Mac owners worldwide were baffled last week, by a trojan that has infected over half a million Macs. They’re mostly stunned because one of Apple’s supposed strengths was supposed to be that its resilience to viruses, malware and other software problems, as well as being unbreakable. The problem is though, that if you have software, then you have something that was written by a human which also means that another human can “break” the first human’s software, no matter how strong or impervious it might appear to be.
In this case, the trojan called “Flashback” affected machines running Java, a popular platform for different computers and other machines, as they say at the Java maker’s website (Sun): Write Once, Run Everywhere or WORE. (In my opinion it’s missing an H but I digress…) However the trojan seems to only have affected Macs as other computer brands, operating systems, cell phones and automobiles that run Java were not affected.
Pictured on the left, one of the only valid uses for an iMac, or at least as good an use as any.
Finally, it remains to be determined if like for Adobe Flash, a notorious-for-being-terribly-protected platform, and also one that’s banned by Apple from their popular iPad and iPhone tablet computers, Java will be discontinued on Apple’s machines. Frankly if they just keep on banning popular platforms because of their inherent risks, they might as well simply start selling bricks. Except their bricks will have been styled by Californian Apple engineers, sport an Apple logo and be built in China for 3$, but still sell for 600$ in the US.
