New Mac Trojan variant: on not panicking and checking it out

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There’s been a lot of excitement today about a Trojan targeting Macintosh computers. There is some excellent in depth coverage over at Macworld, but I wanted to hit on some highlights for people who have been asking me about this.

First, don’t panic. Even if the high end estimates are true, about 600,000 macs are infected, which amounts to about 1% of all the Mac users out there. By those percentages, I would still carry on being a great deal more worried about a great deal many more things, such as your backup plan.

That being said, unlike 99% of all the other scares out there, this one is real in the sense that by visiting the wrong website (apparently, a lot of them are ones ending in a .nu domain – which I must admit, I’ve never even seen. Still, a lot of times those incredibly aggravating pop up windows that shady websites pop up for you lead to funkypants domains) you can become infected, and not even know it. The malware does give a few clues that something is up – upon installing itself within your user folder, it will pretend to run Software Update and ask for your administrator password, so it can gain wider access to the rest of the system. Even if you are savvy enough to deny it (and remember, always ask yourself, why is something suddenly asking for my password? Is this what I expected, and a normal part of my computer routine?), it will still install itself and run in a more limited, but still threatening, capacity.

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Safari isn’t saving my password – or, Keychain Access Adventures

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Update 10/3/13 I’ve been getting a higher and higher number of people asking about Safari flat out refusing to save passwords on certain sites where it used to.

A bit of research made me realize what I should have known: Safari 6 and up will respect a website requesting that certain fields not be autocompleted (such as PayPal and Yahoo). There’s not much you can do about it within Safari, although you could use a third party password manager such as 1Password or a free extension (that link will download it) that would make Safari ignore the autocomplete request.

Update: I’m getting a surprising number of people from around the planet hitting this article, searching for things like ‘Safari isn’t saving password’, ‘Mac keychain’ and ‘why oh why am I always being asked for my keychain password someone help me please’. Anyway, if the article doesn’t answer the question, don’t hesitate to drop a question in the comments.

Your Mac, much like, say, a sheepdog, is supposed to make your life easier by fulfilling your commands. And much like a sheepdog, when you give it a clear, distinct command, and it lopes off into the sunset ignoring it completely, it’s apt to raise your blood pressure.

Just to take an example: lets say you’re doing your daily check in on your webmail, and lets say you’re using yahoo mail. You cheerfully plug in your username and password, and when Safari asks you ‘Hey, would you like to save this password for later?’ you say ‘yes.’

The next day, you happily surf back to Yahoo webmail, innocently expecting that there will be no more password typing for you (after all, typing 123456 can get a bit old).

As an unusually perspicacious individual (evidenced by you reading this blog), you’ve probably already guessed the punchline: not only has your Mac NOT remembered the password, but it pretty much refuses to do it even after you go through the entire denial, rage, and piteous begging stages of troubleshooting.

What is up?

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OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, or the Evolution of the Lion

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With all rumors focused intensely on the upcoming iPad that seems almost certain to drop in March, I felt pretty blindsided by Apple popping up and going “Hey! New version of the Mac OS is here! Guess what comes after Lion? Mountain Lion. Bwa ha ha ha.”

So, 10.6.8 is on the horizon, and in time honored traditions, it adds Stuff to the operating system and Opinions to the Mac nerds out there. Of which I am one. So I have Opinions, and I get to Share! I love capitalizing things.

Mountain Lion continues, not surprisingly, what Lion started: merging what you find on the iPad and iPhone (iOS) into the Mac (Mac OS). I’ve started putting the various OS’s in parentheses so people can ignore them, as I’ve found the minute I utter a phrase like Mac OS eyes begin to glaze. Acronyms are the most powerful eye glazing material known to man.

Aaat any rate, there are a bunch of new features, like moving notes out of Mail and into it’s own application (thank goodness), renaming iCal into Calendar (bittersweet but obvious) and making it be a little less lame at the same time.

I’m going to hit the top 3 points for me:

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Maintaining Your Mac: a Boring Guide

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Recently, I had to buy a new car. Well, a car, as it’s only new if the first ten years of something’s life don’t count. In which case, huzzah! I’m still in my twenties.

Outside of that though, it wasn’t a new car, it wasn’t all that expensive, and boy, was it in great shape. In such great shape, in fact, that my trusty old VW Golf – which had been making horrible sounds that universally caused new passengers about five minutes of alarm and asking ‘No, really, are you sure it’s okay?’ – seemed to rise up, Jacob Marley like, from the metal grave to which it had been consigned to shame me for its ill treatment. It was nearly the same age, after all, and the only reason for the discrepancy (outside of the fact that I drive an absolutely insane amount, I suppose) is that I was much more of the school that as long as I could squeeze the last remaining, clanking, staggering miles out of the vehicle, well then, why take it in for repair?

We don’t really need to go into why that’s dumb. It is. Very. When you own a car, you factor in more than just the cost of purchasing it, but of gas, insurance, tires, and if you’re not a moron, maintenance. Thank you Captain Obvious, yes I know.

But it made me think about similar Total Cost of Ownership considerations for a computer. The obvious ones are there, of course – computer, internet connection, printer, and so on. Then the not-so-obvious but even more critical backups. What about maintenance? Smart people ask me about what they can do for their computers all the time.

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Set your Google privacy settings

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Note: This is a quick and dirty guide. We’ll be improving it a smidge over the up-coming days, to make it easier to understand!   First, log into your google account. You should be able to do that from just about any page with the word ‘google’ in it, including plain old google.com. If you … Read more

SOPA Strike

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Yesterday, I opted into taking our business site down for yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA strike, a decidedly political move. It’s not like outofajam.net being down is going to affect anyone or anything. I mean, the Google bot might be miffed as it crawls the web, but that’s about it. For me (who wields no political power whatsoever), … Read more

Converting PDF to Word Documents

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It might not be helpful to start out by making this point, but I can’t help myself: the trick to converting a PDF into a Word document is that it’s not a Word document. By which I mean that it’s not a text document, and it’s entirely possible that it never was one. It’s the … Read more

PowerPC applications for the defiant among us

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There is a certain sense of accepted outrage that everyone seems to have about computers, and it can roughly be summed up as this: I bought my computer last year and it’s already obsolete!

Well, that’s true. I doubt it even took a year for that to happen; it could have been days (handy-dandy tip: Apple has a 14 day return policy, and even if you’re past that, they are often quite receptive to helping out folks who just shelled out a ton of cash on a machine that has been freshly discontinued). Of course, being obsolete is very different from “not able to do what it did when you bought it,” which is a situation that is going to go on for years. After all, technically, car models are rendered obsolete every year also, but no one has a spasm and insists their car is now worthless.

Curiously enough, one of the most significant ways that your computer is eventually going to show its age is internet access. While most websites, at their heart, are simple amalgamations of text and images, the technologies they use to provide services get constantly updated, and have heavier and heavier system requirements. For many of my clients, the biggest reason Facebook won’t work on their older computers is because newer versions of Flash won’t run on older Macs with a PowerPC chip. It’s not that these new flash videos are any more awesome than they were a year ago; it’s just that you won’t be able to play them.

And if your computer happens to be satisfying you in every other way – which is entirely possible, because many computers running PowerPC G5 chips are still very capable machines – that can be really, well, lame.

But rather than drown our sorrows in digital pity, we have options! Many of them, but here are some internet options that are frequently overlooked:

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