Highly embarassed Apple Ping...
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Posted on 10/17/2006 1:44:16 PM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
We recently discovered that a small number - less than 1% - of the Video iPods available for purchase after September 12, 2006 left our contract manufacturer carrying the Windows RavMonE.exe virus. This known virus affects only Windows computers, and up to date anti-virus software which is included with most Windows computers should detect and remove it. So far we have seen less than 25 reports concerning this problem. The iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS X are not affected, and all Video iPods now shipping are virus free. 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.~ snip ~
(Excerpt) Read more at apple.com ...
I'd bet that someone got fired over this.
Or promoted...
There's taking responsibility for one's own (lack of) action.
This is marketing genius!
I don't speak Yiddish, but I think it must be the very definition of chutzpah to ship a product with software installed that can damage the customer's computer if he uses a competitor's OS, and then be "upset at" the competitive OS for possibly being unable to defend itself against one's virus-ridden product.
I can understand mistakes, although it's hard to buy that somehow a virus directly affecting your biggest competitor's main product just happened to get onto a product that should never have been connected to anything that could contain a virus before being sold. But whatever PR flack Apple got to write this little non-apology probably needs to be in another line of work.
Cool, sue Apple.
Now that's an original thought... NOT!
Pink!
You can't make it up...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/macworld/20061017/tc_macworld/virus20061017_0
This is where I'd seen it originally, then verified at Apple.com
Apple has had this happen before. A run of the install disks back in the early 1990s or late 1980s were infected by the WDEF virus. Of course, they only affected Macintosh systems, so your theory would appear flawed in the assumption that this was intentional to harm Windows machines.
Far more malicious would be Microsoft patches to the Windows operating system or updates to their Microsoft Media Player software which broke Quicktime, Netscape, or any other third party competing product.
No worse than Microsoft bundling together kludges and scotch tape (following a hasty release of what should have been at best beta software) and calling it a "Service Pack".
Unix forever!
Cheers!
Would certainly be interesting to see how those iPods got infected....
Wasn't that the cover disk on MacWorld? I think it was.
Four weeks before the relase of Zune... hmmmmm
The timing is suspicious!
Stuff like this has happened a few times in the industry, including at least one OEM PC maker. But companies do need to get a tighter grip on their suppliers.
I don't think it was so bad. It did acknowledge blame was on their side. They didn't try to stonewall or deny anything, which is the more typical PR response. And I prefer a little snarky humor in my press releases as opposed to the mind-numbingly dull prose that affects most of them.
This should demonstrate the dark side of using contract manufacturers for most of your work. There's very little Apple itself could have done to find or solve this problem :-(.
A virus can't be run without actually being executed on the computer it's being used on. So this seems like a very low-risk problem in reality, because few people try to execute software that's on their iPods. If they loaded a new OS on it, they would have to reformat the volume and the virus would have vanished.
So this should affect Windows users minimally if at all.
D
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