Sensational Headlines: or Why Apple Never Made a Yellow iMac...

Headlines are misleading. They're created as trailers for news stories, trying to give you the explosions and the broad dialogue to hook you and get you to read the story. This is an old story, and yet I'm occasionally surprised at just how far this goes. Technology stories are troublesome in this regard, because the story offers relies on specific details to make sense, and sometimes while writing a fantastic headline someone goes too far and changes the meaning of a story.

This happened with the Washington Post's story on a demonstration of wireless-card driver flaws. The headline is "Hijacking a Macbook in 60 Seconds or Less." Now the headline is descriptive in this part, because the researchers did use a Dell laptop to hijack a Macbook. However, this headline is also misleading because it uses the Macbook as the focus. The problem isn't the Macbook, it's the driver implementation of a third-party wireless card and this problem exists for Windows as well.

Although the story buries this fact deep into the story, the security researcher points it out immediately upon presenting the target Macbook. Of course, the blogosphere goes nuts with opprobrium and vitriol against Apple and 'smug' Mac users which seems like a particularly bizarre reaction, until you remember earlier reactions to Apple's new commercials.

This is a security flaw, and make no mistake about it, Apple needs to create a fix, but let's be clear: you can hack any wireless computer using this flaw. Furthermore, wireless networks are inherently insecure. There's too many ways to attack the network including sniffing the traffic and attaining passwords, creating false networks, and simple brute force attacks. This is just another problematic vector in an insecure system. But, this isn't an Apple problem and the word Macbook was in the headline to drive traffic.