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Author Topic: Non Amiga Q - Mac Virus ?  (Read 4491 times)

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Offline Floid

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Re: Non Amiga Q - Mac Virus ?
« on: December 17, 2007, 06:32:00 AM »
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Gaiyan wrote:
No viruses for OS X.


There were viruses for Classic, and there's now the one actual real-life OS X trojan (and its variants) going around in the wild.  To succumb to that one you do have to click to install a "codec" you've never heard of.

Google "Zlob" and "DNSChanger" for info.  It's unlikely you're infected.

There's also the potential for rogue Dashboard widgetry, which I forget the details of (was considered a gaping hole at the time, nothing ever really took advantage) and disabling Dashboard both avoids that and frees up some resources if you never intend to use it.

...

One 'par for the course' thing I ran into recently was a race condition or who-knows-what that resulted when a user accidentally tried to open about a dozen large zip files at once.  The built-in unzip util stalled, and its UI has no close button or menu ('not quite an application' in Apple's mind, apparently), so I killed it and forgot about it.

Come back two weeks later, and while checking processes for unrelated reasons... it had left a few copies of 'ditto' running that apparently didn't die as child processes (seems said utility pipes to ditto to write its temporary files, go figure), and those were eating 30% CPU while doing nothing.

...

Safari can also get a bit squirrelly after enough use (not necessarily all in one session), which is why they put that 'Reset browser' item in its menu.  I'm not sure what state information actually persists and bogs it down.
 

Offline Floid

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Re: Non Amiga Q - Mac Virus ?
« Reply #1 on: December 19, 2007, 06:59:44 PM »
As The Inquirer reminds me today, there have been some keyboard driver quirks that would also explain the particular responsiveness issue here.

Plugins are generally the culprit with Firefox, but as well as Flash you have Java and the media players to worry about.  Be sure to apply the latest Java and Quicktime patches in Software Update as apparently they patch some remote code execution holes that were known for quite a while (and which the malicious side of the world was just reminded of).

Quicktime on Windows has the same hole, apparently, so go update that too.

...

Javascript/ECMAscript can also bog down the 'fox, particularly poorly written stuff for interstitial ads and things that may be attempting to pull off cross-site scripting-type attacks.

I'm finding the Tab Permissions extension handy compared to toggling scripting on and off entirely (or using the various scripting whitelist/blacklist extensions).  You'll have to drag the controls where you want them via the 'Customize Toolbar' context menu -- putting the current-tab controls on the left side of the bookmarks bar works well, and the new-tab controls on the right side, with the 'New Tab' control moved next to them to remind you which is which -- but then if you know you're visiting a problem site, you can either crack open a new tab with restricted permissions (no redirects, etc) or disable scripting for the current one and refresh, without impacting any other tabs open.

Note that when the icons display an 'x', scripting/redirecting/??? is blocked, and when they don't, it's on.  They're easily misinterpreted to mean the opposite ("Click here to ..." vs. displaying the current status), one of those problems with hieroglyphs.
 

Offline Floid

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Re: Non Amiga Q - Mac Virus ?
« Reply #2 on: December 19, 2007, 07:08:09 PM »
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persia wrote:
[...] Open office is still not really ready for prime time. [...]


Okay, I've got to contest that -- since we're using it daily here (and the old version packaged for the last Ubuntu LTS, no less) it's only as annoying and awkward as the competition, not particularly worse.  The need to actively be-aware-of and control your document layout with [paragraph, page, ...] styles is a big adjustment for users to make... but Word's document model is similar, which is why people have so many headaches with Word.

I noticed OO.o's Windows version doesn't seem to let you dock the Styles as a toolbar/pane (and remember StarOffice for OS/2 didn't back in the day, either), which is pretty much requisite to work with it comfortably if you don't have 24" of display and don't like stuff floating on top of your work.  So perhaps *NIX is a prerequisite for finding it bearable.