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Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe columnist, writes:

“Computer administrators spent much of August fending off a series of computer worms that infect only machines embedded with the DNA of Bill Gates. Meanwhile, Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintoshes are immune, as are Unix and Linux boxes,’ reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe.

“We’ll skip the tedious arguments over which operating system is best — although, come to think of it, have you ever heard anyone claim that Windows was the best? Never mind. The real issue isn’t superiority, it’s diversity. We live in a computing monoculture, in which nearly everybody uses the same type of software running on the same type of hardware, and consequently gets infected with the same kinds of malware,’ Bray writes.

“The great culprit, of course, is… no, not Microsoft. Instead, blame Apple — or at least the company Apple used to be. Its current leadership is doing a first-class job of introducing elegant, innovative products, and turning a profit despite holding just a sliver of the market,” writes Bray. “But in the late 1980s, the days when the desktop computer market was still young and fluid, Apple blundered in ways that ensured it would never gain mass-market popularity. At the same time, Microsoft made pretty nearly all the right moves.”

“Yes, the company cheated a bit, but less than its critics allege. For the most part, the Microsofties succeeded by working hand in hand with the chip makers at Intel Corp. to drive the cost of personal computing through the floor,” writes Bray. “Apple could have joined this merry race to the bottom — by porting its wonderful software onto Intel hardware. But it didn’t. And so, instead of half of us using Mac software and half Windows, it’s more like 3 percent Mac, 95 percent Windows, with Linux thrown in as a rounding error.”

Bray writes, “And now the bill has come due. Our stagnant software monoculture is so susceptible to worms and viruses that the more potent ones sweep around the planet in under a day. Some say that Macs and Linux boxes are inherently less susceptible. Maybe yes, maybe no. But they certainly aren’t susceptible to the same malware, and if more of us used them, they’d serve as a sort of digital firebreak, protecting us against the worst of the worms’ impacts.”

(via MacDailyNews)
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KATIE HAFNER with MICHAEL FALCONE, New York Times, report:

[..] The alien programs extend well beyond viruses and worms - so named because of the way they spread, as the most familiar carriers of malicious code - to new categories known as spyware and adware. Indeed, the number of home PC’s that are infested with alien software that comes in over the Internet and installs itself without the knowledge or consent of the PC user is increasing at an alarming rate.

Richard M. Smith, a computer security expert in Brookline, Mass., estimates that one in every two Windows computers has unsolicited software lurking within. [..]

Vulnerabilities in Microsoft software have only made matters worse. People who use the Macintosh or Linux operating systems are safer, as are those who use Netscape Communicator. Some spyware exploits security holes in Internet Explorer, both because it has more flaws, said Mr. Smith, the computer security expert, and because it is the most widely used browser on the market. [..]

Mr. Kibler’s wife, Stephanie, said that it was hard to keep up with all the new threats, and that computer companies did not make it simple enough for the average user to deal with problems like the ones that afflicted her family’s machine.

“When you give someone the car keys, you also teach them how to drive,” she said. “How could you expect regular everyday users to be able to figure this out? The expectation is not reasonable.”
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