From Slashdot comes an article from MacWorld UK about a malicious Macintosh program disguised as the not-yet-released Mac Word 2004. From the article:
A Macworld reader alerted the magazine to the malware after he downloaded the file from Limewire. The reader told Macworld: "I downloaded the file in the hope that perhaps Microsoft had released some sort of public beta. The file unzipped, and to my delight the Microsoft icon looked genuine and trustworthy."However, he added: "I clicked on the installer file, and to my horror in 10 seconds the attachment had wiped my entire Home folder!"
But perhaps that is what the much-touted future of Linux on the desktop will be; easy to use, but powerful to use under the hood. Of course, unlike Macs, Linux is not owned, operated, and controlled by a monolithic corporation. I like Neal Stephenson's depiction of operating systems as car dealerships in In the Beginning...was the Command Line. Here is why he says about Linux:
It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.