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Stanford/Palo Alto Macintosh User Group Newsletter September 6, 2010
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Dear Steve,
| Hello everybody and a belated Happy Labor Day to one and all. Given the absence of a SMUG meeting to go to on Monday, I was all set to relax with my new iPad, but I couldn't resist the challenge of resurrecting my son's G4 iBook, over 5 years old now and working perfectly until it didn't work at all. OMG, I was in for a world of pain and frustration - just how many 3mm screws do you really need to hold a computer together? But I had a spare hard drive and a few parts from a really defunct iBook, so I soldiered on into the virtual Afghan landscape that is computer DIY. Finally, I had this:  Once I put it back together again, the trackpad didn't work - oh boy, that necessitated taking off the top and the bottom and the inner shields top and bottom all over again, but I could do it in my sleep by this time. And, almost miraculously, I did end up with this:  So, it can be done! And it only took 5 hours! How long will it last, though? Like so much in the world today, an imponderable, but it was fun while it lasted. How many years will pass before I'm tearing my new iPad apart in vexation remain to be seen......anyway, we have a great meeting coming up on the 13th, with some cool giveaways and hopefully not too much doom and gloom about how you WILL LOSE YOUR DATA IF YOU"RE NOT CAREFUL from our friends at Prosoft. See you there! |
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| September 13th SMUG Meeting Agenda | Prosoft Engineering
A welcome back from our friends from Pleasanton, the producers of Drive Genius and Data Rescue software (see info at prosofteng.com). Scott Spencer tells me that user group specials are likely to be offered, plus they'll also talk about their new subsidiary, called TheDataRescueCenter, which specializes in "hard drive & deleted file recovery". They also offer some related services such as "Data Migration" and "media scanning". The first can do such things as read most any historic Mac file format (floppies, Zip drives, etc) and convert them to modern media types. The second provides for "photo, negative, & slide" scanning. More info at thedatarerescuecenter.com
Plus Q & A, Shareware and raffle - Owen Saxton continues his review of cool free and almost-free software (see below for details from our last meeting). I also have both old-fashioned bookware and hardware to raffle off.
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August Meeting Report: Cool Shareware and ESET computer virus protection
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SHAREWARE
The Adblock extension blocks advertising on Safari. You can
turn it on and off, and (of course) you can uninstall it. You won't know what
sites are being blocked, it is rather mysterious about what it blocks.
The FlashToHTML5 extension replaces the CPU hogging YouTube
flash player with HTML player, if that is possible to do.
SecondBar puts another menu bar at the top of your Mac
desktop. This is handy when you use 2 screens. It has a little down arrow that
has its own menu: Preferences, Activate window positioning, Window draggable, Move
windows automatically if overlaid, Show doc icon, Activate global hotkeys, etc.
Ravissant lets you edit your logon window. You can edit the
logon, logo, and the welcome text.
Sloth displays an open list of all your Mac's open files,
all the files in use. You can kill processes, although you might mess things up
that way, you better know what you are doing.
McSolitaire. A solitaire game. (Note from Dave: I have to
admit that games bore me.) This game looks nice. It shows a big display of
cards. It just shows the one game. Owen played it some. It has little sound
effects: clicking, shuffling. This game does not play itself; you still have to
move the cards.
iPhone Explorer lets you explore your iPhone/iPod Touch when
it is attached to your Mac. You can look at the apps, the media. It shows you
the file system on your iPhone/iPod Touch. You can grab stuff on an iPhone and
drag it directly to your Mac. The music folders on the iPhone and the files in
them have rather mysterious names. This is not a fast interface, but it does
work. If you drag those files with the funny names into iTunes, that song will
show up in iTunes named as the proper song. You can do a Get Info on the file: it
has the metadata with it. Someone asked if it changes the filename from the
iPhone back to a song name when it is put back into iTunes this way. (Note from
Dave: I do not think it did that.)
Deeper gets hidden preferences for Finder, Dock, QuickTime,
Safari, iTunes, Login, Spotlight, and so on. Free. The Deeper icon, open it up
and set the preferences, when the icon is closed, it does not take up a lot of
screen real estate.
myAppLauncher helps you quickly launch your apps. It shows a
list of apps you can scroll through, but you type something in and turn up apps
that match. Funny that when you click on the magnifying glass, it goes away!
Tooble takes YouTube videos and download them for playing on
your iPod or the like. Owen downloaded Funny Cats, and the video went into
iTunes.
PRESENTATION
Damir Seferovic, Product Marketing Manager from Eset, told
us about Eset technology and products, and the cyber threat landscape for the Macintosh.
Eset is a leader in security solutions. It uses heuristics: it
looks ahead and finds threats to destroy.
Eset has been in business since 1987. It learned in Windows
how to defend against viruses and the like. Its growth has been 2,860%. It has
100 million uses worldwide. American is becoming its largest market.
Eset is based out of Slovakia. The North American office is in
San Diego.
Intel uses Eset. Companies are putting Eset built-in when
you get your Windows computer. Some guys avoid some virus protection software
because it slowed down their PCs, and as for the Mac, they feel it is not
really needed yet; they do not see the threat.
One of the key benefits of Eset is multi-layered proactive
protection; Este's competitors use a singular method, which takes time to
perform on your computer. And Eset dialogs with its customers. Eset tried to
minimize false positives; when you use safari, you do not want that flagged as
malware. Eset has the smallest footprint of protection software: about 40mb. So
Eset's speed is good. And it does fast scanning, and has an unobtrusive
interface. Eset believes that protection software should be in the background; it
should not do silly pop-ups or other things that you have to click on. You can
tweak Eset if you wish for it to do more stuff.
Eset NOD32 Antivirus 4 has the fast, effective technology to
protect from viruses and spyware. ESET Smart Security 4 has that, and adds a
firewall and antispam technology.
One detection method to find viruses and the like is
signature comparison, where the software to find viruses goes line by line
through software with an idea of what hackers. Eset does advanced heuristics:
if A plus B, you might have a C. Eset thinks ahead: if it finds one thing, it
finds a similar version of malware and does the protection for that.
ThreatSense.net you can send in a report. 3 or 4 daily
updates, in background, most recent threats. (Note from Dave: Maybe I made a
mistake in my notes, when I enter ThreatSense.net, I go to eset.com.)
Question: Can we see what updates were done? Yes, look at
the Eset logs.
Eset is recognized in the industry, it has the highest
number of ADVANCED+ Awards in proactive protection. Damir showed a slide with
LOTS of companies that spoke highly of Eset. Customers like them also.
The hackers today are not the little globs of grease sitting
in Mom's basement writing nasty viruses to crash your computer for no reason.
The majority of malware today is financially motivated, and uses professional
tools. They are organized business.
A guy in the audience mentioned 10,000 or so hacks from
Japan, from Popular Science.
Hacking today is for monetary gain, personal info. There are
100,000 unique malware variants per day.
Damir profiled Macintosh users. 91% of those users spend
$1000 or more on their computer. Hackers would see them as full of money.
Many users consider malware and viruses a Windows problem.
Mac users have been shielded because hackers went after Windows instead. In the
past, money was not on the Mac side. It was on Windows business applications,
banks, etc.
Someone in the audience mentioned scareware, where a window
pops up on your Macintosh and says Windows Security Center found something
wrong, install our software for some $$$ to fix that! (Note from Dave: What's
wrong with this picture?)
As for the Mac OS X and security, its updates and patching
are done very well. The Mac already has things to protect you, like its
build-in firewall, although lots of people do not use that.
Do you have Open Office and Adobe Reader? Best advice for security is to update
them regularly. Update your Mac OS and your apps on a regular basis. Media apps
like QuickTime are the second most targeted (after Open Office and Adobe
Reader). Web browsers are highly targeted for vulnerability research. Update
your Safari to patch any holes! Hackers are always looking for new security
holes.
The human is the weakest link. There is unsafe online stuff,
and there is social engineering trickery, people fail to update, they share
files, they forward infected mail attachments.
Chron jobs are not the same as these updates; chron job is
just some cleaning up on the hard drive, not related to viruses.
If you do not click on an email attachment, are you safe?
You should only open attachments form a trusted source.
Damir showed the terms: worms, scareware, viruses, phishing,
and keyloggers.
A keylogger tracks your keystrokes. So someone sees what you
type. (Note from Dave: I heard an interview on NRP Fresh Aire radio that such
software might be used to see what movies you like. Seems to me that this could
also be used to get passwords.)
Worms are mostly made by the greaseballs in Mom's basement;
a worm infects all files it finds on disk. OS/Leap.A filename: latestpics.tgz.
uses Address Book to grow. OSX/Inqtana is written in Java and spreads in Apple
Bluetooth.
Spyware. OSX/OpinionSpy (June 2010) says Yay, you got a free
iPad. Then it infects all the files it finds on your hard drive.
Scareware. OK, here we get the financial stuff. It says
warning, something is wrong with your Mac, and you need our special cleaner,
for only $19.95, then that cleaner says nothing is (or was!) wrong with your
Mac after you are out $19.95. Scareware has a 10% success to get people to
install it . So the attacker gets about $7000 monthly! (Note from Dave: You
know, if I had less morals and more hacker skills...)
Something to watch for: hackers are known to be bad
spellers.
Information stealers pose as a poker game or something
similar. Asks for username and password, and then reports that to the remote
attacker.
You might find a movie online that ask you to install a fake
codec. Wow, watch this cool video, but you need our latest codec to see it.
Then it puts virus/Trojan into your system. Or there is a fake link to see the
video, and it gets into your address book. Hackers go after your address book
to get your friends' email.
Phishing: this email looks like an email from your bank, and
it asks you to confirm your username/password. You might even get this through
IM chat messenger. (Note form Dave: Your bank just will not ask you to email or
IM information like that!) Damir showed a phishing email that claims you will
get credited $7500! (Note from Dave: Yeah, right.)
Damir told us a little about ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 for the
Mac. It has a very familiar simple design, very Mac-like. The key points are that
it does proactive protection, and it is built for speed. It has dual OS
protection, like for Parallels and Boot Camp, it checks the shared folder so
you can be covered for the windows threats.
If you do a presentation, you can have Eset go into Full Screen
Mode, and it will not gives pop-ups during your presentation. When you exit,
you can check to see if Eset found anything.
Mac Eset needs 186mb memory, a disk install of 45mb, Leopard
or Snow Leopard, and it works with 32 and 64 bit Intel Macs.
It will cost about $40 to $50 per year for one computer.
Tech support is 24/7 based in San Diego.
This stuff is likely to spread to mobile OS: iPhone and
Android.
The beta software is free.
How does Eset for the Mac look? You open it, you get the
main screen. You see maximum protection, since the antivirus and antispyware
checkboxes are clicked. It shows the license is valid till such-and-such a
date, and it shows its updates. It shows statistics: the number of infected
objects (red), and cleaned (green).
You can set up a custom scan, there are lots of options, do
a smart scan, in-depth, target what you want to go after. And it can go into
time machine files.
You can select extensions to exclude from scanning. Some of
those extensions can be large and are from trusted sources. You can limit the
scan time. You can update manually.
As for the Eset setup, 90 percent of users will not think
about it. You can do advanced settings if you want.
Under Tools, you can see log files, files discovered that
are put in quarantine where you can delete them, or restore them if, for
example, they are a cookie that you use. The scheduler tells what has happened
with Eset. And there is Help.
(Note form Dave: All in all, a very nice presentation from
Damir. We Mac users will need to watch out for threats. Especially the ones
that are not Mom-basement greasy.)
Dave Strom/SMUG Vice-President
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As advertised, September 13th in the Redwood Room.
See you there!
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Steve Bellamy
SMUG President
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