The Daily Thing

So I’ve now got OSX Leopard Running on my 15″ PowerBook G4 and it seems to be doing OK. I haven’t really noticed much of a slowdown in performance. In fact, somethings have gotten faster.

I did have to disable one application. GROWL doesn’t seem to work under Leopard. Spotlight has finally come of age so Quicksilver is shut down for the moment while I get used to Spotlight.

There was a hit to video performance. The new Core Video is pretty processor intensive but the Powermac’s vid card seems to be taking it in stride albeit slightly slower for some operations.

Things I like: Spaces (linux users will recognize this instantly), the new look of folders and the way they show file structure in the left sidebar, Alex (the new Voice of OS X).

Things I don’t like: the Dock (2d icons on a 3d bar - looks weird), the menu bar at the top (get rid of transparent - we’re used to it being solid), still limited support for interaction with windows machines via cifs (you can try to login but when you click “connect as” you get nothing instead of an authentication screen).

Tags: It's a Mac Mac Mac Mac World by admin
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Flickr needs video. No really. Yahoo! has been struggling under the weight of Flickr since they bought it trying to find different ways to monetize but the answer lies in video. Let’s start with a scenario and maybe you’ll get where I’m going with this.

Thanksgiving. This year. It’s not yet time to dive into the golden brown bird so everyone is gathered around the new babies talking. Jim and Sue have the video camera rolling right as their daughter takes her first steps. Awesome! Jim says he wants to edit the video before putting it online for everyone to see. No problem since Jim lives in Wisconsin and he’s only at you house visiting.

Jim goes home after the holiday, edits his video and gets ready to put it online. Where should Jim upload it to? Youtube? Google video? Kind of impersonal. Jim doesn’t really want to share video of his daughter taking her first steps right alongside videos of drunken teen girls kissing and dancing to “Barbie Girl”.

What about one of the other video hosting sites? Who? I’ve never heard of them and odds are Gramma never has either. So Jim shuts down his computer and the video never leaves the desktop.

This is where Flickr comes in.

Flickr has already established brand superiority in online photo uploading. Millions of people upload every day! The user base is already there. There just needs to be a way for them to upload video now. WHICH brings me to the next point.

Flickr has developed an easy to use system for uploading and has left the API open so developers can build upon the system.

And the final point, monetization. Transcribing the video from whatever format it’s uploaded in to Flash based video or H.264 for download gives Yahoo! the opportunity to throw in “content sensitive” ads at the beginning or end of the video. This means money, money, money.

How cool would it be to go to your Flickr contacts list and see not only the photos but the videos your friends have upload? Huh? Huh? Is that cool or what?

Yahoo! this is your chance to make a comeback. Don’t mess this up.

Tags: A Wandering Mind by admin
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In what looks like a weird chain of events straight out of Independence Day, conspiracy theorists are celebrating today after recently released documents appear to show proof that the CIA was troubled by the threat extra terrestrials could pose to national security.

Alien life - General - News - smh.com.au: “A raft of newly unclassified CIA documents reveal that the remote possibility of alien invasion elicited greater fear than a Soviet nuclear attack.
More interesting still, the CIA documents show that despite decades of repeated public denials, behind the scenes there raged a series of inter-agency feuds which implicated the highest levels of the US government.

The subject of UFOs and dabbling in psychological warfare techniques not only focused the attention of the US elite levels for 50 years but some of the greatest scientific and military minds of the era were involved in the effort.

A Herald investigation, to be published on Saturday, shows that throughout the 1950s, CIA files clearly document an explosion of activity by US intelligence and military bodies concerned with studying every possible implication for the US, and Western democracies, of UFOs.

The phenomenon, so adored by the cinematic world - from mind control and space travel to extra-terrestrial life - was reflected in the CIA’s fixations. Indeed, while highly educated CIA employees experimented by giving each other surprise LSD trips in 1953, there were others, in other parts of the agency, dealing with a huge flood of UFO reports.

Significantly, however, after a burst of intense scrutiny in the early ’50s, the available documents effectively go cold. Why?

The quintessential Kafkaesque explanation provided is that few files were kept because these would only confirm that the CIA was investigating UFOs. But the wildly eclectic UFO files in fact cover everything from “flying saucers over Belgian Congo uranium mines” to Nazi “flying saucers”.

When The New York Times reported in 1979 that the CIA had investigated UFOs,the news report is said to have so upset the then-CIA director Stansfield Turner that he reportedly asked his staff: “Are we in UFOs?”

The answer then was yes - since the late 1940s apparently.”

Tags: Weird Wired World by admin
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It appears Apple users are no longer immune to the affects of malware. Intego Security has posted information on a trojan for the OS X operating system designed to steal passwords and financial information. This one is totally reliant on the user so if you pay attention you’re probably safe.

Intego.com: “A malicious Trojan Horse has been found on several pornography web sites, claiming to install a video codec necessary to view free pornographic videos on Macs. A great deal of spam has been posted to many Mac forums, in an attempt to lead users to these sites. When the users arrive on one of the web sites, they see still photos from reputed porn videos, and if they click on the stills, thinking they can view the videos, they arrive on a web page that says the following:

Quicktime Player is unable to play movie file.
Please click here to download new version of codec.

After the page loads, a disk image (.dmg) file automatically downloads to the user%u2019s Mac. If the user has checked Open %u201CSafe%u201D Files After Downloading in Safari’s General preferences (or similar settings in other browsers), the disk image will mount, and the installer package it contains will launch Installer. If not, and the user wishes to install this codec, they double-click the disk image to mount it, then double-click the package file, named install.pkg.

If the user then proceeds with installation, the Trojan horse installs; installation requires an administrator’s password, which grants the Trojan horse full root privileges. No video codec is installed, and if the user returns to the web site, they will simply come to the same page and receive a new download.

This Trojan horse, a form of DNSChanger, uses a sophisticated method, via the scutil command, to change the Mac’s DNS server (the server that is used to look up the correspondences between domain names and IP addresses for web sites and other Internet services). When this new, malicious, DNS server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks), or simply to web pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites. In the first case, users may think they are on legitimate sites and enter a user name and password, a credit card, or an account number, which will then be hijacked. In the latter case, it seems that this is being done solely to generate ad revenue.”

As always the best advice is, if you don’t know what it is, don’t install it.

Tags: It's a Mac Mac Mac Mac World by admin
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