A federal judge rules in Apple's favor in the Psystar copyright infringement case

Psystar's $600 Open Duo. Photo: Psystar Corp.

Nearly a year and a half after a Miami company called Psystar announced that it was selling "Open Computers" pre-installed with Apple's (AAPL) Mac OS X Leopard — and 17 months after Apple sued Psystar for copyright infringement — the case has come to its all-but-foregone conclusion: a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday in Apple's favor.

"The material facts are not in dispute," Apple wrote in its request for summary judgment. "Psystar deliberately copies and modifies Mac OS X without Apple’s permission and in violation of the laws protecting copyright."

District Judge William Alsup agreed. At the end of a long preamble, he wrote:

"In sum, Psystar has violated Apple’s exclusive reproduction right, distribution right, and right to create derivative works. Accordingly, Apple’s motion for summary judgment on copyright infringement must be granted." (PDF.)

And so it went for Apple's secondary claims of contributory infringement and copyright misuse. Psystar's motions, meanwhile, were all denied. A hearing to determine remedies is set for Dec. 14.

Apple has several other outstanding claims, including breach of contract, trademark infringement and unfair competition. They could still go to trial, if Psystar has the stomach — and the funds — to persevere.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

MacCodec.com. Source: SophosLabs

"Hey Dimwitt here's a pcworld article about russian hackers targeting Macs. http://tiny.cc/dL4Yi."

I assume that message, sent via Twitter by "chalupatime" Saturday afternoon, was directed at me because I wrote something a few weeks ago called "Why are there no Mac viruses?"

My tortilla-loving friend is correct. There is indeed an article by Gregg Keizer in PC World (as well as in Computerworld) about Apple (AAPL) computers being targeted for malware.

Keizer's source is Graham Cluley, who quotes Paul Ducklin, who in turn offers a pointer to the source of all this chatter: a presentation at last week's Virus Bulletin conference in Geneva by Dmitry Samosseiko, a Russian-born researcher for Sophos, the U.K.-based security software vendor.

Samosseiko's paper, "The Partnerka — what is it, and why should you care?," is available for free as a pdf. It's a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the hundreds of well-organized affiliate networks — known in Russian as "partnerkas" — that traffic, in Samosseiko's words, in "fake watches, fake anti-virus software, fake pills and fake love" for commissions that generate thousands of dollars a day for "webmasters" all around the world.

The six-page paper contains exactly one paragraph about the Mac:

"Mac users are not immune to the scareware threat. In fact, there are ‘codec-partnerka’ dedicated to the sale and promotion of fake Mac software. One of the recent examples is Mac-codec.com. At the time of writing this article, the site is no longer available, but just a few months ago it was offering $0.43 for each install and offered various promo materials in the form of MacOS ‘video players’."

Although there's nothing in that paragraph about targeting Macs for malware, that's the idea. Samosseiko's paper describes a new kind of Web- and social network-based spam he calls Spam 2.0. Using so-called DNS Changer trojans and other programs designed to exploit loopholes in various Web-traffic-directing and search-engine-optimization systems, the partnerkas flood the Internet with come-ons for the Web equivalent of fake gold watches.

In the case of Mac-codec.com, what they were selling was software that promised to help Mac owners run videos created using Microsoft (MSFT) Windows-based protocols.

Although Cluley and Keizer singled out the Mac paragraph as the most newsworthy thing in Samosseiko's paper, neither bothered to ask the author how many Mac partnerkas he'd come across. Dan Goodin, writing for The Register, did.

"It's very infrequent," Samosseiko told Goodin. "We discover new ones extremely rarely compared to Windows platforms."

Samosseiko also pointed out in that interview that the $0.43 bounty Mac-codec was offering is slightly lower than the $0.50 to $0.55 typically paid for Windows hits. And although the site was operating in January and February, it disappeared soon after.

"I suspect that it wasn't as profitable to target the Mac platform at that point," he told Goodin. "[It] probably closed because it wasn't commercially viable for them to conduct business."

As we wrote a few weeks ago, Apple's computers are not immune to malware. But the threat to Mac OS X pales in comparison to that faced by various Windows platforms.

By the way, Samosseiko's paper provides a handy list of the products that generate the most traffic for the partnerkas. The biggest draws:

• Online pharmacies selling generic versions of popular drugs.
• Networks promoting ‘scareware’, a.k.a. ‘rogue anti-virus’ products.
• Counterfeit luxury products such as fake Rolex watches.
• Casinos.
• Adult sites.
• Dating services.
• Affiliate traffic generated via IFRAME insertions.

Note No. 2 on that list: "Scareware" — fake anti-virus software offering to protect computer users from threats that might exist only in the victims' mind.

Thanks, chalupatime, for the warning.

Image: Apple Inc.

There are, as far as we know, no Mac OS X viruses in the wild.

To prove that assertion wrong, you only have to name one.

Academic proofs of concept and theoretical vulnerabilities don't count. Neither do computer worms, Trojan horses, spyware, adware, spam or any of the other nasty species in the zoology of malware.

That eliminates Inqtana-A, iBotNet, MacSweeper and a handful of other examples of Mac malware usually trotted out at this point by PC apologists. Nor can you count the 10-second Zero Day Pwn2Own Safari exploit that got so much press attention last March. None of these, strictly speaking, were viruses.

The issue comes up anew because Apple's (AAPL) latest Get a Mac ads are once again hammering Microsoft (MSFT) for those "thousands of viruses" to which its operating systems and application suites are heir. And that, in turn, has led to a resurgence of comments in this space to the effect that a) Macs are just as vulnerable as Windows machines and b) the only thing that protects them is their miniscule market share.

Those ideas, while widely promulgated on the Web, are wrong. The fact that Mac OS X represents less than 4% of the worldwide installed base of computers might explain why there are fewer Mac viruses. But it wouldn't explain why there are none.

So what's the answer?

First, let's define some terms.

A Mac OS X virus in the wild, to use the definition put forward in a short-lived contest that offered $25,000 to the first hacker who could write one, is executable code that attaches itself to a program or file so that it can spread from one Mac to another. "In the wild" means it has infected, or is currently infecting, new machines through normal day-to-day usage.

By this definition, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of Windows viruses (see partial list), a handful of Mac OS 9 viruses, and not one for Mac OS X.

The reasons for this have been extensively debated by security experts, who offer several explanations:

• Small market share. There is some truth to the "security through obscurity" argument. Many virus writers are motivated by the power they can command — and the money they can make — by seizing control of large numbers of computers. That puts a financial premium on Windows viruses.
• Mac OS X, with its Unix-based file system and kernel, is harder to infect with a self-replicating program. (See Claudiu Dumitru's MacOS X Vulnerabilities for background.) Windows, as I understand it, allows users to write run executable code outside their own protected memory space; Mac OS X does not.
• Viruses are going out of style. The action these days, I'm told, is in Trojans and spyware.

This is not to say that OS X is invulnerable. The frequency of Apple's security updates and the emphasis the company is putting on the new security features in Snow Leopard are proof that it is not. Maybe Apple is just lucky. Or maybe it's better at protecting its users from infection than Microsoft.

That said, if the built-in anti-virus protection in Windows 7 is as good as some earlier reviewers suggest. the security gap could close when Microsoft's new system finally launches next month.

Which may be why Apple is hammering home the "thousands of viruses" message now.

The growing popularity of the iPod touch — Apple's (AAPL) iPhone without the phone — finally registered in the Internet market share data gathered every month by Net Applications.

Stuck for three months running with a 0.11% share of Web traffic, the iPod touch's share in April jumped to 0.15% — a 36% increase in one month, according to preliminary data released overnight Friday. See the chart below:

The iPhone also gained share, up 12% to 0.55%, and Linux rose 13% to grab a larger than 1% share for the first time. But neither could match the iPod touch's growth rate.

Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows and Apple's Mac OS X were each down a hair, to 87.9% and 9.73%, respectively.

Apple doesn't break out iPod touch sales in its quarterly reports, but COO Tim Cook characterized it as a "runaway hit" during the company's second quarter earnings call last week and reported that sales had doubled year over year.

He also released enough information for analysts to calculate that Apple has sold at least 15.83 million units (37 million – 21.17 iPhones) since the iPod touch was launched on Sept. 5, 2007.

To see Net Application’s May 1 report, click here. The month-to-month comparisons are summarized in the table below.

Net Applications’ monthly surveys are conducted by sampling browser data from some 160 million visits to websites operated by the firm’s clients. The Web metrics firm describes the results as “market shares,” but they do not actually measure share of market in the traditional sense of revenue or unit sales. They do, however, provide a consistent methodology by which to gauge operating system trends. (See Ars Technica for a good review of the different ways to measure market share.)

Fasten your seat belts. There could be some bumpy nights ahead in the IT department.

When the information technology guys discover how painful it can be to upgrade their current PC hardware to Microsoft's (MSFT)  Windows 7 — the successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista — they may be tempted to switch to Linux or Apple's (AAPL) Mac OS X.

That's the conclusion of the product specialists at CRN's Channel Web — a publication geared more to IT professionals than to the typical Mac user — after running the latest Windows 7 beta through their Test Center.

"On both fresh hardware and on first-look upgrades from Windows Vista machines, Windows 7 met the world looking like a champ," writes Channel Web's Ed Mozen in a post published Tuesday. "Upon closer look, though, it appears as though Windows 7 could actually be more of a challenge for businesses than Vista ever was. The upgrade path from Windows XP – which is still the predominant desktop OS in businesses — can be described graciously as 'ugly.'" (link)

Part of the problem is that you can't install Windows 7 beta directly from Windows XP. Instead, you have to upgrade to Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later before attempting an install — a process the Channel Web team found to be non-trivial.

Among the scariest quotes in their report:

• "While Microsoft has assured the world that if the hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7, the reality is that is misleading at best."
• "We've almost lost count of the number of blue screens we've seen in the CRN Test Center during the Windows 7 evaluation process."
• "We tried to do the upgrade on an Acer TravelMate, but were stopped in our tracks by Bluetooth driver incompatibilities."
• "On a series of 3-and-a-half year old ThinkPad T43s, an IBM security processor refused to let the notebooks boot up with Windows 7. We needed to crack open a couple of four-year old desktops … to add memory just to try to get a system image."
• "Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, "known issues" and unknown issues."

Channel Web concludes:

"One at a time, these problems can be blown off as inconsequential or simply what happens during beta testing and an upgrade process. But, taken together, these problems are appearing all at once after Microsoft's botched XP-to-Vista upgrade and during the worst economic decline in generations….

"A solution provider can now expect to spend many hours, billable or otherwise, dealing with all the extra pain points brought about by having to navigate through a mine field of three concurrently used Microsoft operating environments.

"Or they could opt to give Linux or Apple's Mac OS X a try. That's not as crazy an idea as it may have been in years past." (link)

During his annual "strategic update" conference call Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Wall Street analysts that while Apple "has probably increased its market share over the last year or so by a point or more," he was more focused on the competitive threats posed by Linux and Google (GOOG). (link)

In response to a request for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson wrote:

"Customers can purchase upgrade media and an upgrade license to move from Windows XP to Windows 7; however, they will need to do a clean installation of Windows 7."

Windows 7 is scheduled to ship in early 2010.

This seems to be the season of lists, the bread and butter — however stale — of journalists facing a slow news day.

This one trods the most familiar ground in computerdom, pitting Apple (AAPL) Macs running OS X against PCs running Microsoft (MSFT) Windows. But it comes from APC, the longest running computer magazine in Australia, and it's unusually insightful.

I post only the intro and the topic headers here because I recommend you read it in the original, complete with well-chosen examples, clever illustrations and charming Britishisms.

Here's how APC Web editor Dan Warne sets it up:

15 reasons Macs are still better than Windows PCs

A journalist colleague of mine recently put this question out there:

"I'm sure I'll either get ignored or flamed for this but what's with all the pro-Mac stuff at the moment? It seems as though everyone […] is either using or recommending Macs these days.

I'm not wanting to start a flame war here but I'm genuinely interested in why this general shift has occurred.

Do people think Vista is truly that awful that they can't use it or even recommend a normal Windows desktop/notebook? I use it every day and I admit I don't like it much either but I don't think it's that bad that I'd jump to using or recommending a Mac instead…"

I long ago stopped actively seeking out Mac vs PC discussions (partly because Macs are now PCs — so the argument is more about Mac OS X vs Windows vs Linux than a proprietary Mac architecture vs an x86 PC architecture), but I still find it confounding that after all these years, people still don't know the basics of the upsides of Macs and OS X. Perhaps it's because of the tiresome arguments from people like this.

So here's my answer. Note, despite what I said above about the argument really being between operating systems these days, I've looked at Macs as a hardware and software combination in this article, pitted against regular PCs running Windows. (link)

Warne's 15 reasons (topics only). For the full article, click here.

1. Reliable sleep mode
2. Extremely fast boot times
3. Apple uses good quality parts
4. Less blinking lights
5. OS X + Windows is better than just Windows
6. Easier to troubleshoot Macs
7. A culture of good quality community software
8. More useful apps out of the box
9. Neat and contained system settings
10. Apple doesn't load the system up with crap
11. Tonnes of small reasons make Mac OS X better
12. Still no need for additional security software
13. Apple seems largely to be lameness free
14. Power of the Linux command line with Photoshop CS4
15. File sharing is much easier

Once again, for the full article, click here.

[Illustration courtesy of apcmag.com]

The presence on the Internet of both the Mac and the iPhone grew smartly this summer, registering record numbers for each operating system in the Net Applications survey issued overnight Wednesday.

The Mac's share of Web hits grew 5.34% to a record 8.28% last month, according to the Web metrics firm's September survey. The iPhone's share, having surged 57% — from 0.19% to 0.30% — in August (see here), grew another 6.67% to hit 0.32% in September.

These monthly surveys are conducted by sampling browser data from some 160 million visits to websites operated by Net Applications' clients. Although the company describes the results as “market shares,” Net Applications does not actually measure share of market in the traditional sense of sales revenue or unit sales. It does, however, provide a consistent methodology by which to measure operating system trends.

By this yardstick, Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows, while still dominant with a 90.23% share, has been slowly losing ground. Apple's (AAPL) operating systems, by contrast, have been gaining share at a fairly brisk pace, albeit from a much smaller base.

To see Net Applications' Oct. 1 report, click here. The results are summarized in the table below.

To get a feel for how Internet use compares with unit sales, check out the chart that Alexis W. Cabot has posted on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board using the latest numbers from Gartner and Net Applications:

Microsoft (MSFT) Windows continued its downward drift and Apple's (AAPL) Mac OS X inched up to a record 7.95% in the market share survey issued Tuesday by Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Net Applications.

The biggest gain, however, was recorded by the open-source operating system Linux, which jumped more than 16% in June — albeit from a small base — to hit 0.79%.

The iPhone held steady at 0.16%, reflecting a leveling off of what had been double-digit growth as buyers waited for the new iPhone 3G, which goes on sale next week. In a separate survey issued Monday, RBC Capital reported "unprecedented pent-up demand" for the new model. Data taken from 3,600 members in RBC's Technology Adoption Panel in early June showed that 56% of those planning to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days planned to buy an iPhone — up from 35% in March and more than double the interest in any of the other brands surveyed. See here for more detail.

The monthly Net Applications survey is conducted by sampling browser data from some 160 million visits to websites operated by the firm's clients. Although it describes the results as "market share," Net Applications does not actually measure share of market in the traditional sense by revenue or unit sales. It does, however, provide a consistent methodology by which to measure operating system trends.

To see their July 1 report, click here. The results are summarized in the table below.

Drilling deeper into the numbers, ArsTechnica's Charles Jade notes that the numbers for Intel Macs grew by a quarter of a percent to 5.26 percent, while PPC Mac's declined to 2.7 percent. In other words, Intel Macs increased at twice the pace of decline for PPCs. "The rapid decline of PPC Macs coupled with sharp gains for Intel Macs no doubt factored into the decision to make Snow Leopard Intel only," Jade speculates. His chart below:

UPDATE: Net Applications' model must be more dynamic than we knew. At sunrise in New York on Monday, Mac's June share was 7.95%. By 8:30 a.m. CT, when Jade posted his report, it had risen to 7.96%. By 3:00 a.m. ET Tuesday it had dropped to 7.94%. And these are last month's numbers!

After showing impressive gains in December and January, Mac OS X's slice shrank a bit last month in the latest Net Applications survey of operating system market share. The iPhone's share growth, meanwhile, continues to outpace every other category except "Other."

As Net Applications measures it (more on its quirky methodology below), the Mac’s market share dipped to 7.46 percent, 1.45 percent off its January record high. Apple's (AAPL) iPhone, meanwhile, hit 0.15 percent, a personal best, up 7.69 percent from January.

Microsoft (MSFT) Windows in all its flavors continues to dominate, with a 91.58 percent share, up a hair for the month but still off the 93.3 percent it held a year ago.

Net Applications’ monthly surveys sample data from visitors to some 40,000 websites operated by the firm’s clients. As such, the findings are a snapshot of installed base — with a bias toward machines that spend a lot of time on the Net — rather than a month-to-month measure of computer systems sold. The February results are summarized in the table below. The full report can be viewed here.

The news was almost lost yesterday in the Microhoo hoopla: even as Microsoft (MSFT) was trying to buy its way into some kind of parity with Google (GOOG) by gobbling up Yahoo (YHOO), a new survey showed that Apple (AAPL) had taken another little bite out of Redmond's core business.

According to the latest market share data from Net Applications, Mac OS X's slice of the computer operating system market grew 3.56% in January while Microsoft Windows' dropped .36%.

As Net Applications measures it (more on its methodology below), the Mac's market share stands at a record 7.57%, up 21.7% from Jan. 2007.

"Apple's market share gains in December for the Mac and iPhone are impressive," the report concludes. "However, for the last days of December, the numbers are nothing short of spectacular."

The really good news for Apple, according to Net Applications, came in the last two days of the month, when Mac OS X hit 8.01%.

Windows is still dominates the desktop, of course, with a 91.46% share, but that's down from 93.33% a year earlier.

Net Applications’ monthly surveys sample data from visitors to some 40,000 websites operated by the firm’s clients. As such, the findings are a snapshot of installed base rather than a month-to-month measure of computer systems sold. The January results are summarized in the table below. The full report can be viewed here.