On Monday, Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.4. In addition to enhancements to existing features, Apple bundled in 13 specific security updates, including one for Safari 3.2.1. The Security Update APPLE-SA-2008-004 and Mac OS X 10.5.4 can be downloaded and installed from Apple Downloads.
Apple has released Mac OS X 10.5.4, the fourth update to Leopard since it was released last October.
The new version contains the usual mix of bug fixes and security updates, with iCal getting the most attention. iCal won't delete events without telling you as a result of the latest update, for example, and Apple said the update "improves overall iCal reliability." Airport and Spaces & Expose also received some updates.
MacRumors.com notes that the update paves the way for Apple to release the MobileMe service, the successor to .Mac unveiled by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
There are also a couple of security-related fixes for Safari and other issues that my colleague Rob Vamosi will cover in more detail. Mac OS X 10.5.4 should pop up through Software Update any moment now, or you can force the issue by visiting Apple's site.
For what it's worth, 10.5.4 did not appear in the list of available updates when I ran Software Update on my Open Computer from Psystar, as expected. As of about 2 p.m. PDT, Psystar hadn't posted a version on its site, although it might take the company some time to get the Open Computer version of the update up and running.
Jack Picks Dell's TechCenter Wiki powered by Wetpaint! Where I work we are JUST NOW winning the fight to even GET a wiki. Dell has taken theirs to a whole new level for their enterprise customers. The Dell Enterprise Technology Center: TechCenter Wiki is a valuable tool for any enterprise running Dell systems. I have already added several of their RSS feeds to my RSS reader of choice (Google Reader and Flock's RSS Reader). The best part that I found about this wiki isn't even in this wiki. It POWERS this wiki! That is Wetpaint!
Wetpaint is a FREE wiki hosting company! From the Wetpaint About Page:
"A Wetpaint website is built on the power of collaborative thinking.
Here, you can create websites that mix all the best features of wikis,
blogs, forums and social networks into a rich, user-generated community
based around the whatever-it-is that rocks your socks. A social website
that’s so easy to use, anyone can participate."
Dell continues to impress me by NOT acting like a big company and trying new things. It is obvious that their attitude is "Try it, does it sell more computers and/or help our customer satisfaction? Yes, do it more and better. No, then drop it and try something else". I am glad to see that someone at Dell tried Wetpaint. They gave me two great tools. I will be using the The Dell Enterprise Technology Center: TechCenter Wiki and I will be using Wetpaint.
This has been a great online tool discovery day!
Why do Apple laptop upgrades cost 200% more than Dell's? - Crave at CNET.co.uk
A recent CNET article tackles an issue that most non-Apple fan-boys always bring up when talking about Apple computers. Operating system aside (and yes, most of us can care less about what the OS offers) why pay so much for generic hardware you can get anywhere else for half the price.
From the Article:
We've got our slide rule and paper out to compare the components that make the most difference to computing performance that we could make direct comparisons with. Let's see how they stack up (all prices were checked on 26 June 2008).
Last week, the IT department had an epiphany, they decided to replace Mcafee Anti-Virus with Norton on all employees computers. Since I work in a company technically retarded, the announcement almost went unnoticed with minimal opposition from all the departments. Only a handful (actually one besides me) didn’t like the decision. We discussed it a bit, that Norton is a resource hog, and will probably slow up our systems. However we begrudgingly obliged.
While I knew that my system was screwed, since I didn’t defragment for some time, had loads of unnecessary applications, didn’t clean my registry for a few month…etc. You know how XP could become after a couple of month of usage. The Norton installation was like the last nail in my laptops coffin. The system has become so annoyingly slow, that on more than one occasion I almost punched the screen! Switching between applications could take up to 30 seconds, sending out an E-mail would take another 30 seconds, random freezes while typing a document, it really got frustrating. I decided to take matters into my own hands. Step one: be the technological renegade I always been, get rid of Norton!
So I fire up my Control Panel, and then click on the Add/Remove Programs icon, click on the damn Norton icon and Remove. Oh oh not so fast cowboy, I needed a password:
At this point, a lot of ideas crossed my mind, smart guessing, brute force, social engineering…etc. But I decided to appeal to Google, maybe there was a default password I could use. After a quick 30 second Google, I landed on a forum, someone had the same exact problem I had, one suggested to fire up the Task Manager and kill a process run by the user (not System) called Msiexec.exe. My first thought, was NO WAY, it can’t be that easy! But decided to try it.
Lo and Behold! The uninstallation rolled and I had a Norton free system within a minute!
Now my question is: is this the kind of security millions of computer users and thousands of corporation depending on? How can such a hack go unnoticed for multiple versions (yes it has been around even for earlier versions) by such a “leading” computer security company? Didn’t any one report it? File a bug? Security through obscurity my ass!
UPDATE: Apparently the image links are not linking back to the original author like I thought. You can reach the original author's page at http://hehe2.net/thedarkside/microsoft/hacking-symantec-easy-peasy/ . My apologies.
S.F. Gate has a great video that every I.T. Department should make laptop users watch. We can only secure the data on the device. It is EVERY user's responsibility to secure THAT DEVICE! Leaving a laptop on your car seat in a locked car IS NOT SECURE!
19 seconds. That is how long it takes this guy to steal this laptop. 19 seconds. If it was in the trunk, he never would have bothered with the car.
Blogged by Jack of www.jackpicks.com
Apple tries to keep its distance from "enterprise" in its official image for its products, but slowly they tuck in enterprise level necessities into their various products without much fanfare. Wired's Cult Of Mac column says that various rumor blogs and sites have been reporting that the iPhone 2.0 software will come with a secure wipe function. •LINK•
While not some sort of ringing endorsement or explicit confirmation of enterprise offerings, it is Apple's way of slowly winking and nodding to consumers and IT technicians that along with push email and calendaring they can also feel more secure in setting the device up to completely wipe itself of all personal data when they want to get rid of it (no word in the article if you can secure it and force it to wipe on incorrect password entries). This will also help existing iPhone owners securely wipe their devices as well once they perform the OS upgrade, which is yet another way of slowly seeping the iPhone deeper into the market via the used market.
Jack Picks Dell! Dell has had some great environmental business initiatives in the last two years. They have done a great job of educating their customers and showing the how being "green" is a good business decision. From Digg, "...Dell became the first in the industry to achieve 80 PLUS Gold-certification for a server power supply..."
This is going to be how the planet gets "healthy". Energy is a finite resource. When companies as large as Dell point that out and show other companies and partners how saving energy is good for the "bottom line" they will change. Some people will say "Too little to late", but I prefer "Better late than never!"
read more | digg story
Google has recently updated the migration tools from Google Apps to "move email from anywhere – not just IMAP systems – to the Premier, Education or Partner Editions of Google Apps." An example of solution that uses the API is gMOVE from LimitNone, a tool that migrates your email, contacts and calendars from Outlook to Google Apps. gMOVE also migrates the tasks from Outlook to an iGoogle gadget.
The tool costs $19 and it works with any Google Apps account. If you post an insightful comment that explains why do you want to migrate from Outlook to Google Apps, you could get gMOVE for free. Don't forget to include your email address so I can contact you.
LimitNone also has a free tool that lets you move from a Gmail account to another Gmail account or to Google Apps: it transfers your messages, filters, contacts and calendar events.
"Web browser performance is an often talked-about and flaunted thing, but many claims are not really backed up by solid evidence. I wrote software that collected millions of data points over 14 hours of actual browsing time, and this article reveals my findings." Seeing is believing!
"After browsing for 14 hours with these programs, and recording all the results into spreadsheets, the most memory efficient browser in my usage is very clear--Firefox 3.0 not only trumps its older version, but every other popular offering on Windows. This article may help other vendors rethink their marketing campaigns, and may prompt further improvements."
You can read all of the technical testing details at the link below:
"Down time used to be our most profitable product," jokes Domas Mituzas, a performance engineer at Wikipedia. The gag is that when Wikipedia is offline, the site often displays a page seeking donations for additional servers.
As a non-profit running one of the world's busiest web destinations, Wikipedia provides an unusual case study of a high-performance site. In an era when Google and Microsoft can spend a half-billion dollars on one of their global data center projects, Wikipedia runs on fewer than 300 servers from a single data center in Tampa, Fla. It also has servers in Amsterdam at the AMS-IX peering exchange.
The rest of the article from Data Center Knowledge is here.
Crash Reporter (wait for it... wait for it...) CRASHED!
Btw, the Crash Reporter came up when Firefox 3 crashed.
Oh, we're on Digg!
Jack Picks Apple Online Turtorials - Secure Trash. Apple offers some nice video tutorials that you can link to for your customers. This tutorial is a guided, step by step, hand holding lesson on how to delete your Trash Securely. This is the type of lesson I love. One that my mother (who's computer world is limited to the archaic tools of the medical billing industry) can easily follow.
I wish Apple would RSS these so it would be easy to create a widget to display these as a "tips&trick" side bar on the security page of any IT website. It would only drive traffic to Apple. I've suggested it to them so why not throw your voice in and see what they do? Maybe someone could do something with the PodCast link that would work like that? If you have information on how to do that please leave a coment with some links!
The Thin Laptop Wars - Forbes.comThe paperback edition of War & Peace, a bottle of wine, the world's smallest cat--all of these things weigh a good deal more than the Portégé R500-S5007V introduced by Toshiba last week.
Is Microsoft Better Off Without Gates? - Forbes.com
"Change is the only constant" is a favorite cliché among technology types. But for an industry that loves to talk about change, its leading lights don't do too much of it, at least not when it comes to turning over control of their companies. Apple, Dell, Microsoft and Oracle are all run by the guys who founded them back in the 1970s and 1980s.
But soon those leaders will move on. First to go is Bill Gates, who on June 27 steps aside at Microsoft.
A study released Monday by the privacy-focused Ponemon Institute and funded by e-mail marketing firm Strongmail reveals a disturbing disconnect in companies between the executives tasked with protecting customer data and marketing departments, which use the data for advertising purposes or share it with third parties.
Want to know how well a company protects its customers' data? Don't talk to its security and compliance officers. Instead, try its marketing department.
What Privacy Policy? - Forbes.com
Jack Picks Dell & Twitter! Key quote "Not too long ago, we (Dell)....recently surpassed $500,000 in revenue through Twitter, and that number is growing." Ya, even Michael Dell won't look a gift 500k in the mouth if it can be generated by one person and a Blackberry! Using Twitter to sell computers, Dell stock holders should be REALLY happy that the man with the name on the box is steering the ship again! The technology industry is going to be rough waters for a ship as big as Dell to navigate. You want the best captain you can get. No one is better than Michael Dell at moving fast and making the right quick decisions.
GO DIGG THIS!
With the recent news that Facebook has just overtaken Myspace in total users (much to the chagrin of Rupert Murdoch & Co.,) it is interesting to take a look at how a website with this type of growth rate scales with demand. With more than 10,000 servers and over 250,000 new users signing up every day, Facebook must stay ahead of the curve in terms of scaling. How is this accomplished? Check out this video interview with Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook.
This is the future of copy writing. Good on TPB for finding a way to help people protect themselves from "Big Brother". Either get with the open source movement or go wither and fade away. Even Dungeons & Dragons is based on the OPEN D20 system. You better add something to the pot that people are willing to pay for or they won't!
Blogged by Jack of www.jackpicks.com
Vulnerabilities could affect over 14 million computers. Read about it on Digg.
read more | digg story
One of my favorite topics to talk about is the reduction of power and cooling costs for computing in general. Whether it is at the home where the small but immediate impact is noticed in an electric bill, or in an enterprise data center where the difference is major, the rush to reduce electricity consumption and cooling costs has caught the eye of many a CIO.
The firs thing to remember when talking about green computing or 'greening a data center' is that the cost to cool the data center is directly proportional to the amount of electricity consumed. This is primarily due to the amount of heat dissipated by the various electronic parts of each server. Most server manufacturers do not publish the electricity consumption (nor heat dissipation) of their servers at idle, average or full load. In modern servers, the idle load can be as much as 60 to 90 percent of the full load. You can see where this is a huge loss of energy from the electricity consumption side, and an equal loss on the cooling side. So how do we solve this issue?
One of the greatest technological advances in enterprise computing (and computing in general) is virtualization. Virtualization allows for several virtual server instances (or virtual machines) to run on top of a single physical server. Most servers in data centers are not utilized to their full potential, but they are used at some point, so often then can not simply be shut down. Virtualization allows you to take these physical servers and create virtual servers out of them that can then be consolidated onto physical servers. Furthermore, high-availability, offered by enterprise server virtualization software like VMware's Virtual Infrastructure, allows these virtual systems to move between physical server nodes in the event of physical hardware failure or maintenance. With this type of infrastructure, it is possible to reach full 100% up time while practically eliminating single points of failure from the hardware side. This is great in terms of consolidation and business continuity, and it does provide a drastic reduction in power consumption and cooling costs. There are many data centers starting to migrate to virtual infrastructures in order to reap the consolidation savings alone, but there is so much more that can be done when one stops to think about what the technology can do.
So we've talked about how we can consolidate servers through virtualization onto physical machines, and we've talked about the bolstered business continuity in the form of high-availability. Obviously, the smaller the number of physical servers consuming electricity and generating heat, the smaller the electricity and cooling costs will be. The main reason data centers leave many under-utilized and power hungry servers turned on at all times is anticipated peak need. This is the maximum need the data center expects all servers responsible for a single application or task to be able to handle no matter what. This can mean that although the average load is 10 percent of total capacity, the data center must maintain 100 percent total capacity in the event of a drastic increase in load. Often, the lack of performance of an application, website or service can be measured in lost revenue, so the inability to meet demand can not be tolerated. How do we overcome this?
A company named Power Assure sells a product which accomplishes what they call Holistic Power Management. What this does, in a nutshell, is power down servers that are not in use and monitor data center load actively to anticipate a rise in load. Then, the system dynamically powers on servers as needed to meet this demand. In essence, the system is scaling resources with power management in mind. Their product is said to be able to achieve 80 percent power savings when set to have very little excess capacity, and still achieve 70 percent reduction when a more reasonable 25 percent buffer capacity is specified. This is a remarkable power savings from both the electricity consumption and cooling cost sides. To be sure, their product is innovative and can impact the bottom line in a very positive way.
Being the inquisitive person that I am, I wonder what would happen if we took Power Assure's technology and merged it with VMware's Virtual infrastructure. We would essentially have a system that could allocate virtual resources on the fly, and then allocate physical resources on the fly when the virtual resources were maxed out. That would be the ultimate in flexibility, efficiency and business continuity. This new hybrid data center would be every CIO's dream, and it would save the planet at the same time. It is a win-win situation that I think you can't really go wrong with. Perhaps the good people at Power Assure would like to let me know if they have plans to tie their product into VMware'd Virtual Infrastructure to make something like this possible. The possible synergy between these two companies would reshape the market in their favor.
vs 
Jack Picks Goodreads!
I have been using Goodreads for several months now. Today is came across Google's Book Search. They both allow for searching and finding just about any book every written. Both services allow for rating and writing reviews. That is where is see the similarities come to an end. Google's attempt to take over another part of the internet falls short on the one thing Goodreads has done perfectly. The feel of my books and my library online.
When I am at Goodreads I feel like I am looking at a digital version of my bookshelf, or my friend's bookshelves. At Google's Book Search I feel like I am looking at the card catalog trying to sort out the Dewey Decimal System again! My reviews on Goodreads feel like I am leaving a note on a warm binding for a friend to see before they choose to read this book or not. That warmth, the feeling of a real library that is shared with friends, is what sets Goodreads apart. I love most all of Google's offerings, but here Google looses to Goodreads.
As you can see from the amount of times I have linked to the Goodreads site I would like more people to use Goodreads.
Here is an excellent albeit short video introduction to the Flock web browser. You have probably noticed several posts about flock here on SMBTechAdvice.com, and that's because we love this browser! It is based heavily on Firefox with added functionality for social networking and blogging.
Google AdSense has been down all morning and early afternoon (PST). This is a real bummer as the weekend is when I check on my measly ad reports. I have a day job and can't easily take the time needed to figure out what ads, ad placement, etc. has been working. I hope to see this up soon!
