You’ve heard the mantra: Mac’s don’t get viruses.

Well, perhaps you haven’t heard it recently. That’s because of a few security flaws that Apple has recently acknowledged. The latest one is actually a worm (malware) that turns Macintosh computers into zombie boxes — just like their PC cousins!

Oh, I remember well those “I’m a Mac” and “I’m a PC” TV ads. How I can imagine Justin Long and John Hodgman bantering back and forth. “I get lots of viruses,” Hodgman’s PC would say. And Long’s Mac would just have to confess, “Me, too!”

The article (link below) doesn’t mention how the Macintosh’s get infected, or how to remove the virus. But the infection seems pretty wide-spread. Also the article is a bit technical.

If Apple follows through as it has with other security concerns, then any vulnerabilities in OS X will be fixed pronto. Then again, you can’t fix stupid: Don’t allow unknown software to be installed on your PC. Mac people now have to heed that admonition.

Net Security

This may seem like a dumb reason, but apparently Microsoft skipped Windows 9 for fear of sloppy programmers.

You see, if a program is designed to look for, say, Windows 95 or Windows 98, then it may simply search for the text “Windows 9” and stop there. If so, the program could misidentify Windows 9 as Windows 95 or Windows 98. At least that’s the reason postulated by the article, link below.

I’m not buying it.

My reason is that programmers use the internal Windows version number, or vernum, to determine which Windows version is being used. Now some just might use the Windows name, but that’s not the coding practices I’m familiar with. There is historical evidence for this reasoning as well.

When DOS 4.0 came out, it was terrible. Many programs wouldn’t run, so the programmers began coding a DOS version test. The problem was that DOS 4.1 was okay, but the version tested only for the “4” and not any “.1” part. Also, numerous developers checked for only a single version of DOS or perhaps only the current version and any earlier versions. This version-checking nonsense drove people nuts as programs wouldn’t run or would refuse to run, despite the DOS version being okay.

To counter the version correction madness, Microsoft introduced a new command for DOS 5, SETVER. It would fool a given program into accepting the current DOS version. I wrote about this command years ago in various books. Anyway, if Microsoft were serious about the “Windows 9” issue, I would think it could devise a similar solution.

Regardless of the reason, the next release of Windows will be known as version 10, not 9.

Gizmodo