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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)."
When I first heard about this, I thought brilliant. What better way for Apple to demonstrate how prone to viruses windows machines are, than to put a virus on an ipod that only affects windows machines.
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.
Not sure exactly what you are referring to. The virus infected iPoid? That's easy, somebody got sloppy.
The inane submission (quotes from another discussion board about a quote from a blog getting posted on another submission board). That's easy too, it's Slashdot Sunday!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The surprising thing is that the worst of the quotes, "As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses...", is still unchanged on the apple web page. Anyway, http://www.apple.com/support/windowsvirus/ has removal instructions for anyone who thinks they may have been affected by one of these ipods.
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?
I used to work for a small company that made CD-ROM's
Only after we recieved 3000 copies of our free handout Amsterdam nightlife CD-ROM did we discover that there was a windows virus on all of them.
We simply slapped a "MAC only" sticker on them and handed them out!
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.
Hey, it works in FPSs. =)
"Bother," said Pooh, as lightning knocked out hi%#&(F*@NO CARRIER
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Putting Microsoft in the spotlight is shoehorning at best, and criminally hypocritical spin at worst, IMHO.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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.
Not necessarily. I've had people ask me if it is okay to type in a password for various things. Anytime I help someone with OS X, I tell them to think about what they are doing whenever it brings up a dialog box asking them to do something.
I helped one of my friends who was very scared of computer a couple years back. I setup a limited access account in OS X and told them to try to mess it up, change the background, mess with all the preferences and just click on things and see what happens. I came back a week later and all the settings were changed. She didn't necessarily like all the settings, but when I actually setup her permanent account, she was much less fearful of changing settings. At this point, I told her to think twice about typing in a password when it asks. She has done very well and I haven't had to help her out with a computer at all in three years. She went from being scared of changing anything to pretty independent and safe at the same time.
So, my point is that there are a lot of people that do actually pay attention to these dialog boxes. I'd much rather have a few dialog/password boxes that are actually relevent than none. At least there is a chance that the person will think about it. Assuming people will click through the dialog without thinking is a rather negative view of users.
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.