Crazy Apple News Site

Apple has admitted that millions upon millions of viruses are targeted at the Mac operating system, and that every Mac, from the humblest Mini to the greatest Mac Pro to the lightest MacBook Air will soon be a drooling mass of spambots and DDoS attacker clones.

Well, actually they encouraged “the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.”

But this minor distinction should not stop us from engaging in large-scale, wholesale panic.  It’s the end of an era, people, and viruses or not, we are going to start getting snobby comments from long-standing (long-suffering?) Windows users.  Again. And more this time.

“Yeah, how do you like that, hippies?” said Rob Enderle, apparently channeling the spirit of Richard Nixon.  “The shoe’s on the other foot now, isn’t it?  Your precious Steve Jobs didn’t save you from the virii in the world, because he can’t!  We’ll get you yet!  You won’t have Rob Enderle to kick around any more!”¹ While syntactically null, this statement goes to further demonstrate the inherent instability of a personality that would deliberately use the word “virii”.

Enderle to one side, now it’s time to start doing pathological system checks, study each and every file in your “Systems” folder, and send emails frothing with exclamation points warning users not to click on icons that look like teddy bears.  Just like the old days, when we used Windows 98.  Remember those days?  Weren’t they great?

Now, I know there are naysayers out there that claim that, with a negligible number of actual live exploits and a better-than-average schedule of system updates and security patches, coupled with a solid Unix foundation, the Mac is not exactly the virus hotel that Windows has become.  But this is just the kind of self-satisfied hubris that is likely to bring the Mac community crashing to the ground in a matter of days as the Mac Apocalypse strikes.  On December 7.  At 7:07 PM.   Which it will do without warning.

Thus far, the news of the Mac Apocalypse has not been widely heeded, and despite Apple’s empassioned pleas for all users to try and thwart this wave of nightmarish evil with the sacrifice of just a few thousand clock cycles per second,² most people say that they “wouldn’t install an anti-virus program on their Mac even if it also played Snood and any two Pangea games of your choice.” ³ Well fine.  That’s your choice.  Just don’t come cryin’ to us when you get p0wned by some 13-year-old Somali computer pirate.  Because we won’t be able to read your emails.  We’re not installing AV software either.

1. This rant funded by the Symantec Corporation [↩]
2. their exact words are, “Here are some available antivirus utilities:” [↩]
3. What is this obsession with Snood, anyway?  It’s really not a very good game at all.  But every Mac user I know who got on the Mac train before Tiger seems to play it. [↩]