Remember yesterday when we posited that a certain Apple-bashing industry pundit had written and posted an entire article predicated on an easily-refuted factual falsehood and sneakily amended it later to be predicated on a slightly less egregious but still easily-refuted factual falsehood? Well, for what it's worth, Shawn King of Your Mac Life was kind enough to confirm that, yes, John Dvorak's recent article about the U2 iPod did originally claim that the unit shipped with over 400 U2 songs on its hard drive and was edited when somebody apparently clued him in to a little thing called "reading product specs." (As of broadcast time, the current version still claims that the songs are bundled with the iPod for free-- which they aren't-- but a few paragraphs in it "clarifies" that they aren't preloaded on the hard drive and have to be downloaded.) While we suppose it's possible that Shawn and the AtAT staff are experiencing tandem hallucinations, we consider it unlikely; otherwise he'd devote a lot more of his shows ranting about the tiny mind-controlling pig-men that walk through walls.

Now, we don't want to turn this into a generic rant about the sorry state of journalism today, but the fact is that Dvorak obviously didn't take the time to read even the press release for the U2 iPod before he wrote his latest screed, let alone the actual product pages, because nowhere does Apple even vaguely imply that the product comes bundled with "The Complete U2." So when faithful viewer sinjin forwarded us another article that appeared to be written around a similar sort of factual inaccuracy, this time in Technology Review, we were all geared up to whine about that one as well. See, this new article strongly implies that Macs are under attack by a real, live virus right now, but it's talking about "Opener," which, as we made pretty clear last week, was in no way, shape, or form actually a virus.

To be fair, the author never outright calls the "Opener" malware a virus, but he certainly implies that it is. In addition to frequent mentions of Windows "virus attacks" for context, he claims that Opener "embeds itself onto Macs running OS X" and hints that the Mac community had to "respond quickly to address the Opener threat," as if this was Outbreak and anyone with a Mac needed to don a biohazard suit before the monkey started biting people. As we said a week ago, it was clear that Opener couldn't "embed itself" onto anything; even Opener's developers acknowledged that it needed to be installed manually by someone with admin access or physical access before it could do anything at all, and it had no vector of spread.

So despite the fact that whether Opener is actually a virus or not doesn't change the thrust of the Tech Review article (namely, that the development of Mac malware should be taken as a positive sign of the Mac market's growth and increasing visibility), we were all ready to debunk the "Opener as virus" implication into a tiny smear on the asphalt, because we didn't want Mac users panicking over nothing. But then we did something that John Dvorak forgot to do-- we checked our facts.

See, a week is a really long time in high tech, and while Opener appeared to be an inert script back then, MacInTouch now has reports from three readers who have found Opener installed on their Macs, despite using firewalls and being "behind locked doors"-- so apparently this thing is spreading somehow, maybe in a trojan installer of some sort. McAfee has also since classified Opener as a worm, claiming that it "tries to spread via shares," presumably because it turns on File Sharing in hopes that connected users will download the script and try to run it themselves. Three affected users isn't exactly an epidemic, but it's more than enough reason to watch the skies; we recommend keeping an eye on the MacInTouch report until people figure out how Opener is insinuating itself onto random Macs out there.

Lessons to learn: 1) things change; 2) paranoia is your friend; and 3) John Dvorak is still a massive tool. But you probably already knew at least that last one.