Bush shows up at #2 if you Google for ‘failure’. Should we be surprised? Technorati has some serious Google Voodoo to top him.
I’m not sure whether to be sad or to laugh….
| After an extensive Beta and Release Candidate cycle, the new release version of Parallels has now been finalized. This upgrade to the previous release of Parallels brings the following feature updates: |
- Coherence view - Hides your XP desktop and floats Windows windows alongside your OS X windows
- Windows apps appear in the OS X dock
- Parallels Transporter - allows easy migration of your existing XP setup from a PC into the Parallels environment
- Plug-and-play USB 2.0 support
- Use of Boot Camp partitions as the Parallels drive - this lets you use a single XP image either running virtually under Parallels, or natively if you reboot via Boot Camp
- Vista Compatability
- CD/DVD burning
Drag-and-Drop support (discussed previously here)
For those running Parallels RC3 (build 3170) won’t see much difference. Those still running the old Parallels public release (build 1970) will see amazing enhancements. As always, make sure you back up your full Parallels disk image, and your Mac just to be safe, before you upgrade.
| It sounds obvious that Parallels users who run Windows need to keep on top of Windows security and patches. However, a recent addition to the Parallels Beta, called Global Sharing, can open up OS X itself to possible attacks from the Windows side. |
The basic issue is that this Global Sharing option, which allows easy drag-and-drop app launching between OS X and Windows, is given carte blanche access to your Mac hard drive. Worse yet, this option is enabled by default, at least in beta build 3150 which I am currently running. Users upgrading from a previous version, to get awesome features like Coherence Mode, booting from Boot Camp partitions, and full USB support, may be vulnerable without even realizing this feature was slipped in.
The basic problem boils down to privilege separation. Parallels runs with the full rights of your OS X user, so in theory an attack could be developed and spread via Windows vulnerabilities that could then drop malicious code into OS X. It could also delete files or alter security and other settings.
Allowing Windows, known to be so insecure, to have this sort of access rights to the host operating system is a major misstep by the Parallels team. So if you run Parallels betas, please make sure you disable this feature (Edit -> Virtual Machine -> Shared Folders then uncheck the “Enable global sharing for drag-and-drop” checkbox and save. You’ll need to shut down the virtual machine to have access to change this setting.
| I was reading a Newsweek interview with Bill Gates this morning, and was was of course expecting a bit of spin. But I wasn’t expecting Bill to be living in his own Reality Distortion Field (no longer a Jobs-only superpower, apparently). On the second page of the interview, in a question about feature comparisons between OS X and Windows, and how they both borrow features from each other, Bill had this to say: |
“Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”
Now, I understand that Gates is pushing hard to convince folks to upgrade to Vista, but this is such a classic example of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) that Microsoft is famous for.
The interviewer should have followed up asking if Bill could cite one example of a Mac exploit allowing a machine takeover. And how can he claim that Windows isn’t vulnerable to such attacks?
The MacBook has moved to the full 64-bit Core2Duo. As with the MacBook Pro and iMac move, this won’t have a huge performance impact but it does pave the way for taking full advantage of Leopard.
In an iPod developer feature guide on the Apple website, they apparently have leaked a confirmation of the upcoming touch screen iPod. On page 10 of the PDF (available at http://developer.apple.com/hardwaredrivers/ipod/iPodNotesFeatureGuideCB.pdf) the following text appears:
Note: Linking to photos and videos is supported only for 5th generation iPods running iPod Software version 1.2 or later. All other Notes feature capabilities described in this document are supported for iPod models with display screens, beginning with the touch-screen models.
In the PDF that section shows a bar off to the left, like it is still text undergoing editing and most likely was not meant to be released to the public:
It will be interesting to see how quickly that PDF gets changed by Apple now that it has been discovered.
Managing your company’s public DNS is serious business - a small typo or mistake can have serious consequences to your website, email, and other services.
For example, someone made what can only be assumed as a clueless mistake when updating their DNS - they added 127.0.0.1 to their records for the myspace.com. For those with weak network-fu, that is a special address which is only used for ‘localhost’ (your own computer). Since they had 5 hosts listed total, one out of five requests for their domain were going nowhere while this problem existed.
$ host -vv myspace.com
Trying “myspace.com”
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24145
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0;; QUESTION SECTION:
;myspace.com. IN A;; ANSWER SECTION:
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.51
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.50
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.49
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.48
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 127.0.0.1Received 109 bytes from 208.67.222.222#53 in 9 ms
I’m not sure why they’re still using round-robin DNS load balancing for their site with good ServerIron, Cisco, and F5 load balancers doing a much better job overall. We moved InfoWorld.com away from RRDNS years ago.
Fortunately either someone at MySpace noticed the issue quickly, or they saw the post at OpenDNS.com or on Digg and remedied the issue. But having such high TTLs in their DNS settings I’m sure the problem took a while to finally clear up completely.
Apple has officially announced new MacBook Pro models with the Core 2 Duo (Merom) CPU. This has been in the rumor mill for some time. While the speed bump of the Core 2 Duo isn’t huge, it’s pure 64bit which will have a greater impact when Leopard comes out (which is fully 64bit). For the time being, two other additions make this a very attractive release: they’ve now added Firewire 800 support back into the 15.4″ model, and also made all SuperDrives dual-layer capable. |
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In the 2.33GHz model, the standard RAM has been upped to 2GB (InfoWorld’s standard for both MBP and ThinkPad purchases) and the max RAM is now 3GB instead of 2GB.
Check out Enterprise Mac for more details, as well as the MacBook Pro page on Apple’s site.
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The official festivities are scheduled for Tuesday 10/24, but the actual download files have already been posted to the official Firefox download site: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0/ |
OS X:
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0/mac/en-US/Firefox 2.0.dmg
Linux:
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-2.0.tar.gz
WinXP:
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0/win32/en-US/Firefox Setup 2.0.exe
Enjoy!
So, after the iPod price drops Microsoft has rethought their offering and lowered their initial price. Like with the Xbox, they’ll be taking a loss per-unit to try and break into the market. But even at a loss, they’re charging slightly more than the iPod (99c more).
Even more confusing is to buy songs for the Zune you buy “points” (80 points per dollar) and songs cost 79 points each. Obviously a ploy to get folks to think the music is cheaper than iTunes Stores $0.99 per track, as well as banking all of those single points that are going unspent, until you buy 79 songs then you will have enough extra points to buy one more.
If you do the math, the Zune tracks actually are cheaper, $0.9875 per track. You save a whopping $0.0025 (1/4 cent) per song compared to iTMS! So if you buy 396 Zune songs you’ll make back the extra $0.99 you paid vs the $249 30GB iPod? After you buy 396 it’s ALL PROFIT!
And it comes in BROWN too?
I can see the marketing headlines already: “Zune, the ‘number two’ music player!”