Enough with trivial issues like who's going to be president of the United States. Ready to plunge back into the real controversy that's currently tearing the Mac community apart? We speak, of course, of the burning question on everyone's lips: is that "Opener" malware a virus or not? Because after some neck-wrenching back-and-forth, here's how things stand: Apple says that Opener is "not a virus, Trojan horse, or worm," while some independent antivirus companies say that it is a worm because it "does try to copy itself" to other hard drives, including network-mounted volumes. So who's right? Maybe we'll need a series of three nationally televised debates in various formats to find out. (If so, at least we'll know that the rectangular bulge on Steve Jobs's back is an iPod.)

Personally, we've already come to our own conclusions, thanks to faithful viewer Harold Martin, the developer who just happens to be the author of the Opener-removing "Closer" script. Harold obviously has an up-close-and-personal relationship with Opener's code, and according to him, "Opener copies itself to all mounted volumes with a /System folder. So if you have a system on an external HD and have your other Mac's HD mounted via network file sharing and so on, it will 'propagate.'" Which is precisely what the antivirus companies have said, in their charmingly alarmist "buy our antivirus software or suffer a horrible flesh-eating demise like those dumb kids in Cabin Fever" fashion.

Whether or not Opener therefore qualifies as a "worm," however, is perhaps a matter of interpretation; if one of our PowerBooks were infected, for example, our Power Mac wouldn't get Openerized too, because while we do keep it connected over AirPort with full access privileges, it just so happens that we only mount a user directory, not the whole hard disk... and we certainly never mount any full volumes over the Internet or anything like that, and we doubt 99.5% of Mac users do either. In other words, there's barely any resemblance between Opener's only method of spreading and the way most Windows worms loot, pillage, and burn any PCs within a fifty-mile radius. So both sides are right, in a way; technically, sure, Opener can spread from one Mac to another in a very specific set of circumstances, but in its current state, its possibility of spreading with any reasonable degree of success is basically nil-- it's a worm, but it's not really a "worm."

So for the time being, at least, when folks like London's mi2g Intelligence Unit say that Mac OS X is "the world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment" (thanks to faithful viewer Alexander Liz for the heads up), they're probably still 100 percent correct-- but that doesn't mean you don't have to take reasonable precautions. If you want to get really serious about it, faithful viewer One Guy From Finland informs us that no less spooky a government agency than the National Security Agency has issued a 109-page document detailing how best to lock down Mac OS X against unauthorized access. Share and enjoy, and keep watching the skies.