulnerability is just a way to know when you're enjoying too much success--with software, at least. Apples sure are pretty tho... iPods too.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I love apples both the fruit and the puter although I do not have an apple computer YET!.

:-)
12:49 AM
Anonymous said…
I had this whole long comment written, but it was entry-length, and I felt stupid spamming your comments that much. The short version:
Built PC with 3gig processor, and lots of other techy joys for $1600 in 2003. Am now on Sony Vaio #3, and it's my favorite laptop ever. (#1 was run over. I upgraded to this one a year ago).

I've had a mac for about two weeks now - an intel macbook - and it's nice and I like the cute pink plastic techshell I bought for it, and adding software's mostly easy, but all in all? I like the PCs better. (There is software for news aggregation that makes my job easier that is mac-only, so this is a business expense.)

I have a Zen vision M mp3 player, and I had a Zen Micro, and recently won an iPod shuffle, and I like the Zen's more than any iPod. Truly.
3:50 AM
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