All the news that fits.
Let that smug grin fall from your pasty faces, web-enabled mac users around the world. Twenty years after the first PC virus hit the street, Apple’s mac platform is threatened for the first time:
The Leap-A worm, which spreads through instant messaging program iChat, is thought to be the first virus for the Apple platform. It poses as a series of pictures which, when opened, allows the worm through a security loophole in order to implant itself in other programs.
Experts say it is easy for users to protect themselves, but that the arrival of malicious code should be a wake-up call to Mac users, who have been unaffected by viruses until now.
Your false sense of security will probably enable you to go ahead and seal your system off yourselves, following the handy and easy-to-follow instructions in the linked article. But still. You should, you know: Watch out.
In other mac news, the new lightning fast Powerbooks are shipping. Windows users are unimpressed, noting that “it still only has one button on the mouse.” Ten thousand mac users start to reply that the ‘ctrl’ key incorporates just this functionality, before heaving a sigh and saying to themselves, “Let it go, Tuma. It just ain’t woith it.”
Four or five, however, don’t get the word.
Meanwhile, here’s a classic case of good news/bad news:
Men in their 50s are more satisfied with their love lives than those who are one or two decades younger, despite their decline in sexual performance, a medical study has found.
Hmmm. What if I don’t want to watch the movie to the end?
Over in Europe, Austria demonstrates, that yes, you can go to jail for being pugnaciously stupid. You can agree (as I think most of us will) that while it’s absurd to put people in jail for saying offensively stupid things which run contrary to the evidence of our senses and history, there’s a deeply unsavory market for this thing that Mr. Irving was pandering too. Write something hateful enough, and you could sell a few books too!
Finally, we turn an unemotional eye to this headline, and say, sure: We could do it that way too.
Actually back in the late 80’s there was the nVir viruses targeted towards the Mac, but they were pretty unimpressive…
Lex, this was funny. The package was supposed to be images of OS X.5 to get Mac users to activate it… Windows users are sent supposed images of Britney Spears to get them to launch malware. What does this say about getting Mac users excited?
P.S. I’m a Mac user.
With regard to Mr. Laden, it’s funny that he and John Kerry sound so much alike, what with Kerry calling American soldiers “terrorists” and all. Amazing.
Re OBL saying we’ll never take him alive, that’s why the Old West posters had “DEAD or alive’, instead of the other way around.
OBL says “you’ll never take me alive?”
What an optimist.