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Finally, pointing out that they're not responsible for the data being compromised is not the same as blaming the victims. As the article I linked mentions, in many cases these celebrities may not have ever fallen for a phishing attack or given their password to "tech support" over the phone. The only error they may have made was in keeping poor company.

WaPo article "Apple then goes on to offer some security suggestions for iCloud users who might be confused about how to protect themselves. The subtext is clear: If there's anything wrong here, it's in the way that individual users secured their accounts."

Apple press release: "To protect against this type of attack, we advise all users to always use a strong password".

read different things into it, but the fact remains: human being suck at passwords. we have sucked at passwords for 30 years, and we will continue to suck at passwords. There has been enormous effort to get people to be better about passwords. As a result, the most popular password is no longer "12345" - it's now "123456".

considering this, all software makers need to recognize that they have a much greater burden to create a security solution that people don't suck at. Apple did that with the touch id thing. brilliant and simple. until software makers (including apple themselves) take more responsibility, they will continue to get owned (yes the user gets hacked, but the reputation of the software suffers too).

a bright spot: in ios8 apple is supposed to open up touch ID so it can be used for things other than the phone unlock. there are a whole host of dangers with touch id, but at least it solves the weak password issue.

Apple has no reason to censor anything, there's lots of complaints on the forums already

And yet they do it. Frequently. Here's a few more examples.

From: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
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Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
    An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan -- at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
    And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.3 The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars -- why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
    It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. ...
====

More on the kid and what he was found with:

http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/20385390/fi
""He really cares about people," she said. "He's kind, he's loving, he's brilliant...I think this is fear because of what just happened in Connecticut." The mother of the high school junior asked us not to identify her or her son. He may be sitting in a juvenile detention center, but she says he's a fine young man who volunteers to help senior citizens and was once a Boy Scout. She says his passion for collecting old stuff, taking it apart and rebuilding things lead to this arrest. .. "

http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?2,1482541,1482565
"The evening news reported that what was taken from the home included cleaning fluids and flour, steel wool and a cell phone."

Unless it's for OWC!

I second your opinion. I've been buying stuff from OWC for maybe six years, and I've always been happy with both the products and the service. I have two of the "On-the-go" drives (FW 400s), and they've performed as expected and have even saved my ass at least once. I can't speak to USB or FW 800 versions, but the FW 400s use bus power without problem. These are great external drives if you use a laptop, and don't want to carry around a large external and a power brick.

They also have a mac-centric forum called Mac Resource Forum, appropriately enough, where the community is pretty helpful.

I've had the privilege of meeting Larry (the owner), Jamie (the manager) and many of the crew at MWSF, and I've been further privileged to have dinner with them all twice.

One further exceptional thing about OWC: Ryan Rempel, an OWC employee, wrote XPostFacto, which allows OS X to run on older Macs not supported by Apple. XPostFacto is open source, and its creation has been supported by OWC.

Actually, no. It's not. MacUpdate is far superior. Why?

• Versiontracker desktop program: $50. Macupdate: $30.
• Macupdate: 2 ads per page. Versus somewhere between 8 and 10 for Versiontracker's main page.
• The bloody links actually make sense. Ie, instead of Versiontracker's "developer info" taking you do the DOWNLOAD page(which then auto-downloads!), with Macupdate, you click on the author's name or "more info" which takes you to the software developer's site or the product-specific section of their site, respectively.
• Download doesn't force you to see another page full of ads to increase their hitcount. It just starts downloading.
• Page loads in about 1-2 seconds, not 10(mostly thanks to, say, only two advertisements per page).

Sorry, but versiontracker blows goats. Switch to MacUpdate, and don't look back- it's just so much friendlier to deal with.

As to Macintouch, it's turned from a useful news site with intelligently written, objective blurbs about new software releases and interesting news items, to Non Stop Press Releases And Whining Users Chock Full Of Ads. I go to MacFixit forums for whining users(or when I need to whine), and MacUpdate for software update news(well, actually- I don't. I use their "notify me of new updates" email service most of the time save when I'm curious as to what new programs are out there). Don't get me started about the incessant reminders of how we should buy everything from Amazon through his affiliate links, or the text ads at the bottom of the page designed to trick users into thinking they're MacinTouch content and not paid-for ads. Ric, old boy, you've gone from doing what you do best(Mac news analysis) to competing with people who are years ahead of you and selling out in the process.

If you want slightly more interesting daily mac news and only 1-2 ads, MacResource has usually played second fiddle to Macintouch, but I have always preferred it. Just seemed more...down to earth.

Also see the Oct. 25 entries on the Mac Resource Page.

Check out MacResource which maintains a RAMWatch of prices for macintosh RAM for various Apple computers.

Check out MacResource which maintains a RAMWatch of prices for macintosh RAM for various Apple computers.

The Mac Resource Page had the best coverage of this DoS attack, imho. They cover it a lot better and in more detail than I could, so instead of repeating their words, I'll just post a link to them here: http://www.macresource.com/. Apple did indeed release a patch today by the name of "Open Transport Tuner". You can find it at the Apple Software Library (http://asu.info.apple.com/) on the "Recent Changes" page.