Rixstep
 About | ACP | Buy | Industry Watch | Learning Curve | News | Search | Test
Home » Industry Watch

Cooperites

Apple Computer has traditionally been regarded as partially immune to the exploits of hackers and virus writers, thanks to its low market share - but those days may be over.
 - Steven Musil, CNET Cooperite


It's official: Apple are doomed, and so is Unix for that matter, for Apple under the bonnet is no more no less than Unix.

They're both doomed.

How can this be? Just ask Steven Musil [sic] or any of the Cooperites at CNET (a Microsoft Corporation).

For it is theoretically impossible that journalists of this repute and caliber could be so downright stupid. They must be right: there is no other alternative. No one but no one would ever dare submit such tripe to an editor - if it indeed were tripe as so many see it - and certainly not to Charles Cooper, head Cooperite at CNET (a Microsoft Corporation).

Apple are doomed because DeCSS JJ has been able to crack Apple's FairPlay DRM again within one day of its release. Astounding feat. No matter that JJ and everyone else will have to actually purchase the songs they try to steal, it's still the crack of the century, far surpassing the Love Bug, Netsky, MyDoom, AnnaK, and all the rest.

No virus ever attacking Microsoft Windows over the past five years - nor the over 90% of Windows machines today not only infected but enlisted in zombie armies out to spam the few still not infected - has ever had the devastating effect of JJ's crack of iTunes DRM.

Been watching Outlook crash and crash again? Watched as Outlook all by itself launched Internet Explorer and sent it to a baaad site where you got your home page hijacked and a dozen new trojans downloaded onto your hard drive?

That's nothing: just ask the Cooperites. It's nothing compared to the crack of Apple DRM. Not even close.

And Apple, say the Cooperites, have had a number of vulnerabilities this year. Or was that Unix instead? Hold on a minute - doesn't Unix run the web? It would seem so with over 70% of all web servers running it and fewer and fewer running what the CSIS called systems too hopeless to fix - Microsoft's own IIS and ASP.NET.

Don't CNET run Unix themselves? A HEAD on their adorable site would seem to say so.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/2.0
Accept-Ranges: bytes
P3P: CP="CAO DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa PSAa PSDa IVAi IVDi CONi OUR OTRi IND PHY ONL UNI FIN COM NAV INT DEM STA"
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=956
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html

But Apache is Unix, isn't it? Unless your admin is a twit and tries to run it on Windows? And that means it's for all practical purposes the same as OS X? Isn't that right?

So what's up? Have CNET made a big blooper here? A typo or two more than usual?

[According to Netcraft, every other time CNET report on their operating system - several times a week - they say they're running 'Linux' and then go back to saying they're running 'unknown' again. Are we witnessing a power struggle within our most reliable online source of information? What is going on?]

Whatever: Charles Cooper and his paid plumbers remain a unique anomaly in the IT journalism industry. Ironic then that this week the head Cooperite leads off with an editorial entitled 'A cyber con game'.

Next we know they'll be telling the world Hans Blix really did find WMDs in Iraq.

About | ACP | Buy | Industry Watch | Learning Curve | News | Products | Search | Substack
Copyright © Rixstep. All rights reserved.