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Finger Pointing Over iPod Windows Virus
rs232 writes sent us some choice quotes in the finger pointing over the iPod's that recently shipped with a virus on them. "It's not a matter of which platform the virus originated [on]. The fact that it's found on the portable player means that there's an issue with how the quality checks, specifically the content check, was done," Poon wrote in a blog entry. and "Steve, if you need someone to advise on how to improve your quality checks, feel free to contact me 8)."
Who cares how it happened? It's Apple's problem. It's Apple's fault. End of discussion. Apple's comment was childish and absolutely un-called for. Apple should apologize publically, announce that they will improved their QA, and move on.
Only a very small number of a specific model of iPod were affected by these Windows viruses. The entire blame rests with the factory making the iPods for Apple and putting the software image Apple prepared in advance not following good practices with respect to how they set up the empty drives before Apple's software went on them. The problem has been entirely fixed and you cannot even buy one of these infected iPods in the retail market today.
In other words, this is old news. And the size of the problem (the number of units affected) was so small, I would put good money down that we would not even know about the existence of this Windows virus problem if Apple had not disclosed it.
And everybody's blaming them for not noticing. But if you think about it, it was a pretty absurd thing for them to have had to "notice". As I understand it, the virus was implanted by one infected machine among a number of machines at a Chinese manufacturing shop they'd contracted iPod manufacture to. Apple said, "here's a thing that looks like an external disk: please put these bits on it for us". A simple and straightforward enough task, one would think -- but in a world where autorun exists and is or has been enabled by default, perhaps not so straightforward.
It's as if I had a letter to mail to 1000 of my customers, and I took one original down to my friendly print shop and asked them to make 1000 copies, and I or the print shop used an automated machine to fold the 1000 copies and stuff them in envelopes and mail them, and only after they were mailed out and opened by my customers did we start discovering that for some strange reason 1% of them had "FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE" overprinted on page 2. And then found out that the "strange reason" was that one of the copy machines at the print shop, among the several that the print shop divided my job among, was "infected" by a "virus".
If that happened to me, I'd be annoyed, too. (It'd be even more annoying if I were accused of ignorance for not having protected myself against this "obvious" threat, that evidently everybody else knows about and makes allowances for.) And I know my response would not be to ask the print shop to be more careful next time, or to run an "antivirus" soluton, or something. I'd take my business elsewhere, and more importantly insist that my future printing contractors use a different brand of copier, one that's not susceptible to preposterous failure modes like that, because even if there is some alleged way of papering over that particular flaw, who knows how many other equivalently egregious bizarre flaws it's got that haven't been discovered and papered over yet?
Absolutely agree. So the remaining question is: aside from the ill-advised potshot, has Apple done right or wrong by those customers? Have they (a) disavowed all responsibility, told customers it's their problem, told them to go talk to the "podunk assembly plant in Hunan Province" if they need help, or (b) done everything they can to mitigate and prevent future recurrences of the problem?
Hardly a cheap shot really, if the OS wasn't such an open door this wouldn't be possible. I dock a poratble hard drive and get an exploit? Not a single prompt from the OS that something is going on? An application asserts itself as a start up process with zero sanity check? If Windows treated this properly it wouldn't try to manipulate files on removable media with no input from the user. If someone could craft an auto-executing file for other OSs, on OS X it would ask me for a password at least and name the process in question; Linux would do the same thing, or just fail silently. Doesn't happen on any other platform, it is a giant shortcoming of Windows as a platform. Stuff like this was supposed to be resolved in SP2.
Insults don't have to be false. Actually, in general, if they're clearly false they're rarely insults.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
If I make a product that screws up something in a typical environment that it's supposed to be in, then it's my fault and no one else's, no matter how cruddy that environment is. This isn't like an unknown flaw or something that's unforseen. Windows is what it is, and if a known shortcoming isn't worked around by your product, then your product is at fault.
Although it's true that windows has security flaws, this is true of most platforms. For instance if Apple had released a worm that exploited SSH instead, would we be arguing who's fault it was?
I'm sorry but as a developer myself I see this as extremely irresponsible. Admiting your faults is a core fundamental of software, you acknowledge and adjust. You don't finger point or make excuses for your own blunder, that's what amateurs do.
It doesn't matter what the operating system is; if it's XP, Vista, OSX, Linux, the next Windows or even the next, it's Apple's responsibility to put checks in place to prevent such things from happening. This is just as much Apple's fault (more so in my opinion) as it is Microsoft's. What if the reverse had been true? What if the Zune shipped with OSX viruses, I bet the tune of Apple would be completely different.