Howard Oakley
Although there were some worrying similarities with the Great Depression of the 1930s, each recession and each banking collapse in living memory has resulted from a different set of mistakes and swindles. Rather than enacting measures that might have prevented the last, to be effective in influencing the future, our lawmakers need to foresee the flaws that will lead to the next big financial cock-up, and patch those before it happens.
This may seem to go against a maxim I proposed in this column previously, that the best estimate of the immediate future is the most recent past. However, the latter applies to forecasting the quantitative behaviour of complex systems, whether they’re tomorrow’s daytime temperatures or rate of leakage from fractured oil wells. Marked deviations in events, catastrophes in their broadest sense, are by definition out of the ordinary and follow different rules.
The same principle of premonitory prevention applies to computer malware and failures, including major breaches of security. Those still wedded to history will clutch at their anti-virus software, pat their enterprise-grade firewalls comfortingly, and put their trust in blacklists of potentially malicious websites. Five or 10 years ago, those were probably quite reasonable devices to keep your computers safe from infection. Although I’m not suggesting for a moment that you should get rid of your firewalls, the few Mac malware products to date show just how limited past protection is in the current security landscape.
Opinion Spy (or more officially OSX/OpinionSpy) is of itself no big deal. As spyware goes, it’s pretty mild and hardly the sort of threat to make system administrators break into a cold sweat. As I wrote in the last Mac Business, it’s easy to spot and remove without specialist tools. But its arrival was essentially unforecast and the way it spread in free screensavers wasn’t anticipated. Gone are the days when we can sit smugly thinking that because we don’t engage in online file sharing, delight in illicit pirated products, or furtively scroll through porn sites, we won’t be exposed to Trojans or other nasties.
Here’s one of the great strengths of Apple’s oft-lambasted software distribution model for iOS devices: as long as it can maintain the absolute integrity of its App Store, the ordinary iPhone and iPad user can sleep easy at night. As long as you don’t break jail, you can also be fairly confident that your children and their grandparents can enjoy the Apple experience without being assailed by content that could bring offence. I’m no friend of censorship, which inevitably results in absurdities, and still have a cherished collection of original issues of the ‘underground’ magazine Oz. However, we must have the choice of cruising the leafy and peaceful avenues of suburbia, or living louche in the alleys of Bohemia.
Given what we know of malware, and of its uncanny ability to exploit human weakness, there is much to be said for safe online software outlets such as the App Store, for the Mac. They pose serious challenges to those who operate them, but are one of the few ways that anyone can anticipate the next significant malware threat to Mac OS X.
