In a report released Thursday, McAfee's Avert Labs division said that the number of discoveries of vulnerabilities on the Macintosh platform has increased by about 200 percent in the past three years, from 45 in 2003 to 143 in 2005.

Those numbers are still very low compared to the wild wild West of Windows operating systems, but the Mac operating system is just as vulnerable to targeted malware attacks as Windows, McAfee said.

Apple's high profile could make it a bigger target in the future.

"McAfee believes that hackers will increasingly point their digital 'lock picks' toward Mac OS X," the company said.

Soul of the car

Microsoft researchers are trying to determine the demographics of searching for certain Internet keywords to improve the performance of the company's new adCenter online-advertising platform. Their research is also unlocking automotive mysteries, such as what kind of customer finds the Mazda Miata appealing?

Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's chief advertising strategist, entered Dodge Caravan into the program last week at a Microsoft-sponsored summit for advertisers.

It turns out that 54 percent of searchers were women, age 25 to 50. Then he entered Ferrari Maranello 575, calling it "a nice little car."

Not surprisingly, 66 percent of searchers were men, age 18 to 24. "There must be some young entrepreneurs doing pretty well," he said. (Or fantasizing about doing well.)

But those two were pretty easy. "Let's pick a tough one now — at least tough for me," Mehdi said, typing Mazda Miata in the program. "Is it a women's sports car? Is it a male, midlife-crisis car? I can never tell by looking at the car."

According to the program, 55 percent of people searching for it are male, 35 to 50. "So, I think it is more men looking to get that sports-car enthusiasm back in their life," Mehdi said.

A great mystery solved.

Check the hype

The advertising and marketing executives gathered at Microsoft last week seemed to agree that although the online-advertising industry started 11 years ago, it's actually much younger. After making big promises it couldn't keep in the buildup to the Internet bubble, online advertising basically had to do a restart.

"We ran screaming down Madison Avenue saying you don't need television anymore, you don't need print. It was awful," said Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer at Yahoo! "We did that to ourselves."

As a result, she said, the industry is really only about five years old.

Google everywhere

Google certainly won some praise up here this week. At the Microsoft gathering, Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of the DeNuo consulting company, told the packed audience that rapid iteration is one of the reasons "Google is running circles around Microsoft."

At a Bellevue Chamber of Commerce luncheon, InfoSpace Chief Executive Jim Voelker was asked about rumors that Microsoft and Yahoo! might form some kind of partnership.

"Who thinks that will work?" he wondered. "Why would 100 smart people from one side and 300 smart people from the other side be smarter than Google? ... It is clear that Google has those guys on the run."

Back talk

It's not that Rishad Tobaccowala's comment above didn't go unchecked.

Jim Stengel, chief marketing officer of Procter & Gamble, asked Microsoft executive Joanne Bradford at the gathering if Tobaccowala was allowed to stay on the stage after making that remark.

"It's all right, it's all right," she said. "I'm not sure how he's getting to the airport, though."

Download, a column of notes, items and miscellany, can be reached at 206-464-2265 or biztech@seattletimes.com. For items through the week, check out Tech Tracks at seattletimes.com/techtracks.

More business & technology headlines...