They need to stop making blacklists and whitelists of what controls are safe, and instead, make it so that no controls are safe.
This seems to me a place where rather than using the blacklist/whitelist method, something akin to Privilege Separation like OpenBSD uses in several places (most notably in OpenSSH) might be in order. Yes, this requires quite a bit of additional coding to do, and it's not completely analogous, sure, but it's more the concept of the separation of permissions instead of generally exposing the controls/functions and trying to control access through methods that are proving themselves to be less-than-robust.
Nothing is going to provide perfect insurance against the unexpected, but it does seem to be a fairly solid method for mitigating risk.
I for one would LOVE to see a Mac version, but I'm incredibly glad to see that Linux and FreeBSD were given due attention from the onset.
I know for small companies in particular, you've really gotta pick your battles, so I salute them for choosing to give full support to Linux and FreeBSD. I hope the community response to the product is as strong as many have predicted, and that it's a solid success for the company and users alike.
If it is:
1.) It will give them incentive to keep going (and to perhaps add other versions.)
2.) It may give other developers/firms incentive to start rolling out more products for Linux, *BSD, etc.
I'll second the motion here for 'Carbon Copy Cloner' (not 'Carbon Cloner Copy' or whatever it was mistakenly called above) by another poster.
Sure, there are quite a few different tools and systems and what-not with which one can easily make backups of your Mac; however, two things I like most about Carbon Copy Cloner are:
1.) that it can make a fully bootable disk *and*
2.) it actually does what its name implies: it copies your data onto another disk.
These handy features can be quite a relief in the event of Something Very Bad(tm) as you can easily get going again from your Carbon Copied disk; however, with other systems there may be a lot of other steps or gyrations (like tar -czpf your_backup_file.tgz) you have to go through to get back in action.
Aside from this, if you're really concerned about data loss, in addition to regular proper backups, the next must-have insurance policy (for pennies these days) is a second drive so you can create a RAID-1 array. Not always possible (i.e. laptops), sure, but if you can do it, it can be a HUGE timesaver to help you avoid having to resort to your backups.
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Nothing is going to provide perfect insurance against the unexpected, but it does seem to be a fairly solid method for mitigating risk.
I for one would LOVE to see a Mac version, but I'm incredibly glad to see that Linux and FreeBSD were given due attention from the onset.
I know for small companies in particular, you've really gotta pick your battles, so I salute them for choosing to give full support to Linux and FreeBSD. I hope the community response to the product is as strong as many have predicted, and that it's a solid success for the company and users alike.
If it is:
1.) It will give them incentive to keep going (and to perhaps add other versions.)
2.) It may give other developers/firms incentive to start rolling out more products for Linux, *BSD, etc.
I'll second the motion here for 'Carbon Copy Cloner' (not 'Carbon Cloner Copy' or whatever it was mistakenly called above) by another poster.
Sure, there are quite a few different tools and systems and what-not with which one can easily make backups of your Mac; however, two things I like most about Carbon Copy Cloner are:
1.) that it can make a fully bootable disk *and*
2.) it actually does what its name implies: it copies your data onto another disk.
These handy features can be quite a relief in the event of Something Very Bad(tm) as you can easily get going again from your Carbon Copied disk; however, with other systems there may be a lot of other steps or gyrations (like tar -czpf your_backup_file.tgz) you have to go through to get back in action.
Aside from this, if you're really concerned about data loss, in addition to regular proper backups, the next must-have insurance policy (for pennies these days) is a second drive so you can create a RAID-1 array. Not always possible (i.e. laptops), sure, but if you can do it, it can be a HUGE timesaver to help you avoid having to resort to your backups.