TECH NOTES

Apple’s ‘Leopard’ OS release on track for October, says analyst
Click title to see rest of article at ComputerWorld.com…

Gregg Keizer
September 24, 2007

Apple Inc. will meet its October deadline for releasing Mac OS X “Leopard,” the next edition of its operating system, an analyst said today. But its impact won’t be close to that of 2005’s Tiger, or Mac OS X 10.4.

“I think they’ll make it,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc. “The noise I’m hearing is that the beta is getting close to good enough. They gave themselves enough time when they delayed it in April.”

Five months ago, Apple announced that it was pushing back Leopard from a mid-June release to sometime in October. It blamed the delay on the iPhone, saying it was forced to steal engineers and other personnel from Leopard development to wrap up the smart phone in time for its summer rollout. The iPhone hit store shelves June 29.

Macs are easy to hack: researcher
Click title for source at BuilderAU.com…

Robert Vamosi
2007/08/14

“Macs are as easy to hack as they are to use”, according to researcher Charles Miller.

Miller and his colleagues at Independent Security Evaluators discovered the first known vulnerability within the Apple iPhone.

During his presentation, “Hacking Leopard: Tools and techniques for attacking the newest Mac OS X, at the recent Black Hat Briefings, Miller said that for some reason the Mac OS has over 50-plus suid root programs.

Suid stands for “set user ID” and is used to temporarily elevate privileges to perform a specific task such as running executables.

Given the root access provided by these tools, they provide at least one vector for attack.
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Mac vs. PC cost analysis: How does it all add up?
Click title for source at InfoWorld.com…

Comparing Macs to technically comparable PCs has some surprising results — and runs counter to a lot of conventional wisdom regarding computer pricing

By Scot Finnie, Computerworld, IDG News Service
June 11, 2007

People have been arguing online about how much more expensive Macs are than PCs — or not — for more than a decade (and in print for years before that). These discussions usually involve some hard facts but also some persistent myths. As a longtime Windows guy who has recently migrated to the Mac, I think I’m in a pretty good position to try and sort out reality from fiction. Let’s take a look at what you can really get for your money these days.

But first, let me say to all those people who have ever bought a Packard Bell or eMachines PC and believe that great value in a computer means any model that sells for $600 or less: I agree — Apple doesn’t have an answer for you. In fact, I suggest that you skip this article entirely. You’re not going to find anything of interest in it.
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Myth or Fact? Is Mac OS X Really More Secure than Windows?
Click title for source at InformIt.com…

Date: Apr 6, 2007 By Ryan Faas

Apple’s ads often promote Mac OS X as a much more secure platform than Windows and that sense of security and freedom from viruses, spyware, and network attacks is one of the things that often encourages Windows users to buy a Mac. But is Mac OS X’s greater security real or just marketing? The truth is that it’s a combination of fact and myth. Ryan Faas tells you why.

If you boot up and surf the Web using a Windows PC without installing or configuring any security tools, it will likely pick up some piece of spyware, some adware, or a virus on it pretty quickly. By contrast, you can surf the Web using a Mac without changing any of the default install settings for months without problems. This is what most people point to as proof that Mac OS X must be more secure.
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