New and Noteworthy: Gates gets defensive about Vista, lashes out at Apple; Govt makes request for Apple options documents; more

Gates gets defensive about Vista, lashes out at Apple In an interview with Newsweek, we see Bill Gates at his most defensive, angrily decrying Apple's "Mac vs. PC" ads and questioning Mac OS X's security. "Well, certainly we've done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it?s superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to it. [...] You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you?re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it?s fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let?s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?" More.

Apple says government makes request for options documents Reuters reports that Apple Inc. said it had received informal requests from the U.S. government for documents and additional information on its past stock-options practices. "Apple has provided results of its internal review and independent investigation into past stock-options grants to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney's Office, it said in an SEC filing. The company has received informal requests for documents and additional information, it also said." More.

"Month of Apple bugs" may be extended ZDNet reports that the developer behind the Month of Apple Fixes is considering continuing the project to provide 'zero-day patches' for critical issues affecting Mac OS X users in the future. "Landon Fuller was an engineer in Apple's BSD Technology Group, and one of the principal architects of the Darwin Ports project. Fuller started the Month of Apple Fixes (MOAB Fixes) project in response to the Month of Apple Bugs (MOAB) project, which promised to feature a new Apple software bug for each day in January. MOAB has now finished, but Fuller is keen to expand the MOAB Fixes initiative into a project similar to the Zero-day Emergency Response Team (ZERT). ZERT is a group of engineers and security experts from industry, community and incident response groups that offers unofficial patches during malware crises." More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• AirPort Extreme 802.11n Enabler (#3): Reminder of supported models; Ad-hoc networks still stuck at 802.11g speeds; more
• Odds and Ends: Knowledge Base updates
• AirPort Extreme Update 2007-001 (#5): Continued dropouts (lapses in connectivity)

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