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>Any company I found is going to be Mac-only. There's little point in tolerating the huge overhead associated with running a Windows network.

A lot of network admins remind me of this whenever I'm going to install 'x' unpopular version of daemon because it hasn't been exploited in years (even though it is still open source)...

Security through obscurity is still no security at all.

Macs are just as vulnerable to spyware and virii (eat me grammarians) as a PC.

Back in the days (when Windows 98 was the best of the bunch) I used a great tool called ZipMagic. It turned zip files into folders, just as you describe, I could even share the zip file/folder using SMB and other people could connect directly to \\mycomp\stuff.zip\.

I always wondered how the magic was done, thanks for a very informative post.

Alex

PS Might you have a link to that 'update'?

I've never used RISC OS, but I have used ZipFolders. Any klunkiness should be blamed on Windows Explorer, which is not an example of good GUI design. Anyway, I used to think that making a Zip file look like part of the file system was way kewl. But after using ZipFolders for a while, I decided it added too many complications. (Like all those archives that come with the JDK having all their contents lying around!!) Better to use a well-integrated archive program.

I used to keep my macs working for 3-4 months before having to reinstall the whole shebang. I only reinstalled Mac OS X once since october. Macs are quite easy to keep clean, after some time you know where "cruft" accumulates. If anyone's interested, Alladin sells a product called Spring Cleaning, which I don't use. I clean my mac by hand. Seriously, on Mac OS X the only messy places are ~/Library and /Library. If you put your personal mess in your home folder, that is.

My Gnu/Linux distro of choice is Debian. If you use debian, you know how quickly apt installs those libraries. Have a look at deborphan, which "finds 'orphaned' packages on your system. It determines which packages have no other packages depending on their installation, and shows you a list of these packages. It is most useful when finding libraries, but it can be used on packages in all sections". I run apt-get remove `deborphan` about once a month.

Another great tool for the Gnu/Linux user is cruft, which, as the name says, tries to find the cruft on your system. It generates many false positives (e.g. /vmlinux), so use with many grep and caution :-).

Which tools do you guys use to keep your system clean?

For years now, smart Mac users have left Audio CD and CD-ROM autoplay off, because of a variety of worms that were propagated by those methods.

There was a time back in '98 or so that just about every Zip or CD-R coming back from a service bureau was infected.

Launching arbitrary code (fooling IE into thinking an .app is a .dmg) and autostart worms can be exploited in the same manner.

Microsoft has known about this problem in OS X 10.0 for a while now (it's an IE problem in X, really, as IE is what autolaunches .DMG and .SMI images) the MacOS 10.1/IE 5.1 update supposedly alleviated the hole, FWIF.

The article is speaking about a hole running with a Classic mode browser or running truly under OS 9 -- a variation on the same theme.

If you're concerned about this:

• Go to your software update panel and get current -- 9.2.2 and 10.1.3 for os 9/X, respectively
• Get Stuffit Expander/Deluxe 6.5 from Aladdin
• Under your Quicktime control panel (OS 9) or prefpane (OS X), turn Autostart off
• Get yourself a copy of Norton Antivirus for Classic or X. It's wonderful about letting you know if something is virused or if a disk image has a payload when it's being expanded.

Anyone who sends CD-Rs and Zips out and back in to their machine has no excuse for leaving autostart on, and Apple has no excuse for shipping the OS with those on by default, escpecially with the problems it has caused over the years.

That means (at least without further hacking) it can't be used as a transfer medium between the G3 and work and the iMac kept hidden in your darkest closet, which is sort of a shame considering that it has all the right things built in to be even better than the several portable firewire drives on the market.

Apple has said explicitly that you could use this 5GB (yes, FIVE gigabyte, not ten) as a storage medium. Presumably the storage of MP3s would be restricted to interfacing with only one unique copy of iTunes. But that's no problem, just zip up (or use the excellent DropStuff, free utility from Aladdin for windows and mac) those MP3s and transfer the files that way. Sure, you won't compress them much, but you can route that silly protection.

Note that in product demos of the beast, the iPod shows up as a FIREWIRE DISK ON THE DESKTOP. I see no problems with transferring MP3s, just be a little craftier. Sheesh. Hardly any hacking required.

Yeah, that sucks. However with a combination of Stuffit for Linux, ill2svg, and Sodipodi you should be able to play with it under linux. In fact, I'm going to give it a try.

PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Systems, but Aladdin Enterprises (not the StuffIt maker) has produced a portable GPL'd PostScript interpreter and tools called the GhostScript package. It even includes the GhostView PDF viewer for those platforms that have X11 servers.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

this, and all the files are in .sit (Mac StuffIt) format... I guess they only want the extensive Mac hacking community working on this one.

Stuffit Expanders for Windows, DOS, and Linux can all be found here.

this, and all the files are in .sit (Mac StuffIt) format... I guess they only want the extensive Mac hacking community working on this one.

Stuffit Expanders for Windows, DOS, and Linux can all be found here.

this, and all the files are in .sit (Mac StuffIt) format... I guess they only want the extensive Mac hacking community working on this one.

Stuffit Expanders for Windows, DOS, and Linux can all be found here.

this, and all the files are in .sit (Mac StuffIt) format... I guess they only want the extensive Mac hacking community working on this one.

Stuffit Expanders for Windows, DOS, and Linux can all be found here.

The company that makes Ghostscript, Aladdin Enterprises, has a very informative homepage on all the other "Aladdin" companies on the web. Aside from the makers of Stuffit Expamder for Macintosh, there is an Aladdin Knowledge Systems that makes software security products, Aladdin Industries that makes Thermos (tm) bottles, the Aladdin Casino in Las Vegas, and an Alladin company in Queensland, Australia that no one seems to know what they do.

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