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Posted on 08/14/2009 1:14:51 PM PDT by Swordmaker
In a post on their "Psystar Community" website titled "A taste of their own medicine," Psystar writes, verbatim:
We are pleased to announce that an agreement with Apple’s counsel was reached earlier this month and we now have the final list of their deponents for our proposed topics with respect to this litigation. For the past week and for the following ten days we will be doing depositions of some of Apple’s highest level people. After numerous depositions of Psystar employees and associates the shoe is finally on the other foot, oh the joy!
Now given that there is a significant interest in this litigation aside from the business interest of Psystar, in particularly those of the OSX86 community and others; we want all your input. On that note we’re taking the top ten most highly moderated questions for each person to be asked at their depositions. Please bear in mind that these must relate to the litigation at hand and if you feel this correlation is unclear, please elaborate to help us better understand your perspective and/or argument.
Below is the list deponents by date, feel free to post your questions as comments or email them directly to if you feel that the question would be better unleashed via surprise attack. Bear in mind that we might not be able to release the answers to said questions until the conclusion of this litigation (re: Apple’s Super Secret Protective Order) but we are still allowed to use them amongst our legal counsel and in court.
Aug. 07 — John Wright — OS X — Senior Software Manager
Aug. 12 — Kevin Van Vechten — OS X — Software Engineering Manager
Aug. 13 — Phil Schiller — Marketing — Senior VP Worldwide Product Marketing
Aug. 14 — Mike Culbert — Mac Hardware — Senior Director
Aug. 18 — Gary Thomas — TBD
Aug. 19 — Simon Patience — OS X — Head of Core OS
Aug. 21 — Mark Donnelly — Apple — VP Finance and Worldwide Business management
Aug. 21 — Greg Christie — TBD
Aug. 21 — Mansfield — Mac Hardware — Senior VP Mac Hardware Engineering
Each of these men are the most knowledgeable people in their respective fields.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: In mid-March, we ran an online poll that asked "Who's really behind Psystar?" The results were:
Click to see Results Chart
One of the more interesting responses for "Other answer" was: "Three high school kids with a stolen keg."
Does this mean Mac will soon find themselves attacked by viruses?
Always thought it suspicious that PC’s were the main target
of viruses. I don’t know... ya think perhaps MAC/Apple
generated them?
...just sayin’.
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Just when I thought this whole issue couldn’t get any stranger...
I really don’t have much sympathy for Pystar here.
Apple created the product. If they want to keep the hardware closed/proprietary, so what?
There are plenty of desktop operating systems designed to run on a variety of hardware. Nobody is going without a computer because they can’t buy an Apple clone.
What/who is Psystar and why are they suing Apple?
They sound like real weirdos and “divorced from reality”... which is probably why they got into this thing in the first place...
I think a judge is about to “slap them silly” and bring “reality” home to them, soon...
Originally it was the Mac that was the virus target of choice. Apple had invested heavily in populating the higher education market with Macs. Sooo, with lots of Macs kicking around, and lots of geeks with time on their hands it was inevitable.
As the market shifted to WinTel so did the virus authors.
Now, between the small target and the unix-based OSX it's just too much of a bother to write a virus for a Mac.
You can read the past threads and find out for yourself. Short version: Psystar is a Florida-based company that’s selling generic PCs with Mac OS X preinstalled. Apple is suing them to stop this practice, as they are not an authorized reseller. Psystar contends that they make legit volume purchases of OS X and so are authorized to do whatever they want with it.
Apple is suing Psystar for copyright infringement for installing and selling copies of OSX and other Apple intellectual properties on Psystar computers in violation of Apple's End User Licensing Agreements. Psystar is counter suing claiming first that Apple is illegally using it's monopoly position in the "Mac OSX Computer Market" to prevent other makers selling Mac OSX computers which the judge threw out as ludicrous; and now claiming that Apple is abusing its copyright by limiting who can sell OSX computers with OSX installed.
Several months ago, Psystar filed bankruptcy and put the lawsuits on hold but when the bankruptcy judge ruled that the bankruptcy could not proceed until the lawsuits were completed, Psystar switched lawyers ( their original ones were creditors being denied payment in the bankruptcy) and dropped the bankruptcy, showing that it was merely a delaying tactic to avoid answering Apple's interogatories. The judge also ruled they cannot ever use a bankruptcy again to delay a lawsuit with Apple. The judge was not happy with them!
Hi Jo..., don’t think I’ve seen you in a Macintosh thread before... :-)
But, you were saying — “Does this mean Mac will soon find themselves attacked by viruses?”
—
Well, I think that some of those nasty virus (and worm and trojan) writers have been trying, but they haven’t had any real success to speak of (I mean one or two, here and there, and even then, hardly worth mentioning...).
Compare that to the thousands upon thousands upon thousands for the PC/Windows platform and that’s a *real nightmare* there...
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
And then you said — Always thought it suspicious that PC’s were the main target of viruses. I don’t know... ya think perhaps MAC/Apple generated them?
One could take that one of two ways... either “Apple” (the company) did that, or “Apple users” did it. Well, from my way of thinking, neither one of those two seem really viable. Companies, themselves, are not in the business of creating viruses. The penalty and backlash would be too steep for them to try it. However, companies have created software that some have claimed acts like a virus... LOL... (one might wonder about Microsoft, itself in that regard, or Sony in their efforts to protect their music [which they backed out of...] and a few other odds and ends of companies having some foolish ideas about marketing and/or foolish things to do). But as far as maliciously doing something like that from a company standpoint, just doesn’t make too much sense.
As far as the “users” themselves are concerned (i.e., software writers and coders/hackers), the Macintosh users could care less what happens with the Windows/PC platform, as far as creating problems for them (in the way of viruses), because they seem to be doing “good enough” all by themselves, without anyone going out of their way to create problems for that platform... LOL...
So, these malicious hackers are creating all these problems for the PC/Windows platform, basically because it’s “easy pickens’ “ and the Macintosh platform is very much more difficult to compromise. Some say it’s not difficult to compromise a Macintosh computer, but aside from all that “bluster” you hear from those who say that — they haven’t been able to “show it happening” yet — to this date (and we’re talking about almost a decade of the Mac OS X operating system). *In real life practice* the Macintosh platform is the safest one out there — no doubt about it
Hubby would agree with you accept he reasons Mac’s aren’t a target because there are less of them.
I’m a conspiracy theorist (which I’m sure you already know) and find it a compelling question
considering the long standing enmity between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Hubby would agree with you accept he reasons Mac’s aren’t a target because there are less of them.
At this late date hacking computers is a business opportunity. People would hack Macs in preference to PCs ifThe first two criteria are attractive for hackers. The third, apparently not so much.
- there were enough Macs around to make a good business out of,
- there was no competition, so that they could be the only one to take over Macs, and
- they actually could take over the Macs.
I suggest Psytar ask the Apple execs these questions:
Why didn’t you just give us some money to go away? You knew that is all we wanted.
Will you assign an Apple employee to our assembly plant to install the software and accept the license agreement?
Do you think we are stupid?
Are you mad? Please don’t be.
Ask your hubby just how many Macs he thinks might be enough to make attacking them attractive to hackers?
Here are some facts to help him decide:
All of this should make Macs very attractive targets for thieves.
So just how many Macs will it take to make it attractive for hackers to take advantage of all those "vulnerabilities" and steal money from those affluent Mac users?
Some more facts for your hubby's consideration in determining his answer to the question:
Hackers have written viruses for Windows that targeted fewer than 12,000 vulnerable machines. The Witty Worm, designed to exploit an already patched vulnerability in Black Ice's firewall application for Windows, infected all 12,000 unpatched Black Ice protected computers on the internet less than 45 minutes after it was released into the wild . Other hackers have written viruses that were designed to infect iPhones that had been converted to run LINUX as an OS—which probably numbered in the low three digits if we're generous. Hackers have written malware designed to infect a cell phone that had just 30,000 sold.
All of this and more shows that hackers have shown a predilection to write malware for anything even remotely capable of exploitation. So, if the Mac is as easy as some Windows people claim it is to exploit, where ARE the exploits attacking the 40 million sitting duck Macs? Where are the viruses? Where is the spyware? Where are the worms? Where is the Mac's fair share of the now over one million Windows malware attacks?
If the Mac were as easy to exploit as Microsoft's Windows, to match the Mac's world wide market share, Mac users should expect to see around 5% of all malware being written for Macs. In the US, it should be at least about 10% to meet half their consumer market penetration? That would be 50,000 to 100,000 expected malware examples. We do not see such numbers of Mac OSX malware... it's not even close.
Instead of Mac malware in the tens of thousands, the OSX Mac has attracted just under twenty (not 20 thousand, fewer than 20) total known malware examples in nine years. Most of the Mac malware are Trojan Horses—malicious programs that are designed to do something other than what they are claimed they will do which depend on trickery to get a user to install them on their machines—all of which have been described as being only mildly dangerou. Security firms describe these Trojans for the Mac as having infected from zero to 50 machines. If we were to assume that all 20 Mac malware infected the maximum of 50, then that would be 1000 infected Macs. In nine years, there have been only 1,000 infected Macs out of about 50 million sold? That's not just pretty good security, that's phenomenal security!
There have also been seven proof-of-concept worms and viruses that have never been seen outside of a computer security lab. Most of those proof-of-concept did not even work as intended! One such Mac worm, the OSX.Oompa-Loompa.A/OSX.LeapA worm was a POC example that was intended to invade other Macs by exploiting an already closed vulnerability in Bonjour, Apple's auto-recognition system for computers and peripherals on a Local Area Network. Researchers reviewing this wormfound it took two security specialists from Secunia, two Apple experts from Macworld Magazine, and over six hours to get the oompa-Loompa to merely copy itself from the infected lab Mac to another Mac, which when copied to the target machine, required the target user to accept the file and run it himself(!), where it then failed to execute.
I would suggest to you and your hubby, that there is something else operating here than mere "Security by Obscurity."
Swordmaker, you were saying to Jo Nuvark — I would suggest to you and your hubby, that there is something else operating here than mere “Security by Obscurity.”
—
I would agree, and would hope that others could see that this is so, too...
It is quite telling that *so many* Macintosh users run without antivirus software and don’t worry in the least. I’ve got Intego VirusBarrier, myself — but I continuously wonder why, since I haven’t come up with so much as a “peep” out of it for years now — except for a couple of cases of a Windows virus in some e-mail a while back (of course, that Windows virus wasn’t something that would do anything on the Mac platform so it was academic for me).
So, Jo..., just hop on down to the nearest Apple Store and play around a bit with them. :-)
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