So when was the last time your Mac actually contracted a virus? If you've only been a member of Macville for a few years, the odds are pretty good you just said "never"; if you've been around long enough to have used, say, System 7 extensively, maybe you caught one or two over the years. We're not counting Microsoft Office macro viruses, of course, which technically aren't Mac viruses, since they infect Microsoft's cross-platform macro engine and anyone who's used Mac Office in a Windows-type environment probably got hammered with six or eight of those infections a day. But those aside, actual Mac virus infections are almost ridiculously rare, and that's something to keep in mind for the next time people are making you say what you're thankful for before they'll let you at the turkey and stuffing.

After all, consider how bad things are for the "standard platform"; if you pulled a brand new Windows XP system out of its boxes, set it up, and plugged it into the Internet, how long do you think it'd survive before it got infected with something or other? Well, faithful viewer Ulmanor forwarded us a CNET article in which researchers at the Internet Storm Center claim that "an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet will last for only about 20 minutes before it's compromised by malware." And while that will only surprise you if you've had your head stuck in a bucket of concrete for the past couple of years, you still might find the sheer absurdity a little tough to come to terms with. After all, this is a pristine Wintel PC, fresh out of the box, connected to the Internet and then left to do nothing-- no surfing to dubious porn sites, no running illicit peer-to-peer software, no other just-asking-for-it sort of behavior. Nothing. Could it really be compromised in twenty minutes, just by sitting there?

According to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the answer is a big fat "Yuh-huh." Perhaps skeptical of the twenty-minute infection claim, the school decided to try the experiment for itself; it put two unpatched Windows systems on the 'net, and voilà-- "both were compromised within 20 minutes." So apparently this is a real metric and not just some sensationalistic scare tactic. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; some of our best friends are sensationalistic scare tactics.)

Note that just last year, the average infection time for a 'Net-enabled, unpatched Wintel system was apparently forty minutes, which doesn't bode well for 2005; if we're looking at a linear progression, here, next year an unpatched Wintel will become infected as soon as that network cable is plugged in and the link light goes green. By 2006, Wintels will contract viruses twenty minutes before they're connected. And by the end of the decade, the very act of purchasing a Wintel PC will result in the buyer himself coming down with cholera, syphilis, and the plague before he can get the thing into the trunk of his car. Yeah, yeah, "Service Pack 2," "Longhorn"-- whatever. Mark our words, people will be dissolving into goo in the aisles of Best Buy before the decade's out...