Fanboys Continue To Boggle Minds
You know Apple is in a good position when you read articles like this one. Note the headline: Vista notebook falls in hacker challenge.
You see that and have to think the article is about how unsecure Vista is. Then you actually read the piece, and discover that during a contest a Vista laptop was actually the second one to fall victim to hackers. What fell first? A Macbook Air (due to a hole in Safari, an Apple product, which one would presume means all Macs are most likely vulnerable).
And how did they exploit Vista? They found a security flaw in Flash Player, Adobe’s nearly ubiquitous third party add-on. Flash, while on 90-some percent of PCs, isn’t produced by Microsoft and doesn’t come with Windows.
So, here’s what I imagine went through the writer’s head. “Ok, hackers had a contest, tried to hack a Mac, a Windows machine, and a laptop running Linux. On the second day, they hacked the Apple by exploiting some Apple software that comes loaded by default. On the third day they hacked the Windows laptop using a third party add-on that doesn’t come with the machine and has to be installed by a user. How do I title this one? Maybe ‘Windows Vista: Unsafe At Any Speed’? No, too sensationalist.”
Tech journalism at its finest here. The author or whoever else titled that article should be fired immediately for lack of journalistic integrity.
March 31, 2008 at 1:19 am
Hi Matt,
the vulnerability found in the MacBook was from a buffer overflow in the open source PCRE library used by the javascript interpreter in Safari.
I believe it is the same vulnerability that was used to jailbreak iPhones.
It was a similar scenario to the Flash vulnerability found on the Vista machine.
The whole CanSecWest contest is fanboy fodder, regardless of operating system preference. Any sufficiently sophisticated system will have security vulnerabilities.
March 31, 2008 at 3:00 am
For the record, at least one person got the Nader reference.
March 31, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I read the article about the Mac failing first before I saw the Vista one though. It was reported in a couple of places. So it makes sense for them to mention the Vista notebook next, rather than mentioning the Mac -again-.
March 31, 2008 at 1:58 pm
You don't alter headlines because maybe someone else read about the same story somewhere else. And even if you did, you'd at least do so in a way that isn't deceptive.
April 1, 2008 at 7:58 am
Matt: I agree with your basic assessment. However, there is an alternative thesis that is far more benign: PCs outsell Macs by such a large number that the average person isn't interested in hearing about a hacked Mac, they just want the information about PCs. News distribution sources, being part of a capitalistic market, write stories people will play to read.
The point being that perhaps the story wasn't written from the “PC vs. Mac” viewpoint, but rather from the “Wow, the computers everyone uses aren't safe, and by the way, the computers no one uses are even less safe.”
But given the ubiquity of Mac fanboys, you're probably right.
April 11, 2008 at 7:03 am
Your post seems to demonstrate your “anti-fanboy” stance more than any real information. For days after the MacBook Air was exploited all you saw were headlines that indicated that the MacBook Air was exploited in 2hrs or some timeframe like that. No one argued for the fact of mentioning, that not a single computer was hacked in the first days of the hacking event. So the real time frame was 1 or 2 days, plus x hrs.
First it wasn't until the competition relaxed the hacking rules, that ANY computer got hack. And next, by any reporting standards, all the headlines were sensationalized. Regardless if it was the MacBook Air or Windows Vista, so that's modern media, not fanboy-ism or other such disdaining nonsense. Modern media sensationalizes, get over it.
Besides, the hacking contest is full of would be hackers these days, without targeting known vulnerabilities through web-based exploits, which both the hacker who accessed the Mac and the Windows machine did, its possible none of the machines would have fallen; because most of the participants can't hack their way out of bag, without instructions.
April 30, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Childish name calling aside, Mac users are just people who make a choice.
Windows users? Well, they are people who have let the world make the choice for them.
You'll have to pardon us Mac users for feeling happy that we made a choice.
May 1, 2008 at 1:33 am
The problem is that that is not true. Some Windows users make a conscious choice and some Mac users do not. Also, even if it were true, it doesn't mean it's a good choice. By your logic, committing suicide is a choice, living is not.