macOS Archive

We don't normally report on security issues, especially not when they occur on Mac OS X. So far, the security issues on the Mac can barely be labelled as such, and really don't deserve a lot of attention. Now, however, it would appear we're looking at the first successful widespread malware infection on Mac OS X. Not a bad track record for an eleven year old operating system, by the way.

"As noticed by several users running the developer preview version of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple is no longer including its X11 application for running software through the X Window System interface. The X Window System has an extensive open source history, with development on the Mac side being handled under the XQuartz project. Apple's X11 application has been based on this effort, although as with many open source projects bundled for use in commercial software, X11 has generally been somewhat behind the latest XQuartz releases. The current version of X11 is 2.6.3, while XQuartz is currently available in version 2.7.0." Makes perfect sense. I mean, you guys were using XQuartz already anyway, right?

It's still early days, but this has the potential to put more fuel on the Apple rumour mill fire than anything else in recent times. A BA thesis by Dutch student Tristan Schaap details how, during his internship at Apple's Platform Technologies Group, he ported Darwin to a certain ARMv5 developer board. A few blog articles later, and the headline has already turned into 'Mac OS X ported to ARM'. So, what have I been running on my iPhone and iPad all these years?

Apple has released Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 (by far Apple's most inelegant product name). It's a whole bunch of under-the-hood stuff, mostly bug fixes. It adds support for Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian. It's all in Software Update.

And so the iOS-ification of Mac OS X continues. Apple has just announced that all applications submitted to the Mac App Store have to use sandboxing by March 2012. While this has obvious security advantages, the concerns are numerous - especially since Apple's current sandboxing implementation and associated rules makes a whole lot of applications impossible.

Introduction not necessary. Read it.

"One item of interest regarding last week's Mac OS X 10.6.8 update reveals that Apple has enabled TRIM support retroactively for solid state hard drives shipped in Apple-produced configurations. TRIM is a feature that allows solid state drives (SSDs) to automatically handle garbage collection, cleaning up unused blocks of data and preparing them for rewriting, thereby preventing slowdowns that would otherwise occur over time as garbage data accumulates."

"Using a Mac may certainly be a safer choice for a lot of people as despite being vulnerable they are not targeted. However this is not the same as Macs being secure, something Eric Schmidt erroneously advised recently. I may be able to browse impervious to malware on a Mac at the moment, however I personally would not be comfortable using a platform so easily compromised if someone had the motivation to do so. In this article I address just why OS X is so insecure including the technical shortcomings of OS X as well as Apples policies as a company that contribute to the situation."

Looks like Apple might have changed their mind and rushed a security update against Mac Defender a bit too quickly. "Hours after Apple released update and the initial set of definitions, a new variation of Mac Defender is in the wild. This one has a new name, Mdinstall.pkg, and it has been specifically formulated to skate past Apple's malware-blocking code." Update: And one day later, Apple has updated its malware definitions to detect the new version. MD's turn.

It seems that the fight between Amazon and Apple has just entered into a new phase. The two companies are already in the world's silliest tussle over the trademark for the term 'app store', and now Amazon has kicked it up a notch by launching a competitor to the Mac App Store. While not nearly as large as the Mac App Store, it contains a number of big-name titles which are not available through Apple's offering - such as Microsoft Office.

"Per MacStories, Apple has released a new Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 3 to its developers this evening as well as Xcode 4.1 Developer Preview 5. Apple last updated Lion for developers in late April. That version contained several UI changes presumably based on feedback from developers."

"Ars Technica's John Siracusa looks back with a decade's hindsight at his early reviews of Mac OS X. He talks about what went right, what went wrong, and what he's still waiting on." I've read them all over the years, and Siracusa is by far the best reviewer on the web. His Mac OS X reviews are worth it for the technical details of the inner workings of Mac OS X alone - even if you don't use or like Apple's operating system.

When you run smbd -V on your Snow Leopard installation, you'll see it's running SAMBA version 3.0.28a-apple. While I'm not sure how much difference the "-apple" makes, version 3.0.28a is old. Very old. In other words, it's riddled with bugs. Apple hasn't updated SAMBA in 3 years, and for Lion, they're dumping it altogether for something homegrown. The reason? SAMBA is now GPLv3.

Ten years ago, to the day. March 24, 2001, the first official released version of Mac OS X went on sale, for USD 129. It was a massive step up and a massive step down from MacOS 9 at the same time - technically way more advanced, but clearly still in its infancy and pretty much unusable. Kernel panics, crashes, incredibly slow, and lacking many key features. It was so bad, in fact, that Mac OS X 10.1 was released as a free upgrade. Of course, we geeks know that Mac OS X is technically a lot older, but alas, let's just celebrate these 10 years. Maybe Lion will finally bring a usable non-crashing Finder!