Tue, May 2, 2006

If you're at all interested in news articles about Apple and the Mac (in other words, "Andyyyyyy!"), you're familiar by now with mainstream stories that make hay out of viruses or other security vulnerabilities that have been identified for Mac OS X.

These articles exaggerate and misrepresent the issue, because it makes for a more sensational story than the truth: Macs, like any other computer hooked up to the Internet, are susceptible to some level of hacking. For a variety of reasons, they are very rarely hacked, and when new vulnerabilities are discovered, they are discovered by security companies who announce their potential for harm despite the fact that no one in the real world has actually acted to take advantage of the vulnerabilities. (In most cases, Apple fixes the loophole before anyone has time to exploit it; in all cases, such an exploit is entirely preventable if users practice basic online safety, like not running programs that they receive as attachments to spam e-mail.)

It surprises me that – if newspapers have such low standards for getting the facts right – they wouldn't go after topics more interesting than Apple Computer. If you're going to make shit up just to sell a story, make shit up about Brangelina. That's where the money is.

Anyway, I read one such article back in February and I wanted to rip it apart but I never got around to it:

'Worms' Turn on Apple Macs, Bigger Target as Sales Boom [WSJ]

Ah, the perennially enjoyable "selling more Macs is dangerous for Apple" approach. How cute.

More recently, the AP released another such dopey article, and the now-fully-full-time John Gruber had the decency to tear it apart for us:

Good Journalism [DF]

So, enjoy that. Unless you don't really follow Macs in the press, in which case it's just a funny blog entry.