Fake MobileMe email / phishing threat

 Ars.Technica recently posted an article about a new phishing scam that actually sounds like it has a chance of bamboozling many users: Bogus emails, purporting to be from Apple, which prompt you to update your .Mac / MobileMe account information:

“As usual, the e-mail is disguised to look like a legit message coming from Apple, but clicking on the provided link (so that users can "update" their billing information with a working credit card, of course) forwards them to a site that is not at all affiliated with Apple.”

Phishing, if you didn’t know, is something you’re not generally protected against just because you use a Mac. (unless the phish attempt has to do with installing malware or viruses which don’t run on Macs). Threats are platform-independent. In this particular case, there’s no virus or malware. Instead, it’s good old fashioned trickery and forgery, using “social engineering” to get you to make a mistake and turn over information you shouldn’t to somebody you don’t want to know.

iTunes Plus Upgrading Finally Done Right

Apple or the record labels or whomever could make the decision came through for once. You can now selectively upgrade your iTunes purchases to 256k, DRM-free versions!

If you’ll recall, I did some serious lamentin’ about having to upgrade my entire library in one shot at a cost of almost $500. So, I upgraded nothing.

Now, a trip to the iTunes Plus page shows an upgrade button next to individual albums or tracks. I upgraded my “must haves” (desert island discs, if you will) to the tune of about $50.

It’s not $500 for the labels – but they weren’t going to get that anyways.

What I wish were different about the Mac OS. And by different, I mean better.

There’s a derogatory term used on discussion forums for people who blindly support an operating system and poo-poo its shortcomings and weaknesses, despite all reasonable evidence to the contrary: Fanboy.

I’m no Apple fanboy. Yes, it’s my operating system of choice, and I recommend it to people whenever I can, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things about it that make me nuts. Now, I’m in “corporate IT guy mode” at the time of this writing, so I’m setting aside all the great things the Mac can do as a creative tool and focusing on the work-a-day aspects of it.

First-up: remote control. Quite frankly, Apple’s Remote Desktop feature is lame in many ways when compared to Microsoft’s remote desktop solution (based on the very mature and solid Terminal Services foundation). Apple RD is slow, allowing minimal customization of the remote view upon launch. You get a color slider, and that’s about it. Any adjustments you want to make to the remote GUI have to be done within the remote GUI. That’s absurd – why should I have to suffer through all those remote clicks and make trips to System Preferences? With a Microsoft RDC client, I can create a remote connection profile that specifies screen resolution, color depth, sound on/off, mapping local to remote drives, mapping printers, and more before I even connect. And the speed. Yikes. Microsoft’s RDC performs so well, sometimes I forget that I’m not actually at the computer I’m controlling.

Now, in fairness to Apple RD, it does do some things that Windows RDC doesn’t do. You can generate a variety of reports on remote systems, send application packages that automatically install software and reboot the remote system, and observe a remote desktop versus controlling it.  I just wish they’d fix the speed issue. It could be that part of that speed issue has to do with the Mac GUI itself. For example, there’s no way in OS X to turn off the fat, obnoxious drop shadows behind every window. Those drop shadows make remote control sessions slower, because the remote session has to draw that many more pixels.

Second – badly behaving network shares. Maybe this one should be first. Connect to a share on your network so that the remote volume mounts on your desktop. “Family Room iMac” for example. Fine. Now, go shut down Family Room iMac, return to your computer, and you’ve got about an 80-90% chance of staring at the bouncing beach ball for 2 minutes the first time you open a Finder window or click on the desktop (tip: force-quit the Finder to get out of this situation). Even if you don’t try to access that now-closed share. That’s ridiculous for an operating system with Unix underpinnings. Windows doesn’t do that. A Windows share does nothing at all until you double-click on its icon. And then, Windows just says “nope, that share’s not here” and lets you go about your business.

You can imagine how this little problem becomes a big problem in an office environment with 20 or more Macs connecting to each other, off and on all day. Invariably, somebody you’re connected to via sharing shuts down and goes home for the day whilst you’re still working. Grrrr.

Third – Apple really needs to fix the shortcomings of the Finder. There’s even a phrase that’s been coined for this desire: “FTFF.”  You can figure out what the abbreviation stands for, ha ha.

Sometimes when I have to spend all day working on a Windows system, I realize just how much better of a workhorse Windows Explorer can be. The Finder just has too many maddening little quirks that surface after hours and hours of heavy lifting.

For example, one thing I can’t stand is that if select a bunch of files from one folder, and drag to copy to another drive or folder, and one of those files can’t be copied for some reason (it’s corrupt, or has a bad filename, whatever) THE WHOLE OPERATION TANKS. On Windows, you’ll get an alert about each and every file that can’t be copied, and you can decide to continue the operation with the rest of the files or cancel.

There are tons of other Finder “issues” – so many, that there’s a software company out there who’s main product, "Pathfinder,” is meant as a Finder substitute. I’ve purchased and used Pathfinder in the past, and always end up disabling it after a few months because of its system overhead and quirkiness. But I see that they’ve got a brand-new version out, so maybe I’ll give it another shot. I do miss its tabbed Finder windows and ability to customize all text and icons with OSX.

And finally, peer to peer file sharing on a network, with trusted computers set up with shares which everybody should be able to read and write to, is NOT as simple as it should be. In fact, it’s downright maddening. In this case, Apple technology does NOT “just work.” It’s not the Apple way. It’s more like the “obscure Linux way” or something. I’m sorry, but Windows NTFS settings for permissions and file shares are much, much easier for me to work with.

I can imagine how somebody with less experience might go mad trying to sort out peer-to-peer sharing. I have issues on my company’s network with shared folders that I’ve never, ever been able to figure out, and believe me I’ve tried. Sometimes they work for one user, but not for another with the exact same setup. Sometimes you have to authenticate when you want to put a file into a Mac share that’s explicitly set to be wide-open. Other times, you have to enter a password to copy, move, or even open files ON YOUR OWN HARD DRIVE if somebody else put them there via file sharing.

How about you? Where do you think Apple could make improvements to its operating system – whether compared to Windows or not?

New Macbooks - Mostly Hits, One Miss

The new Macbooks are pretty sweet.

They've improved in almost every category: better screen (with LED backlighting); svelte, lighter aluminum bodies; and of course faster processors and video cards. Oh, and there's that really cool-sounding enlarged iPhone-ish trackpad thingie. I say "cool sounding" because I really haven't had a chance to play with one yet.

One thing, however, has a lot of the Apple faithful scratching their heads: the new Macbooks no longer have FireWire (FW) ports. Not FW 400, not FW 800. Nada.

If you don't know what FireWire is, then I guess you may not miss it.

But the rest of us will miss:

• FireWire's speed vs. USB. With all other things being equal, a FireWire connection to an external hard drive is WAY faster than USB 2.0
• Migration assisant via FireWire. Upgrading a new Mac sure is a lot easier when you can just hook up your old one via FireWire, run Migration Assisant, and let your new Mac do all the work of bringing things over from the old system. Apple has updated the migration utility and supposedly it now works with USB, but see point number one regarding speed.
• Hooking up our video cameras to our Macbooks. If you've got a camcorder and its connection to your Mac is FireWire, you're out of luck. So if you're in the market for a new Macbook, you'll have to either skip the Macbook in favor of the more expensive Macbook Pro, or get a new camera that uses USB. Or stay put. This is the most aggravating problem with regard to dropping FW, especially considering that new Macbooks still come with iMovie. How do they expect people to get their footage from the camera into iMovie?! (Steve Jobs made the point that new cameras are dropping FireWire. C'mon Steve, we know that Apple wants to already be where the standard will be for everybody else a year or two down the road. But this move doesn't give anybody an alternative. At least when Apple dropped the floppy drive years ago (and people complained about that), you could get an external USB floppy drive if you really wanted one).
• Using audio gear with our Macbooks. I don't do this myself, but a lot of audio pros take Macbooks into the field because they're so small, light, and dependable. And Macbooks can run audio software such as Logic and Protools quite well. But guess what? A lot of that expensive hardware is FireWire based.

All of this points to why Mac fans are calling this one of the dumbest moves in a long time. Especially when you consider that Apple made FW famous - and that other computer manufacturers have been adding, not removing, FW. How embarassing for us now, when our Dell-toting friends can hook up their FireWire devices, but we can't. And for those with a substantial investment in FW hard drives and enclosures, I feel your pain.

I have yet to hear a good reason for dropping it from the Macbook. At least they could have made it optional; I'd pay an extra $25 for the FW port - which probably cost a buck to include in the first place.

There's an interesting thread about this on ars.technica, if you want to hear what others are saying about Macbooks sans FireWire.