Note: Earlier this evening, the guys over at MacHeist admitted that Malcor was their doing. This article was written before MacHeist made their admission. While there was some speculation that MacHeist was behind it, I didn’t feel like dragging them into it when I wrote this piece since there was no confirmation that they were indeed behind Malcor at that time. As such, this article assumes that the malcor “hacks” were a PR stunt carried out without MacHeist’s involvement. My opinion has changed since then, but I’m not writing any more about this mess until I’m ready to do so. Please keep this in mind as you read this article. --Ed.

It’s hard to run a tech news site or blog. It’s hard to keep writers motivated, and it’s hard maintaining and growing a readership base. For this reason, I can understand why some Mac sites participated in the Malcor hoax, which Hadley Stern of Apple Matters admitted was a bad PR stunt. I can understand why these sites would take part in an out-of-the-box way to gain publicity. No publicity is bad publicity, as the old saying goes.

That doesn’t mean it’s right, though.

Readers expect those who operate sites—especially ones like Apple Matters—to hold some standard of ethics. When the site operators don’t, well, readers are disappointed and may stop reading the site. So in that case, when you get caught, there is such thing as bad publicity.

Me? I love a good prank as much as anyone, and…
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Not long after the Malcor hacking controversy became news last week, there have been some rumblings if whether or not these were legitimate hacks or an elaborate PR stunt.

Today we have our answer.

Hadley Stern posted a short article on AppleMatters entitled A Bad PR Stunt where he seemingly admits that Malcor is (surprise!) nothing more than a PR stunt (and I say “Seemingly” because he never actually mentions Malcor in his post).

An excerpt:

I am very sorry to post this publicly but at this point this has gone to far. Apple Matters is a big site, and it runs on Expression Engine, one of the best platforms out there. At this point this joke is begginning to impact other businesses and I cannot let that happen.

Well, so much for that.

UPDATE: According to posts in this thread, Some of the executives for EllisLab, the parent company of ExpressionEngine (the content management system used by Apple Matters, as well as here on Deep Thought) and EngineHosting (Apple Matters’ web host) are not happy. As EllisLab Vice President Leslie Camacho bluntly put it, “EllisLab is not amused. The people responsible for this stunt have been temporarily banned from ExpressionEngine.com until this is worked out. You want to seriously piss us off? Lie about the security of EE and EH in a very public manner.” Later in the thread, Camacho notes that Hadley Stern apologized.

UPDATE 2: EllisLab has posted an official response to the “hacks”.

It’s been almost a month since Leopard made its debut and I’m just now writing up the conclusion to my review. What gives, you ask? I wrote it as several parts over about three weeks. I actually planned a couple more sections, but stuff happens, time marches on, and things have to be prioritized. So it goes.

Mac users waited over two and a half years for Leopard to emerge. I wrote two articles based on the WWDC previews of Leopard (one, two), and in both, my initial response was “meh.” In 2006, Apple showed off a handful of new features, but it was pretty clear that Leopard was incomplete. Some of the new features were pretty cool, like the new iChat and Time Machine, but Apple didn’t really mention a whole lot in reality. Steve Jobs promised “top secret” features would be revealed closer to Leopard’s release.

Macworld Expo came and went back in December, and Apple said nothing about Leopard.

Spring rolled around, and in place of a release, we got a delay, with the promise of a near-final beta unveiled at WWDC 2007.

WWDC 2007 rolled around and rumors abounded. There were talks of ZFS replacing HFS+, a new user interface, built-in virtualization, among others. And then there was Jobs’ mention of “top secret” new features. The rumor mill was turned up to 11 heading into Jobs’ WWDC 2007 keynote.

What we got was a retooled desktop look and a new Finder. So much for mind-blowingly awesome new…
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All righty, it’s been a while since we’ve done a hardware comparison here.

Lately it seems that all-in-one desktop computers have seen their popularity rise. Since August, Apple has released a fairly large update to the iMac, Gateway unveiled their Gateway One PC (which is way sexier than the Profile 6), and the Dell XPS One.

In this article, I will compare one configuration of the Apple iMac, Dell XPS One, and Gateway One. And if you think you’ve seen this sort of article around here before, well, you’d be right.

First thing’s first

Before I start, I want to get a couple things out of the way. First of all, I am not framing this article to make one company look better or worse, so let’s not even go down that road. These prices are for models as configured on Sunday, November 18, 2007, and are what the manufacturers list on their US online stores (Dell/Gateway Home and Home Office and Apple’s standard pricing). All prices are in US Dollars.

Secondly, yes, I know you can buy a regular tower PC for less than you can buy an all-in-one. Yes, I know you can build a PC for less. Please don’t leave a comment telling me this. In general, all-in-ones are presented as mid-range to higher-end consumer desktops.

A method to this madness

For this little experiment, I set out with some basic specs in mind:

• At least a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 320 GB…
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A hacker is targeting Mac-oriented web sites which come across as too smug.

I wish this was a joke. I really do.

An individual simply identified as “malcor” is threatening to launch “untraceable and unstoppable” attacks against Mac web sties against Mac sites. The problem? Smugness. This person has already taken down one site and has threatened to take down any other site which the hacker feels displays “Excessive Apple fanboism”.

The first target? GlennWolsey.com. Glenn’s site now reads, “This website has been flagged for excessive Apple fanboism, and has been taken down for 24 hours.”

In his/her/its own words:

This apple is rotting at its core. It is infected with smugness, and more and more, the symptoms are starting to show, whether it’s the eye roll at the non-iPod music player, or the snide comments about my laptop’s lack of curves.

Everyone knows that when something starts to rot, the rot must be amputated to protect what is left. As an underground hacker for many years, I am in the perfect position to perform this operation. It is a pleasure to accept this opportunity on behalf of the Mac user’s community.

Seriously, what the hell?

UPDATE 27 Nov 2007: It was all a prank planned by MacHeist. Read their explanation here.