They had the ship 40 years

I admit it's a vast stretch to think humans would be able to master the language, let alone the operating system and peripherals of these aliens; but let's say they have. The Golblum character, having been told how the operating system works and how to tranfer files between human technology and alien technology, COULD have written a program that would have caused a complete system lockup of the aliens' green shield throughout their local network. Don't you think the world's greatest hacker could write such a program for an unprotected network, even on an unknown operating system, if given all of the OS's technical manuals and unlimited access to the network servers?

Didn't quite have 40 years

The alien ship may have been in the bunker for 40 years, but if you'll remember, Brent Spiner mentioned that it was only in the past few days that the ship had come on-line. But for argument's sake, let's say that they did somehow manage to dismantle and reassemble the craft in the 40 years that they'd had it. If I gave you (or, to borrow from your example, the world's greatest hacker) a computer with an unknown OS, and no power, could you or the hacker somehow manage to write OS-compatible code just from looking at the hardware and at the most 24 hours of time with the operating system? I could theoretically see implanting hostile code into the system through the alien fighter's computer -- which I assume would be something akin to a trusted client in our system. But even the coders I know couldn't use C or C++ (I forget which exactly, but if you look carefully at the Mac's monitor in the scene, it shows the name of the programming language) to write even a decent "Hello World" message that would work on an unfamiliar OS.

Huge virus

Viruses tend to be tiny infectious bits of code so they can sneak in and disrupt things, but JB's virus takes so long to load that it must be re-writing the operating system, you'd think they'd have noticed it!

Oh yes it will

Macintoshes require only the right software to run the same versions of software as PCs. One currently available is Virtual PC 3.0, which uses a toggle-mode interface. With this you can turn your Mac into a Windows98 machine and run all Windows software, as well as MS-DOS 6.2.2. Until very recently, Windows has not had a comparable product and couldn't use Mac software.

Already Compatible

Since the aliens were so easily able to manipulate our satellites, it seems to me that our programming languages must be at least similar.

government cover-up

Did you see men in Black ? For all we know, the Mac/PC was invented by using technology from this spacecraft. Dispite the ship having no power I am sure they could have got the basics. This is a bit far fetched i know, but so was the film......

The alien’s ships were using an emulator.

The aliens were using our computers to do that they would have had to do something to make their computers compatible with ours Dave just used that to get into theirs. Watch the new version with the added scene in Area51 he explains how the ship is working to the guy in charge of area 51.

Our systems...

The aliens use a signal somehow like ours. It even distrupts our tv signals. And if David's job back in the company was to track and eliminate signals distrupting the broadcast, he could have done. All he has to do is to find the signal, manipulate it, and broadcast the manipulated signal. If energy is send as signals hierarchically to the alien ships (just like the shields), you go to the main transmitter, and make it help you transmit the wrong signal.

It could happen

Remember. The bits of code stored in our sattelites by the aliens was in binary. It was counting down to 0. Once he figured they used the universal language of computers (i.e. BINARY) he simply wrote the code with the proper compiler. Being that I'm not EXTREMELY familiar with MAC's I cant say exactly what it would entail there but I know on a PC it would be fairly easy to slap together something in C++ that would efficently do some damage. Although I think the major hurdle would have been that he was working in an 'alien' (pardon the pun) network. Its a pain for hackers to work in a network they arent familiar with but is more than likely similar to one they do know. Much less one put together by an alien species. Either way its obvious Dave was a fricking computer super god. Because to do all that in the time alotted would be grueling. Although he probably had the help of however many MIT grad technicians that were working in Area 51 at his disposal. :)

Fundamentals of computing

All computing is theoretically based on Boolean math. This, coupled with the fact that We've had the spacecraft for 40 years would give us most likely enough time to see how the unit ticked. Not to mention, the ship just "powered on" doesn't mean that they didn't have another means to bring the ship online. Remember how they had written flight instructions for will smith without flying the craft?

hard disk, no power

The "flight instructions for Will Smith" would be a poor example, since the time when Will sees the instructions on the dashboard is several days after the spacecraft's power has come back up. I have no doubt that, had the film been a real event, the technicians would have played with the controls AND their manmade magnetic lock on the craft in that intervening time, simply to see what would happen.\r\rHowever, there's still alot of reason to believe that a Mac COULD interface with the alien ship. Someone correctly points out that the aliens had the ability to interface with the TV satellites' signals, which means that there was at least SOME alien-human interface software craeted by the aliens.\r\rIt's also worth pointing out that C programming language, in all its forms, can play host to assembly language subroutines. It's possible that Goldblum's C program was simply a wrapper for the assembly code language, which is almost binary-level in its simplicity.\r\rThe huge size of GoldBlum's virus may be the result of packing in alot of extrraneous camouflage for the virus. For example, there's one type of modern virus that is at least partially imbedded in PICTURE FILES. Think of that movie "THe Lawsuit" (?) with Gene Hackman facing a big corporation. He asks the corporation's lwayers for their papers about a car's safety test, and they hide the vital report in a MOUNTAIN of similar papers. Sometimes a haystack is a needles best camouflage.\r\rFurther, just because a system has no power source does NOT mean that you can't lift data from it. Hard disks, for example, have been rescued from fires and from the collapsed World Trade Center buildings. All that's required is for the data expert to understand how to read the data, and then understand how the data is organized. It's not an impossible task, given 40 years and a whole lot of funding.

Not totally imposible

A.) A Linux box can infect a Windows box, thanks to the internet. It doesn't really matter what OS sent the malicious message.

\r\rB.) Scientists had 40 years to tear apart a ship and figure out how it worked. Humans are VERY skilled at figuring out obscure problems.

\r\rC.) The aliens were not like humans in any measureable respect. Their motivations were few, and their individuality was virtually none. Chances are, they didn't have to deal with many (if any) attempts to intrude into their computer system. They might have pulled a Microsoft and made their system a little too convenient. In short, our society grew up with people mucking around with computers to be obnoxious, we do not know that the aliens in ID4 evolved the same way.

\r\rD.) The fighter craft they commandeered was a perfect delivery device. It was all automated. They didn't need the Mac to actually send a virus, all they needed the Mac for was to send a few commands through the ship to the mothership to cause the shields to drop. \r\r

\r\rThere are two ways to look at this. 1.) The writers of the movie didn't think that bit out enough. 2.) It was a statement about the dangers of conformity. For the latter point, Consider what our immune systems would be like if biological viruses didn't constantly force us to evolve. One little microscopic element could bring down a civilization. Why couldn't one little laptop bring down an ill-experienced mother ship?

\r\rI will concede on this, though: If point #2 was really what was on the writer/director('s) minds, they did a terrible job of getting that idea across. I think it was meant to be more of a nod to War of the Worlds.

40 years not enough

The mere fact that they communicate with our satellites in binary means nothing. They would have to use binary. I saw no mention anywhere of how alien another OS could be. Consider trinary logic (more efficient than binary). 40 Years means nothing either. The power of computing that would even have the mere possibility of overcoming all these obstacles is much more recent than that. Lets be kind and say 20 years. 20 years to overcome an alien technology, perhaps on a level so advanced, that the mere computing speed would be too much to read much less respond to. Not to mention that such a race would be even more paranoid than we are with regards to security. Also, their technology could have changed in the past 40 years since we found their spaceship. They would be able to communicate from that spaceship, but for us to overwhelm an alien OS that has not stood static for 40 years is really quite unbelievable and I don't believe that #32 has been refuted.

No.

First of all "binary" is not a "universal computer language". It's not a computer language, let alone any form of language. It's a mathematical base, no different from using tally marks, roman numerals, or dice to depict numbers. \r\rIn any case, despite what they say in the movie, there was no "virus". Goldblum's character used that term because it pretty much explained the effect of it. In reality goldblum's mac simply interfaced with the ship, to tell it to bring the sheilds down on the mothership (and other ships). They already knew the human interface for the ship (since will smith obviously could fly it pretty damn good), so i'm sure they also were aware of the data interface, and given a suitable adapter (which anyone could probably make in less than ten minutes using nothing but a serial port and some wires), could simply send queries of ANY base (binary, trinary, quadrary, quintary, hexal, sepal, octal, noval, decimal, etc..) at any required voltage, tolerance, amperage, whatever to figure out what did what. all they had to do was put the ship in communicating range of the mothership and have the mac tell the ship to send the right signal.\r

Jeff Golblum sobers up fast

First, it's "Mac", not "MAC". We are here to nitpick after all.\r\rThe Jeff Goldblum character is drinking heavily when his dad happens to mention health, giving him the idea for the virus. He go straight over to the alien ship, wakes up a scientist and tells him to "Get everybody down here right now". Not in a week, not "get me a team of programmers, a weapons-grade cappuccino and some Panadol Extra." By the time they gather around, say 20 minutes later, he has sobered up enough to develop a laptop application that is able to disable the ship's shields. Even assuming he added the funky "Negotiating with host" and "Jolly Roger" modules after the demo, and granted he didn't have time to tackle the weapons systems (which would have been a nice-to-have), that is still pretty fast work for a drunk guy.\r\rRegarding the 1950's ship being out of date, presumably its Software Update application brought it back up to date as soon as the power and network connection came back up. However it seems very odd that the aliens' inventory systems didn't light up when the ship came online. That thing must have been 40 years overdue for a routine service, not to mention its MIA status, but the docking station alien with the banks of controls around him doesn't notice anything unusual.\r\rAnd another thing. Back on Earth they are using Morse Code on the assumption that the aliens wouldn't recognise it (even though it was still in regular maritime use until 1999, and the aliens had clearly been probing us since the 1950s), but as soon as they upload the virus, the radio operator back at base touches his headphones and announces "They've uploaded the virus!" Yet still the mothership aliens don't notice anything. WTF happened to radio silence?