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)."

Comments

Re:ill-advised comment, but not Apple's fault

[laird]

From what's been announced, the disk duplication step of manufacturing was fine. Ironically, it sounds like the virus got onto the iPods as a post-manufacturing quality check where the manufacturer connected a few iPods to PC's to check them, and some of those iPods got infected from an infected PC. But this apparently affected a very small number if iPods.

To keep this in perspective, in 1995, the first Word macro virus -- now called Concept -- was massively distributed by Microsoft on a CD-ROM called Microsoft Windows 95 Software Compatibility Test. The shipment went to hundreds of companies in August 1995. And MS has distributed viruses on CD's to huge numbers of their customers numerous times. (http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/onestop.htm, http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/wazzu.shtml, http://pcworld.com/article/id,101930-page,1/articl e.html) So while I am sure that MS' quality control has gotten better, I think that MS isn't in much of a position to play "holier than thou" on the issue of distributing viruses in their products.

It's a subtle bug, not obvious to solve

[goombah99]

I've read that the underlying problem was more subtle, which might explain some of Apple's expressed frustration with MS. I can't confirm this but it may have been that the infected PC got the infection from a blank, formatted, drive from the drive manufacturer. Even if that is not true in this case, there is nothing stopping it from being true.
It's a pretty subtle bug that, until now of course, I know would have bitten me since I would not have looked for it. I, and the technicians who do jobs for me, often replace burned hard drives in my clusters and computers with units straight out of the box. In some cases we have pre-formatted hot-swap spares still in the shrink wrap sitting on the shelf waiting to go in.

On my macs and linux machines, I sometimes use external USB drives to share with Windows PCs. I don't usually reformat these specifically because I don't entirely trust that the macintosh disk formatting program will create a prisitine PC FAT format. In all likelihood it can, I just don't have the ability to know. And I have reason to doubt: past experience has shown that when one OS provider emulates another's native formats (e.g. Samba or UFS or HFS++ or ZFS or NFS) that the emulation is usually less than complete or has artifacts.

It would be a major hassle and expense, to have to reformat every drive in a rack of clusters one is upgrading. But apparently that is now the requirement to be sure the manufacturer did not ship you a virus on the "blank" harddrive.

The problem is perhaps more diabolical than it seems. Imagine some Apple engineer putting out some specs for the process standards the Chinese manufacturer must follow. He's paranoid they won't have good practices with keeping their windows boxes clean. He also wants to assure the peripheral performance is comaptible with the ipod loading software and to assure the integrity of the data transfers to the ipod. So he decides that the sure way to do this is to make absolutely certain the box has never been on the internet, and to spec every part, so the machine has to be built at the chinese factory from scratch. They then load in the special Apple approved Windows software CD with apples programs and data. Seems foolproof. But it's not.

One might argue that to actually eliminate you have to boot from a trusted CD and then format the drives. But wait, this does not solve the problem. Isn't the problem of creating a trusted CD or and ipod install the problem we started out trying to solve? So one has to some how have a system that one can trust to do this. And that system has to be available to the manufacturer. It's kinds slippery.

If you were about to suggest "well just use Linux" to format the drive, well then apparently you just emitted the same faux paux apple did. Blaming Windows for the problem.

Re:What's so bad about that quote?

[fbjon]

Bullshit. Microsoft has got nothing to do with this. Nothing! What matters is that malware found its way onto the iPods during production. It doesn't matter what the malware was, what purpose it had, or for what platform it was designed.

Putting Microsoft in the spotlight is shoehorning at best, and criminally hypocritical spin at worst, IMHO.