Letter From the CEO
Current Events
by Robert Pritchett
Pity Parties and MUGs
Do you know what Pity Parties are – Ladies get together and cry on each others shoulders and drown their sorrows in lots of comfort food. Anyway, that is what I was told. There are actually folks who specialize as Pity Party Consultants and get paid for putting them together!
From what I was able to research, there are no Macintosh User Groups in Louisiana, but there are 2 or 3 in Mississippi and 4 or more in Alabama. The insurance agencies I communicated with in Mississippi said the devastation is much worse than is being reported nationally, as they continue to work out of FEMA shelters and compare trailer trappings at their Pity Parties.
So folks, if you can, please donate to your favorite charity organization and perhaps earmark your US tax returns in an effort to assist those in need, especially in the Deep South. Of course any folks who read this outside the US could do similar stuff in your countries as well. Please make a positive difference in the lives of others!
Crossplatforming Mactels
The XP on MacTel contest is now over $12,000 USD. Colin Nederkoorn posted his rules at http://windowsxp.onmac.net/The%20Contest.html.
Brett Johnson’s ELILO (EFI Linux Boot Loader) gets Linux on a Mactel platform at http://sourceforge.net/projects/elilo.
Apparently WINE can be ported to Mactels and can emulate Windows on Macs without the Windows OS at http://www.winehq.com/.
Schadenfreude and Mac Malware-du-Jour
I called it Malware-du-jour, because it seemed we were getting the trend of a malware report per day, but it stopped. Mostly due to the fact the 2nd report was of a vulnerability that was actually handled by Apple way back last summer, yet the press jumped on it as a current event the day after the Leap-A worm was reported. Sensationalism and just poor journalism was being exhibited and those of us who live in the Mac environment were calling them on it.
Schadenfreude is a German word that describes the pleasure in reporting someone else’s misfortune: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
What we have been experiencing is Schadenfreude by the non-Mac media as they continue to use unmitigated gloating as they misreport recent Mac Malware events.
I guess perhaps one of the broken 15 or more commandments (Rev 1) that Moses had initially destroyed of the stone tablets on Mount Horeb (so as not to completely condemn humanity, he had to go back and get them replaced (Rev 2) with the lesser 10 strongly–worded suggestions, the Decalogue or in Hebrew, “10 Statements” discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments). One could have been on not committing Shadenfreude;
“Thou shalt not commit Gloating.”
We’ve been countering Mac-inspired malware Schadenfreude by discussing correct information and quelling FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in our macCompanion Blog and many of our staff have also been spreading good information in their other podcasts during February.
MacSurfer.com also posted a link to our Mac OS X Tiger Safety and Security videos that are accessible from our home page at macCompanion.com. Over time we will be updating those and improving them.
In the Mac ReviewCast (http://www.macreviewcast.com), Episode 42, Tim Verpoorten and I talk some about Mac Security issues and what to do about them.
Steve Stanger did an excellent job in his The Mac Attack episode #29 http://themacattack.libsyn.com/ explaining about why the Leap-A worm was named Oompa-Loompa.
Gene Steinberg interviewed Intego again and he also interviewed Kirk McElhearn, a former member of the macCompanion staff at http://www.techbroadcasting.com/ in the February 23rd podcast as they discussed the so-called security issues. He also posted how to practice safe computing in his MacNightOwl site at http://www.macnightowl.com/index.htm#precautions.
Tom Yeager at InfoWorld talked about alarmist media and Mac Malware attempts at http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/02/23/75815_09NNmacvirus_1.html.
The latest vulnerability being reported regards Safari and the Mail.app.
Folks can go to Safari > Preferences > Remove Download list items and uncheck Open safe files after downloading. It is that simple to stop this vulnerability from happening.
I’m sure Apple will release a so-called security update to make the Preference in Safari not default to being on when it comes to having the option to Open Safe files.
Meanwhile, Intego released a PR item also showing how to do this, but also state that their latest virus definitions list for VirusBarrier X and X4 offer protection from hidden executable files and we posted their PR piece in our macCompanion Blog on February 24th.
Mark Allan’s donationware clamXav we reviewed in December (http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/december2005/Shareware/ClamXav.htm), also has updated definitions to cover recent malware activities. I’ve got ClamXav set to scan Emails, because it keeps finding phishing Emails that have nasty attachments intended to compromise my machine. Thankfully so far, they only affect non-Mac OSes.
Mal means bad in Spanish and Malware is any combination of Internet-contracted viruses, Trojans and Worms. They all may be manipulated little binary ones and zeros in code, but each focus on different weaknesses in technology. We care how they are being presented to the public even if the casual computer user could care less. We just don’t like malware and we want it stopped.
Meanwhile Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte call Mac OS X a “Consumer OS” and say that there are more secure UNIX OSes out there in Episode 28 of Security Now! at http://grc.com/securitynow.htm.
May Apple continue to improve the best “Consumer OS” on the planet!
