Slashdot Mirror
Apple Releases Security Update 2004-01-26
ollie_ob writes "Apple's released an important security update for Mac OS X today. The update includes changes to the following important apps and services: Apache 1.3, Classic, Mail, Safari, Windows File Sharing. In addition, it includes the 2003-12-19 Security Update. It's available via Software Update." It's also available for Server.
This item's been sitting here a while, without even a FP troll. Is the Apple OS so secure that a security patch is not an immediate "get it now"?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
We're not sure what it does. But it installs fine and seems to work!
According to this PDF from Apple, Mac OS X Server already carries both Apache 1.3 and 2.x. If you only have OS X client, you can also download a bundled Apache 2 package from Server Logistics here, if you really want it. I tried it about a year ago, I remember it has a nice preferance pane with which you can change some settings, restart the server, and view and edit your httpd.conf (although it was a little buggy with saving the file, TextEdit had problems with the permissions)... It couldn't do anything that wasn't just as easy to do from the command line, though.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
Ever since the 10.3.2 update crashed my laptop I wait a day or two to see how things are going. That was the only crash I've ever had in Mac OS X though, and I had reloaded and (automatically) had all my settings back to the way they were before the crash, and had the system all patched up, even with the patch that crashed the system, within 35 minutes. This was amazing to me, considering all the hundreds of times I've spent reloading my own or other people's windows boxen and the frustration of importing all the previous settings (and never quite getting them ALL back). I'm not going to say OS X is the OS that does it all, but I will say that after using MS OSes since DOS 3.2 my new desktop OS of choice is OS X for reasons like that... Even so, I still do wait a day or so to patch because clearly things can, and do, go wrong some times.
I don't know weather to write this as troll, astroturfing or just ignorance. I rather update my box more frequently, if it fixes the bugs and security problems. My Fedora boxes run "yum update-check" nightly, my RedHat boxes run up2date nightly, my OS X boxes check software update daily, and I have no complaints when they find an update. I like having notices sent to my mail box, so I can check them all in one place. (you can do this with scripting the OS X command line softwareupdate).
I wish I could automate the checking for updates form Microsoft. Launching a web page and clicking through daily is no way to check for updates (and MS's security announcements are typically not sent when the updates are made available, but can be a day or two later).
MS's "monthly" policy scares me. There is more to an OS than uptime. I'd rather know my boxes are secure than know that it's been a while since I rebooted them (and I run a number Linux, OS X and Windows boxes).
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
As a matter of fact, not only is it available for 10.2.8 but also for 10.1.5, just check the download page under the OS X tab on apple.com.
If only we got that sort of backwards compatibility with windows...
Happy 20th Anniversary, Macintosh users. You get... a security fix.