I was getting frustrated: I had just plugged in my brand new 500GB external hard drive, and I desperately wanted to play with Time Machine. Not for the backups or whatever it does, but for the cool space effects and flying windows. But it wouldn't do anything: "Next Backup: 7:15 PM" it said. It was 7:01PM.
Now, as I've mentioned before, I'm not an impatient guy -- but 14 minutes?! C'mon now. Not to mention all the time it needs to actually back up my computer. But I wanted it to start now. Alas, I found no method of triggering a backup...and so I waited.
Of course, I'm a complete idiot. Apparently all you gotta do is right-click (ctrl-click for you one-buttoners) the Time Machine dock icon and, sure enough, there's a "Back Up Now" option. Not sure how I missed that, but I'm comforted by the fact that I'm not the only one who did.
And since I'm not, I figure perhaps some of you missed it too -- hence this post. So. There you go.
[via DaringFireball]
This seems fitting for Halloween -- the whole spooky-and-invisible-ghoul-attacks thing. Apparently Intego -- a security firm that develops the Mac anti-virus software VirusBarrier -- has discovered an actual, honest-to-goodness Trojan Horse for the Mac, code-named OSX.RSPlug.A. (Remember, this isn't a virus -- viruses self-propagate, or move from one computer to another on their own. This does not.)
The horsey, found on several porn sites (I felt dirty writing that), masquerades as a QuickTime codec. When a user tries to view one of the site's videos -- horrible! horrible! -- he's told QuickTime can't read the file, and that he has to download an updated version of the video codec for it to play. Shameless that he is, he downloads the disk image and installs the software.
The software, of course, isn't a video codec at all, but rather a Trojan Horse that modifies his DNS settings! (Thunder! Crash! Dramatic music!) Macworld sums up the untamed horse's nasty behavior:
When the malicious DNS server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks) or to web pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites, according to Intego.
Result: No porn for you! Oh, and your credit card info in the hands of evil, evil people.
But what does it all mean? How do you know if you're infected? How do you exorcise your Mac of this evil? Thankfully, Rob "Freakin' Genius" Griffiths answers all of these haunting questions in great detail at Macworld.
There is one sentence in Rob's article that stands out, and should act as a mantra for all mankind:
Rule #1: Do not install software from untrusted sources, especially if that software comes as an installer package and requests your administrator's password!
Word.
I know, I know: my profile says that Terminal is my one app I couldn't live without, but that's only because it's too hard to pick just one. You will, however, notice that the first icon in my Mac's dock is Mail.app. It's the first program I run every morning, and the last I quit. So it's good to see that Apple's paying it some attention in Leopard: and I'm not talking about HTML stationary (blech).
My favorite new feature in Mail are data detectors, as I gushed about on the most recent podcast. Ever get an email with somebody's contact information, or an invitation to an event? Sure you have (if you haven't, let me know: I've got a kickin' party to invite you to). In the olden days, you used to have to copy and paste said information from the Mail message into Address Book or iCal. Man, we had it tough.
Leopard's Mail simplifies that with the aforementioned data detectors. Now when you see an invitation: "dinner on November 16th" for example, mouse over it and you'll see a gray dotted-line appear around the information, along with a little triangle. Click the triangle and you'll get a contextual menu offering to let you add the event to the appropriate application. Even cooler, selecting that icon will pop up a panel for that app right there, meaning you don't even need to launch iCal or Address Book. Sweet, right? It certainly makes it a lot more likely that I'll actually remember to add events to my calendar and people to my contacts.
While we're at it, an anonymous reader pointed out that Mail's also fixed one nagging bug: it recognizes nicknames entered in your contacts' listings. My solution for this in Tiger was to add a group called "Dad," for example, that only contained my father's email. Now I can just add "Dad" to his nickname field and Mail will figure out who I mean when I type "Dad" into a To: field.
Are those pigs flying by the window? Wait, no—an easy mistake to make. They just happen to be your everyday common pigbird: birds that look like pigs. Our friends at TidBITS are reporting that Apple's End User License Agreement for Leopard Server is different from previous versions of the OS X Server license in that it appears to allow for virtualization. Here's the relevant portion of the new license:
This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Mac OS X Server software (the "Mac OS X Server Software") on a single Apple-labeled computer. You may also install and use other copies of Mac OS X Server Software on the same Apple-labeled computer, provided that you acquire an individual and valid license from Apple for each of these other copies of Mac OS X Server Software.This change would mark a major about face for Apple, which had previously been pretty adamant about not allowing any virtualization of OS X, even when using virtualization software on OS X. Of course, this change doesn't apply to the desktop version of Leopard, merely the server.
If you're curious as to why that change is important, or what it means for Leopard Server and the IT professionals who love it, I highly recommend Adam's article above; as you'd expect from TidBITS, it's thorough and informative.
If you're hoping that this is a predictor of functionality to be possible with the client version of Leopard (or virtualizing OS X on other OSes), don't get your hopes up. VMWare and Parallels are both working closely with Apple to make virtualization of OS X Server a possibility; as a result, it's likely to be very tied to Apple's rules and regulations.
Apple, you sneaky devils. Hiding new features and options in places that we would never even think to look for them! It's true: while most of Leopard's shiny new gewgaws are pretty obvious, there're a fair share that you might need to dig around for. Take, for example, the additions to the Accounts preference pane.
"What additions?" you might ask, and you would be justified for doing so. Apple's tucked them away in a hidden contextual menu that I would never have found on my own (cheers, Mr. Frakes). The trick is this: first unlock the Accounts pane by clicking on the padlock and entering your administrator password. Then, control-click on your name in the account list. You'll see one choice: "Advanced Options..." Therein lie the secrets that man has sought since the beginning of time. Or OS X, anyway.
Now, as Apple says at the top of the subsequent dialog, these are serious options. There's a reason Apple's buried them: Don't be mucking about in here if you don't know what you're doing. That said, you can change a number of things from this panel, such as your User ID, Group ID, Short Name (which, by the way, could royally screw up your machine, so be extra careful), Login Shell, Home Directory, UUID, and aliases. The above hint that I linked to really deals with aliases: by specifying one here, you can enter it wherever you see your short account name ("dan" instead of "dmoren" for example, if typing those three more characters is really an undue burden).
Tired of the Halloween theme yet? Too bad. Like primetime TV, I will not let a minute go by without reminding you of the current holiday. Tim Gaden, the Mail.app uber guru, is back and better than ever! He’s got a killer tip about how to restore your Mail.app bundles now that you’ve installed Leopard (Dan, your wish is apparently Tim’s command).
Two quick commands will restore those old plugins (maybe):
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3
Yay! Mail Act-on and Mail.appetizer are back (the former more than the latter). I love my bundles; I was afraid they might not return. This may not work for all bundles, but it’s worth a shot.
Our constantly online lifestyle has made a firewall a must for essentially every computer user. This is so much so that it’s hard to find an internet capable OS without one built in. These days, Windows enables its own by default. That’s great. Unfortunately, Apple still isn’t enabling OS X’s by default. And that’s the least of its worries.
Heise Security runs down several issues with Leopard’s firewall. They’re all worth our attention. First, in the normal operating mode (allow specific service ports), it doesn’t just open ports for the listed services. Rather, it allows any service started on the Mac to poke holes. That includes malicious software.
Further, there are some other services that Apple keeps running, like ntp and netbios that have open ports not listed in System Preferences. Now, you might argue that’s ok because you trust Apple to keep those services up to date (and relatively free of vulnerabilities). If you’re paranoid, you’d turn on the straight deny option of the firewall to close up all ports. That still wouldn’t protect you. NTP, for example, is still available, even in that mode.
This is one of those reasons that I still recommend the use of a router even with a single Mac (and turn off UPnP for the love of Pete). I hope Apple addresses these issues soon.
It’s Halloween and that means I’ll tell you a tale of fright. Gather round the campfire kids as I shine this flashlight at my face in a spooky way. There were once these things called InputManagers. They were powerful pieces of software that could do wonderful or dangerous things. Browsers were enhanced to usable states.
But then InputManagers were pronounced dead. Dead and buried.
One more tip we got regarding Leopard, is that InputManager plugins are no longer allowed. That’s right… no more little hacks from anybody besides Apple. No more Apple menu hacks. No more Safari plugins.
You’d think the story ended there… Boo! InputManagers are alive and well (even SIMBL, the Safari plugin handler is back). The rules have just changed a little bit.
The upshot is that Apple took a hard long look at security related to InputManagers. More recently, critics of InputMangers have pointed to a lack security as the main issue with them. The ease with which InputManagers were once installed spooked me and I don’t panic easily. They now require admin privileges and permission. It’s a fair compromise to keep such a powerful API.
