December 2006 – Newton's Lore

Unlocking FileVault

There’s a presentation at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress on
Unlocking FileVault, wherein they’ve reverse engineered some parts of the private Frameworks used to implement DiskImages and Apple’s 128 bit AES encryption.

My Mac Christmas

My Mac related Christmas gifts this year were a copy of iWoz, (the autobiography of Steve “Woz” Wozniak), and an iTunes Store gift voucher.

Looks like Apple needs some peak capacity planning though, the iTunes Store was unreliable due to the load of lots of people trying to presumably fill up their Christmas iPods.

One small leap for an iPod…

one giant leap for podkind. Spotted aboard the International Space Station.

Will there be a (Product) Red iPod for Mars though?

New Mac v PC ads

In the spirit of the holiday season Apple has created a new Mac v PC ad. It’s the one named “Goodwill” (look for the Santa hats). Looks like there’s some other ads I haven’t seen before there too. QuickTime, of course.

January – month of Mac OS X security holes

It appears that the Month of Kernel Bugs folks are going to be targetting Mac OS X kernel bugs in January.

Even more annoyingly, January is the month when lots of staff are still likely to be on holidays, so least likely to be able to respond rapidly. Hopefully lots of their computers will be off though (reducing greenhouse gas emissions), perhaps limiting the damage.

Then again, having managed to kernel panic my Mac from within QuickTime for Java the other day, I say bring on the fixes Apple!

Speaking of QuickTime for Java and Security holes, Apple released Security Update 2006-008 which patches a hole which could allow a QuickTime for Java applet to grab an image from your iSight and upload it to the web server. More discussion and a demo link here on Macslash. Assuming you haven’t installed the update yet.

iPhone released – by Linksys

Tired of waiting for Apple (and hoping to cash in on some free press and search queries no doubt), Linksys have released iPhone.

It looks like it supports WiFi 802.11b/g and also has a wireless base station for routing non-VOIP calls through the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS).

Save 20% with MacSanta

The MacSanta site gives a 20% discount on software purchased from participating developers using the coupon code MACSANTA. Developers include Rogue Amoeba (Audio Hijack Pro), Flying Meat (VoodooPad), and Bare Bones Software (BBEdit), and Advenio (Mac Gourmet). There’s even an RSS Feed to keep you updated as more discounts become available.

There’s even a poem “A visit from MacSanta”.