VaxCave

Dan and I were in a popular electronics store awhile ago on our way back from GeoCaching. They had some OS X machines there and I thought I’d check out what they were running.

The machines were running some sort of demo. Command-Option-Esc to force quit that demo. That spit me out to the finder. I took a look in the users control panel to see what users they had. A local admin and the regular customer user. I thought that I would just enable Administrator rights for the customers, but I was locked out. Darn. Let’s try something else. I went to Applications > Utilities > NetInfo Manager. In the NetInfo Manager I enabled the root user. This is where the administrators of the machines in the store screwed up. This stuff should be set already so little busy bodies like me can’t screw with their systems. I enabled the root user, back to the control panel, authenticated, and blammo. Access to everything.

The idea that stores are careless like this makes me angry. I could’ve done all kinds of fun things with these machines since they were connected to the outside world. Could’ve been a jerk and destroyed the boot info for the OS, removed all the other accounts but mine, copied trojans to the startup sequence, etc. This is why there are such security problems in our country. People think that bad things can’t happen to them. Well it’s fortunate that it was me this time and not some lunatic doing major dirty work.

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p>Since this has happened I’ve emailed the tech people at this chain and told them to distribute a memo to their local techs to enable and secure the root user. I received a nice reply thanking me for bringing this to their attention, but their response also said “We do not actively employ Apple and OS X specialists.” To me, this reads, “We don’t know anything but Windows.” Unfortunate.

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Filed by AxsDeny at 2:46 pm under General
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You may have read lately that Microsoft has stopped production of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh platform. The loss of IE is no big deal. It’s one less browser/platform combo to worry about for web developers. IE was the first thing I deleted when I installed OS X on my machine at work. So I’m not getting worked up about it.

Many people are getting huffy about this move. People think MS is abandoning Apple. It is a bit of a slap in the face to Apple, but it makes sense. Microsoft made IE only to take control of the browser wars back in the late 90s. They gave it away. Now, it serves no purpose to them on the Mac platform. They dominated that market already by having Apple bundle IE with the OS. But now, IE has become a key part of the Windows operating system, no longer a part of any Browser War. So logically, they are making no money from IE on the Mac, which means they have every reason to scrap it. Since the Mac version of IE now has some serious competition in Safari, Microsoft knew that it was a losing battle. Not that they couldn’t win another browser war. They probably could, if they outlined a serious update schedule. But since since most Mac users are sheep for their OS they will use what Apple tells them to (Safari). Geeks that have switched from *nix use anything that is not IE. What has developed is a demographic problem for the use of IE on the Mac platform. The sheep eat what’s given to them and the geeks don’t like the sour taste of IE. Discontinuing IE on the Mac is nothing but a financially viable decision for the people in the MBU at MS.

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p>Frankly, I’m glad IE is gone for the Mac. I never use it. The best thing that can come out of this situation is that developers will start adopting some standards. I’m tired of Frontpage and Word generated HTML pages that are tailored specifically for the VB-centric version of IE for Windows. When developers build web applications that only work in IE on Windows it makes me want to scream. Especially when it’s something like an online banking interface or something similar. I write web apps BECAUSE they are platform independent. If you want something that runs only on Windows running IE, just write a VB app, post it as an executable, and leave everyone else out of it. Writing a sniffer for IE only sessions is one of my pet peeves. Like anyone cares about my pets though.

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Filed by AxsDeny at 10:55 pm under General
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With the new preview version of iChat it is possible to do video and audio chat. I’m looking to try out the audio chat with anyone running the new version. So any of you Mac freaks out there feel free to leave a comment and we’ll work on trying this out. I can try the video too if you have the setup to do so.

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Filed by AxsDeny at 10:16 pm under General
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Certifications by way of Dungeons & Dragons. Finally someone has stepped into my world a little bit.

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Filed by AxsDeny at 10:46 am under General
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I nifty little blog about Mac stuff. Right up my alley. Check it out.

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Filed by AxsDeny at 10:23 am under General
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