Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 20th May 2011 20:37 UTC
I have personally tried to pretty much let the whole MAC Defender trojan thing pass by, since we're not a security website. However, we have an interesting turn of events this week. An article over at Ars Technica quotes several anonymous Apple Store employees as saying that the infection rate of Macs brought into the Apple store has gone up considerably. More interestingly though, Apple's official policy states that Apple Store employees are not allowed to talk about infections to anyone - they're not even allowed to inform Mac owners if they find the infection without the customer's knowledge. Another interesting tidbit: Apple mandates the use of Norton Antivirus on company Macs, according to one Apple Store genius.
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RE: Apple is not responsible
by Thom_Holwerda on Sat 21st May 2011 18:00
in reply to "Apple is not responsible"
Member since:2005-06-29
RE: Apple is not responsible
by WereCatf on Sat 21st May 2011 18:35
in reply to "Apple is not responsible"
Member since:2006-02-15
Is Apple responsible if you fall for a scam?
You're missing the whole point: Apple specifically tells AppleCare NOT to tell customers if their Macs are infected by it. That's not just negligence, that's downright malicious.
No one is saying Apple should be held responsible if people fall for scams. But people ARE saying Apple is responsible if they tell their employees not to inform people of such even if the employees know about it.
RE: Apple is not responsible
by danbuter on Sat 21st May 2011 20:56
in reply to "Apple is not responsible"
Member since:2011-03-17
RE: Apple is not responsible
by StephenBeDoper on Mon 23rd May 2011 01:56
in reply to "Apple is not responsible"
Member since:2005-07-06
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.More News »
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Member since:
2011-05-21
Mac Defender is NOT a virus (and there never has been even a single Mac OS X virus!). It's a "scareware" scam, in which a naive user blindly uses their own password to purposely install a bad application.
Is Apple responsible if you fall for a scam?
What if a naive user fell for another scam, like giving all their money to a "Nigerian prince"? Would Apple also be responsible because the request came through email on Mac OS X?
The answer of course is "No".
But Windows users (thanks to abysmal reporting by bloggers on the Web) seem to think that Mac Defender is a "virus", and so are comparing the security of Mac OS X to the "Swiss Cheese" non-security of Windows OS.
Let's repeat the fact again, for those Windows users who mistakenly believe that Mac OS X has viruses just like Windows:
During the 10 years that Mac OS X has been in existence, there has NEVER been a virus for the Mac.
Or to put it into numbers:
Windows OS = hundreds of thousands of viruses
Mac OS X = zero (0) viruses
;-)