In case you haven’t been following this mini-saga – about two security researchers, an alleged MacBook wireless security vulnerability, and a writer from the Washington Post – here’s your study guide.
The original story at blog.washingtonpost.com (does the “blog” part mean we should lower our journalistic expectations?) has the unassuming title of “Hijacking a MacBook in 60 Seconds.” An alternate, more descriptive title is “Hijacking a MacBook via a Third-Party Wireless Card that Nobody Would Ever Use, in 60 Seconds, and Also Allegedly Hijacking it via the Built-In Card that Everybody Uses, But Wait, Maybe Not, Sorry, We Can’t Talk About That.
About a year ago I filed a minor bug report against the Camino browser, noting that text selection didn’t work quite like “real” Mac apps, where if you double-click a word and then drag, you select by words (likewise for triple-clicking and paragraphs). I quickly learned that this bug went back almost seven years.
Activity on the bug for most of those years consisted of people marking other, new reports of the issue (there were usually a few each year) as duplicates of that original bug.
In the wake of OpenDarwin’s shutdown announcement, Apple has launched Mac OS Forge, a home for selected open source projects from Apple and from the community.
The present site feels a bit like a stub – e.g. the WebKit link still goes to OpenDarwin – but it’s good to see Apple stepping up to the plate. Just seeing tickets and commits from Real Apple Developers is exciting. And I give them bonus points for using Trac, too.
Yesterday, the OpenDarwin project announced it is shutting down:
OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative…. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.
I’m disappointed that no strong movement emerged in support of a Darwin-based open source operating system, but perhaps it’s just a testament to the growing power and polish of other available OSs, e.
During the same period that I thought I’d be playing a lot with an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux (but haven’t), several notable Apple fans have made, or are seriously and publicly considering making, the jump from OS X to open-source operating systems like Ubuntu.
Mark Pilgrim led the way. (He does work for IBM, though he’s gotten remarkably few snide remarks about that in the comments.)
Cory Doctorow is talking like he’s about to do it as well.
For a long time, through several PowerBooks, I’ve been mystified at occasional unrequested shifts in left/right audio balance. I figured that in my frantic typing I was hitting some undocumented keyboard shortcut. Nope. The real answer:
In some cases the audio balance may unexpectedly drift towards the left or right channel. This can happen if you rapidly press the volume up or down keys while the computer’s microprocessor is under heavy load.
Late last year the Xiph QuickTime Components project took up where the moribund qtcomponents.sourceforge.net had left off – great news for lovers of open audio formats like Ogg Vorbis. (Vorbis encodes music at higher quality than MP3 at equivalent bitrates, and is unencumbered by patents and licensing.) The latest release of the components, earlier this month, features Intel compatability and preliminary support for FLAC (a lossless encoding).
The thing that makes this project so useful is that QuickTime components can transparently provide services to any OS X application relying on QuickTime – such as iTunes.