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news of 2005-04-27
The new PowerMacs.
Yep. As widely anticipated, they just suck. *cough*. Really, I'm a bit angry with Apple. They have to know that people won't sell their 2.5 GHz machines now to get 2.7 GHz machines. If you have a PowerMac G5 now, there's just no real need to upgrade. You can get a dual layer SuperDrive at basically any PC store. I say: IBM's the new Motorola. Pity, though.
[ written by fryke™ on 2005-04-27 at 15:46 CET ]
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Now's the time: Make 'em switch!
Remember my unofficial switcher's guide, where I wanted us (you and me) to go out and switch PC users to Mac users? Well: Now's the time. Let's call it a game. Tiger's out (well, 2 days to go...) and Longhorn is taking another 18 months or so. This is the window we've been looking for.
If you come across a person complaining about what a drag their PC is, switch them to the Mac immediately. This is important. Let's help Apple turn the game upside down. Heck: If their PC is doing them wrong, they can get a Mac mini for 499, an eMac for 799 or an iBook for 999 USD. That includes Tiger and iLife and comes without the trouble of worms and viri. That's cheap enough. If that _ain't_ cheap enough, sell them your old iBook or Mac mini, if you happen to have one. They can keep their PCs for all the things they think it's better than the Mac or that are not available on the Mac. Be aggressive about it.
We have 18 months to turn the world around. Let's do it.
[ written by fryke™ on 2005-04-27 at 13:01 CET ]
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Mac/Cowhand-A Update: Nothing to see here
As suspected, Sophos' claim of having found a new trojan for Mac OS X is a bit of hot air. Well: It's not like it doesn't exist, but according to MacBidouille, Intego (another maker of antiviral software for the Mac) knows about this "Cowfight Underhand Trojan Server" for about a year - and its VirusBarrier software can get rid of it since about that time, too. Nothing to worry about either: That trojan isn't really spreading or anything.
Another thing to keep in mind is that this is not a virus. It's a "trojan horse" in the traditional (well, computer-traditional) sense, i.e. it's simply a script that - if you run it, and only if YOU run it - can do harm to your computer (in this case, it opens a port to the outside world, which is bad). This type of thing is of course possible in Mac OS X. You can even write your own if you want to. Just let an AppleScript execute "rm -rf ~" (rather don't, since that'd erase your files and folders - all of them!) in Terminal, compile the script, give it a name that fools others and send it around and voilà: You're a script kiddie yourself. This is not Apple's fault, and there's not much they can do about it, since if you actually want to erase your files and folders, you should be allowed to. So, theoretically, you could one day get an E-Mail by a "friend" (or someone faking the E-Mail address in the from-field, which is very easy) who sends you "some interesting little app", and if you run that thing, it might do harm. But really: Do you run apps that are sent to you by E-Mail, if you haven't asked for any?
The difference with the trojans existing for Windows (or at least some of them) is that they ARE in the wild, they're being sent around by the millions and use weaknesses of both Windows' security issues and dumb users to spread even more. They're often combined, too. The case where you start a Windows machine and it becomes infected with a worm which starts to send E-Mails with itself attached to all of your address book contacts is not what can - at least not yet, definitely - happen to you as a Mac user. And that's a very big difference.
[ written by fryke™ on 2005-04-27 at 03:10 CET ]
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