Apple gets Pwned

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
$ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'
root

Wow. A one line script that allows any logged in user to grab root, not even a buffer overflow or third party software involved. This is movie plot hacking at its finest. I haven’t seen an attack this bad in years.

The only thing I would imagine that could be worse would be if you could execute this attack remotely.

Wireless Menu Icons

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Sometimes when trying several wireless networks before finding one that works, I connect to one that gives me an icon like this in my menu bar:

classic Mac in a gray piece of pie in the Finder’s menu bar at the top right of screen

Basically it looks like a small classic Mac in a gray piece of pie. Does anyone know what this means? All I’ve figured out is that the connection usually (always?) doesn’t work.

A New Printer?

Monday, April 14th, 2008

My HP LaserJet 2200dn seems to have given up the ghost. It is reporting media-jam-error even though there’s no apparent media-jam. I suspect a broken sensor of some kind. At this point my options are to take it in for repair or replace it. It’s a tad more than five years old; and while I’ve seen printers last longer than this, not all do. So two questions:

  1. Does anyone know a reliable HP repair shop in or around Irvine?
  2. If I do replace it, what should I get?

Here’s what I’m looking for in a printer:
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VMWare Fusion Cheap

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

Just noticed that Academic Superstore has VMWare Fusion on sale for $39.95 with free shipping, no rebates or academic IDs required. That’s more than $20 cheaper than I’ve seen it anywhere else. I’ll probably grab a copy since the more expensive Parallels still isn’t working for me.

Undo All in iPhoto

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

Few companies seem to feel as free to violate Apple’s human interface guidelines as Apple itself. One thing that has annoyed me consistently for years now is the poor Undo support in iPhoto. You can make edit after edit to a photo, but as soon as you leave editing mode or export photo Boom! The edits are all committed, and the Undo stack is cleared. You better like what you did because there’s now no going back. Or is there?
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Dissing Parallels

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

I am decidedly unimpressed with Parallels 3.0. In fact, I would almost call it completely non-functional and a fraud except that I have been able to install Ubuntu 6.10. However, it’s completely unable to manage Windows 2000 as advertised. The install repeatedly and reproducibly hangs with a spinning beach ball of death. Sometimes I can’t even Force Quit parallels. Even kill -9 failed once, and I had to reboot to get rid of it. Installing Windows NT 4.0 got a little further and at least did not create a spinning beach ball of death. However it still failed:

Windows NT could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem

Furthermore, attempts to report these problems hit any number of bugs ranging from choosing the wrong e-mail program (not everyone uses Apple Mail) to server errors when I try to submit the bugs via their web site:
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