SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) are systems for providing security to Internet communications, particularly Web browsingRead more...
With Amit Singh's release of MacFUSE at Macworld Expo 2007, the Mac now embraces a much broader array of file systems, improving cross-platform compatibility, network connectivity, security, and convenient integration with a variety of online servicesRead more...
On a quiet October afternoon in Arlington, Virginia, Dr. Rhonda Clevenson sits her sixth-grade Exemplary Project students down in front of the several iMacs scattered about her classroom to teach them how to edit video in iMovieRead more...
In the first two installments of this article, we looked first at Apple's proprietary programming environments for Mac OS X - Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa - and then at its cross-platform Unix layerRead more...
In the previous installment of this article we looked at three of the five breeds of programs that run in Mac OS X: Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa. Those three are most notable because they're used for the majority of current Mac OS X programsRead more...
As we discuss Apple's new operating system, there's a strong awareness that, no matter how good Mac OS X itself might be, it can't succeed without applications created outside AppleRead more...
With Mac OS X, Apple is bringing Unix to a large, new audience. In part one of this article, I offered a brief history of Unix and mapped out how Unix will provide the basis of Mac OS XRead more...
With Mac OS X, Apple is building Unix into the Mac OS, and this has technical, social, and political ramifications for Mac users and the rest of the industryRead more...
Like many Mac users, I've been busy this last week installing Apple's Open Transport Tuner 1.0. This patch blocks a potential denial of service attack that can be launched from Macintosh systems running Mac OS 9 and certain CPU configurations running Mac OS 8.6 - see Geoff Duncan's piece in this issue for details on the vulnerability and Apple's fix.
John Copeland, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, identified this potential attack after detecting a port scan on his home networkRead more...
One of the best things about the Internet - a legacy of its educational history - is that it lets us share information with people all over the planetRead more...
In the beginning, the concept was simple: pay $10,000 to anyone who could bypass the security on a Macintosh Web server using only off-the-shelf software to protect the system (see TidBITS-303)Read more...
Chris Johnson writes:
The Office of Telecommunication Services (OTS) of the University of Texas System now supports an archive site for Macintosh freeware and shareware, which can be accessed with both FTP and the World-Wide Web.
ftp://ftp.utexas.edu/pub/mac/
http://wwwhost.ots.utexas.edu/mac/main.html
The archives are maintained by Chris Johnson, former and long-time administrator of the University of Texas at Austin Computation Center's Macintosh archive, microlib/mac, and creator of its WWW interface [And an extremely nice one it is, tooRead more...
Chris Meyer writes:
The recent in-depth review of Timbuktu in the recent TidBITS was much appreciated. Here is another angle on Timbuktu. Pacific Bell has been pushing ISDN for telecommutingRead more...
Gatekeeper 1.2.7 is a set of Macintosh system extensions (INITs) and related control panels (cdevs) that, when active (i.e. allowed to install themselves during the boot process), offer protection against attacks by all viruses known to the author at the time of this release.
Gatekeeper also monitors computer activities for what are considered to be suspicious 'events' or 'operations,' in an attempt to intercept what could be variants of known viruses or even completely new viruses.
Since its initial release in January of 1989, Gatekeeper has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to stop the spread of viruses which were unknown during its designRead more...
Users of Gatekeeper 1.2.6 will soon receive a warning stating that 1.2.6 is out of date and should be replaced with a more recent version. This warning appears automatically when modern versions of Gatekeeper exceed six months in age and is intended to prevent people from unwittingly depending on obsolete versions of the program which may no longer offer effective or safe protection from virusesRead more...
