I know, its sad.  I too am a die hard mac user.

Today alone I have received 4 copies of an email with the subject line “2 Populaar Myths About Female Orgasms -  How to Become an Irresistible Lover” containing an attachment named “Preview.app Document”.

I haven’t had a chance to analyse the .app yet, but I think its safe to assume that its malware of some sort.

The good news is that OS X is still built well.  If I double click it thinking its a document its going to tell me “Hey stupid!  This is an app that was downloaded from the Internet.  Are you sure you want to run it?”.  Maybe not in those exact words.  At that point if I say – “I thought I was opening an document, but sure, lets run this app-like-document” – then I deserve to be infected.

For all the detail oriented folks here are the headers (bold are items changed to protect my info):

Return-path: <efflrescent@aperfectmix.com>
Envelope-to: MY_ADDRESS
Delivery-date: Fri, 01 May 2009 09:39:27 -0400
Received: from [87.18.181.177] (helo=ksecb.telecomitalia.it)
by myserver.mydomain.com with smtp (MyMail Dameon)
(envelope-from <efflrescent@aperfectmix.com>)
id 1LzsxZ-0000Ib-JG
for MY_ADDRESS; Fri, 01 May 2009 09:39:27 -0400
Message-ID: <49FAF79E.9745295@aperfectmix.com>
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 13:39:25 -0100
From: Chesner <efflrescent@aperfectmix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: MY_ADDRESS
Subject: 2 Populaar Myths About Female Orgasms -  How to Become an Irresistible Lover
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”————32D524EA4E2E67F07C94899F”
X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.8
X-Spam-Score: 38
X-Spam-Bar: +++
X-Spam-Flag: NO

The body contains no data.

I got my IPhone the day after the last post I made.  I must admit it was worth the wait and by the far the coolest device ever created by humans.

Now all I need is SSH and RDesktop clients for.  They have VNC and mainframe/midrange term-emulation, so it can’t be far off.

My wife and I waited in line early morning the day of the IPhone 3G launch.  By the time we got in the AT&T store they had sold out of all 16gig models so they put them on order for “direct fulfillment”.

She got the white model and received hers two days ago.  I got the black one and still have not received mine.

My buddy, Billy, went into the same store after work the day of the launch and signed up for the direct fulfillment of the same model I ordered.  He just received confirmation that his is at the ATT store ready to be picked up.

So why did I wait in line?!

Missy and I hopped in the line at our local AT&T store this morning at 7am to try and get ourselves two iPhone 3Gs (16gig).  At this point the line already wrapped around the side of the building.  We finally got into the store at about 11am to find that they had sold out of the 16G version.

They set us up with “direct shippment” of the phones so they should arrive within 5-10 days.
I can’t wait!

Best of 2007

• Gizmodo’s Most Popular Hits of 2007
• LifeHacker.com – The Best of 2007 Roundup
• Break.com – Top 10 Internet Videos of 2007
• arstechnica.com – 2007: The year in review
• Search Security – Top 10 Security Headlines of 2007

Tech

• IANA and ICAN rolling out IPV6 on Root Name Servers

Security

• Business Week – Homeland Insecurity

Privacy

• U.S. is “Endemic Surveillance Society” Says Electronic Privacy Information Center and Privacy International
• Eavesdropping on Bluetooth headsets

Apple

• Appletel – Ultimate Leopard Tweaking Guide

Thats right! On Dec 12th it was released to manufacturers and the 15th it will launched during MacWorld.

Details are available on the MS Mac Biz Unit blog.

I started using time machine with the network drive hack…

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This turned out to be a life saver. Last Monday at work things started slowing down, big time. Eventually everything locked up. I could move my mouse but the OS would not accept keyboard input and none of the open apps would respond.

I powered it down and it booted up to the ? folder. I booted into my Leopard DVD and opened disk utilities. No hard drive was detected. How bad is that?

On the new MacBooks the hard drive is a user serviceable part. They had a replacement hard drive to me the next day.

Restoring from my time machine backup got me up and running in no time at all. I found that there are two ways to restore during the leopard install process.

1. Stop the install and go to the utilities menu. Select the time machine restore option and it will restore the entire hard drive as it was before.

2. Go through the install process as you would for a fresh install with your time machine drive plugged in. After the install reboots it will ask you what you want to restore. If memory serves it had check boxes for…

• Home directory
• Applications
• Settings
• Everything else

The “everything else” is useful if you have fink installed as its outside the normal directory structure.

EDIT: Now I know why the drive failed.    It was the same model as the article reports and I did hear loud clicking.  Mystery solved.

There are reports of an in-the-wild Trojan horse program that targets
Mac OS X systems.  Users are encouraged to visit malware-serving sites
through spam messages in Mac forums.  The Trojan, which pretends to be
a QuickTime plug-in, can hijack users’ search results, sending them to
websites the attackers want them to visit.

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3595
http://www.scmagazineus.com/Trojan-targets-Mac-users/article/58290/

This is yet another example of malware exploiting stupidity and thats all.  I am sick of people jumping at every trivial little article they find regarding mac malware and saying “see, the mac isn’t safe either”.

First off, nothing is ‘safe’… just safer.  Second, you can have the most secure operating system in the world but if someone is stupid enough to install malicious software onto it then it will be infected just like windows.

When I see a self-propagating  worm that exploits a zero-day vulnerability in OS X, only then will I change my rant… but only slightly.

I just picked up a copy of Leopard and am LOVING it so far.  Spaces, stacks, cover flow and the new finder — alone — make it worth the upgrade.

Although I have found one minor issue.  When mounting a hidden share (active directory smb://servername/share$) it mounts it as you would expect… but then when you go browse back to in finder it will not display the share.

Now when mounting a share it will display the server name in the left area of finder, when clicking on that server it displays all shares that you have access to.  I am assuming because the share is hidden it is unable to enumerate it from the server, but it obviosly works because it opened it when I specificly told it where the share is located.

Hopefully they fix this in a update because I am not able to find anything on it on their support site.

I am a firm believer in David Allen’s GTD (or Getting Things Done) and have been searching for a nice and easy to use task tracking system. I am also a huge fan of all things gui-less so naturally I started coding series of scripts for the purpose and GeekTool to display todo’s on my desktop.

Initialy it was nothing more the following line added to my .bash_profile

alias todo=’echo $1 >> ~/todo.txt’

But before long I found myself wanting to write a ‘done.sh’ script to remove items. At that point I realized I had to implement a numbering system, use copious amount of awk and sed and spend far more time than I cared to on the project.

At some point I recall briefly reading about something similar on digg. A quick google search lead me to todotxt.com.

What a system this is! Combined with GeekTool I have an excellent way of staying organized.

Rather than explaining how it works I embedded an example video for you.

Now all I have to do is implement a system that uses DUE:MM/DD and a cron’ed script to alert me via growl when something is due. Ahhh, if only I had some free time.