Author: Ralf Bergs

Geek, computer guy, licensed and certified electrical and computer engineer, husband, best daddy.

Categories
Computers Mac

ARDAgent exploitable locally

I was pointed by a colleague that ARDAgent can be exploited locally to gain “root” privileges under MacOS 10.4 and 10.5. A quick search on Google turned up this post on Macworld that gives some details about this issue.

To check whether you’re vulnerable type the following in a Terminal window:

osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"';

And if it says root you are vulnerable. To quickly protect you type the following:

sudo chmod u-s /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent
Categories
Mac

TrueCrypt for Mac

I was very happy to see that there’s TrueCrypt for the Mac, a disk encryption tool I really like and use since a long time on my Windoze PC.

Quickly I installed it. The installation went smoothly, and a quick test was successful. However, when I played some more with it, I found a strange oddity which I couldn’t clarify myself. I doubt that it’s because I’m a new Mac user, but I rather think it’s a quirk in TrueCrypt. Let’s see whether anyone can reproduce the issue, and whether it will be fixed (shortly). 🙂

Anyway, this is a tool that you should definitely use when you have confidential data on your laptop.

Categories
Mac

Hibernation on the Mac

As a Windoze user I was used to putting my notebook into hibernation. This has the following advantages over shutting the machine down or putting it into sleep:

  • Shutting the machine down means a long boot when I need it again, plus I have to open all apps and docs again which I was using when I shut it down.
  • Sleep mode eats up your battery quickly, because he machine is still running at a reduced power level.

However, I couldn’t find a menu item to put my Mac into hibernation, so I googled a bit and came across this Wikipedia entry.

Altho I agree that the way the Mac does it seems quite nifty (in fact IBM notebooks had this feature aeons ago…), I still wanted to be able to immediately put my Mac into hibernation. So I googled again and came across this nifty lil’ Apple script.

The tool works very well, I recommend it.

Update: My buddy Jochen just pointed me to a blog article he wrote recently. He discussed a preferences panel that allows you to configure how the Mac sleeps and/or hibernates. This is a nifty tool, but still doesn’t exactly do  what I need. I want to be able to immediately force the Mac into hibernation, and SmartSleep unfortunately cannot do that for me. 🙁

Categories
Computers Mac

GPG with IDEA on the Mac

One of the first things I did when I got my new Mac was install Mozilla Thunderbird, the invaluable EnigMail extension, which is a very easy-to-use frontend to GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), and of course GPG itself.

All went very smoothly, and to check whether the installation was fine I tried to opened an encrypted message which I had received some days ago. Unfortunetly GPG couldn’t decrypt the message. A quick look at EnigMail’s console window told me that the message was encrypted using IDEA, and that the version of GPG I had installed was lacking support of that encryption algorithm.

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Categories
Computers Mac Toys Work

Ok, so I got a Mac… :)

I received a new work-horse for my job some days ago, a MacBook Pro. It’s very nicely equipped, featuring the following items:

  • 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
  • 4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM – 2x2GB RAM
  • 200GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm
  • extra power supply
  • AppleCare Protection Plan

The whole package cost almost EUR 2.900. 🙂

What I found strange is that the MacBook came preinstalled with 2 RAM sticks of 1G each, which I had to remove and replace with 2 sticks of 2G each, “Kingston” brand. I don’t know whether this is Apple’s official policy, or whether it was our local dealer who wanted to earn some extra bucks. 😉 Anyway, I now have two spare 1G sticks which I will put into the old Dell D810.

The MacBook already has the new multi-touch trackpad, but it hasn’t got the fastest CPU available today, which is the 2.6 GHz model. I don’t think it makes that big of a difference, tho. 🙂

I’ve already installed a lot of applications I need, and so far I like the Mac very much, altho I must admit that it’s quite different than a Windoze PC which I have been using for the last 20 years. 🙂

Categories
deutsch Politics

“China späht angeblich PCs des Bundeskanzleramtes aus”

Nachdem eben schon in der Tagesschau darüber berichtet wurde, lese ich nun auch im Heise Newsticker darüber, dass angeblich China das Bundeskanzleramt mit Hilfe von Trojanern ausspioniert.

Nehmen wir einmal an, diese Meldung wäre nicht nur einfache Propaganda, dann stelle ich mir die Frage, wie sich diese erbärmlichen Dilettanten — denn das sind sie ganz offensichtlich — anmaßen können, die PCs von Bürgern mit einem so genannten “Bundestrojaner” infizieren zu wollen, und dabei gleichzeitig garantieren wollen, dass der so infizierte PC dadurch nicht angreifbar für andere Angreifer wird.

Wer die eigene IT-Infrastruktur, die seiner unmittelbaren Kontrolle durch “hochkarätige Spezialisten” unterliegt, nicht mal im Griff hat, der sollte gefälligst seine Finger von anderer Leut’s PCs lassen!

Categories
Computers deutsch

Deutsches Update auf Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 fehlerhaft

Update (10:51/13:34 Uhr): Ich muß diese Meldung konkretisieren. Das Problem tritt nur unter bestimmten Umständen auf, siehe unten.

Das deutsche Update auf Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 scheint fehlerhaft zu sein. Beim Versuch, das Update von Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 auf 2.0.0.6 durchzuführen erscheint reproduzierbar eine Fehlermeldung des Thunderbird-Updaters, dass “eine oder mehrere Dateien […] nicht aktualisiert werden [konnten]”.

Dieser Dialog besitzt nur einen “Ok”-Knopf, der nicht etwa Thunderbird beendet, sondern einen Neustart auslöst, wobei dann der Update-Prozeß erneut gestartet wird. Das führt wenig überraschend zu einer Endlosschleife!

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Categories
Computers

Apple’s Safari for Windows finally usable…

I’ve just installed Safari Beta 3 about half an hour ago, and so far I’m pretty impressed.

Other than previous versions I’ve tried under Windows, this one is finally usable, pretty stable, and also compatible to most sites I’m regularly visiting, including comdirect’s brokerage website (which has an unfamous record of “shutting out” unwanted browsers or even browser versions.) Moreover, it is fast — I can’t tell whether it’s the “fastest browser available,” as Apple says, but it seems to render pages quite quickly compared to Firefox, according to my first subjective impressions.

BTW, I’ve written this blog entry using Safari, and even WordPress’ Web 2.0 features are working absolutely smoothly. 🙂

Update: I noticed that for some strange reason, WordPress “swallows” line breaks in posts submitted using Safari, so I had to re-edit this post using Firefox. 🙂

Categories
Computers

iTunes rantings…

What makes Apple computers so popular is their supposedly intuitively-to-use software. I have to admit that I can’t comment on “native” (read: MacOS) Apple software, but I can comment on Apple’s Windows software and my comments aren’t exactly favorable…

A few days ago, I installed Apple’s latest iTunes software for Windows. I had already played around with a previous version of iTunes (4.x I think) which I didn’t like very much then, because it was “sluggish” even on fast computers (because it obviously didn’t make use of multithreading so it blocked every now and then,) not very well integrated into the Windows desktop, etc.

Unfortunately Apple didn’t make their homework. iTunes still is very sluggish to use (at least on my 1.2 GHz, 1 GB RAM machine,) and it’s also not very intuitive to use. Let me give you an example: I configured iTunes not to use the “1-click buy” feature, but to use a shopping cart. I bought a song and wanted to download it. I searched around, but couldn’t find the shopping cart, no matter where I looked. I finally found it in a different iTunes window, that was laying around under the current window. Hey, is this intuitive???

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Categories
Toys

Look, Ma, I’ve got an iPhone… ;-)

Not! 🙂

Seriously, now. A colleague today brought his iPhone with him, and I had the chance to briefly (read “one minute”) play with it. Here’s me holding it in my hand:

I was astonished how large and heavy it is, compared to my SonyEricsson W880i. It felt very “solid,” tho (or probably just because of this ;-)). My colleague usually wears it in his trouser’s back pocket. The display was excellent — very brilliant and “crispy.”

We had a presentation about the Greenphone some colleagues are developing software for, and in a short break I had a minute to look at the iPhone. No more, or else I would be able to write more about it.