Aieeeee! Walk away from your desk for a few minutes and this is what you get. Some misanthropist plugs themselves into your MacBook's USB port, copies over the 'Newton Virus' and - bingo! - sometime later all your Mac's desktop furniture suddenly collapses and then starts rolling around at the bottom of your screen. There are icons and menu bars everywhere.

Luckily, this isn't a harbinger for the malware onslaught Mac OS X users have been threatened with for the last seven years (that's yet to surface, BTW). It's merely a piece of funky interactive art cooked up by UK art scamps Troika.

Newton hits it on the head

The 'Newton Virus' - cleverly named after the Newton PDA invented by Apple in the 1990s - harnesses the motion sensor technology in the MacBook and MacBook Pro, and then uses it to mess your desktop around. Tip your MacBook this way and that and the icons and menu bar tumble around like coins in the bottom of a washing machine. Hilarious.

You can see the action unfolding for yourself on YouTube, or the Troika Newton Virus website.

Funny though this is, there's little room for Mac users to be complacent. Malware may not be a threat on the Mac today, but it doesn't follow that it will remain this way forever. As the Mac becomes more popular, so do the dangers. We'll be looking at Mac malware - and the measures you can take to protect your against it - later this week.

[via TUAW]