Now the tricky bit… Flashback calls home to a server and downloads an icon of an app you might trust and inserts it into the position of the OS X security window fooling you into thinking that an app on your computer is trying to get your permission to install something. If you type in your password it’s all over and your system is infected.

This infection vector I should mention comes from Java and not OS X per-se.

The Flashback Trojan horse is designed to attack Mac OS X and steal personal information by injecting code into web browsers and other applications (Java). The malicious Java code attempts to call remote servers and upload screenshots of personal information and data to them.

It is difficult to exactly pinpoint where the infection took place. For OS X systems with Java installed, visiting a malicious website containing the malware code will result in one of two installation possibilities.

The Flashback Trojan will ask for an administrator password, and if the password is supplied the Flashback Trojan will install its payload within the Applications folder.
If no password is supplied the Malware will install to users accounts and run a more global course.

How do I prevent from getting infected?

First, watch out for the OS X security window popping up when you visit web sites. This should never happen but since the Trojen uses Java to do it’s nasty business the only solution is to disable Java completely until a patch has been released by Sun (keep your software updated!!)

If you suspect you’ve might have been infected or just want to test your system, Kapersky has released a tool to diagnose and remove it. http://www.flashbackcheck.com

Here’s a neat video of Steve Jobs circa 1993 giving a demonstration of NeXTStep.  See if you can pinpoint the similarities of NeXTStep to OS X!

Some Books we highly recommend:

With the advent of iOS’s success Apple has seen fit to pull some of it’s features and implement them in Lion. There are a couple of features which are at first a bit annoying but easy to fix.

If you’re on a MacBook you’ve probably noticed that the trackpad scrolling behaviour has changed. Prior to Lion, a 2-finger scroll down would make the page scroll down but in Lion it’s reversed. We’re so used to the old way that we needed to change it back. Fortunately this is easy to do:

In System Prefs, click on Mouse, Click Point & Click. Deselect Scroll direction: natural.

The other issue we were having is the new page-swiping to switch between apps and Safari web pages. Prior to Lion a double-finger swipe would allow you to switch between back and forth buttons. In Lion a 2-finger swipe is now app switching and a single-finger swipe is back and forth between web pages.

We just decided to disable app swiping:

In the Mouse System Prefs click More Gestures and deselect Swipe between full screen apps and change Swipe between page to swipe left or right with two fingers.

iOS Scrollbars

You’ve probably noticed by default that all scroll bars in Lion are now invisible until required. For some this might be confusing. We’ve become used to it on iPhones and iPads and don’t mind it in Lion but you if want them back:

In System Prefs, click General, select “Always” under show scroll bars. They’re still light grey however and not the old blue ones.

If you’re a technical person who is adept with OS X and fully understands the OS you might have noticed that the Library folder in your home folder has disappeared. Actually, it’s still there, just hidden by default. Apple most likely changed this so that inexperienced users didn’t delete the critical Library folder or make changes internally that would screw things up. This is a good move in our opinion but if you want it back just fire up Terminal in Applications/Utilities and type:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

and press enter. Like magic the Library folder will appear in your home folder. Proceed with caution as always….

Lion’s Restore feature
Apple has learned a lot from iOS and is certainly including a lot of features from it in Lion. Going forward Apple wants us to forget about quitting apps (Lion can do this automatically to save resources) and also saving files. This is a very good thing since a lot of people forget to save files and even worse, where they saved them. Lion features a new system called restore where compatible apps can save their document and window states when you quit (no need to save your documents first), it just bring everything back when you relaunch it. Safari, iWork, TextEdit and many more already support this. However we feel in some cases that it’s not a good feature, Online banking comes to mind first.

Fortunately it’s an easy feature to disable. Go into System Prefs, General and deselect “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps”

New high-quality voices

If you like to use speech in OS X but are bored with Leopard’s Alex we have some good news. Alex is great and all but Apple has licensed some new voices you can use in Lion but they are not installed by default.

To get the new voices go into System Prefs, click Speech, click text to speech and select customize from the System voice pull down menu.

Scroll down the list until you reach English (United State) and there will be a longer list of new male and female voices. You can select each one and click Play to hear them. Select the ones you want and click OK and System Update will download and install the ones you want. Enjoy!

Disable the new window animation

Lion introduces a subtle new window animation that you might miss it if you are not paying careful attention. In our minds the animation takes a new precious milliseconds off the performance of the computer so we disable it. To turn off the animation you need to type the following into Terminal.app location in the Utilities folder:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

Relogin to your system to activate the change.

If you ever want to reverse the change just type in the command again and change NO to YES.

As we find more tips we’ll update this blog post.

Cheers

Firstly, all PowerPC support is gone. The Rosetta (PowerPC) emulator will no longer function on Lion therefore if you still have any PowerPC applications that you rely upon you will need to either upgrade to Universal or Intel binary application if you plan on upgrading.

Secondly, Mac OS X Server functionality is built-in to the client and thus Apple will no longer sell a separate Mac OS X Server install. We don’t know at this point if the license will require a serial number ($) but we suspect it won’t anymore which will certainly help those who need server functions on their Mac but were not willing to pay for the server version or invest in a Windows Server. Since Apple no longer manufactures the Xserve perhaps they will allow virtualization of it in the future on non-Apple hardware. Time will tell.

Windows converts will appreciate the window re-sizing behaviour they expect from Microsoft Windows. Mac OS X finally gets window resizing from any side of a window. Apple has finally given up on the lower-right corner after 27 years.

The latest version has several features that are lacking in Safari on the Mac and after some careful testing over the course of a week we’ve made it our default browser. Based on the same WebKit rending engine as Safari, Chrome displays websites identically to Safari which is good for our web development testing. CPU usage shows it to be lower than Safari and much lower on sites that use Flash.

There is also a good selection of extensions for Chrome (as opposed to Safari) and even our beloved 1Password works as well so we feel that Chrome is ready for prime-time on the Mac. Give it try, you’ll be impressed!

http://michaelgracie.com/2009/09/23/plugging-mcrypt-into-php-on-mac-os-x-snow-leopard-10.6.1/

First mcrypt on Leopard, and now we ready for the winter cat. Additionally, special thanks goes out in advance tocommenter Yvan Barthelemy (a.k.a. ybart) for cluing me in here. The procedure is almost exactly like the previous…almost. So pay attention.

The following instructions cater to those who a) are developing on OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1, b) need the capabilities provided by mcrypt during their PHP development, and c) do not want to completely recompile PHP to get there. You’ll get mcrypt loading dynamically for use in PHP with this method.

First, you are going to need a few things…

1) libmcrypt-2.5.8, which you can pick up here; NOTE: make sure to get libmcrypt and not mcrypt.

2) PHP 5.3.0 source, which you grab here; and

3) Xcode 3.2 tools, which you can pick up here (Apple Developer Connection membership required).

Next, create a directory at root called ‘SourceCache’ and dump the files from #1 and #2 in there and unwrap.

Move to the libmcrypt-2.5.8 directory, and punch in this…

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64' CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' ./configure --disable-dependency-tracking

and then…

make -j6

and finally…

sudo make install

libmcrypt is ready – now for the PHP extension…

Move back to /SourceCache, then down to php-5.3.0/ext/mcrypt – type…

/usr/bin/phpize (phpize should be in /usr/bin – if not go find it and change the command as appropriate)

Then configure as follows…

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64' CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' ./configure --with-php-config=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/bin/php-config

Again make -j6 then sudo make install

Make sure you have php.ini in the /etc directory (it will probably be php.ini.default to start, particularly if you’ve just done the Snow Leopard upgrade, so rename it). Ensure that enable_dl = On but do not remove the ; from in front of ;extension_dir = "./". Add one line to the .ini file in the Dynamic Extensions section…extension=mcrypt.so

Restart Apache – you should be all set (again), according to phpinfo():

The fees however are generally a mystery to the public so we have posted the current fee structure as posted on the Ontario Electronic Stewardship website. The fees are on a per-item basis.

All of these are in high definition so make sure you click on the 360p button to the right of the speaker icon and set it to 720p to watch the highest quality video. Be sure to click on the 4 arrows icon to the right as well to see them full screen!  Press the escape key on your keyboard to return to our website.

Enjoy!

The GraphicCARE team

However, if you don’t access those on a regular basis the Drobo will spin down the hard drives in an effort to conserve energy. This can be rather annoying since it takes time for the drives to spin up to have access to those libraries.

The easiest solution is to write a simple launch daemon PLIST file that will keep the Drobo from spinning down by writing an invisible file to the Drobo and thus keep the drives up and running.

To create the file run TextEdit and paste in the following code and save it as com.graphiccare.PreventDroboSleep.plist into your home folder Library/LaunchAgents folder and reboot your computer. NOTE: You must be logged in to your account for this to work as it runs periodically as a process under your account name. If you want it to run all the time regardless if you are logged in or not, save the file to /Library/LaunchAgents instead.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>com.graphiccare.PreventDroboSleep</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/usr/bin/touch</string>
		<string>/Volumes/Drobo/.keepalive</string>
	</array>
	<key>StartInterval</key>
	<integer>300</integer>
</dict>
</plist>