Ask and ye shall receive (and receive and receive). Just yesterday we were wondering whether Apple would cram one more product announcement into an already-overstuffed month before June melted into July, and apparently Apple was listening and decided to toss us a bone. You remember Rendezvous, yes? It originally shipped as a new technology in Jaguar, and it's kindasorta like AppleTalk for TCP/IP, enabling zero-configuration auto-discovery of devices and services on a local network. In other words, it lets you print without having to type in the printer's network address, it lets you see your officemates in your iChat Buddy List without adding them by hand, etc. Good stuff.

Well, when Rendezvous was first announced, Apple said it was an open protocol, and now the company is apparently actively pushing it as such. Have you checked out Apple's developer page on Rendezvous today? (You do check it daily, right? Why, of course you do.) Because as faithful viewer Scott Geenvish points out, Apple has just posted a "Technology Preview" release of-- you guessed it-- Rendezvous for Windows. Chalk it up as just one more Apple product-- like QuickTime, iTunes, and AppleWorks (if you can find it)-- you can bolt onto a Windows system to make it slightly more Mac-like and slightly less unbearable. While it's mostly for developers to mess with so they can add Rendezvous auto-discovery to their Windows applications, the preview apparently allows Windows systems to print to printers shared on a local AirPort Extreme/Express Base Station, so it might be useful to select non-developers as well.

But wait, there's more! Act now and you also get a Technology Preview of Rendezvous for Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. That's right, you POSIX-compliant-OS-using folks out there, Apple didn't forget about you either. And if you order in the next ten minutes, you also get Rendezvous for Java Clients absolutely free! Clearly Apple's trying to shove Rendezvous into everything from crab cakes to toothpaste, and our future is gleaming bright with the prospect of IP-enabled, auto-discovering, zero-configuration Thermos flasks and fruity revitalizing shampoos.

What, as far as product announcements go you don't think it's quite up to the standard of new Power Macs and displays and the iTunes Music Store crossing the pond? Well, geez, give Apple a break-- WWDC is a developers' conference, after all, so you have to expect a certain amount of geeks-only content, and in any event the company must surely be scraping the bottom of the Announcement Barrel™ after the rest of this whirlwind month o' fun. So just marvel at the sheer unlikelihood that we'd have gotten anything more at all in June, look forward to a fresh start in July, and ponder the advent of a world in which everything's wired together but no one types addresses anymore. It's like some sort of beautiful dream...

You know what we like best about those guys over at Dell? Their subtlety. Case in point: as faithful viewer discord35 points out, on a page for a new special offer they casually ask you, "Is your iPod battery starting to fade?" You know, like they're concerned or something. And if you happen to answer "yes" (because they're clearly targeting people who don't understand that when they talk to their computer's display, the web page doesn't actually hear them), Dell informs you that instead of shelling out $50 or whatever to replace the battery in your trusty ol' iPod, you should "consider upgrading to a brand new Dell 15 GB DJ." See, all you have to do is blow $199 on a 15 GB Dell Digital Jukebox (think "iPod" but with Dell's internationally renowned sense of style), send them your yucky 'Pod, and they'll send you back a check for a hundred clams. In other words, you get a Dell iPod rip-off for $99 after rebate provided you're willing to give them your iPod in exchange.

Sounds like an outstanding deal, right? Right. We're sure you're just jumping at the chance to "upgrade." Why? Because this is, as Dell itself insists, "A Deal That Rocks!" Want to know exactly how Hard it Rocks? Well, in addition to getting $100 back on a DellPod purchase, you also receive free shipping, 25 free song downloads from the Dell Digital Music Store (oh yeah, there is one of those, isn't there?), and "Microsoft Plus Digital Media Edition Software," whatever the furry heck that is. We especially like how there's no warning whatsoever that the Dell device to which you'd be "upgrading" (too much irony-- the engines canna take much more o' this, Captain!) will be utterly incapable of playing any music you may have purchased at the iTunes Music Store. But that's surely just a minor inconvenience, especially since this is... A Deal That Rocks!

Now, does anyone else smell desperation in the air? Because get this: whereas Dell could clearly sell off all those discarded iPods (and with A Deal That Rocks this hard, you just know they're going to swimming in millions of 'em! Millions, we say!) on eBay, the company actually claims to be "recycling" them instead. Frankly, we hate to imagine what horrible destructive acts for which "recycling" is clearly a euphemism, but in any case, it's obvious that any iPod sent in to Dell's "recycling center" has played its last tune. Dell is apparently taking such a bath on its ill-advised copycat foray into the realm of digital music-- where the iPod and the iTunes Music Store still reign supreme-- that it's actually offering what amounts to a $100 bounty on every iPod it can "recycle" and get off the streets for good. If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em and wreck 'em!

We can't wait to hear how mind-blowingly popular this promotion turns out to be. By the way, given its name, we should note that we can only get down on our knees and give thanks that this promo didn't launch during the "Dude, You're Getting a Dell" days, or we'd surely be pummelled with commercials even more insufferable than the rest of the Dude oeuvre.

You'd almost forgotten about that guy, hadn't you? Oooooh, so close.

Unrepentant Mac Apologism time! It seems that there are some "statistics" flying around that can be interpreted to mean that Mac OS X is, practically speaking, no more secure than Windows, and we certainly can't let that sort of stuff go unchecked, now, can we? Whether it's true or not, we mean. So we feel it's our sworn duty to cast all sorts of aspersions on the reliability of said stats and on the character and competence of those who compiled them. Of course, you'll have to keep in mind that absolutely nothing we say on the subject carries any weight whatsoever, since, far from being experts on computer security, our real expertise is in the field of making vegetables out of Play-Doh. (Corn on the cob is our specialty. We can get it all bumpy and everything.) However, while we're not security experts, we've seen one on TV; surely that counts for something.

Anyway, it's like this: faithful viewer C. J. Corbett tipped us off to a Techworld article last week with the ominous title of "Mac OS X security myth exposed" which leads off with this oh-so-fair-and-balanced sentence: "Windows is more secure than you think, and Mac OS X is worse than you ever imagined." See, security firm Secunia claims to have compiled some honest-to-goodness statistics proving once and for all that choosing Mac OS X over Windows is your surest path to having some scary 'net dude invade your system, swipe your financial data, and start leering at digital photos of your family members in an... unsavory manner.

How is this possible? Well, numbers don't lie, and while Windows XP Professional clocked "46 advisories in 2003-2004, with 48 percent of vulnerabilities allowing remote attacks and 46 percent enabling system access," Mac OS X racked up 36 such advisories, with 61 percent remotely exploitable and 32 percent allowing the takeover of the system. See? Worse than you ever imagined. It's like a wedge of Swiss cheese with a shotgun blast through the middle or something. Meanwhile, Windows users will no doubt be thrilled to hear that their virus-ridden, spyware-loaded, worm-propagating systems are more secure than they think. Good for them.

There are just a few problems with this argument, however. The first is the claim that Mac OS X isn't much better than Windows XP Professional because it had 36 security advisories compared to Windows's 46. Maybe we're fresh off the turnip truck or something, but 22% fewer advisories sounds quite a bit better to us. Also, if you actually look at the data to which Techworld refers, it's not 36 advisories for Mac OS X at all; it's 33. (Apparently Techworld decided to go back to 2002 to fetch its reported number.) Granted, the Windows number is also 45 instead of 46-- yeesh, Techworld; fact-check much?-- but even so, now we're talking about nearly 27% fewer security advisories for Mac OS X than for Windows XP Professional.

Now take a look at the advisories themselves, and notice how no fewer than eleven of those 33 advisories (that's a third, for the mathematically inept) are titled "Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities" or something similar. Yes, in its advisory count, Secunia is including those advisories it generated just to report that Apple had fixed something. Does anyone else find it a little odd that Secunia penalizes Apple for fixing problems, including ones that were fixed so quickly that Secunia had never found out about them in the first place? (While they may describe a flaw and immediately note the presence of a patch, none of the Windows advisories appears to exist simply to announce that Redmond had fixed a bunch of holes.)

Notice also that Secunia yaps on about how, for Mac OS X, "of the 36 advisories issued in 2003-2004, 61 percent could be exploited across the Internet and 32 percent enabled attackers to take over the system"-- but never mentions how many could be exploited across the Internet to enable attackers to take over the system. Personally, we aren't much concerned about exploits that require local access to a Mac, because if anyone's climbing in through a window downstairs, we've got more important things to worry about than whether or not he can mess with our Finder preferences. We picked one of those advisories at random, noted that it's tagged with an impact of "System access" and a location of "From remote," and then scoped out the description of the flaws to find that the only ones listed that appear to allow "escalation of privileges" can only be exploited by "malicious, local users." So as long as we keep the doors locked at night and don't tick off our housemates to the point of digital vandalism, we're apparently all right.

And finally, how is it reasonable to conclude that Mac OS X is barely as secure as Windows based strictly on these (apparently shaky) advisory counts anyway, since that methodology completely ignores the fact that while Windows users get stomped on by worms and viruses on a seemingly hourly basis, the first truly serious Mac OS X flaw found since the product shipped over three years ago apparently resulted in a grand total of zero malicious exploits? Something is rotten in Denmark.

And maybe in the UK, too; faithful viewer jfletch pointed out another Techworld article from almost two months ago that also quoted Secunia and claimed that Mac OS X's security problem at the time "makes Microsoft's current Sasser problems look no more than a nasty nip." (Of course, two months later Sasser still turns up in articles on Google News posted just hours ago, but who's counting?) Now, far be it from us to claim that there's some sort of Techworld-Secunia conspiracy intended to undermine Apple's attempt to gain an entry into the enterprise market, because we would never-- oh, who are we kidding? There's some sort of Techworld-Secunia conspiracy intended to undermine Apple's attempt to gain an entry into the enterprise market. We've been jawing about this incessantly for about four days straight, now, so determining motive is left as an exercise for the viewer. Follow the money!