macOS Archive

BusinessWeek explores why the chance is right for Apple to license the Mac OS to 3rd party hardware vendors. "First, the caveats: there's as much chance that Apple will license the MacOS as there is that Steve Jobs will show up to his next keynote wearing a dress instead of the usual attire. Secondly, he's probably right not to change course, because there's plenty of evidence that Apple's proprietary approach is the way to go to win the huge consumer electronics and digital media markets that are now opening up. But humor me anyway, because it's actually an interesting time to consider the question."

Exactly five years ago, 24th March 2001, Apple officially launched its new operating system, Mac OS X, the highly anticipated (and highly needed) successor to Mac OS 9. From the official press release: "Apple today announced that beginning this Saturday, March 24, customers can buy Mac OS X in retail stores around the world. Mac OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system, combining the power and openness of UNIX with the legendary ease of use and broad applications base of Macintosh."

In Mac OS X, the root account is disabled by default. The first user account created is added to the admin group and that user can use the sudo command to execute other commands as root. The conventional wisdom is that sudo is the most secure way to run root commands, but a closer look reveals a picture that is not so clear.

"One of the beauties that comes with Mac OS X is the Keychain that helps you manage your authorization needs as it acts as a depository of passwords. By using the Keychain you don't need to remember a myriad of passwords but rather just the Keychain password. Don't worry about losing your passwords either, since the Keychain can be backed up with ease."

Apple released another version of the security patch it distributed on March 13 to users of its OS X operating system software, in order to address a problem reported with the update. The company said it distributed the new patch, dubbed Update 2006-002 v1.1, in order to fix an issue with Apple's Safari Web browser that some users observed after installing its 2006-002 security update. According to a post on the company's Web site, the previous update had caused some Safari users to have problems launching the browser.

Learn Objective-C with Xcode in the new free PDF book from Bert Altenburg, Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin. Jump into Cocoa Development with some ready made classes and example code for XCode 2.0 and above. The book starts from scratch with basic programming knowlegde and ends up in the depth of Objective-C and Cocoa.

Here are the results of the challenge launched by the Unversity of Wisconsin to test OS X against hacking. "The response has been very strong; traffic to the host spiked at over 30 Mbps. Most of the traffic, aside from casual web visitors, was web exploit scripts, ssh dictionary attacks, and scanning tools such as Nessus. The machine was under intermittent DoS attacks. During the two brief periods of denial of service, the host remained up. The test machine was a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, had two local accounts, and had ssh and http open with their default configurations. There were no successful access attempts during the 38 hour duration of the test period."

I recently set up my new Macbook, and I was upset to see that my Windows Media video files no longer worked. The Flip4Mac player that Microsoft endorsed after they officially killed Mac Windows Media Player doesn't install or run on Intel Macs, but it can be easily circumvented with a little tinkering. Read on for details.

"In response to the woefully misleading ZDnet article, 'Mac OS X hacked under 30 minutes', the academic Mac OS X Security Challenge has been launched. The ZDnet article, and almost all of the coverage of it, failed to mention a very critical point: anyone who wished it was given a local account on the machine (which could be accessed via ssh). The challenge is as follows: simply alter the web page on this machine, test.doit.wisc.edu. The machine is a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, has two local accounts, and has ssh and http open - a lot more than most Mac OS X machines will ever have open."

Gaining root access to a Mac is 'easy pickings', according to an individual who won an OS X hacking challenge last month by gaining root control of a machine using an unpublished security vulnerability. On February 22, a Sweden-based Mac enthusiast set his Mac Mini as a server and invited hackers to break through the computer's security and gain root control, which would allow the attacker to take charge of the computer and delete files and folders or install applications. Within hours of going live, the 'rm-my-mac' competition was over. The challenger posted this message on his Web site: "This sucks. Six hours later this poor little Mac was owned and this page got defaced".

Geekpatrol benchmarks Rosetta performance, and concludes: "I'm impressed with Rosetta; Geekbench performance running under Rosetta is 40% to 80% of what it is running natively. Plus, running Geekbench under Rosetta is comparable to running Geekbench natively on a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz (our baseline system), at least in the single-threaded tests."

"It should come as no surprise that Mac OS X is a favored platform for Rails development. Rails and its supporting cast of web servers and databases thrive on the rich Mac OS X environment. The premier text editor favored by legions of Rails programmers everywhere is TextMate, a Cocoa application. And all members of the Rails core development team work with Macs. This article introduces you to Ruby on Rails by building a trivial web application step by step."

Data is valuable only if it can be stored and accessed. With multiple vendors of directory services solutions competing for your business, you may worry that their disparate systems will not be able to interoperate and that it will be difficult for clients to support multiple vendors. This chapter will help you to store and access data on Mac OS X server.

Apple had their pick of kernels when transitioning from OS 9 to OS X, and they chose to create their own kernel based on Mach 3.0. Was that really the best decision or did Apple make a huge mistake? At the time Linux was gaining support and developing rapidly, while development on Mach had pretty much ended two years earlier. This article makes a case for Apple using the Linux kernel in a future version of the Mac OS.