Category: Mac Software

  • Park Your Virus Impervious Smugness Mac (and Linux) Users

    Screenshot of ClamTk 3.08 running on Ubuntu 8....
    Image via Wikipedia

    I use linux. I prefer it over Windows for many reasons. It’s more resistant to viruses, less of a target, but that doesn’t mean that malware or other viruses are impossible. If someone were to trick me into running something and even worse, trick me into using my administrator password to install something system wide, it could be the same end result as a windows malware infection. To be fair Microsoft has improved their security over the years. They are still the most likely platform though to get a drive by virus just by visiting a site (with no user interaction.) That much said, Mac users and Linux users should avoid being smug. Why? They aren’t completely safe. No one is. Social engineering is the most common (and most effective) path to getting malware on a computer.

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  • Free Codeweavers Wine today Only

    This is for Mac or Linux. Their servers are VERY busy right now as you might imagine. But, if you’ve always wondered about crossover wine, see if you can get a copy today at Codeweavers main site. I was redirected to their DOWN page which is a lean page with the download links and a place to sign up for a license key. The license key you can register by the end of the month. Right now their server is crying since they’ve been dugg and slashdot’ted at the same time, but I’m sure it will be possible to slip in sometime today for a free copy of their polished product.

    On a side note, I’ve been a paying crossover license owner for some time although on my current main laptop I’ve been using stock wine with VERY good results. If you look “up the food chain” though. Many of the good results we get in the free stock wine is thanks to the work at codeweavers. So…. in spite of todays free offer, they deserve the communities support if you believe that a working Windows compatibility layer is important to the future of operating systems such as Linux.

  • OpenOffice 3 officially released

    Good linux format review of the new features and the overall feel (if you can get to it this morning. The main openoffice.org site is down at the moment. New features include a plugin for pdf import, support for the new Microsoft XML docx style file formats (read only). Writer can show several pages at once in the zoomed out view (with editor notes in the margin). Calc can support 4 times the number of columns and has new collaboration features.

    Sounds as though it’s a good all around improvement. The speed is about the same as the last version in the 2.x series in their comparison.

  • Hard drive testing utilities

    Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

  • X-Plane and linux

    I’ve mentioned X-Plane before – it’s a flight simulator that strives to be as accurate flight modeling -wise as possible. Realism is one of their goals and it’s also unique in that it’s available for Mac/Windows and Linux (version 8 that is). (There is flightgear also, but X-Plane has still felt like better competition for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator line.) Anyway… Version 8 had linux support. Version 9 has beta’s out now for Windows and Mac, but there are rumors in the forums that version 9 may not see linux support. (Apparently the person in charge of the linux port has been hired by Google and was working on the linux port in his free time gratis…) I hope we’ll see a version 9 of X-Plane for linux. I wish I could lend help, but bash scripting is pretty much the zenith of my coding skills. (BTW – version 9 LOOKS nice from the screenshots I’ve seen. Here come a few more x-plane related thoughts….

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  • Exploits in wild for recent Apple vulnerabilities

    If you’ve been delaying on updating with the recent Apple Mac OS X updates…. don’t, there are exploits in the wild now for at least one. It’s speculated that this code may have been in the wild before Apple released the security updates.

  • Multiple Apple updates as Mac goes to version 10.4.8

    Apple is fixing 15 security flaws with the 10.4.8 version upgrade of Mac OS X. (There is a second update as well…. Security Update 2006-006). In typical fashion there are a bundle of issues in these updates. Several address remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.

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  • Firefox zero-day vulnerability (or is it?)

    I saw a comment somewhere else that zero-day was overused and in essense ANY previously unknown vulnerability in open source software is technically zero day… the intent here though is to use the word in this context…. “vulnerability has been released without giving the vendor an opportunity to patch…” Yes, the fun vulnerability weekend seems to be continuing – there’s a javascript zdnet has coverage it’s “impossible to patch” (?) from the individuals that have publicized it. The announcement came at Toorcon.

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  • Apple Macbook pro and other wireless fixes

    Do you remember the big bruhaha a month or so back about the “apple wireless vulnerability” that everybody picked apart because in the video taped demonstration they used a third party card…. EVEN though the demonstrators stated that the same vulnerability existed in Apple’s own driver some on the internet tore one reporter up over stating that because Apple denied being shown exploit code (slight semantic issue there…) Well… those driver vulnerabilities that must have not existed, were fixed today by Apple. Brian Krebs has the story, as well as incidents.org

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  • Firefox and Thunderbird updates

    As I’ve just posted to the security-update-notice category, Firefox and Thunderbird both have been released in 1.5.0.7 version…. the release fixes a number of known security issues and you should upgrade as soon as possible. Details on the issues at incidents.org Also, you can visit mozilla.com for downloads

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