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VidBITS: iTunes 11 and Comparing Antivirus Apps

iTunes 11 continues to occupy our thoughts, largely thanks to all the comments and email that we continue to get about it, so we devoted a lot of this 45-minute staff roundtable to discussing just why iTunes 11 is so important. Michael Cohen hit the nail on the head with his comment that iTunes 11 is actually a sort of meta-operating system, and how that makes it fertile ground for user interface experimentation (and mistakes!). Matt Neuburg pointed out that iTunes 11 is nearly identical in interface to the new Remote app for iOS, leading to some argument about whether Apple is pushing all interfaces to be more like iOS. Other issues that came up include problems being encountered
by classical music buffs, the Command-1 and Command-L tricks for getting back to Music from wherever you might be, how to sort the Albums view with View Options, and the continued lack of any coherent approach for sharing a single set of music within a family.

Next, responding to a number of recent reports about the differing accuracy of antivirus apps, Rich Mogull educated us about the techniques that different apps use to identify viruses and why they do better or worse at identifying viruses. This still isn’t as big a deal on the Mac as on Windows, where Rich said there are, by some counts, 65,000 new virus variants appearing every day. But most interesting were Rich’s insights into the murky world of cybercrime, where companies offer virus-creation toolkits with 24-by-7 support and sites where new viruses can be tested against all existing antivirus programs before being released. Rich also shared his experiences infiltrating this world with a fake identity that applied for a job as a
“money mule,” culminating in a phone call to his recruiter while on stage at the DEF CON security conference.

Though there are a few visual jokes in the video, you won’t miss anything important if you instead listen to the audio-only version, which you can do by clicking the Listen link above, or by subscribing to the TidBITS podcast to listen during your commute or workout.

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