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Flashback Malware's Ad-Click Hijacking Detailed, Could Reap $10,000/Day
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My iMac is barely a year old and to be properly supported the expectation is that I buy an upgrade to Lion. And with Mountain Lion coming out Summer 2012, once again the expectation is what, that I buy another upgrade to be properly upgraded.
That is inexcusable and gouging.
That is inexcusable and gouging.
Am I the only one sick of hearing about this?
Each time some security threat comes out, MacRumors goes into near-warmongering mode, constantly posting updates every other day about how this will destroy Apple.
Blah blah blah. Time to move on to something more newsworthy, MR. This is no longer front page news.
You're beating a dead horse just to milk the story for all its worth. And it shows.
At least take it off the front page. Put it on the Mac blog if you want. It's not worth the daily, front page updates. Or create a section of the site called "Security" if you really can't get enough of it.
Each time some security threat comes out, MacRumors goes into near-warmongering mode, constantly posting updates every other day about how this will destroy Apple.
Blah blah blah. Time to move on to something more newsworthy, MR. This is no longer front page news.
You're beating a dead horse just to milk the story for all its worth. And it shows.
At least take it off the front page. Put it on the Mac blog if you want. It's not worth the daily, front page updates. Or create a section of the site called "Security" if you really can't get enough of it.
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As someone already answer the question I will address a large issue at hand that I am seeing a lot of people confuse.
JavaScript and Java are not the same thing. JavaScript only has java in its name because when the creators were trying to ride on the rising popularity of Java. They have nothing in common other than the name.
JavaScript is what is called a weak language and Java is what is called a strong language.
Remember javaScript and java share name only. Nothing else.
I thought it was 67%... or was it 53%?
Your analogy is hardly applicable. The fuel for these computers hasn't been banned. A better analogy might be to say, there are new seat covers, but for some people they'll need to replace the tires on their car in order for these great new seat covers to fit, otherwise their car will stop running.
I have to agree with Rodimus:
While I'd love to have had a five year warning, I wouldn't necessarily expect that. But I would expect a proper warning. Something along the lines of "introducing Snow Leopard...and for everyone running legacy software, please be aware that this will be the LAST VERSION OF MAC OS X THAT WILL SUPPORT POWERPC CODE."
According to that link's write-up, "Extended Support" isn't even that. It's bare-bones tech support to companies (like mine) still using older systems. And that's all.
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Here's my malware question.
Yesterday my iPhone caught something that automatically changed the top number in my phone Favorites list to a number I didn't recognize. If I deleted that entry, it then reset the *new* top number to be the number I didn't recognize. No area code, by the way. If I reordered the list, it changed whatever the top number was to the new number.
So I reset and restored my phone, and the problem went away. But it sure looked like a malware hook for getting me to call some scam number. Anybody else have an experience like this?
Yesterday my iPhone caught something that automatically changed the top number in my phone Favorites list to a number I didn't recognize. If I deleted that entry, it then reset the *new* top number to be the number I didn't recognize. No area code, by the way. If I reordered the list, it changed whatever the top number was to the new number.
So I reset and restored my phone, and the problem went away. But it sure looked like a malware hook for getting me to call some scam number. Anybody else have an experience like this?
See my note above. There is no support for XP, save to large corporate clients, and it's just tech support - no updates.
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Read that timeline page again. It provides support ONLY to large corporate clients. And trust me there are no updates or bug fixes. All work on XP and Vista is over. They have a help line for the next 2 years. And only for large corporations. Thats all.
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They have IT departments don't they?
You're missing something here. There's no such thing as a "weak" or "strong" language. You mean Javascript is a weakly typed language and Java is a strongly typed language. That refers to variable declaration and usage.
However, there's more to it than that. Java is a compiled, programming language, while Javascript was historically an interpreted, scripting language (less true today, as Javascript "interpreters" now actually use JIT compilation to speed up execution).
But it's like you say, both have nothing to do with each other. Java was developed at Sun Microsystems by Bill Joy while Javascript is an ECMA standard developed at Netscape (hence it's real name : ECMAscript).
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Consumer technology. Transition consumer technology at that. You got your 5 year warning when Apple said "we're switching to Intel processors". That right there was a clear signal of where PPC in Macs was heading : the brick wall.
Heck, 5 years... I get 6 months from Novell for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server...
At least be realistic.
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If this chart only shows one thing (and if this is true, because i feel like this is BS) it's that Lion is a complete failure compared to past updates.
More than half of Mac users still use Leopard and Snow Leopard even tough Apple sold more Mac than ever preinstalled with Lion (and they can't even downgrade to SL although some want to). And we all know on this board that most people just CHOSE to stay on Snow Leopard.
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But most smart, and non-hypocritical people, know that. What I want to add is that my reason for not switching wasn't security problems or bugs (in fact I didn't get any on Snow Leopard, that was the point of the update, and I don't know anyone else who's had problems), it's simply that the Lion update was shvitty and didn't bring anything NEW that is worth it (and I hear nothing good from the few things that could be, like versions of autosave)
Well, Moutain Lion is still heading in that direction, it doesn't look like it's bringing anything NEW that is worth it, it's just adding tons of security and protection tools (Apple Security Essentials, OS X Logo testing, OS X Malicious Software Removal Tool, OS X Security Center, OS X Defender...yes, you can verify) making it an even closed environment, and like for Lion it's removing lots of useful advanced users features.
If this chart only shows one thing (and if this is true, because i feel like this is BS) it's that Lion is a complete failure compared to past updates.
More than half of Mac users still use Leopard and Snow Leopard even tough Apple sold more Mac than ever preinstalled with Lion (and they can't even downgrade to SL although some want to). And we all know on this board that most people just CHOSE to stay on Snow Leopard.
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But most smart, and non-hypocritical people, know that. What I want to add is that my reason for not switching wasn't security problems or bugs (in fact I didn't get any on Snow Leopard, that was the point of the update, and I don't know anyone else who's had problems), it's simply that the Lion update was shvitty and didn't bring anything NEW that is worth it (and I hear nothing good from the few things that could be, like versions of autosave)
Well, Moutain Lion is still heading in that direction, it doesn't look like it's bringing anything NEW that is worth it, it's just adding tons of security and protection tools (Apple Security Essentials, OS X Logo testing, OS X Malicious Software Removal Tool, OS X Security Center, OS X Defender...yes, you can verify) making it an even closed environment, and like for Lion it's removing lots of useful advanced users features.
Have to disagree - "Microsoft Update" keeps feeding my few remaining XP systems patches and updates. No new features, but security and bugfixes.
See .-1
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And more to the topic, Microsoft clearly communicated the EOL date to its customers years in advance - and extended the date based on customer feedback.
Many Apple customers didn't know that PowerPC support was being dropped until they tried to run a PPC app after upgrading.
Another huge difference is that for the overwhelming majority of apps, the XP app does install and run on Vista/Win7 x86/x64. Some don't (often ones that assume admin privs are enabled instead of following published best practices), but the majority do.
It's a losing battle for an Apple fan to complain about Microsoft's long term support.
Consumer vs Enterprise level support.
Anyone still arguing this point is completely not understanding the difference in dynamics here...
And that is why Apple is why Apple is not in Enterprise and what is left of them is in Enterprise is being kick out very quickly.
Apple said they were going but that is still not a warning. It just more proof when they kick enterprise world.
Apple doesn't pretend to want access to the Enterprise market either. That should be obvious from their operations. They are purely a consumer driven company, have been for most of their 35 years of existence.
Interesting. Not what MS website says. At work we've had nothing for a while.
And I haven't turned on my old XP machine, at home, in about 4 years, so...
So I guess I stand corrected.
Or "planned obsolescence" vs "investment protection" ....
The Microsoft consumer benefits from Microsoft's extended support, the Microsoft business customer demands it.
Apple does whatever it can to push you towards buying a new Apple.
Microsoft gets paid by the enterprise to provide bug fixes and security patches, so they can trickle them down to consumers for close to 0 costs, contrary to Apple which doesn't.
Completely understandable to someone not looking to just flame for flaming's sake but looks at the actual "big picture".
Believe it or not but Canon HAS released a stable version of the EOS tools for lion.
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57369929-263/canon-eos-utility-updated-to-work-in-os-x-lion/
Their picturestyles and other tools work also.
Once a machine is infected by Flashback, it reports to a command and control server. The information sent to the server includes the status of the downloader, the machine's UUID and the Darwin kernel version number. Dr. Web and other security firms were able to sinkhole a couple of the C&C server addresses for a while and collect the data that is the basis for these statistics. A more in depth breakdown is available on Dr. Web's site: http://news.drweb.com/?i=2410&c=5&lng=en&p=0
There are about 70-75 million Macs currently in use, of which 10 million or so are PPC or Core Solo/Core Duo and cannot upgrade past Leopard or Snow Leopard. Macs with Lion have only been shipping for 3 quarters, to the tune of 14 million units. This means that nearly 30% of those who could upgrade to Lion have done so in the past 9 months. It took Windows 7 two years to surpass XP (a feat that Vista was never able to manage.) Lion has almost twice the installed base of Leopard and is just about tied with Snow Leopard in under a year. So, Augure, I'm a little confused as to why you regard Lion as such a commercial failure?
I'm also a little fuzzy on why an argument about Rosetta broke out in this thread. Rosetta was a cross-platform virtualization technology that Apple provided when they made the transition to Intel x86 so that developers would have a reasonable amount of time to recompile their applications as universal binaries. It was always meant to be transparent to the end user, and for the developers, it was made abundantly clear that it was only appropriate for particular use cases and came with a significant performance penalty. PPC Macs haven't been made in over 5 years. If you're running an app that still requires Rosetta, that would mean that the developer hasn't bothered to recompile their code as a universal binary despite having had over five years to do so. The whole argument surrounding Flashback has revolved around Mac users not keeping their software as up to date as they should, and Apple being a few weeks behind Oracle on patching a vulnerability that was then exploited. How did an argument against Apple for not continuing to support the use of software that hasn't been recompiled in 5 years creep in to the equation?
You can talk all you like about extended support and enterprise vs. consumer, but the bottom line is that in 6 years and 4 OS releases Apple has pushed from PPC to IA-32 to AMD64 with most of their users not really noticing. Apple was able to do this by being more aggressive about discontinuing support for older hardware, software and OS releases. Microsoft was in no position to do the same due to the vast nature of their installed base. And hey, how's that transition to 64-bit going for Windows users?
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You should be able to turn off Java for Safari
With any luck you're not actually doing Applets for Uni, but Swing apps or command line apps. In which case you can turn off Java in your web browser, but still use javac, Eclipse, Net Beans etc.
If your uni is still teaching you to make Applets, then yes you do need that enabled, but hopefully the course work will soon be updated to realise that Applets are on their way out (Java as a language for server side and other work however is still extremely popular).
With any luck you're not actually doing Applets for Uni, but Swing apps or command line apps. In which case you can turn off Java in your web browser, but still use javac, Eclipse, Net Beans etc.
If your uni is still teaching you to make Applets, then yes you do need that enabled, but hopefully the course work will soon be updated to realise that Applets are on their way out (Java as a language for server side and other work however is still extremely popular).