iFunia Mac Video Converter Pro Get Snow Leopard
Compatibility

post from prMac on 05 September 2009 10:51:00 PM. © prMac

iFunia has confirmed that iFunia Video Converter Pro is now fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. iFunia makes innovative, assistive technology and software for Mac OS X, as well as the iPhone, iPod. This Mac video converter helps consumers to convert their digital video content to appropriate format for use on personal computers or popular portable and mobile devices such as the Apple iPod, iPhone, Sony PSPs, Apple TV, and BlackBerrys.

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http://prmac.com/release-id-7367.htm

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Matt Mullenweg on How to Keep WordPress Secure

post from Daring Fireball on 05 September 2009 09:40:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Matt Mullenweg on WordPress security:

Where worms of old would do childish things like defacing your site, the new ones are silent and invisible, so you only notice them when they screw up (as this one did) or your site gets removed from Google for having spam and malware on it. I?m talking about this not to scare you, but to highlight that this is something that has happened before, and that will more than likely happen again.

And:

There is only one real solution. The only thing that I can promise will keep your blog secure today and in the future is upgrading.

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Read The Full Article:
http://wordpress.org/development/2009/09/keep-wordpress-secure/

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Scoble on WordPress Security

post from Daring Fireball on 05 September 2009 09:36:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Robert Scoble:

A few weeks ago some hackers broke into my blog here (this was before 2.8.4 was released). At first I thought they just left some porn sites in a couple of blog entries. So we upgraded Wordpress (I was on 2.7x back then). Deleted a fake admin account. Deleted the porn sites. And thought we had solved the problem. We didn?t.

They broke back in, but this time they did a lot more damage. They deleted about two months of my blog.

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Read The Full Article:
http://scobleizer.com/2009/09/05/i-dont-feel-safe-with-wordpress-hackers-broke-in
-and-took-things/

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Weekly App Store Picks: September 5, 2009

post from TheAppleBlog on 05 September 2009 07:09:00 PM. © TheAppleBlog

app-store-picks-image

The first week of September has seen a deluge of new arrivals at the App Store. It’s time for me to search through the latest releases for iPhone and hand-pick my recommendations for the past seven days.

This week I’ve been looking at Button, Facebook, BlogPress and Quicksilver.

appicon_button Button (Free)
One of my favorite sci-fi novels, “Better Than Life,” oscillates between a deep space distopia and an almost perfect Earth as it follows the surviving crew members of the Red Dwarf mining ship. It’s soon revealed that the crew’s collective vision of Earth is actually a highly addictive massively multiplayer online game beamed directly into their brains, leaving their real bodies in a seemingly catatonic state. Rather than take a giant leap towards this sinister style of multiplayer gaming, Button instead takes baby steps. There’s a big button, everyone around the world sees the button, when the button lights up you must push the button, sometimes you win a prize, usually you don’t. Button is effectively a nonsensical distraction that seems to tickle just the right bit of your brain. Plus, you can ramp up the futility by playing as a team. I’ve created a special team called tab just for readers of TheAppleBlog, come join my group and let’s push buttons together.

appicon_facebook Facebook (Free)
The official Facebook app has finally received its first major update for some time, bringing the service’s iPhone implementation almost (but not quite) up to speed with the 3GS and 3.0 firmware. For starters, the app’s user interface has been streamlined and tidied up — gone are the tiny buttons, pointless scrollable horizontal groups bar and crash-happy inbox. The main feed benefits from having a clutter free interface and now incorporates likes and comments. The menu screen features several big chunky buttons, designed for ease of navigation. Notably, the app now allows video recording and uploads, a real boon for iPhone 3GS users. However, it’s seems that when Facebook update their app, there’s always something missing. In this case, there are no Push Notifications, an OS 3.0 feature which could have been designed solely for apps just like Facebook.

appicon_blogpress BlogPress ($2.99)
The official WordPress app just isn’t working out for me. While I appreciate the WordPress app being free, I’m still not impressed by the app’s sluggish navigation and overly technical user interface. In essence, the WordPress app doesn’t feel pretty and it doesn’t work as it should. With this in mind, I’ve been on the hunt for a replacement and BlogPress seems to be just the app to knock WordPress off my iPhone. The app features a WYSIWYG editor, incredibly important as you certainly don’t want to be tweaking your latest post’s code on your iPhone’s keyboard. There’s also video uploading, something which the WordPress app doesn’t currently support, handled by uploading your video to YouTube and then embedding within your latest post. BlogPress also supports posting simultaneously to multiple blog services, including Blogger, MSN Live Spaces, WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, Drupal and Joomla.

appicon_quicksilver Quicksilver ($1.99)
And finally, while on the subject of replacing apps, I’ve been on the hunt for an alternative to Nimbuzz — while it’s an excellent feature-rich iPhone IM app, and free too, I’ve been feeling like I need a more streamlined solution. With it’s minimal iChat-esque interface, Quicksilver is the perfect app for a quick bit of iPhone IMing, with one caveat: it’s made for XMPP-compliant servers only, which, in non-geek-speak, means it’ll work with Google Talk but not MSN. The really great thing about Quicksilver is that it incorporates Push Notifications, making it more than worth the two buck asking price. When you close Quicksilver, you’re not logged out of chat, instead you’re status is changed to away. If one of your contacts should get in touch, the message will arrive on your iPhone as a push notification.

That’s all the picks for this week. I’ll be back in seven days with more news from the week and picks from the App Store.

In the meantime, what apps have you been using this week?

Read The Full Article:
http://theappleblog.com/2009/09/05/weekly-app-store-picks-september-5-2009/

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Review: Apricorn's Aegis Padlock drive

post from Macnn | The Macintosh News Network on 05 September 2009 05:15:00 PM. © Macnn | The Macintosh News Network

Apricorn's Aegis Padlock is a portable USB hard drive, but one that looks like it came from a spy fi...

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http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=ce05bca7377dc867c2eb9be08c7fdad3

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More on the Snow Leopard/Old Version of Flash
Brouhaha

post from Daring Fireball on 05 September 2009 02:19:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Jeffrey Czerniak answers my “What should Apple have done differently?” question:

John Gruber’s latest piece of Apple apologetics concerns the fact that Apple shipped a known-vulnerable version of Adobe Flash Player on the Snow Leopard DVD. He has the gall to ask those of us who consider this a bad thing,

But what exactly should Apple have done differently?

Gruber apparently considers the possibility of postponing the release of Snow Leopard in order to coordinate with Adobe to be unreasonable. If postponing Snow Leopard is out-of-bounds, then I have another suggestion:

Apple could have posted a security advisory.

Is it possible in the run-up to going GM that a serious issue could be discovered that would warrant postponing the release of a major OS update? Sure. That’s exactly why GM releases aren’t rushed. Is this Flash situation such an issue? I believe not — and have seen no evidence that it is.

As for Apple issuing a security advisory, sure. That would be nice. But that’s not how Apple rolls. Apple’s policy regarding security issues is not to publicize them until after they’ve been addressed by software updates. It’s not unreasonable at all to disagree with this policy, but I think Apple is pretty happy with how it’s worked out for them so far, so don’t hold your breath waiting for it to change.

Why Doesn’t the Snow Leopard Installer Do the Right Thing if You’ve Already Installed the Latest Version of Flash?

Mike Ash — on Twitter here, here, here, and etc. — argues that the problem is specifically the issue of the installer downgrading the version of Flash for users who manually upgraded to the latest version of Flash while they were on 10.5. (Forgive him for his brevity, given the constraints of Twitter.)

I have no sympathy for the argument that Apple should have included an eight-day-old version of Flash in the Snow Leopard installer, or that they should have delayed the release of Snow Leopard to include it. I do have sympathy for the argument, like Ash’s, that the installer ought not replace a newer version with an older one.

And there’s a good — but, alas, in my research, unanswered — technical question as to why this did not in fact work as Ash and others expected. The Mac OS X Installer system relies on “bill of materials” bom files. From the bom man page:

The Mac OS X Installer uses a file system “bill of materials” to determine which files to install, remove, or upgrade. A bill of materials, bom, contains all the files within a directory, along with some information about each file. File information includes: the file’s UNIX permissions, its owner and group, its size, its time of last modification, and so on. Also included are a checksum of each file and information about hard links.

The bill of materials for installed packages are found within the package receipts located in /Library/Receipts.

In theory, the Snow Leopard installer could look at the bom for Flash and, if the installed version is greater than the version in the installer, leave it. I do not know why it doesn’t work this way. Perhaps the bom file left by Adobe’s Flash installer is malformed. Perhaps (and this is my guess) the installer for major OS versions does not check for such things for components in the “Essentials” and “BaseSystem” installer packages. (Flash, and all other default items in the /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ folder, are part of the Essentials package.)

Yesterday, as a hypothetical example, I wrote:

That?s just how the installer works. The same is true for any component you manually upgrade. Like, say, if you overwrote the system version of Python with version 2.6.2 ? when you upgrade to Snow Leopard, the installer will give you the system standard version (2.6.1).

Ends up I chose a bad example, because this is not true. DF reader Jonathan Lundell emailed me to report that he had in fact upgraded his system version of Python to version 2.6.2 while on Mac OS X 10.5.8, and, after upgrading to Snow Leopard, he still had version 2.6.2 installed, not the Snow Leopard default version 2.6.1.

Python is not part of the Essentials or BaseSystem packages, but rather part of the BSD package. My guess is that’s the difference — that the components in Essentials (and perhaps BaseSystem) are treated differently than those in “regular” packages. For those who know the answer, I’m all ears, and I’d love to set the record straight.

(As for why the Mac OS X Installer might be designed to treat the Essentials and BaseSystem packages differently in this regard, consider the following hypothetical. What if the very latest version of Flash worked just fine on Leopard but did not work on Snow Leopard? That is not the case, but, what if it were? (And don’t tell me it’s not possible.) In that case, if the OS installer worked as Ash and others desire, after upgrading to Snow Leopard you’d have a system where Flash did not work at all. Some people may reasonably argue that they’d prefer a broken version of Flash than a potentially vulnerable version, but the point of the components in the Essentials package is that Apple deems them, well, essential. The installer logic for these “essential” components may reasonably be that it’s going to install its own known versions no matter what’s already on the disk being upgraded. Why Flash is deemed essential is a good question, though.)

Which Vulnerabilities Apply to Flash Version 10.0.23.1?

Lastly, I’ve been attempting to research exactly what the vulnerabilities are in Snow Leopard 10.6.0’s version of Flash, but have come up empty. There are three versions of Flash to keep in mind:

10.0.32.18 — The current version of Flash 10 from Adobe.
10.0.23.1 — The version that ships with Snow Leopard 10.6.0.
10.0.22.87 — The version of Flash Adobe identifies as having “critical vulnerabilities”.¹

Adobe’s security bulletins and advisories page lists just four advisories for Flash Player 10. One dates back to February and is no longer relevant; the other three were from late July. One of the advisories from July is specific to Windows Internet Explorer. The other two apply to Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Advisory APSA09-03, dated 22 July 2009, states:

A critical vulnerability exists in the current versions of Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2009-1862) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild via limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader v9 on Windows. […]

Advisory APSB09-10, dated 30 July 2009, states:

Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in the current versions of Adobe Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. These vulnerabilities could cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

Adobe recommends users of Adobe Flash Player 9.x and 10.x and earlier versions update to Adobe Flash Player 9.0.246.0 and 10.0.32.18.

In both advisories, the “affected software versions” are listed as “Adobe Flash Player 9.0.159.0 and 10.0.22.87 and earlier 9.x and 10.x versions”. So both of these bulletins mention version 10.0.22.87 as being vulnerable and recommend updating to version 10.0.32.18. But neither mention version 10.0.23.1 at all.

Is version 10.0.23.1 susceptible to the same “critical vulnerabilities” as version 10.0.22.87? I can’t find any version information about Flash 10.0.23.1 whatsoever. It could be that 10.0.23.1 has all, some, or none of the vulnerabilities in version 10.0.22.87. I do not know.

The only mention from Adobe regarding Snow Leopard’s version of Flash is this post on the Adobe Flash Platform Blog by Tom Barclay, which reads in its entirety:

The initial release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) includes an earlier version of Adobe Flash Player than what is available from Adobe.com. We recommend all users update to the latest, most secure version of Flash Player (10.0.32.18) — which supports Snow Leopard and is available for download from http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.

So, yes, Adobe clearly recommends upgrading to 10.0.32.18, but doesn’t mention any specific problems with 10.0.23.1.

10.0.22.87 is, in fact, still the standard version of Flash in Mac OS X 10.5.8. ↩

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2009/09/more_snow_leopard_flash

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Large Scale Attack Against WordPress
Installations Underway

All versions other than the very latest are apparently susceptible. I have to wonder when WordPress users will start switching to some other platform.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/old-wordpress-versions-under-attack/

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Large Scale Attack Against WordPress
Installations Under Way

All versions other than the very latest are apparently susceptible. I have to wonder when WordPress users will start switching to some other platform.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/old-wordpress-versions-under-attack/

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MyAppleSpace Hosting Live Chat During the Apple
Media Event September 9

MyAppleSpace is delighted to introduce live chat before, during and after the Apple keynote October 14th. My Apple Space is aimed at providing Apple users around the globe a place to connect, cultivate relationships, build a strong sense of community and designed to be a user driven switcher machine on the internet. It's a great resource for finding out about the latest Mac Hardware, news, latest software updates or just meeting new friends.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-7366.htm

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Install Mac OS X on GA-EX58-UD3R Intel Core i7

The EX58-UD3R is based on the latest X58 Series motherboards of GIGABYTE, designed for the intel?s new Core i7 processors. With the price of X58 motherboards coming down to $200 or less, 3GB DDR3-1066MHz memory kits priced as low as $53, and the Core[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ihackintoshfeed/~3/Oz4mbr_KTr4/

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