"MP3Concept Trojan Horse" caused an uproar in the Mac OS X community. It also gave something for those Windows folk who seem to jump at the chance to call us on our mac pride something to harp about. ( No, I don't fault them - I enjoy a good laugh when my PC friend gets hacked or something of the sort! ) If you've somehow missed the whole fiasco, move on with your life and forget about it. If for some reason you ( like me ) still want to get in on it, go read Gruber, he does a far better coverage than I'll attempt. ( Crying Wolf )
I would like to think this hullabaloo was a one-time shot. I'd like to think that next time some lame-duck, sorry excuse for a threat to Mac OS X security comes along that we dismiss it with the lack of fanfare it deserves. Alas, I am not sure that will happen. Security is important to all of us. We value our relatively secure status as Mac OS X users. I know that when I glanced at the headlines for the first time, I was immediately engaged and very curious - perhaps even a little scared. ( mission accomplished for the traffic/attention hungry news folks)
What I didn't like was the number of big news outlets that blew this thing up and changed the facts so quick. Intego was the worst offender. If a security company either A) doesn't know enough to get their technical facts right, or B) doesn't care and purposely stretches the truth as far as they did, then they are not a valid security company in my book.
With a scrap of technical knowledge, a person could verify the facts and know this was no where near the crisis some news outlets tried to make it sound like. I think I'm particularly bugged because it just seems to be the standard in journalism lately. And we all seem to be suckers for it. :(
Let's hope we don't have a true security situation that really requires our community attention anytime soon. And let's all never read any of the offending news outlets ever again. Hmm, I think I just made my tenth visit today to each of those said offenders. Alright - maybe just take things with a grain of salt. :)
Our order processor, eSellerate (part of MindVision) decided to add a new "feature" to our store called the eSellerate Download Service. The services costs $4.99 and was turned on automatically April 5th, 2004. It automatically adds itself to every new order (not product, just order) and it is "non-obvious" for the customer how to turn it off and that it is not necessary. It almost looks like it is mandatory and is a download "tax".
It is now off by default on our store, but we've have an enormous amount of people go head and purchase it when it was on. It hurts our sales in the long run (adds another 50% to the cost, a $10 product becomes $14.99) and has no clear benefits. The stuff off our store is always the same file available from our website. eDS might also distribute old versions of our software with bugs we quickly fixed in it. I am thinking like 10.4 comes out, the current WSX isn't compatible and needs an update so we update it. Someone purchases WSX today and did a clean install of 10.4 when it was released then used eDS to redownload the old, 10.4 incompatible version. Not good. And sadly there seems to be no way to turn it off ad infinitum.
Erik of NSLog(); also has some thoughts on it. He asked me to check something on his store and that's when I noticed eDS.
So I got a PC. Yes, a Windows box. I've been needing it for various little things lately and I'm tired of waiting for VPC for G5's to arrive.
Some random thoughts:
- XP boots fast. Really fast.
- Firefox is great on the PC too. :)
- PC's crash. Stuff doesn't "just work". I know I may have had an exception experience, but I've crashed several apps and black screened it all in the first few hours of running it.
- MS has put a ton of work into some XP features such as that sidebar thing on the side of file browser windows. Quite impressive and quite useless.
- I'm sick of little yellow popups.
- Does a PC know what "sleep" is? I want the sucker to be totally silent when it's asleep.
- I hate stuff that won't stay out of my tray. (the little dilly on the bottom right of the task bar)
- Windows Media Player sucks. Really bad. It's horrible.
- PC hardware is cheap.
- Remote Desktop is cool.
- Category View of the Control Panel sucks.
In general, it hasn't been to terrible of an experience thus far. Of course I like things about Windows, but after using it for a few hours, I sure am happy I have my G5 to turn back to!
Many thanks to everybody who emailed me in response to my yesterday's post about the iChat "feedbag" error and its resolution in iChat AV 2.1.
Yes, it is indeed fixed. I no longer get the feedbag error 17. Instead, I get this:
On one hand, this is way more clear to the user. One the other, I still can't have many friends. Sigh...
I have posted a while ago about iChat's "Feedbag Error 17" message that iChat gives me when I try to add even more buddies to my buddy list.
Today, I have received an e-mail from Apple's DevBugs team indicating that the bug is apparently fixed in iChat AV 2.1. I cannot test this as I don't have any more buddies to add at the moment. If anyone wishes to sacrifice their privacy, can you possibly email me at slava//unsanity.com your AIM handle so I can try to add you in and see what happens? =)
Oh, and it's the April Fools day. I will not participate in the fun and post weird stories, I think. =)