Apple Still Has Not Patched the DNS Hole

Steve Shockley notes an article up at TidBITS on Apple's unexplained failure to patch the DNS vulnerability that we have been discussing for a few weeks now. "Apple uses the popular Internet Systems Consortium BIND DNS server which was one of the first tools patched, but Apple has yet to include the fixed version in Mac OS X Server, despite being notified of vulnerability details early in the process and being informed of the coordinated patch release date."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

published on Monday, the 28. July 2008, apple-slashdot

PowerPC Support in Mac OS X 10.6 After All?

Contrary to claims that Mac OS 10.6 "Snow Leopard" will drop PowerPC support, Gizmodo has heard that PowerPC support may indeed be living on. The source, who claimed to get ahold of the 10.6 seed, indicated that work has been done on P...

published on Sunday, the 8. June 2008, macrumors

Next-Gen JavaScript Interpreter Speeds Up WebKit

JavaScript is everywhere these days. Now WebKit, the framework behind (among others) Safari and Safari Mobile, as well as the yet-unreleased Android, is getting a new JavaScript engine called Squirrelfish, which the developers claim provides massive speedups over the previous one. The current iteration of the engine is "just the beginning," they claim; in the near future, six planned optimizations should bring even greater speed. With JavaScript surviving as a Web-page mainstay despite many early gripes, and now integral to some low-powered mobile devices, this may mean many fewer wasted seconds in the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

published on Tuesday, the 3. June 2008, apple-slashdot

Mac OS X 10.5.2 out the gate

In development for months, Apple at last unleashed Mac OS X 10.5.2 on Leopard users Monday afternoon. The update packs the first substantial improvements to Leopard since its release in late September.

published on Monday, the 11. February 2008, think-secret

Mac Version of NaturallySpeaking Launched

WirePosted writes "MacSpeech, the leading supplier of speech recognition software for the Mac, has canned its long-running iListen product and has launched a Mac version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the top-selling Windows speech recognition product. MacSpeech had made a licensing agreement with Dragon's developer, Nuance Communications. The new product is said to reach 99% accuracy after 5 minutes of training."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

published on Wednesday, the 16. January 2008, apple-slashdot

VMware Virtualizing No-hack Leopard Server

The guys at VMware are supremely dedicated to bringing the best support for Virtualization that they can to the Apple platform. I’ve played with both Parallels and Fusion and the choice of the latter was an easy one for me. But the one sticking point tends to be Apple’s licensing of their operating [...]

published on Tuesday, the 15. January 2008, apple-blog

ZFS For Mac OS X Source Code Available

nezmar writes "Noel Dellofano, who is part of the ZFS development team at Apple, has a post on Mac OS Forge announcing a late Christmas gift: he is making available binaries and source code, plus instructions, of the ZFS filesystem for Mac OS X."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

published on Saturday, the 12. January 2008, apple-slashdot

10.5: Make vanished Spaces windows reappear

I occasionally have the problem with Spaces (in both 10.5 and 10.5.1) where active windows for an application stop showing up; this seems to be a bug with Spaces. One solution has been to disable Spaces and re-enable it. But using the scripts from this earlier hint, I can use the "Collect on Current Space" script to get all the windows to show up in whatever space I'm in, regardless of whether they would show up before.This is a real lifesaver when unsaved changes are in a window that won't show up.

published on Thursday, the 3. January 2008, macosxhints

Army Buys Macs to Beef Up Security

agent_blue writes "The Army is integrating Macs into their IT network to thwart hack attempts. The Mac platform, they argue, is more secure because there are fewer attacks against OSX than Windows-based systems. 'Military procurement has long been driven by cost and availability of additional software--two measures where Macintosh computers have typically come up short against Windows-based PCs. Then there have been subtle but important barriers: For instance, Macintosh computers have long been incompatible with a security keycard-reading system known as Common Access Cards system, or CAC, which is heavily used by the military. The Army's Apple program, created [in 2005], is working to change that.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

published on Friday, the 21. December 2007, apple-slashdot

Patent: Multi-Sized Icon Interface for Mac OS X?

Appleinsider points to a recent patent application published from Apple which explores the use of different sized icons within one window. The relative size differences in the interface are said to reflect the relative importance of each icon. ...

published on Thursday, the 5. April 2007, macrumors