Paging anyone with MONZ in their MSN contacts (and the muppet himself!)

I think the only piece of software I've ever paid for (except the OS
itself) was iWorks 08, but then only 'cos Pages churns out the in-school
newsletter for which I'm responsible and which, if you'll pardon a
momentary lapse in my characteristic modesty, really is fucking good.

It's a pity that I can never show it here, as the school name is all
over the shop, and I'd be subjected to a campaign of harassment that
would make TOG's stalkers look like amateurs.

D.

 

Bad form ...

Oh, and iUSBCam.

D.

 

that's a very good point, and one which I'd temporarily forgotten.

 

I've just received two messages from him saying just that.

<dons tin-foil hat>

I might be some tine...

</d>

 

<bad form>

I did a wget of the link and it downlaods a win32 binary. No fear foe me,
then.

 

"Some owners of Mac computers have held the belief that Mac OS X is
incapable of harbouring computer viruses, but Leap-A will leave them
shell-shocked as it shows that the malware threat on Mac OS X is real,"
said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos."

I always thought this. How can it be impossible or incapable of
harbouring viruses? It's just no one ever made one and that's the bit I
*really* found odd.

 

Some of our titles have migrated to Quark on PC, and while I've played
with it, I've always thought it just seemed to run "better" on a Mac.
I could never figure out why. The other day, I spent some time using
Quark on a PC and realised why.

Quark was designed around a Mac keyboard, and some of the shortcuts
are absent on a PC keyboard. You play Quark like a musical instrument:
ll the crucial keys are within easy reach of your left hand, while
your right hand operates the mouse, and you use the two together. One
of the crucial keys is the 'control' key on the May keyboard: extreme
bottom left. By holding that down and clicking on a document you can
activate several shortcuts, but that didn't work on the PC version I
tried.

I suppose you could experiment by designating some keys as 'hot keys'
on a PC keyboard....

 

Adobe bundles Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and they're way
cheaper than buying Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator (or comparable
apps) separately. Lots of people have moved to InDesign for this
reason. EMAP, for one.

 

In the past, Macs used to be inherently more secure because Windows
was such shite. I think that's still the case, to a lesser degree,
though.

But the real reason is that there aren't enough Macs out there for it
to be worthwhile: you want to create a botnet, steal people's banking
details, or just **** up their machines, go for the platform that has
95% of the market.

 

prawn scribbled:

Well if you ran MSN in Wine, and then downloaded that binary...

 

That's true, but I'd have thought there'd be significant bragging
rights involved in creating part of the first wave of Mac/linux viruses.

 

yeah, right. Like *that's* going to happen.

 

Yes but (to a greater extent) no. A bloke in the US offered a million
dollar reward or something equally insane, to the first person to write
a virus for Mac. The offer stood for a while, until someone twigged
that what the guy was in fact doing (unwittingly) was offering a
financial incentive to someone to commit an offence, namely design a way
to hack or otherwise disrupt personal computer systems. So he had to
retract the offer.

A big part of why Mac OS-X is so far untouched by viruses has to do with
its being based on BSD Unix. Quite aside from the fact that Win32
viruses won't execute on a *nix, there's also the non-negligible
protection offered by Unix's permissions system. So even if a virus did
get downloaded in an e-mail or whatever and was executed, the only
damage it could do would be the user's $HOME. Unless a user were stupid
enough to type his password when a downloaded executable asked him to.

That's not the same as an inherent weakness in the OS, any more than
allowing a user to type sudo rm -rf / is 'weakness'. It just means that
you can't legislate against idiocy and sooner or later, 'checks and
balances' have to stop, and common sense has to take over.

As for why Mac OS-9 was never attacked, I know next to ****-all about
that.

Any Mac users who're reading this (i.e. who haven't yet plonked me) and
who want to protect their Macs from the Leap-A worm mentioned in darsy's
follow-up to my post, should go into their Finder, go into Applications/
Utilities, and launch Terminal. Then type this ..

sudo chown root:admin ~/Library/InputManagers

.... enter password and hit ENTER. Sorted.

D.

 

Got it on a cover-DVD on a mag I bought in Oz last month. Along
with Abiword, Audacity, DeepBurner, Virtual PC, OpenOffice, PDFCreator,
AdAware, Kaspersky, AVG, SpyBot, Google Earth ... u.s.w. ... and Gutsy Gibbon.
My brother thinks it's the bees knees after I showed him all the filters, etc.

--
Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
GSX600F, RG250WD "You Porsche. Me pass!" DoD #484 JKLO#003, 005
WP7# 3000 LC Unit #2368 (tinlc) UKMC#00009 BOTAFOT#16 UKRMMA#7 (Hon)
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".

 

Dr Ivan D. Reid wrote:

Oh yes. The GIMP has much more ability than I. The trouble is that I use
it so infrequently that I find myself searching for tutorials for the
particular thing that I want to achieve. Version 2.x is a huge improvement
on 1.x too.

OpenOffice rocks but is still a little weak and fiddly on mail-merge
functionality. VirtuialBox is my VM of choice and is brilliant.

I'm, erm, Alpha testing Hardy Heron ATM. One or two bugs have been reported
by me (to be expected). Otherwise, the eye-candy and functionality are
good.

 

Dunno what kind of keyboard you have on your PC, but mine has a
Control key at the bottom left. And the bottom right as well.
If the keyboard shortcuts aren't the same then that's bad
design/programming rather than it being the PC's fault.

 

I assume he meant that CTRL-click on a PC doesn't (AFAIK) activate a
contextual menu ...

http://coughlan.fr/context0.jpg
http://coughlan.fr/context1.jpg

D.

 

The virus runs itself when downloaded?

 

I was tempted, but then I saw it was still beta, so I'm waiting.
Got other problems on my hands at the moment, like a server w/- new mobo &
quad-core Intel to replace an Athlon X2; it's only got one IDE interface
and it seems the IDE HDD and the DVD drive aren't playing happily together
on the one cable. After about an hour, something locks up and I can't
access any external commands from bash[1] -- especially not reboot or
shutdown!

[1] Scientific Linux CERN 4.x on a SATA drive -- I should probably boot it
into Ubuntu64 on the IDE drive and see if it happens there too. Tomorrow
night I'll set both drives to cable select and see if they can sort out
their differences then (having learnt a few things I didn't already know
about IDE cables today).

--
Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
GSX600F, RG250WD "You Porsche. Me pass!" DoD #484 JKLO#003, 005
WP7# 3000 LC Unit #2368 (tinlc) UKMC#00009 BOTAFOT#16 UKRMMA#7 (Hon)
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".

 

I didn't say it was the PC's fault - just that it didn't work on the
set-up I tried.

Couild be programming, could be the architecture, could be curable by
assigning hot keys, like I said.

I dunno, really, but Quark just doesn't feel as 'native' on a PC as it
does on a Mac, and I've been using it Macs for nearly 15 years.