Muskoka Mac User Group

A recent report by Heise Security says that the firewall in Leopard defaults to off, even if you are upgrading from a Tiger install that had it turned on.
The report also goes on with some mildly concerning information about issues with the firewall even when it’s activated. I’m not calling this report gospel yet – it seems a little hard to believe, and I’ve not had a Leopard install to play with yet.
Bottom line is, DO make sure the firewall is on after you install Leopard….

Updated Oct31
Well, now I’ve seen independant confirmation.

If you don’t have an external NAT router, I wouldn’t call this a giant concern, but I’ll be looking into third party solutions when we upgrade at work….

Updated again
this blog post and extensive comments looks to me to be pretty definitive. Bottom line, is still check that firewall, with the new caveat – Don’t trust the guest account to be secure. Which only makes sense – physical access to your computer = complete control almost every time, ‘guest account’ or not…

You can’t buy an iPhone with cash anymore. Debit or credit card only.

Why? Quoting an anonymous Apple employee

“We need to track the purchases of the iPhone [because] we have people buying the phones, unlocking the phones and selling them”

Wait – It Gets Better!
Now you can’t use a gift card to buy a phone either…

Of note here – unlocking cell phones is specifically mentioned as a legal practice in the US – even in their much misguided DMCA law…

It’s been downloaded 300,000 times, so somebody must be finding it useful.

You can find it here.

Here’s the summary – It’s Not Cancer !

Check the Pine Dog website for all the details….

Main Topic: BACK UP STRATEGIES AND WHY YOU NEED THEM
Other topics: Why Brian prefers the OS called Ubuntu
Why upgrade to Leopard?

Meeting Location: The Digital Life Centre
Meeting Time: 7:30 – 9 ish
SEE YOU THERE. REMEMBER TO BRING A CHAIR

Today our good Macuser friend David is undergoing surgery dealing with the cancer that has returned to ravage his body. If you are a praying person please hold him in your thoughts and prayers as often as you can in the next 48 hours. Here’s a note that his wife Nancy sent last night. I encourage you to go to his website (link is in the body of Nacy’s email) called The Pinedog which he has created with iWeb. David’s positive outlook and attitude of awe about life in the midst of very difficult circumstances is a gift to each one of us.
Blessings, Meg

Hi all,

David’s surgery starts at 8:00 am tomorrow morning. Many people want to be updated. The only way I can do it is by calling Trevor in Huntsville and having him post an update on our website. The earliest I will know anything is when the initial surgeons finish their work at around 2:00 pm. Then the vascular surgeons begin to put David back together and we anticipate they will finish sometime in the evening.

Please go to: www.pinedog.ca for the updates.

Love,

Nancy

Got a pop up today asking me to update my copy of Google Notifier.

I was expecting a minor bug fix kind of thing. What I got was Google Updater!

Now isn’t that the definition of spyware? Where you download product A and end up with product B too – without mentioning it at all?

And Google Updater itself is both cool and horrible. It checks for updates for all your Google software – that’s cool. It includes some teaser intro material to Google applications you don’t have installed in case you would be interested in then them – and that’s cool.

What’s horrible? The update option is

notify me whenever updates are installed

And it’s disabled by default!

I mean come on Google! You don’t give me any options to control the process – just the notification!

I’ve deleted Google Updater – and I’ll pitch Google Earth, Google Notifier, Sketch Up and everything else if won’t function without it.

You don’t own my computer Google – I do! What – do you think you are Microsoft or Apple or something?

Next meeting I’m demonstrating a new version the only OS that seems to take users’ rights seriously at our meeting. Fair warning proprietary software guys…. I’m really getting sick of things like this.

Nice to see Canadian government sites trying to help spread the word about internet safety. Here’s two links with what looks like good info:

savecanada.ca
safecanada.ca

and

RCMP internet security

Worth perusing….

I’ve got a hankering to revamp this website. At the very least it needs a Wordpress update. I’d like to install an iPhone – iPod touch friendly version and maybe change the theme around. Nobody but me seems to grok the calendar plugin we’re using – I’m going to look around for alternatives to that too.

It’s not been changed much since Rod left – so let’s blow out the cobwebs!

Let me know if you’ve got any ‘gotta have’ features and I’ll see what we can do.

Brian