The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
7:00pm Tuesday  •  California Theatre
Tickets Available  •  Fun Will Be Had

Linked List: January 18, 2008

Friday, 18 January 2008

The Talk Show, Macworld Expo Special Edition 

Yours truly with Panic co-founders Cabel Sasser and Steven Frank for an hour-long discussion regarding this week’s Macworld Expo news.

My favorite line was Cabel’s: “Always bet against the Internet!”

Malware and Market Size 

Ian Betteridge:

They simply refuse to believe the “security through obscurity” line which states that the Macs low market share helps it safe.  This is largely because they have an outdated view of what malware is produced for - they simply don’t understand that a lot of malware is produced not for kudos but for profit, and when you’re going for profit it makes more sense to hit the biggest possible market (i.e. Windows).

There’s no doubt this is partly true. If you could somehow prove that Mac OS X and Windows were, in fact, equally “secure” from a technical standpoint, Windows would still suffer from more malware because of its dominating market share.

But, and I’ve argued this before, it doesn’t explain why the Mac has, effectively, none. If it’s true that malware developers who want to make money will only write software for the vastly larger Windows market, then why doesn’t the same logic apply to non-malware commercial developers? There are two halls full of commercial Mac developers here at Macworld Expo. I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s not just Windows’s massive market share advantage.

Gawker Hosting Nutty Tom Cruise Scientology Video 

Nine minutes of the most-sensible-sounding vapid nonsense you’ll ever hear. Really hurts your brain if you try to make sense of it.