DV for Teachers

Mike Bombich has released a beta of the essential Carbon Copy Cloner, which I use to back up my Macs to external hard drives. A “clone” is an exact, bootable (!!) copy of your hard drive. Do this regularly and you’ll never need to fear a hard drive crash.

If you’re in education and you use it, send Mike a thank you for his generous licensing for educators:

Please note that if you are using CCC for an educational institution, you should NOT donate to Bombich Software. My heart is in Education and all software that I write shall always be free to Education.

Security news, but don’t worry if your system is up to date: Exploit released for Mac OS X flaw | CNET News.com

“The risk presented by this exploit is limited by the fact that it can only be exploited by a logged-in user, although the user may also be logged in remotely,” [Dino] Dai Zovi said. “The issue is also mitigated by the fact that a patch has already been released.”

If you’ve installed the latest 10.4.8 update, you’re patched for this vulnerability.

Not really, says John C. Welch, in aHas Apple Lost Its Security Shine? Welch is a Mac consultant and author. He says:

The truth is, all the malware for Mac OS X thus far has been rather lame, and not much of a danger to anyone who practices a few common-sense steps. The real threats in the Mac world are complacency and foolish behavior on the part of users. (...) While Mac OS X is quite secure out of the box, there are some easy things that you can do to keep yourself safe.

Wise and informed advice follow. Please read and learn and apply, and your Mac – and more importantly, the data you keep on it – should stay safe.

Now, about those backups you’ve been meaning to do….

Technophilia: Protect your web searches – Lifehacker

AOL’s recent “doh!” release of more than 500K user search records has prompted many people to examine their search methods. While no one approach is absolutely foolproof, using a combination of common sense searching strategies will make it harder for engines (or anyone else) to put together a detailed profile of you. Keep reading today’s feature for a few ways to protect yourself from search engines.

You may not think you have anything to hide, and you very likely don’t have anything to hide. So why worry? Because it’s none of their damn business. Protect yourself, and be aware of the trails you leave.

Macworld: Protect your Mac

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Your Mac is the safest personal computer on the market. Even though we’ve had a couple of scares this year, there are still almost no Mac viruses. According to research done by Sophos (a maker of antivirus software), at press time there were only four known OS X viruses, compared with roughly 80,000 on Windows.

But let’s face it—we live in a dangerous world, and not all of those dangers (especially those to your privacy) are platform-specific. Here’s how to keep your personal information out of the wrong hands—and keep your Mac out of trouble.

I am not a security expert, and Macworld, though authoritative, isn’t infallible. Nonetheless, from my experience, this looks like a good series of tips for keeping the data on your Mac safe from web nasties. Don’t forget: it’s the data that’s more important than which machine it’s on. Back up everything on a regular basis.

They’re cute – and this one about viruses is correct , but disingenuous. A handful of potentially serious vulnerabilities have cropped up in the last few months – potentially serious. They were properly reported to Apple several months ago, and there are no reports of outbreaks, but Apple has issued no fixes for these yet. Despite some strongly worded criticism, for the moment I believe thatcautious concern and awareness are called for. I know much more about end-user multimedia applications than operating systems, so I encourage you to do your own reading and come to your own conclusions. Add to that persistent requests that Apple do the right thing and help us keep the doors locked.

bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » Recovering Disk Images with DiskWarrior

How a veteran Apple programmer got into a jam and how he got out of it.

Moral: Disk crashes and file corruption can happen to anyone, even seasoned pros. Make backups more often than you think you need to.

Daring Fireball points to news of a “trojan” for Mac OS X. Key exceprts from the Ambrosia Software Web Board -> New MacOS X trojan/virus alert where the news was posted, by Andrew Welch, president of Mac software developer Ambrosia Software:

• You cannot simply “catch” the virus. Even if someone does send you the “latestpics.tgz” file, you cannot be infected unless you unarchive the file, and then open it
• This should probably be classified as a Trojan, not a virus, because it doesn’t self-propagate externally (though it could arguably be called a very non-virulent virus)
• It does not exploit any security holes; rather it uses “social engineering” to get the user to launch it on their system

  Please go and read it; some of it is technical, but it’s worth trying to understand. The fault here is less the Mac operating system than naivete or misplaced trust. Don’t open it if you don’t know what it is and what’s in it. Andrew Welch summed up the discussion thread (as it stands at this point) this way:

  Regardless of anything, explicit user actions are needed for anyone to become infected by OSX/Oomp-A—if you don’t download, decompress, and then double click on the file, you can’t become infected by it. It tries to fool the user into doing this, because it is at its core a rather simplistically written program.