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The site looks totally awesome in Internet Explorer for OS 9 and OS X. It's okay under Netscape 7 and FireFox. It still needs significant tweaking for Safari and Omniweb. It's so messed up in iCab that I'm not even going to try to make it work in that bro...
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Wired reports on a serious security hole in Mac OS X today. The vulnerability permits a person to design a web page that can run programs or execute AppleScript or Unix command line code on your computer. Such code could be used for any number of nefario...
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Apple has released a security update to fix the dangerous OS X vulnerability disclosed earlier this week and reported here yesterday. The security update should be available through the Software Update Preference Pane as of this evening. A standalone upd...
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The "secure" version of the Help Viewer that comes with the recent security update is 2.0.6 (v.111.3). It replaces version 2.0.4 (v.111) from OS X 10.3.3. It is found at this path: System/Library/CoreServices/Help Viewer.app I'm not recommending this, b...
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Jason Harris from Unsanity has demonstrated yet another security issue similar to the ones that were eliminated by the latest Apple security update. This exploit can be performed in several ways. The most obvious way requires some cooperation or gullibil...
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It turns out that the "telnet" protocol can be used in the same manner as the "help" protocol to execute malicious code under OS X. The fix is the same as it was for the "help" and "disk" protocols. Use the More Internet Preference Pane to set TextEdit or...
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I upgraded my laptop to Mac OS X 10.3.4 this weekend. Since I was doing something that could jeopardize the integrity of my data anyway, I took the opportunity to install a slew of updates that I have been postponing, including the latest XCode Tools (pro...
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A friend of mine complained that Classic wouldn't start up after upgrading to OS X 10.3.4. Whenever it was launched, the Classic application attempted to install updated extensions in her Classic System Folder, but failed. Repairing permissions didn't he...
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In my last post, I wrote about helping a person to get Classic running again under OS X 10.3.4. A couple of things that I should have stressed were that I was talking her through the whole process on the phone and her computer skills weren't very strong. ...
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This week Apple released Security Update 2004-06-07. Among other things, it patches the operating system to alert users to potentially malicious code and prevent it from executing. This effectively ends the recent OS X security "crisis" (where "crisis" is...
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It never hurts to use a high quality cable. Gigabit-certified ethernet cables that meet CAT-5E and CAT-6 certifications can cost significantly more than ordinary Fast Ethernet cables. The cheaper cables are usually certified to work with up to 100Mbps ne...
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Does a high-quality ethernet cable speed up file transfers? Yes it does. I was going to graph the results, but it doesn't seem worth it. My file-transfers saw a 13% speed increase across-the-board when I upgraded to CAT-6 cables. That's a pretty nice in...
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"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" was a very bad movie. Ignore the hype for a moment and the movie starts to look like a hodge-podge of disconnected scenes that are utterly dependent on loving and intimate knowledge of the book or submission to the ...
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While perusing the collection on illegal-art.org I came across an entertaining piece of conceptual art by Kembrew McLeod. It seems that Mr. McLeod managed to get a trademark on the phrase "Freedom of Expression" and staged an infringement. His lawyer was...
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iTunes 4.5 includes a "feature" that annoys the heck out of me. Taking up valuable space on my already-crammed TiBook's monitor is an additional graphic that appears in the Song Name, Artist and Album columns of the iTunes playlist. Clicking on one of th...
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Has your quaint, isolated European mountain-town suffered from the worldwide economic downturn? Well, perhaps you, too can joint the ever-growing team at RENT-A-VILLAGE. At RENT-A-VILLAGE, they specialize in exploiting your entire population by making ev...
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The Mac SE Simulator ("WebSE") at myoldmac.net which attempts to simulate an old Mac within an interactive Flash animation is a curiously flawed rendition of System 7 on a M68000 (a.k.a. 68k) computer that nevertheless engenders pleasant feelings of nosta...
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The September issue of Macworld Magazine has a neat tip for speeding up your interface a bit by changing the behavior of sheets. Sheets are a part of the OS X Aqua interface. They are simple dialog boxes that are attached to a document window, sliding do...
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Yet another snafu in the seemingly futile pursuit of a reliable electronic voting machine occurred last week when Sequoia Voting Systems demonstrated its new paper-trail electronic voting system for state Senate staffers in California. Wired reports that...
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When I lived in California, I was introduced to a regional fast food restaurant called Carl's Jr. (home of the Green Burrito) that served some of the most satisfying sandwiches that I have ever tasted. Their regular burgers were alright -- a bit like larg...
