Steve Jobs Gets Mad Poon; iPod Owners Get Virus
Oct 20th, 2006 | By James Lewin | Category: Computer Hardware, iPods & Portable Media Players, Strange 
Earlier this week, Apple issued a warning that some of its iPods are infected with a Windows virus. Some video iPods made after Sept. 12 were shipped infected with the RavMonE virus. The virus affects only Windows computers
In a unusual PR move, Apple blamed their manufacturing problem on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
“As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it,” said Apple.
The blogosphere doesn’t seem to be buying Apple’s excuse. No one, however, seems more upset than Microsoft’s Jonathan Poon, who handles virus scanning for releases at Microsoft.
“Where’s your class?” Your integrity?” Poon asks Apple, noting that, instead of focusing on how and why the Virus was included in the first place, the company tried to divert the blame on the Windows platform.
Poon even offers to show Apple CEO Steve Jobs how to practice safe checks.
“Steve, if you need someone to advise on how to improve your quality checks, feel free to contact me, ” adds Poon.
“It’s not a matter of which platform that the virus originated,” notes Poon. “The fact that it’s found on the portable player means that there’s an issue with how the quality checks, specifically the content check was done.
“This also indicates that through the manufacturing cycle, the base device from which the image was duplicated to the other devices in the manufacturing run, was connected to a PC that most probably did not have, and I quote their press release, ‘up to date anti-virus software which is included with most Windows computers’.”
Frankly, I can’t imagine caring whether anyone at the Evil Empire is upset over Apple mentioning that their products are unsecurable. If they don’t like it, they can bloody well do their jobs and fix their product.
Apple admitted that they did something wrong: Using a windows machine in your manufacturing process is a mistake, and one that I’m sure Apple is now correcting. Poon can go Zune himself.
-jcr
John
There’s no denying that Windows security is a mess – but I think that people are upset that Apple, which has been making money by the bushel with iPods, not only doesn’t have its production act together, but blamed its mistakes on others.
It’s OK that they made a mistake; it would have been cool if they had admitted their mistake and quickly corrected it – but pointing fingers instead is really a bad PR move.
They DIDN’T blame their mistake on others.. What part of “we blame ourselves even more” didn’t you understand? What are they supposed to say?
Maybe something like:”A few iPods were infected with a windows boot-sector virus, gee, don’t know how that could have happened since we were using a Solaris box to initialize them”?
-jcr