It is backwards day here at Macalope Worldwide Headquarters and our sponsor is none other than Apple, Inc.! (Disclaimer: not actually a sponsor.) Yes, the Macalope isn’t here to skewer pundits today but Apple itself. If you haven’t heard, Apple shipped High Sierra with a serious security flaw, one people are amusingly referring to as the “iamroot” vulnerability, in reference to the plant guy from the comic book movies with the guy from that show. The plant guy’s catchphrase, the Macalope believes, is “WHAAAAZZZZZUUUUUUP?!”
Pretty sure.
As you might expect, people are flipping tables over this vulnerability, but the Macalope is not here to deride the quality of the table flipping. No, he’s more here to point out that not all the tables are flipped, let’s keep flipping. Because read the afore-linked piece. This is a bad bug. It’s not much of a problem if you work by yourself in a forest on the edge of a great plain near a magic stream, not far from the Fairy realm like… uh, well, many people do these days, presumably. But if you’re in charge of a school or an office full of Macs that almost anyone can walk up to and access? Leave no table unflipped. This is a company that is now aspiring to have a formidable presence in the business environment. Bugs like this are not excusable.
Also, this is exactly the kind of thing the Macalope looooves to point at other companies for doing and laugh long into the night, drinking larger and larger amounts of coffee—weird, disturbing and seemingly medically impossible amounts of coffee—just so he can stay up and keep laughing until the sun comes up, reflecting off the drool coming out of his mouth/floppy drive and alerting him it’s finally time to get some sleep.
So, you want to call it “a Garbage Fire of Bad Security,” you just go ahead and fill your boots. The Macalope is here for that, my dude. Flame on.
Sure, it’s not like Apple’s competitors don’t have their own security problems, but your neighbor’s dog going to the bathroom all over the neighborhood doesn’t excuse you going to the bathroom all over the neighborhood. It’s a shame because Apple’s record on security policy has been improving slowly over the last 10 years.
Apple was, at least, seemingly very quick to patch the vulnerability once it was made public. The bug was noted more obscurely in Apple’s forums weeks ago, although it’s unclear if a bug report was filed as a result. So, if we assume the company only found out about the bug on Tuesday when most of the rest of us did, that’s some quick work. Bravo. If they’ve known about it for weeks… well, the Macalope was trying to think of a network significantly worse than Bravo but but he’s not coming up with anything.
The company screwed up really badly. And, as people and mythical beasts who own their products, we want to hold them accountable for these kinds of screwups. No, the company is not going out of business. It probably won’t see that much of an impact from this at all because, sadly, no operating system is bug-free and this didn’t affect iOS, its fun-time cash piñata. So if someone says “APPLE DOOMED BY IAMROOT BUG” (well, when someone says that) then, yes, the horny one will step in and start brewing some coffee. Until then, let us work together as one until all the tables are overturned.