OS X

Netscape.com breaks for Safari users

January 13, 2005

Until last month Apple used netscape.com to provide the default home page to its Safari users. Apple made a change last month and until today the old page continued to work. Now, however, a user of Safari who goes to www.netscape.com is treated to a redirect loop (the previous URL was home.netscape.com/apple.adp). Oddly changing Safari's user agent doesn't solve the problem. Internet Explorer on OS X continues to work. For now it appears it's just the users of Safari who have to go without the Netscape Network home page. cnn.netscape.cnn.com which is not on Netscape's servers does still work for Safari.

OS X Rootkit - includes Opener script

October 22, 2004

There is a discussion going on over at Macintouch about what they are calling "Opener" Malware. I sent a comment but unfortunately it was below the threshold of what was published. The discussion is focused on the Opener script but mostly misses the critical point - that it is a part of the OSXRK - OS X Root Kit. All of the comments I read at Macintouch are at best mis-informed. While the Opener script itself does not "infect" computers as a part of the OSXRK it can be used to exploit machines. From the readme file:

###################################
# osxrk : OS X - Rookit
#
# the burning man - Public Release 0.2.1
# Sept. 2004
#
# by g@pple
#
# greets and thanks to Dim Bulb, Dr. Springfield, Jawn Doh!, B-r00t!,
# the fbsdrk & fbsdrootkit teams for inspiration.
#

This is the initial Public Release of the OS X RootKit. This type of rootkit should be easy to defend against if you really care about your computer. Keep your system up to date and patched.

Opener - OS X Rootkit

October 21, 2004

There is a note on Macintouch today about somebody being hit by the opener rootkit on OS X. The rootkit is available for download from a .mac account as osxrk. This kit has been in the 'wild' for over a month now. The opener file says it will move itself to /System/Library/StartupItems. The script is aware of LittleSnitch and kills it before making network connections to download tools for wiping out logs and gathering of passwords.

From the readme "rootkit that has a lot of standard tools included, adds a TCP backdoor via inetd, does data recon, and more."

Allow root to SSH in? No.

October 20, 2004

By default OS X ships with the root user set so you can't login. Many people know that you assign a password to the root user and viola you can now login. What is disappointing is that Apple by default does not configure SSH to prevent REMOTE login by root. It's a simple configuration change to the /etc/sshd_config file. There are two ways to do it. I prefer to add the following line:

AllowUsers      username

There is also the possibility of using DenyUsers and putting root in that list, but by using AllowUsers you further limit who has access.

An idea for Family Controls

October 20, 2004

According to MacinTouch today Apple's next OS, Tiger, will include Family Controls that give administrators more granularity over the abilities of applications. What isn't mentioned there but would be nice are time of day related controls. Something that would allow kids to chat via iChat at certain hours but would limit what times of day it's possible.

Another Quicken 2004 Bug

October 6, 2004

So I've spent the last few nights with a very annoying Quicken 2004 bug. If you name accounts with symbols at the beginning of the name it impacts sort order. But it does it differently in different lists. That would be annoying. What is a huge bug is that in lists like the "Selected Accounts..." list in reporting a list is displayed but a different list is changed. So you think you're clicking to include or exclude your cash account and really it's your retirement account or some other account. So I had to rename 20+ accounts to get reporting to work. At least I won't have to buy Quicken 2005.

Software wanted

September 24, 2004

I've been thinking on several software programs I'd really like to have. For example I want iMovie Pro. I have and use iMovie, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro (HD). They are all good programs. But I want a program with the power of Final Cut Pro and the video capture of iMovie. Yes Final Cut is used by many large budget productions and its clip logging features and batch capture are stunning. However I usually want to stick a tape in and capture all of it or a portion of it and iMovie does a great job of putting them together into clips.

I've recently started doing most capture work in iMovie and then editing in Final Cut. However if all this were done in Final Cut it would be possible to have it continue to track reels and tell you where the reel it needs to re-download might be found. Maybe someday.

Solutions for non-mounting disk in OS X 10.3.5

September 4, 2004

Solution for non-mounting disk images We previously reported issues with Disk Utility being able to mount disk images. Users upgrading to Mac OS X 10.3.5 are receiving various errors, including "- 536870208" when attempting to do so.

Now MacFixIt reader Theodore Lyman has received a workaround from Apple that, in his case, allows disk images to once again work properly:

"Tech support was unable to resolve this immediately after having me go back to my base system i.e. no cards, extra memory etc. Also as I mentioned, Disk Utility would not create images either, giving the same error message. What was also unusual about this was that there was no option for the size of the disk image as there usually was. the pull down was gone.

"Solution - after about 24 hours, an Apple tech called me back with this solution - which did work.

"From the /System/Library remove the following files - "Extensions.kextcache", "Extensions.mkext", and the folder "com.apple.kernalcaches"

"I then was told to run sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions (in the Terminal) to reset the cache info."

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