This guide provides an overview of features in Mac OS X that you can use to enhance security and harden your computer. In the paper, you can read instructions and recommendations for securing Mac OS X version 10.5 or later, and for maintaining a secure computer.
RelatedMail is a very useful plugin for Apple Mail that shows messages related to the currently viewed message.
A teenager is making a multi-touch table running Mac OS X, similar to Microsoft's Surface, for a science fair. The table uses infrared light emitting diodes, where an IR camera transmits input via fingertip motions to the computer running Mac OS X.
Parallels has released a new beta build of Parallels Server for Mac that now supports creating virtual machines to run Leopard Server. When the company released last month's public beta of Parallels Server for Mac (which also supports versions of Windows and Linux), it had removed support for Leopard Server VMs due to technical and performance issues.
Time Machine users, rejoice! Pierce T. Wetter III has provided a modified version of the GrandPerspective utility - a version that understands the use of file and folder hard links peculiar to a Time Machine backup. You can use this modified GrandPerspective to scan your entire Time Machine backup folder. For one thing, this tells you immediately how big your Time Machine backup really is (something that's surprisingly hard to find out otherwise).
This guide will show you how to access a computer located on your home network from outside of your local area network. For the purposes of this guide, let’s assume we are trying to access a HOME SERVER such as a Mac Mini located on your home WiFi router. The home computer could just as easily be a Ubuntu, or similarly flavored Linux machine. The first thing that we will need to do is determine your home IP address, and then we will setup port forwarding on your wireless router. Keep reading to get started with this process or go here to learn how a SSH Tunnel works.
The truth is that security through obscurity is a flawed idea. Yes, there are fewer recorded attacks on the Mac platform, but by no means does that make it secure. So what's a Mac user to do? Like the book says, don't panic. In this article we'll take a look at some basic ways you can improve your Mac's security right out of the box.
Many Leopard features are buried just beneath the surface, unknown or ignored by users even though they've had Leopard installed for months. These "hidden" features may be things you never heard of or noticed, or even used without realizing their presence or scope - but they're too good to miss.
If you need to rename several files at once every now and then, this is the application you have always been looking for. Name Mangler is a batch file renamer that supports all common renaming tasks: Find and Replace (including support for regular expressions); Number Sequentially; Change Case; Set Extension; Add Prefix/Suffix; Remove/Insert Characters.
Moreover, you can combine all of these using the Advanced renaming mode, which even comes with some extra features, such as conditional statements, nested counters, and more.
Some of the changes in Leopard are obvious—Time Machine, Quick Look, Spaces, and so on. Others are more subtle. Here are some tips and tricks for working with some of the lesser known new features in System Preferences and Terminal.
Apple would like you to believe that Mac OS X is a complete package, able to fulfill all your needs out of the box. But unless your needs are limited to e-mail and web browsing, there's plenty of room to improve upon OS X's solid foundations. You could go out and spend hundreds of dollars on software, but in most cases there's no need to fork over your hard earned cash. Here's a list of all the free software you need to trick out your Mac.
Whois or "Who is," is a way to query for contact information (or domain name ownership information) about the person or company in control of a site. If you want to know who runs a website, you don't have to look any further than your Mac and opening a Terminal window.
ExpanDrive gives you perfectly transparent access to open, edit, and save files with your favorite programs, even when those files are half a world away. Transparent means that you don’t even notice you’re operating on remote files—they act like they’re on an USB drive you plugged directly into your own computer. Daring Fireball has a good article about this software title.
Apimac released Compress Files ‘08, a compression tool for Mac OS X that enable Mac users to create a variety of compressed and encrypted files as well as encrypted disk images. For high security, you can use Compress Files to encrypt part of your hard disk through the use of an encrypted disk image protected with a password.
Chris Pirillo writes: "Microsoft does some amazing things - very amazing things. My choice, however, for a primary desktop operating system is no longer Windows - it’s Mac OS X. Duh. It’s rather difficult to admit that officially, if only because… well, I think Microsoft does amazing things."
Fortunately for anyone with a stylish iBrick adorning their coffee table, there is hope, and that hope's name is iPhone firmware 1.1.3. Braving the dangerous seas of unlocked iPhones and firmware updates, Gizmodo was able to successfully recover a phone originally unlocked with AnySIM, activate it in iTunes for AT&T, make calls, and use data.
The video demonstrates the results of the DNS changes made on a Mac OS X system.
More information at Touchmodders.
There's never been a better time to void the warranty on your MacBook Pro and upgrade to one of those sweet 2.5" WD Scorpio 320GB drives. That was what made me throw caution to the wind and attempt a Time Machine-assisted swap. The good news is, it works as billed. You get a bit-for-bit transfer to the virgin drive with minimal fuss.
Here is a little movie of ProRemote in action connected to a ProTools LE rig.
What's the deal with SNMP? Well, the 'deal' is that people wanted a flexible, relatively low overhead way to manage their network. They wanted a way to read and set information, and have devices inform them when something goes wrong, or is about to go wrong. The result is SNMP. Now, why "Simple", when, as we shall see, it's actually pretty complex. Well, it's "Simple" in the sense that there's not much to it. There's about three things that can happen in SNMP:
1. You can query a value and get a reply
2. You can set a value and get a return code
3. An SNMP-enabled device can send you a notification, or "trap"
That's pretty much the entire range of SNMP right there, and of the three, two is the least common. It's what you do with those numbers that gives you the power, or rather, what utilities like Nagios, Cacti, and Lithium do with the numbers that make things interesting.
Here's a comprehensive list of ways to speed up Aperture. Some are quick, some are cheap, some are neither.
Leopard includes more information about Wi-Fi networks in the vicinity of your computer than meets the eye. The revised Mac OS X updates the AirPort menu in the system menubar after you select, which is a neat feature and provides more accurate results. It also shows a lock icon next to networks protected by some form of encryption. But there's more information you can extract by holding down the Option key while selecting the menu.
A very welcome new feature in Leopard is the ability to view fonts directly in the Finder. You can get a full-alphabet-preview in two places: Column view, and Quick Look. The rest of the views display an icon with the letters “Ag.” Hitting spacebar from any view will give you and alphabet preview (in Quick Look). No need to open Fontbook, or a 3rd party browser anymore.
To find out the iPhone's state of security, Fast Company magazine purchased an iPhone for Rik Farrow, a UNIX specialist and consultant, and commissioned him to crack through its defenses, which he did using H D Moore's Metasploit, a popular platform for testing security systems.
If the high price tag for Apple hardware has kept you from buying a Mac but you're willing to roll up your sleeves and get adventurous, you can build your own "Hackintosh" - a PC that runs a patched version of OS X Leopard.
The article, written by Leo from Zen Habits for Mac Format, is available for download in PDF format.
Some of the top tips in the article:
1. How to clear your Mac desktop.
2. How to create a minimalist working environment.
3. Why Spotlight makes filing unnecessary.
4. How to use utilities such as Quicksilver, Mail Act-on, and others to be productive.
5. How to make quick decisions.
6. How to clear your mind so you can focus on the task at hand.
7. Why single-tasking is better than multi-tasking.
Stacks is pretty much Leopard’s only non-eyecandy change to the dock, and it had the potential to be pretty handy, but the fact that the icon representing the stack is whatever the top file in the folder happens to be really ruins it (for me at least). However, if you haven’t yet given up on stacks and thrown them off your dock, there is a solution: overlaying stacks icons.
You must set a VNC password in Leopard's System Preferences in order for the TightVNC client to connect to it. (Or else TightVNC will give you an error about the server not supporting the right security protocol.) To do so, in System Preferences, go to Sharing, and from Screen Sharing, click on the "Computer Options" button. Set your password there and TightVNC will be able to remote control your Mac given its IP address.
If you're into customization, check this site.
Daniel writes: "If you, like me, have essentially kept a single keychain from the dawn of time, there’s a feature in the Keychain Access application you need to know about: “Keychain First Aid.” You find it under the Keychain Access menu, just below Preferences. Whenever I see anything unusual happening with my keychain, I try to remember to hop into Keychain Access and re-run this. Putting aside the question of why my keychain is allowed to get so routinely screwed up that it requires “first aid,” let me say that I appreciate this repair functionality because it generally solves problems quickly and effectively."
If you enjoy Leopard’s new Mail Stationery for sending beautiful HTML email, but wished you could personalize it more, read on for some very good news! Apple has made Mail’s new Stationery feature quite easy to edit to your heart’s content, as long as you have an image editor that can save .jpg and .png files, and an HTML editor such as Dreamweaver (or just text edit if you’re a die-hard HTML coder). Just follow these simple steps.
The packaging is considerably more minimal than the last release. The box is roughly the size of a double disc music CD and contains a single installation DVD and a "Welcome to Leopard" booklet. Here's a quick install guide with some useful tips.
Install some software updates and delete files you don’t need anymore. Because you’ll be making so many changes, you shouldn’t perform these steps until after you’ve made a complete backup. After you’ve cleaned up your Mac, restarted, and verified that everything is working properly, you should update your backup so that it’ll be closer to the state of your disk when you upgrade to Leopard.
Most Web browsers have handy autofill features that enable you to enter passwords, addresses, credit card numbers, and other data in forms with just a couple of clicks or keystrokes. Autofill isn’t dangerous in and of itself, but it can lead to problems. For example, someone with access to your computer could potentially log in to your bank account, make purchases in your name, or discover where you live. The same would be true if your computer were stolen.
Making your Java application look and feel like a native OS X application has until recently been one of those things that is hard to get right. There are various solutions floating around, but they tend to force you to build and package the application on a Mac and they often involve some manual steps. The OS X Application Bundle Maven plugin solves the packaging part of creating Java applications for OS X.
Want to try out the latest Leopard beta, but don’t have a dual-layer DVD burner? or maybe you’re just too cheap to buy dual-layer DVDs? This guide will help you install Leopard using only a single-layer DVD. You will need a standard blank DVD and roughly 15 gigs of free space on the drive that you will be performing the image manipulation on. All references to time are based on a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook and your times may vary depending on processor and drive speed.
By downgrading your firmware from 1.1.1 to 1.0.2 using the method outlined here, all iPhones can get use of third party apps.
Here's an article about how to use Automator to write a very simple backup utility—you’ll be able to compress and copy a given folder with a single mouse click. While not an ideal backup solution, it’s a great way to make sure your most important folders can be easily backed up. The general idea of the hint isn’t necessarily the specifics of this backup script, but rather to show how simple and yet powerful Automator workflows can be.
Richard Menta made a short video in which he shows how an iPod touch can be used to discover available wireless networks nearby.
Mac OS X is a powerful platform for Java development. While the Java development environment is fully integrated into Mac OS X, the Eclipse IDE brings a fully integrated Java development environment to Mac OS X that provides a consistent cross-platform experience. Discover how to use this environment to import existing Xcode projects into Eclipse, tweak key bindings, and integrate Eclipse with the Mac OS X-bundled CVS.
Brian Lam at Gizmodo writes: "This morning, the Navizon GPS app showed up in Installer.app. After creating a username and login (get this: email NOT required), the free app started up, taking about 30 seconds to find my location by measuring the delay between nearby cell towers and using their known locations to pinpoint where I am. Then it pushes your coordinates, by latitude and longitude, to many, many, many decimal places of degrees, to the map application."
With the help of some free, open-source software, you can unlock your iPhone in about an hour, free of charge. Here's a tutorial on how to do it.
The iPhone has lots of things other mobiles don't: Wi-Fi, touchscreen control, highly advanced wallet-draining power. But by far its most distinctive feature is the ability to impress the pants off young and old alike. Of course, if you want to get the most out of the iPhone's pocket reality-distortion field, you have to do a bit of optimization. Try it yourself.
Here's a fine tutorial video from the folks behind the Mactipper blog.
Apple's Open Directory is a powerful directory services platform that supports a variety of clients, most notably Mac OS X and Windows. Open Directory is based on open-source software, including OpenLDAP and Kerberos, and includes some components specific to Mac OS X Server. As such, Open Directory is an easy-to-manage application for Mac and multiplatform networks. It functions well as a network's sole directory service and can integrate well with Active Directory or, for that matter, with any LDAP-based directory services platform.
As Leopard’s release comes closer and closer, everyone’s trying to find new ways to emulate the new OS’ features on Tiger. We’ve already seen how to modify your UI to look like Leopard, but what about the actual Leopard features? Using current, pre-existing apps, you can move some of Leopard’s functionality right over to Tiger.
Will Apple ever equip its Macs with TV tuners? Thankfully, that's not the end of watching TV on a Mac. Other companies are willing to fill the gap Apple has left, and if you want to watch analogue or digital broadcasts, satellite or cable transmissions on your Mac, you can. The doyen of Mac TV products is Germany's Elgato, which has come to dominate both the software and hardware sides of the equation.
Voodoopad is touted as a personal wiki, but is really much more. Its byline is “you put your brain in it”, which is really the essence of GTD – move things out of your head, where they are liable to get lost, and into a system, where they can be organized and acted upon.
If you wanted to install third-party native software in your iPhone but you didn't had the necessary technical knowledge or courage, the newly updated iPhone Installer.app will make it so easy that it will be very hard to resist.
iStumbler is the leading wireless discovery tool for Mac OS X. It provides plugins for finding AirPort networks, Bluetooth devices and Bonjour services. Here's more information on how it works.
iMovie has always made it impossible to produce advanced slideshows, especially when setting custom Ken Burns start-and-end frames. The problem used to lie with iMovie’s sluggish importing and encoding functions, however the problem seems to have been fixed with iMovie ‘08, thanks to Apple’s decision to completely rewrite the application. Encoding and clip manipulation performance is faster than ever, and the new user interface is clean and intuitive.
Jungle Disk is an application that lets you store files and backup data securely to Amazon.com's S3 Storage Service. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. In order to use this service you need a tool like Jungle Disk because Amazon doesn't provide any direct way to upload or download data from S3. Jungle Disk integrates into your local file system like any other drive.
This article shows you how you can upload MP3 files from your desktop to your iPod, download MP3 files from your iPod to your desktop, and how you can delete files on the iPod. Normally, Apple's iTunes software is needed to manage an iPod, but iTunes is not available for Linux.
Fortunately, there are Linux alternatives such as Amarok that can handle the task.
All Macs are ready out of the box, but what happens after they're removed from the cardboard cocoon? Lethargy. Torpor. They get slower, too.
For the sake of your Mac's soul, here's 10 commandments of keeping your Mac fresh - Cupertino fresh.
ost of the hacks that have been publicized so far are aimed at controlling or enhancing your own iPhone, but a darker side has emerged too. A security firm announced a possible Wi-Fi-based browser exploit, which could give hackers access to an iPhone's microphone, surfing history and contact information - and possibly website and e-mail passwords stored on the phone, too.
Make no mistake: the iPhone is a magnet for hackers, both good and bad. The hacks in this article run the gamut from easy hacks almost anyone can do to advanced mods that require serious hardware and software skills.
You may not know this, but if you have more than one Mac and you’d like to share your Internet connection between them, there’s no need to buy an AirPort base station. Mac OS X comes with the software you need to turn almost any Mac into a base station all by itself.
If you need to get a packet trace and you don't already have a favorite utility for doing so, you can use the tcpdump command line tool. All versions of Mac OS X include this tool, as do many other Unix-style platforms. Keep in mind that the BSD subsystem must be installed in order to use tcpdump.
Tom Yager writes: "At the time I wrote the iPhone review, it was not clear to me (or anyone) how iPhone would behave if the device were activated, a process that requires a two-year commitment to AT&T Wireless, and the AT&T Wireless service were subsequently cancelled. I called AT&T yesterday to cancel my service, something that you can do without penalty within 14 days. My iPhone's only been one day without AT&T, but so far, all of the device features that don't rely on the cellular network--pretty much everything but Visual Voice Mail--work without issue. And if I had to call 9-1-1, I could."
This is precisely the kind of thing that is so irritating about Microsoft Word: You are just using it normally, for the most basic of tasks, and it’s not even able to behave in a normal, predictable manner.
Safari on iPhone uses the same Web Kit engine as Safari on the computer desktop. With the Safari Web Kit engine, you can develop sophisticated Web 2.0 sites and applications that will impress and delight iPhone users. To design a web application that shines on iPhone and ensures a great user experience, you’ll want to read this article.
The goal of the Metasploit Project is to provide useful information to people who perform penetration testing, IDS signature development, and exploit research. Here's a guide on how to install it on a Mac.
This screencast teaches you how to switch an account from POP to IMAP. And to be honest, you don’t need an iPhone to benefit from this setup. IMAP will allow you to check your email from work or some one else’s computer and have access to all of you email folders and sent emails. This is not for web services like Google or Hotmail, although as long as it supports IMAP it doesn’t really matter.
If your iPhone is having trouble connecting to the Internet using your home or office WiFi wireless router, the solution may be to change the iPhone’s DNS settings.
The Chaos blog has a very interesting article that will certainly inspire many mac geeks that enjoy working with hardware. They transform an old 500mhz G3 iBook with a faulty screen into a server. But this is no ordinary server, it fits onto your bookshelf, it looks very cool and all the details to make one are enclosed in the the howto.
If you have more than one workstation, you administer several machines connected to a network, or just frequently connect to various networks, sooner or later you'll find a packet sniffer to be quite useful.
While the TPM chip is not used by any of the Apple software products, that doesn't mean that developers cannot use it for the specific purposes of their applications. While it is not the best idea to target just the computers that have TPM chips, this "perfect" customizations can be used in some organizations for instance running just the TPM-enabled Macs.
Is your Powerbook/MacBook/iBook screen broken? Did Apple quote you the costs of a new laptop to replace it? It’s not as hard as you may think to do it on your own and get by a lot cheaper. However, it definitely takes some confidence in working with computer hardware.
This article describes in detail how to create password protected PDF files on Mac OS X by using a freely available command line utility, as well as an Automator Workflow.
Mac OS X periodically runs background tasks that, in part, remove system files that are no longer needed. This includes purging older information from log files or deleting certain temporary items. These tasks do not run if the computer is shut down or in sleep mode. If the tasks do not run, it is possible that certain log files (such as system.log) may become very large.
When it comes to security, Mac OS X has proved on numerous occasions that it is quite safe, right out of the box. However, that doesn't mean it cannot use additional security to prepare it for the Wild West we call the Internet. Enter DoorStop X - a comprehensive approach to securing your Mac.
This is a very useful list of what you can achieve during bootup.
A plethora of announcements were enough to get eager Mac users drooling for Leopard, so the delay hit them hard. But while they will have to wait for the new OS, they don't have to wait to add some Leopard-like features to their Macs. Shareware and commercial tools already make it possible to add many of these features (or something similar) to the current Mac OS X 10.4, known as Tiger.
Today it seems the classic game ROM community is growing and growing as more and more are discovering how to play classic arcade and console games on their computers. For a long time, the Mac platform has lacked great emulators that feature solid compatibility and a full-set of features. However, some developers are working hard to build solid emulators and more and more Mac users are enjoying the same classic games their PC friends have been enjoying for quite some time.