 It's always amazing to read the news online or watch the news on TV, especially when it's a "slow news day." Because slow news day is a synonym apparently with make up irrelevant crap and call it news.
You all know what I mean, right? TV news does those humanitarian puff pieces that they call news but really are just fabrications -- take some little orphan kid for a day on the town while interviewing them on why they're so awesome and should be adopted; show some three-legged dog that got rescued from Michael Vick's compatriots to hustle money out of you for PETA, the ASPCA, and your local animal shelters; talk about what celebrity got spotted at what grocery store chain in what neighborhood with whom; and scare you into believing that just about everything in the world can cause cancer (or, conversely, try to convince you that random things can cure or prevent cancer).
Online news is no different. Even in supposed business and industry type publications, there are articles fabricated out of seemingly thin air with no apparent basis of newsworthiness. One has to wonder if these are published with the intent of trying to manipulate corporate stock prices, to try to justify a writer's job by making a quota of submitted articles, or if these publications are really so naive as to believe that these news pieces are, in fact, news.
Take this article here: The San Francisco Chronicle reports: Apple surpasses Microsoft in security vulnerabilities
The basis of the article is that Secunia, a group which tracks security issues within published software inclusive of Operating Systems such as Mac OS X and Windows, says that Apple now has more security vulnerabilities reported in their database than Microsoft products do for year to date.
However, fifth paragraph:
"To assess the 'performance' of vendors in terms of vulnerabilities one should rather look at the changes in the type of vulnerabilities, code quality, handling of vulnerability reports, ability to update users, quality of patches, ability to communicate to end users, number of products, complexity of product portfolio, and other factors which cannot be read out of mere aggregate numbers."
Seventh paragraph, and portion of the eighth:
Renowned Apple hacker Charlie Miller said Apple's security problems have grown along with the brand's popularity, but the company has done fairly well in patching the holes in its products.
"Ironically, even though Apple has many more vulnerabilities than other vendors, you still don't see many actual attacks in the wild," Miller said.
So, the point of the article was to tell us that a report says that Apple has more vulnerabilities, but it doesn't necessarily matter? How is it newsworthy if the report says clearly that the results don't necessarily mean anything without a deep diving analysis into the vulnerabilities and products themselves -- and there's no such analysis going on in this article?
While they have a quote from a hacker saying that Apple's been doing well in patching holes and hasn't weathered nearly as many attacks, there's no mention as to whether the vulnerabilities count they're talking about is unpatched, patched, or combined -- if it's a combined number, and Apple has fixed (and these are illustrative numbers, I don't have any real data and I'm too lazy to try to find out) 99% of all vulnerabilities Secunia's aware of and Microsoft has only fixed 80%, then does it do any justice to anyone to sensationalize an article about Apple "having more vulnerabilities"?
I love my iPhone, all the other computing devices in my life right now are HP though, and I run Windows 7. So I don't honestly care one way or another about the whole Apple vs. Microsoft debate anymore.
I just hate how the media sensationalizes things by dragging a more popular party like Apple down simply to boost page clicks. Whatever happened to journalistic objectivity?
Okay, I've gone off on this enough. End rant. |
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