Microsoft blames Apple's "quality checks" for iPod virus
By Darren Murph 
posted October 19th 2006 9:52AM
posted October 19th 2006 9:52AM
Ah, how we love mindless bickering between two mega corporations. In Apple's case, its beloved iPod seems to be a globe-sized target for attacks (and lawsuits), and just a day after the company laid blame to Windows for "not being hardy enough against viruses" found on recently shipped 5.5G 'Pods, Microsoft is firing back with its own harsh criticisms. James Abrams, Microsoft's former head of quality control, pronounced that "Apple didn't know what they were shipping," and suggested that fault should be redirected to Apple's lackluster "quality and content checks." Abrams even stated that McDonald's handling of its own virus-infected DAP problem was far superior to "a lesser company's blame game." Johnathan Poon, Microsoft's current quality assurance guru, finished off the tongue-lashings by prompting Steve Jobs to "contact Poon if he needed someone to advise on how to improve quality checks." Regardless of which party is truly culpable, it looks like we've got ourselves another full-fledged Mac vs PC battle royale on our hands here, and we're certainly not stepping in to break this one up.
Seriously, I'm surprised not too many people have brought up the fact that tongue-lashings and Poon were mentioned in the same sentence.
For all of the sophomoric bickering between apple and ms fanboys on this site, I would have figured there'd be more poon jokes. His name is POON!!!
I use a laptop w/OS X and one w/XP side by side. I'm a big Apple fan and not an MS fan. That being said, I think Apple showed no class in mentioning MS in this. They should have just owned up to the issue and took steps to fix it.
Perhaps the mid-term election tactics are spreading. God, shoot me now.
As usual, in keeping with MS' stuffy, humorless image they just can't seem to take a little friggin' joke. If they couldn't see the tongue-in-cheek way in which the remark was presented then somebody over there needs to grow a clue.
Am I the only one who finds it funny that the Apple ad playing at the top on this page is the one about how pc's get viruses and macs dont.
Coincidence?
Yeah... pretty funny stuff here.
I think this is pretty much back-firing on Apple.
And there is no way that the comment by Apple was "tongue-in-cheek"... if you think that you are a fool. They were trying to deliver a serious blow to MS...
I would believe that they did this on purpose (just to put a spotlight on MS's virus issues) before believing it was a tongue-in-cheek comment.
And Microsoft would be 100% correct in this situation. Quality control rest squarly on Apple's shoulders. No matter what their Chinese Manufature's were doing, (or NOT doing), THEIR name is NOT labeled on a $400 dollar iPod, is it?
I agree with the commenter above,
POON is the best name... but you ought to hear what his name was before he shortened it due to sexual harassment litigation.
Apple stock up... Dell down...
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8KRNKMG0.htm
what I don't get is if your one of those people who have had to replace 4 of their iPods, why are you still buying/using them. Glutin for punishment I'd say.
and the virus was from a windows machine
"And Microsoft would be 100% correct in this situation. Quality control rest squarly on Apple's shoulders. No matter what their Chinese Manufature's were doing, (or NOT doing), THEIR name is NOT labeled on a $400 dollar iPod, is it?"
So does this mean it was Dell's fault for Sony making exploding batteries? Or is it Sony's fault? Sony was the one that took the hit for that debacle.
Now it is not Apple's fault that the manufacturing plant is using defective Windows OS machines that loaded the virus/worm onto the iPod.
How exactly should Apple "quality check" the iPod? They plug it into a Mac and, believe it or not, the iPod worked fine with no virus.
Why? Because OSX isn't a crappy OS that get infections.
Do you think M$ will "qualtiy check" their Zune on a Mac OS? M$ can care less if their products work on other OS's. In fact, if it wasn't for recent lawsuits, Zune probably wouldn't work on any other OS except a Win OS.
The newly released IE 7 ALREADY has a problem discovered.
Get mad at Apple cause M$ can't get their shit together for even one day.
this is the reason why more and more geeks are turning to linux. pengiuns don't argue
Actually, I love Linux. I switched from Win OS to Linux in late 90's. I got tired of the crap M$ produces. Then when OSX came out I instantly became a Mac fan, since OSX is based on BSD.
well... i guess dear old arrogant Apple are finally learning what it's like to be the dominant player. It was never your amazing virus proof software that protected you... it was your relative insignificance in the market.
It's always fun to watch Apple and its drone-like enthusiasts pretend it even close to being the company Microsoft is. Apple is a niche company. They've had great success with the iPod, primarly due to its innovativeness, but the rest of their products experience negligible market penetration.
I think the height of hilarity is Apple's continued insistance that their computers are less vulnerable to infection by viruses. Apple completely overlooks the fact that Mac OS's market share is around 4% and that virus writers, in their attempt to cause as much chaos as possible, aren't going to bother writing a virus that only has the potential to infect 4% of OSs.
Apple... arrogant... *@#$&(@*#**#$
"As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses"
They ship a virus that only hits computer running Microsoft Windows, then they attack Windows for not being "hardy" enough to resist their virus!?!
I have a hole slew of profanity laced comments about Apple, but I can't post them here...
RAWR!
what the f is a virus..?
no, seriously.
Mike:
virus (noun)
A self-replicating computer program written to alter the way a computer operates, without the permission or knowledge of the user. Though the term is commonly used to refer to a range of malware, a true virus must replicate itself, and must execute itself. The latter criteria is often met by a virus which replaces existing executable files with a virus-infected copy. While viruses can be intentionally destructivedestroying data, for examplesome viruses are benign or merely annoying.
Courtesy: wikipedia.
You're welcome!
Okay, so by almost everyone else's logic (as much as has been seen thus far, anyway), that it's Apple's fault, couldn't it be just as plausible that MS managed to download a virus onto a system responsible for part of the iPod's manufacturing, in order to discredit Apple?
After all, it was a PC where the virus came from, and it's been established that at bootup, the Windows XP operating system sends system information back to microsoft BY DESIGN, via it's 'WGA Validation' scheme. Mind you, even though windows no longer does this at every bootup (as of June, 2006), it STILL does this on a less frequent basis. (links to corroborating articles are below)
What this means is that MS collects some amount of information about the system, including its IP address, to ensure that no other PCs are running XP on the same license, and with an IP address, it's possible to determine the location of said system (down to the city, ISP, and network node its running on). Also, by the same process, they send some data of back to the machine in the form of an updated validation setting file, (and with MS, who knows what else). This doesn't even consider if "automatic updates" were enabled on the system(s) in question, which could open up even more potential doors for something like this.
Anyway, what this means, in theory,is that even though it is a stretch, that MS could have somehow deliberately transferred the virus to the manufacturing system during this otherwise routine process, specifically for the purpose of infecting the iPods. Isn't it a rather convenient coincidence, that the only virus that was reported to be on that computer (thus far), just so happened to be one that infects external devices, (ie. iPods)? And what are the odds of THAT occurring?
to quote a science-fiction character, "I believe in coincidence. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences."
sure it's a conspiracy theory, but no less one than the kind many others here are postulating, that Apple did this in some way, for a dubious reason that would only smear their own brand. If anything, mine offers a much more logical culprit and motive, (why would Apple infect their own devices, when MS would be the ones who have something to gain by doing so, namely, discrediting the Apple iPods just before the Zunes were scheduled for release?), and suggests a possible method for accomplishing it?
STOP being rabid fan-boys, and think about who has the ability to pull this off, and who has a reason for doing so. i highly doubt that Apple falls into that category. Only one other corporation, whom already has a shady reputation as it is, does.
Unless anyone can unequivocally prove me wrong, and do so in as concise (and hopefully at least,in as respectful a manner), this is the opinion that i will stand by and defend.
(of course, i'm assuming that the manufacturing system that was infected is/was running a version of the Windows OS that has, or is capable of running the WGA Validation software. Unless anyone can prove that it wasn't, it's a valid assumption).
- Bardiel
Here are those articles, as promised:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3175
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060608-7017.html
http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Admits_WGA_Phones_Home/1149798507
Too bad the iPod doesn't have WiFi. Then it could just squirt the bad ol' virus right back at windows where it belongs!
Hey Bardiel,
Where were you when OJs wife was killed? Unless you can prove to me conclusivly that you didn't do it, I think I am justified in assuming you did it.
Man take an f'ing logic class.
Bravo. Well said Joe SMith.
_______________________________
Bardiel-
Don't you think if MS really wanted to f**k with Apple, it would have done so in a way that resulted in more than 25 people reporting their PCs to be infected?
Though I agree there are some threds of logic in your rant, you have failed by creating an argument to fit your conclusion. At this juncture, I don't think anyone can definitively say what happened, but logic points to a likely conclusion: An honest mistake occured, whereby a testing computer at the manufacturing facility became infected with a worm, which then infected iPods attatched to it. The worm is blocked by up-to-date spyware/virus programs, so only the unfortunate clods who don't use those programs have anything to worry about.
If you can definitively disprove my arguments Bardiel...I don't care. :-)
A worm?
In an Apple?
Haw, haw!
"lesser company" are they really that ignorant??
WOW.
Seems to me that if Microsoft had worked harder on the quality control of Windows viruses would be a problem in the first place. Microsoft sounds like Sony these days.
It seems much more likely that Apple releases the virus on the iPod so that it can use this against Microsoft. Both have an OS release coming and Apple wants to gain share. What better way than to debunk Microsofts focus on security and viruses?
Butthead - "Uhhhhhhhhh, he said Poon. Huh huh huh."
Beavis - "I am the great Poonholio. I need tee pee for my bunghole!"
you guys are jokes yes apple made a mistake 1! mistake for what 20 of microsofts i mean i agree the minis were not great but apple fixed it wiht the nanos which are great and you pepole must just not take very good care of stuff cause i have never had to replace my ipod and it works fine
o and microsoft actually dose need to improve there virus protection
Since when has Karl Rove been running the PR department at Apple?
come on! only 25 ipods were affected! compare that to a millon windows pcs....
Actually, yes.
you can really tell the collective ages of the posters here based on their comments.
Viruses were very common on Mac's in the late 80's and early 90's - more common than with windows PC's, in fact.
the OS X system is not immune from viruses, by any means, although the occurences have been rare in recent years. My opinion is, they will become more frequent in the coming years.
this is an interesting page of links to read up on OS X viruses:
http://antivirus.about.com/od/macintoshresource/
Just face it, Windows sucks, it has a lot more security holes than any other OS on the planet, it has a gazillion of viruses (yet, moronic geeks still love the crappy OS for no particular or logical reason), it doesn't have that perfectly developed anti-alias system for displaying fonts correctly, and Vista is just another copycat. Where was Microsoft when Apple did that years ago... Oh wait... Fixing XP holes!
Darn it, even Chris Pirillo wants to switch sides, and you still think Windows are better? I've been a PC user since Windows 95, and switching to a Mac has been a blessing and less frustration for me ever since, it works every time you need it.
When having an OS that can be infected that easily, well, take it like a man, it's Microsoft's fault for manufacturing a s*itty OS.
Considering that I couldn't freaking disable autoplay in windows xp, I fully agree with Apple on this issue!
First off, I do agree that Apple shouldn't have made the comment in the first place. They (or their manufacturer) screwed up, they should have caught the problem. They should teach their employees not to surf for porn on computers running windows. bad things happen... :P
Now, the iPod infection has nothing to do with Macs getting viruses. It was a Windows computer, not one running OSX. And that post earlier with examples of mac viruses. only saw one that would do anything on tiger, but you basically have to install it as your system is telling you, "this is a virus". all the others were for older versions of the mac os. and the older versions, 6,7,8,9 are different. those viruses can't run on osx, especially the new intel macs. osx was a complete rebuild of the mac os, so don't compare past versions with current ones. i'm sure the pc that infected the ipods weren't running 95...
the past couple years macs have gotten a rep for not being affected by viruses. now, i would think by now someone would be dying to prove people wrong (some ms fanboy). so far it hasn't happened, leading me to believe that osx really is more secure than windows.
and i bet half the people here putting down osx have never used a mac before. i don't make comments on a product i've never used before. i've used windows since i've used computers, i know the os, it strong points and it's weaknesses. example: look at your services running in xp and find "remote registry". disable it.
25 computers get a "virus" and we generate all this hype. I think we all have a little too much time on our hands.
What if Apple tried to play a senseless joke on Microsoft by putting a virus on a couple iPods. Maybe Microsoft wanted to finish off Apple by planning a 25-computer attack, putting a virus on a few iPods, take them to court, and then feel that much better about themselves? Could we track this virus back to some man living in a basement?
If the dominant users of iPods have Windows instead of Apple, why would it not be tested to be sure it will work for the 80% majority Windows users?
Who cares..