19 posts tagged “os x”
<stolen from PCWorld>
With Vista hacked Friday, a Linux laptop remained uncompromised at the CanSecWest PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.
Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference.
Earlier this week, contest sponsors had put three laptops up for grabs to anyone who could hack into one of the systems and run their own software. A US$20,000 cash prize sweetened the deal, but the payout was halved each day as contest rules were relaxed and it became easier to penetrate the computers.
On day two, Independent Security Evaluators' Charlie Miller took the Mac after hitting it with a still-undisclosed exploit that targeted the Safari Web browser. After about two minutes work, Thursday, Miller took home $10,000, courtesy of 3Com's TippingPoint division, in addition to his new laptop.
It took two days of work, but Shane Macaulay, finally cracked the Vista box on Friday, with a little help from his friends.
Macaulay, who was a co-winner of last year's hacking contest, needed a few hacking tricks courtesy of VMware researcher Alexander Sotirov to make his bug work. That's because Macaulay hadn't been expecting to attack the Service Pack 1 version of Vista, which comes with additional security measures. He also got a little help from co-worker Derek Callaway.
Under contest rules, Macaulay and Miller aren't allowed to divulge specific details about their bugs until they are patched, but Macaulay said the flaw that he exploited was a cross-platform bug that took advantage of Java to circumvent Vista's security.
"The flaw is in something else, but the inherent nature of Java allowed us to get around the protections that Microsoft had in place," he said in an interview shortly after he claimed his prize Friday. "This could affect Linux or Mac OS X."
Macaulay said he chose to work on Vista because he had done contract work for Microsoft in the past and was more familiar with its products.
Although several attendees tried to crack the Linux box, nobody could pull it off, said Terri Forslof, a manager of security response with TippingPoint. "I was surprised that it didn't go," she said.
Some of the show's 400 attendees had found bugs in the Linux operating system, she said, but many of them didn't want to put the work into developing the exploit code that would be required to win the contest.
Earlier, Miller said that he chose to hack the Mac because he thought it would be easiest target. Vista hacker Macaulay didn't dispute that assertion: "I think it might be," he said.
<Stolen from The Entourage Help Blog>
With the help of a plug-in, the Finder can display the contents of Entourage mail messages without having to open them in Entourage. Shin-ichi Kawamura has posted Entourage QuickLook Plug-In ver. 1.1 as a free download on his website.
The website and the included Readme.rtf file are in Japanese but I needed no translation to tell me when I opened the .dmg file that I simply need to drag and drop the Entourage QuickLook Plug-In.qlgenerator file into the /Library/QuickLook folder. Installation is that simple. If you’re not an administrator on your Mac and do not have privileges to install items into the main Library folder then you can place the plug-in inside ~/Library/QuickLook where “~” is your own home folder. You will need to create the QuickLook folder if it doesn’t already exist.
Read the rest at The Entourage Help Blog.
<stolen from theAppleBlog>
The guys at VMware are supremely dedicated to bringing the best support for Virtualization that they can to the Apple platform. I’ve played with both Parallels and Fusion and the choice of the latter was an easy one for me. But the one sticking point tends to be Apple’s licensing of their operating system: They don’t like it running on non-Apple hardware.
But a change in licensing for the Server version of OS X has opened the door for virtualization. VMware is kicking it at Macworld San Francisco as I type this, and demoing their newly installed virtual machine, running OS X 10.5 Server all day long. They’re certain to clear that this is no hacked version of our beloved operating system, but a straight install from an Apple-licensed DVD, running within VMware’s Fusion Virtualization software. And Fusion supports 64 bit operating systems too, so Leopard Server is purring in all its glory.
This is big news, as it effectively enables users to run multiple instances of Leopard Server on a single machine. For Mac-based businesses, the environmental savings of this alone are huge! (Think, reduced power requirements and reduced cooling costs, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.)
If you’re at the Expo, check out the VMware booth and all the cool stuff they’ve got going on.
</stolen>
How long until I can run OS X on my VMware ESX servers?... That would be a HUGE win for R&D departments wanting to test Safari on OS X...and for the geeks admins cool people who want to play with OS X but don't have Apple hardware. Of course, that's the sticky part...Apple hardware...
Call me what you will but I actually waited in the sun for a little over 2 hours to pick up an 8Gb iPhone. It rocks. The 2 issues I have with it I knew of prior to the purchase - no 3G and no (current) Exchange support. I dealt with the lack of 3G with my Treos so I can deal with it on my kickass iPhone. There's talk of Exchange support already in the works. To me, this is a necessary feature for the iPhone to compete in the business market.
Regarding the comments that [insert smart phone here] can do everything an iPhone can, I concur. However, the same could be said for OS X vs. Windows. While Windows can do everything OS X can do, and more actually, there's no comparison as to which is the better OS after giving it a try. So says me. ;-)
I gotta say, Apple did a fantastic job not only in bringing a (somewhat) revolutionary device to the market, but also in the way they marketed it.
Apple announced today that they've ported Safari over to Windows. Assuming it's fully compatible with the OS X version, this could be a godsend for software development/QA in that if they're not an OS X shop they no longer have to keep an iMac lying around. Not that anyone minds having an iMac on their desk...
Lifeclever has a great howto on how to use Quicksilver with Yubnub to do rapid web searches. Up 'til now I hadn't bothered to look into using Quicksilver for searching the web as I ASSumed I'd have to remember different triggers, etc. for each site I want to search (Google, IMDB, Wikipedia, Dictionary, etc.). However with Yubnub it's as simple as "g iphone".
Lifehacker has a good introduction to Quicksilver, the God Send for OS X:
by Adam Pash
Quicksilver is bar-none the best productivity application on the market today. Whether we're talking Mac, Windows, or Linux, freeware or shareware, this Mac-only, freeware application launcher-and-then-some is the best productivity booster I have on my computer.
Quicksilver can be used to launch files and applications, manipulate data, and seamlessly plug into almost any application on your Mac so that you can perform actions as soon as you think of them in a few short keystrokes. The only problem with Quicksilver is that a lot of people also find it to be one of the most obtuse desktop applications around. In this first part of our Quicksilver series, I'm going to introduce you to the basics of Quicksilver to lay the groundwork for more advanced Quicksilver kung fu to come.
Continue on and read the rest at Lifehacker.I ran across the following tip on The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
Quicksilver never fails to impress. I just ran across this excellent tip on macosxhints.com for setting little timed reminders to yourself. There are a plethora of little egg timer type applications for OS X, but why bother with one of those when you can do this in Quicksilver? Suppose you want to set a little text reminder like the one above to yourself to go off in 15 minutes. With this little tip you can set Quicksilver to pop up a reminder at any given time, or after any given delay. Big TUAW 'attaboy to mcgraths for discovering this. Read on for a full mini-tutorial.
[Via Digg]
1) Invoke QS, hit period to enter text modes and type your reminder: e.g. "Check Oven," tab now to the second pane and select Large Type.
[Via Digg]
1) Invoke QS, hit period to enter text modes and type your reminder: e.g. "Check Oven," tab now to the second pane and select Large Type.
2) When you hit enter you'll get a large notification as follows (screen shot reduced):
3) Here's the cool bit: now invoke QS again, and in the first pane type "last," and select "Last Object," hit the right arrow and your last command "Check Oven" (Large Type) should appear.
4) Tab to the second pane and choose Run after Delay... or Run at Time... This will reveal the third pane, tab to it, and type in the delay (e.g. 45s or 30m or even 3m 30s) or the time (e.g. 7:15pm) as appropriate.
5) now at the time you specified (or after the delay you specified), the notification as in step two will pop up.
A few notes: For this to work you must have proxy objects in your catalog, which means you must "Enable Advanced Features" in the QS Preferences. In addition, you can interleave reminders if you choose one with remind at time, and the other with remind after delay (when I tried to interleave two reminders after Delay it didn't work for some reason). Finally, you can use the same trick to run any command, not just Text (Large Type).
Thanks to tjs on vim.org for this:
Add these to your .vimrc to make vim behave like every other app
that uses tabs. If you're not on a mac (most of you) switch the D to
another character, D maps the command key.
"tab mappings
map <D-1> 1gt
map <D-2> 2gt
map <D-3> 3gt
map <D-4> 4gt
map <D-5> 5gt
map <D-6> 6gt
map <D-7> 7gt
map <D-8> 8gt
map <D-9> 9gt
map <D-t> :tabnew<CR>
map <D-w> :tabclose<CR>
After doing so, commandkey+1-9 switches tabs, commandkey+t opens a new tab, commandkey+w closes the current tab etc..
Thanks to Barry Wainwright, Microsoft MVP (see http://mvp.support.microsoft.com for details) for this:
Save the script as a compiled script (via Script Editor) as "Nuke the Mail" & put it in the folder ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items/. The script can be manually run from the menu or called as an action in a mail rule.
(*
-- ** Start Script ** --
-- Nuke the Mail v1.0
-- A script for Microsoft Entourage v11
-- (will not work with vX)
-- an applescript by Barry Wainwright <mailto:bar...@mac.com>
-- This script released under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial,
ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales License.
-- see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/> for full
details
-- 19/12/2003 - First version
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
try
set theMail to current messages
delete theMail
delete theMail
end try
end tell
-- ** End Script ** --
*)
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