September 2008 Blog Posts
Adobe announced today details for its upcoming release of Creative Suite 4; due in October 2008.
Adobe CS4 will bring upgraded versions of its flagship products, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign in addition to tighter integration between applications and contain tools to allow collaboration between artists, producers and everyone in between.
Click here for a summary of what’s new in Adobe Photoshop
Click here for a summary of what’s new in Adobe Illustrator
Click here for a summary of what’s new in Adobe InDesign
More details on Adobe’s home page here
Use the following tip to get quick access to the “Lock Screen” feature that protects your Mac from prying eyes when you’re away.
1) Open up Keychain Access (Find it in Applications > Utilities)
2) Next, click on the Keychain Access menu and choose Preferences
3) Tick the box “Show Status in Menu Bar“
Now to lock your screen quickly, simply find the padlock icon in the top right hand corner of your screen and choose “Lock Screen”.
VMWare Fusion 2.0 is now complete and available as a free upgrade to users of 1.x. Fusion has an improved interface, allows you to print directly through to the printers set up on the Mac side, and performs automated snapshots so that you can go back to a stable version of your virtual machine if things go wrong.
The new version of VectWorks is faster and more powerful than the previous version. The biggest change is the new 3D modelling engine called Parasolid (developed by Siemens PLM software). The improvements are many – read about them here.
Here’s one for all the Adobe Photoshop users out there.
Sometimes Adobe Photoshop can be, let’s say, somewhat temperamental and sometimes downright annoying. But before you reach for them install discs, try this:
1) Quit Adobe Photoshop if it’s running.
2) Press and hold COMMAND-OPTION-SHIFT whilst restarting Adobe Photoshop
3) You should get a dialogue box like the one below
4) Click Yes and Adobe Photoshop will automagically trash its’ preferences files without having to search through your system folders and libraries to find it.
Neato!
Well, after an illustrious 4.5-year career in Mac support, and after 10 years as a Mac user I finally came across my first virus; and it wasn’t technically a virus. Not a bad record for an operating system, but still a worrying view of things to come.
The non-virus that had infected a client’s computer DNSChange Trojan Horse, which alters a computers DNS settings in order to redirect certain websites like Google.com to a fake Google.com, where each of the search results takes you to a spammy advertising site. It seems like this implementation of the Trojan Horse was used relatively innocently: the spammy advertising sites pay an advertiser/spammer every time a user arrives at one of their websites, so this Trojan Horse author, through his or her fake google.com, is tricking infected users into clicking on links to spammy websites. OK, far from innocent, but it would have been fairly trivial for a more malicious author to present a fake lloydstsb.com to steal all your money, or a fake facebook.com to steal all your friends!
The method of infection was simple:
1) a user arrives, somehow, to a website (of pornographic nature; although the female user assured me she’d never visited such a site!) that tells you you need to download a plugin in order to play the movie file on the page.
2) You say “Yes… what’s the worst that could happen”
3) An installer is downloaded…OS X presents a warning that is a file downloaded from the web and asks are you sure you want to open it? You say “Yes… what’s the worst that could happen”
4) The installer looks benign, execpt that the title is “Porn4Mac”. You say “Nothing suspicious here”.
5) Crucially the installer asks you for your Administrator password. You enter it and the installer runs.
6) Infection complete. A root level cron job is to set to run a script every minute that changes your DNS settings .
The crucial thing here, and the reason why this isn’t causing panic among Mac users, and glee amongst PC users, is that in order to become infected you have to get to a malicious website, allow an automatically downloaded program to run, and enter your password before any damage can be done. By definition a virus is “a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user” and that’s not what this is.
The things that worry me are threefold:
1) There is very little Apple or an anti-virus/anti-malware software vendor can do about this kind of attack. In order to allow legitimate programs to be able to function, you sometimes have to give them your admin password: and if a program has that then it can do pretty much whatever it wants.
2) The method used by this Trojan would be obvious to any non-novice Mac user because it has so many visual warning signs that show that something is afoot. However, if this was done better it could easily trick even an advanced user.
3) Although it’s only speculation: is this a sign of things to come? Are we about to embark on the sisyphean task of malware removal that our friends in the PC world have become so used to? Only time will tell.
Daniel’s sage advice: Don’t download any programs/plugins/scripts from pornographic websites.
Our Doctor Logic Ninja workshop debuts next Tuesday, 9th September to a fully booked venue.
If you’ve missed your chance this time, fret not as you can register your interest and we’ll notify you of our next available workshop!
Also coincidentally, Apple are having a media event that morning, with rumours of a revamp to the iPod nano and iPod touch product lines.
All in all, it’s set to be a good day!
Oh and the hidden tip? For those who haven’t yet deciphered it yet, try this:
Press and hold the ALT key (also known as the Option key) the next time you’re using Exposé (all windows mode). Neat huh?
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