Two things happened this past week that actually made me put my coffee down, which doesnt happen often on a Sunday morning of reading tech blogs in my bathrobe.
First one: Instagram is on Android now. Finally. It went up in the Play Market last Tuesday and apparently got over a million downloads in the first twelve hours, which is a genuinely wild number for an app that was iOS-exclusive since October 2010. Eighteen months! Ive got a buddy, Deepak, who's been running Android since the original Droid and hes been complaining about this exact thing at every single lunch for as long as I can remember. "Why do I have to feel like a second-class citizen just because I didnt buy an iPhone," he said, more than once, usually while stabbing at his phone trying to find some half-baked Instagram clone that wasnt it. I dont think hes wrong exactly, but I also get why Kevin Systrom and his team wanted the app buttery smooth before they touched Androids fragmentation nightmare. Building for one screen size and one OS version spread is just easier than building for the fifty flavors of Android floating around out there in 2012.
I put it on my own Android phone Wednesday night and, credit where its due, it doesnt feel like a cheap port. The filters are there, its fast, the camera capture doesnt lag the way some of these copycat apps do. Im not going to pretend Im some huge Instagram guy though - I mostly use it to take pictures of my lunch and my dog, Baxter, and maybe four people ever like them. But I get the appeal now in a way I didnt before, when it was just this thing my iPhone friends kept talking about.
Now the scarier one.
So apparently theres a piece of malware called Flashback going around that's infected something like 600,000 Macs worldwide. Dr. Web, this Russian security firm, put the number out earlier this week and its been bouncing around every tech site since. The way it gets you is through a fake Java update prompt - you dont even need to type your password, it just installs itself if you click through the wrong dialog box. Which, look, I have definitely clicked through dialog boxes I didnt fully read at eleven at night while trying to watch a video that wouldnt load. Havent we all.
Ive got a 2010 MacBook and Im not going to lie, this one got under my skin a little. Ive spent a decade telling PC friends that Macs "dont really get viruses" like its some kind of law of nature instead of just, you know, a smaller target for a long time. I ran the terminal commands going around to check if Java on my machine was compromised (there's a whole thread on the Apple forums with the exact commands, if youre curious, just search Flashback Java check) and thankfully came back clean. But it rattled me enough that I actually turned off Java in my browser preferences entirely, which I should have done ages ago honestly since I never use it for anything anymore anyway.
What gets me is how quiet Apple has been about all this. No official statement, no patch out yet as far as I can tell, just a bunch of third-party security researchers and antivirus companies doing the work of telling people whats going on. Feels backwards. Youd think with the size this thing has gotten to theyd want to say something.
Anyway. Two different companies, two totally different weeks - one shipping a product that half a million people apparently wanted immediately, one getting caught flat footed by something that snuck up on 600,000 machines while nobody was really looking. Makes you think about how much of what were all carrying around in our pockets and bags runs on trust we dont really examine that closely until something forces us to.
Going to go check my Java settings again just to be safe. And maybe post a picture of Baxter.