PWN to OWN. This is the name of the contest that made most Mac users worldwide seriously think about reading a security book or two to learn about securing their Macs ASAP. During the aforementioned contest a Mac running OS X Leopard was the first to give in to the intrusion attempts. It may not have been the brightest day in Apple’s history but it surely was the one when every Mac owner out there gave a second thought to the “Macs are the most secure” theory.
So, if Macs aren’t as secure as we have previously thought (I did too and even bet on the Vista computer that it would be the first to be compromised), what can we do to defend ourselves against attacks? One way would be to fire up the old integrated Mac OS X firewall and configure it to accept only incoming connections from IP addresses we know.
Although this is a good thing to do, the integrated firewall doesn’t do as good of a job as Apple would want us to believe. If you are not a very experienced user you’ll probably end up just enabling the damn thing and what protection do you think you’ll get? I’ll tell you: not very much because the machine that got “owned” at the PWN to OWN contest had the default settings and it went down pretty fast. Read More»
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With so many different computer systems around now, many online memory shops like Crucial (www.crucial.com) and Kingston technology (www.kingston.com) offer to walk you through buying the correct chips for your particular system. As part of this process, you are usually asked to fill out an online form that specifies the make and the model of your computer, as well as the processor your machine uses. Read More»
Posted in Computer, Hardware, Mac | 3 Comments »
Windows Vista more than doubled its market share in March from the prior month, while the share of computers running Mac OS X fell for the first time in nine months, according to statistics released today by market research firm Net Applications.
By the end of March, Vista was used by 2.04% of computers connected to the Internet, according to the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company. That’s up from 0.93% of PCs in February.
Now ranked the fifth-most popular operating system by Net Applications, Vista jumped ahead of Windows 98, which had a 1.36% share. Vista still trailed its seven-year-old ancestor, Windows 2000, which had 4.71% share in March. Read More»
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Microsoft has started private testing of the next version of Office for the Macintosh, which is due out in the second half of the year. Office 2008 for Mac, as the product is known, helps bring the desktop suite back into compatibility with two key technologies.
First, the product is the first version of Office that runs natively on both Intel- and Power PC-based Macs. The new software also adds support for the XML file formats that Microsoft added to the Windows version of Office–Office 2007, which hit store shelves in January. Read More»
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