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March 19, 2008

security

Kay’s “Icarus” argument waxes ridiculous

Posted Mar. 19, ’08, 3:14 PM PT by Aayush Arya
Category | Security

Kid IcarusRoger L. Kay, over at BusinessWeek, has a beef with Apple. In a short article composed mostly of whimsical allegations unsupported by any sources (with a pinch of unicorn dust), he lays blame on Apple for being pompous about security and making fun of Microsoft in their “Get a Mac” ad campaign. Roger seems to think that the tables are turning now and Apple is in for a taste of its own medicine.

For years, Apple’s marketing has consisted of accentuating the positive and ignoring everything else.

Unlike, say, every other company’s advertising. There’s a reason why we have marketing and advertisement: they’re meant to convince you, the consumer, to go out and buy the product—the last thing any company seeks to do in an advertisement campaign is be honest. Self-righteousness sells products. Honesty makes you friends in a book club.

Apple sold nearly 7.8 million Mac desktop and laptop computers in 2007. That’s a 37% gain over the number sold in 2006 and well more than double the 2001 volume. It’s little surprise then that reports of Mac viruses have been rising steadily.

In Roger’s little dream world, where Microsoft is the knight in “heavy armor,” maybe—but in the real world, the only Mac viruses we know are the desktop-crumbling, Sudden Motion Sensor-powered awesome displays of hacking genius. Apparently, it’s easy to write that Mac viruses are on the rise but maybe a bit too inconvenient to actually provide links to stories that support that theory.

Hackers went to town on the iPhone from day one, opening it for service with nondesignated wireless providers and dropping applications onto it at will.

Applications that brought additional features to the device, ones that actually helped the device owner—the kind of things that we don’t generally term as viruses or malware. This smells like familiar territory; we’ve been down this road before. A hack and a virus are two separate terms for a reason: they happen to have different meanings. Roger, like Seth Weintraub, just seems to be having a problem differentiating between the two.

As if there weren’t already enough incentive to hack the iPhone, the 30% revenue “share” Apple will require for every application sold through the iTunes Store should do the trick. To cast Microsoft as the bad guy who’d stop at nothing to hook its customers’ bank accounts up to an intravenous drip is just too much. Taking such a large cut just for distributing software is no more generous a policy than any coming out of Microsoft.

If it wasn’t obvious that Roger was a bit short on actual points here, he makes it abundantly clear for us by this paragraph. Even overlooking the fact that Apple’s business deal for iPhone developers has little to do with the security of Apple’s platforms, especially Mac OS X, I fail to understand how a thirty percent charge for distributing and promoting the applications is not a great deal.

For less than one-third of a price that the developer is free to choose, Apple takes care of the credit card processing, hosting, marketing and makes your application available onto every iPhone in the world. Add to that the cost of running the entire infrastructure and supporting the free applications and factor in their own profits (as surprising as it may be, Apple is in it for the money) and you’re left with what sounds like a very fair deal—fairer than most, if I may say so.

The Microsoft-supported Handango store, for instance, retains at least forty percent of all revenues, and that’s excluding taxes and other commissions that might be applicable. Clearly, Apple knew what the going-rate was in the industry before deciding on the 70/30 revenue split, and they’re as competitive as you can reasonably expect them to be.

There is no such thing as real security. All you can do is throw up roadblocks—which, by the way, make it harder for both crooks and law-abiding citizens to drive on your roads.

It sure does, which is why Apple has, at least thus far, steered clear of such methods. In the case of the iPhone, Apple is trying to make sure that the roadblocks lie between the app and the store, so that only safe apps make it to the App Store and the aforementioned law-abiding citizens get to drive on a smooth sailing freeway. I’m not sure how this factors into the whole “iPhone is a malware paradise” theory, but from my own point of view, it seems to have the potential to be more secure than Mac OS X—and that’s saying something.

Everyone makes mistakes. But society loves to repay hubris with derisive laughter.

Truer words were never spoken, Mr. Kay. But all your story really shows is that you may have gotten a little too much sun yourself.


4 Comments

Philippe said:

Very good post!

March 19, 2008 5:10 PM
Jon said:

"the last thing any company seeks to do in an advertisement campaign is be honest."

Actually, if one has a worthwhile product or service, that is the first thing you have to do. Despite what a lot of people think, honesty and advertising do go hand in hand. Word-of-mouth depends on honesty and more than anything else determines success or failure in the marketplace. Although it's always been true, it is especially true in today's world. Because of word -of-mouth, shoddy products and services usually don't last long.

Word-of-mouth is the absolute best form of advertising and also the most damning, as witnessed by the success of the Mac and the iPod and the failures of Vista and Zune.

Otherwise, a good piece.

March 20, 2008 8:39 AM
Jeremy said:

I don't really buy the argument that the only reason there are no (or only one or two) mac virus is because of apples marker share. While it's true that a virus writer would prefer to target windows machines since they will inflict more damage (or reap more reward if it is an economic drive), surely there is a significant incentive (at least amongst some highly skilled virus writers) to produce a nasty mac virus. The incentive would be thus: to be able to stick it to the supposedly arrogant mac users who rave about their systems superior security, and also take credit for being one of the few to undermine mac os x's security. I guess marker share is important, since it provides the critical mass for the organic distribution of a computer virus. However windows machines could easily enough carry mac virus and pass them along until they reach a mac (despite not being infected themselves), so even this hypothesis for why their are few if any mac virus out in the wild seems flawed. The only conclusion I can come to is that macs really are better security wise, or that the would be mac virus writers who would only be in it for the glory are not sufficiently proficient in mac code as to be able to write a genuinely nasty mac virus.

I should note that I am no coder my self, and thus my argument may be based on a number of false premises. But I don't think this is strictly a matter of computer code, but rather of ordinary logic and human psychology.

Any ideas? Where does my argument fall down?

March 20, 2008 8:43 AM

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