Tiger Suffers Dashboard Setback.


No sooner had many Mac users installed Tiger than news broke of a potentially devastating method of using a malware Dashboard widget to perform any task a user is capable of, such as deleting files from the Home directory.

While little has come of Arlo Rose’s threats to create a Doomsday Widget, there is concern that others who might harbor ill will toward OS X, Apple or Mac users in general might exploit Dashboard’s flaws.

Attempting to squash the panic that has swept through the Macintosh community and threatened to slow the adoption rate of Tiger, Apple CEO Steve Jobs convened an impromptu press conference today to address the issue.

According to Jobs, “There is little or no evidence that nefarious parties – disgruntled former Apple employees, the Japanese yakuza, evil Nazi scientists seeking to re-animate Hitler’s brain, what have you – have so far sought to create any kind of ‘Doomsday Widget.’

“While it is technically possible to trash all of a user’s files through such a widget,” Jobs continued, “I want to stress as emphatically as I can that it is not – repeat, not – possible for you to contract a bad case of the clap through a widget. Not possible. I know there were some rumors floating around the lunch room at a junior high school in White Plains… but… um… just wanted to clear that up.”

Jobs indicated that Apple programmers were hard at work creating a counter-measure to a potential Macintosh catastrophe, the like of which has not been seen since the release of Microsoft Word 6.0.

“We have our top people working on this around the clock,” Jobs said.

“Sina,” he called out to Senior Vice President of Applications Sina Tamaddon. “Who do we have working on this?”

“Um,” Tamaddon stammered, shuffling quickly through some papers.

“Gordy.”

“What?” Jobs asked. “No. Not Gordy. Gordy’s… he’s… We need our top people on this, Sina.”

“Gordy wasn’t doing anything, so…”

“Yeah, there’s a reason for that,” Jobs said. “Well, anyway, we’re going to get our top people on this. Not Gordy.”

Meanwhile, widget downloads have slowed to a crawl on Apple’s web site, prompting the company to give many of them away for free in order to boost traffic.