Emotional flip-flop time again! Remember how your stomach churned when you first heard that "Opener" was Mac OS X's first real virus and it could do all sorts of truly nasty things to your system? Okay, now do you remember the overwhelming sense of relief you felt when you found out that Opener is actually not a virus after all, but malware that has to be physically installed by someone with admin access before it can do its thing? And then do you remember the premiere of Stomach-Churning 2: Electric Boogaloo when you heard that several people had found Opener running on their Macs when no one else had access to them and at least a couple of antivirus companies had claimed that Opener kindasorta is a virus after all?

Well, good news: apparently you can quit chugging the Mylanta, because according to ZDNet UK, Apple has poked and prodded at Opener for the past week, and has released an official statement of its findings-- namely, that "Opener is not a virus, Trojan horse, or worm. It does not propagate itself across a network, through email, or over the Web. Opener can only be installed by someone who already has access to your system and provides proper administrator authentication. Apple advises users to only install software from vendors and Web sites that they know and trust." Whew. Finally, we can all relax.

Or can we? We hope you didn't get too used to the flip-flop, because it might be time for a flop-flip right back into Ulcerville. Don't forget, McAfee has officially classified Opener as a worm, claiming that it tries to "spread via shares," and now another antivirus company, Sophos, insists that Opener is a worm because it "does try to copy itself from Apple Mac drive to Apple Mac drive." Note that this assertion is directly at odds with Apple's report that Opener doesn't self-propagate, so clearly somebody's wrong and/or lying, here.

Of course, everybody knows that security companies like Sophos make their money by making you paranoid so you'll buy their antivirus software, and Sophos in particular might have less credibility than most; don't forget, these are the guys who insisted last year that "a Mac has no more inherent security when it comes to malware than a PC," when anyone with a reasonable grasp of default Windows and Mac OS X security settings knows that's just patently false-- or certainly was at the time, prior to the release of Microsoft's Big Scary Security Patch a couple of months ago.

That said, we'd feel a lot better if Apple could explain exactly why "security experts" keep insisting that Opener attempts to self-propagate if it really doesn't-- and some sort of guess as to how Opener has turned up installed on Macs reportedly sitting behind firewalls and locked doors would be nice, too. Basically, if we should be panicking, we'd love it if Apple could just go ahead and say so; we could really use the exercise.