Capital Apple Apr 2004
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Volume 21.04 April 2004 The Official Journal of the 1 Meeting Details WELLINGTON MACINTOSH SOCIETY INC. Special General Meeting 2004 A Special General Meeting of the Wellington Macintosh Society Inc. will be held on Monday 26 April, 2004, at (e)-vision,2 Blair Street, Wellington, commencing at 7:15 P.M. BUSINESS To recieve and accept the 2003 Financial Report Graeme Moffatt, SECRETARY Following the SGM, Ian Telfar, the manager of MagnumMac Wellington, will demonstrate some of the latest software and hardware offerings from Apple Computer Inc. Basics/OSX 7–9pm, Monday 3rd May 2004 (separate groups for basics and OSX) Digital Media Users Group (web and publishing) 7–9pm, Monday 10th May 2004 Digital Video Users Group 7–9pm,Monday 17th May 2004 Cover Photo: The front cover of the first issue 1.1 in May 1984 of what was later to become Capital Apple. 2 3 President’s Report Hi folks. choose the “Download Link to Disk” Electronic option from the pop-up menu. After the magazine has been downloaded, Magazine the PDF can be opened using Acrobat/ We’re into our Adobe Reader or the Mac OS X Preview second month of application, depending on how your the electronic dis- system is configured. tribution of Capital For those running Mac OS X and us- Apple, and it seems ing the Safari web browser, this appears to be going well so to be the normal behaviour, so no special far. I’m pleased to report that we are action is required. getting a high proportion of “electronic only” membership renewals, which will Macintosh Workshops reduce the workload of the committee at A workshop was held at (e)-vision the magazine labelling session. on Saturday 3rd April, and those who I’m aware of one member who was attended were able to get lots of help not able to access the electronic maga- from the experts on hand. zine last month due to a web browser We intend to run a workshop every configuration problem which prevented two months for the rest of year, with the accessing any PDF documents. next one being held in June. More details This also raised the issue that for will be provided next month once we’ve anyone using the “PDFViewer” web set a date. browser plug-in, the default behaviour The workshops are reasonably flex- of older web browsers is to view a PDF ible in content, covering any topics on document as if it is a web page (inside the which the attendee needs help, assuming web browser), and it is difficult to save we can find a suitable helper. Registra- a copy of the document for future refer- tion is essential - we need to know what ence (without downloading it again). you want to cover so we can plan ahead. In order to avoid similar problems in Please use the form on the web site or future, we are doing things slightly dif- contact a committee member if you want ferently this month: instead of providing to attend a workshop. a direct link to the magazine, we will give The workshops run from 10 am to 2:30 you a link to a web page which contains pm including a lunch break (a light lunch a link to the PDF. is provided). We are charging a fee of $75 If you want to download and save a per person. Non-members must also join copy of the magazine, you can go to the WelMac in order to attend, which raises web page, then click-and-hold or Ctrl- the cost to $105 or $115 depending on click on the link to the magazine, and whether you want a magazine. 2 3 Macintosh Basics Meeting collected by automated software used For those who need help on basic by spammers to build lists of targets. Macintosh operation, or on some spe- My address was also published on web cific area, don’t forget about the “ba- sites, from which it was also collected. sics” meeting which is held on the first In recent years, we’ve had several ad- Monday of each month (a week after the dresses in the welmac.org.nz domain main meeting). We can usually break up published on our web site, many of into small groups and deal with specific which go to me. areas of interest, so this meeting can be The current state of play is that I regarded as a shorter version of the consistently receive over 200 items of workshop, and attendance is free for junk E-Mail every day. A quick scan any WelMac members. through my “Junk” mailbox reveals The Junk E-Mail Problem 686 messages sent between Monday and Wednesday, including the usual mix of It is interesting to note that April 12 adult web sites, male potency enhance- marked the tenth anniversary of the first ments, Russian and Korean messages widely distributed “spam” message which I can’t even read, etc. There are (unsolicited commercial advertising), about 30 copies of various worms, and the now infamous advertisement from at least 10 “bounced mail” reports from the legal firm of Canter & Siegel. misguided anti-virus software which The problem of spam and other thinks I tried to send a worm to some- forms of junk E-Mail has now reached one else (actually a third computer sent such a scale that it may only be a mat- it, with the headers changed to make it ter of time before changes are forced look like it came from me). on way that the Internet E-mail system This completely swamps the real E- operates. Mail messages I’m receiving (typically In addition to spam (unsolicited com- 10 or fewer), so I’m very reliant on soft- mercial messages) there is also the prob- ware which can filter out the junk and lem of E-Mail worms, which at times can leave me with the real messages. send out large volumes of messages. At The main lines of defence at the mo- one point I was getting over 100 copies ment are ISPs and/or E-mail software of one particular worm per day, and the which offer filtering techniques, with total volume was sufficient to overflow “Bayesian Filtering” being quite com- my ISP’s limit on the total amount of E- mon. Unfortunately, the spam authors Mail I could receive, possibly preventing have figured out ways of poisoning this real messages from arriving. system. My E-Mail software is now in a I have had my personal E-Mail ad- state where almost every message I re- dress ([email protected]) since ceive is regarded as junk mail, unless it I got my first Internet account around comes from an address which is already 1992. For many years, I posted mes- in my address book. sages to Usenet news groups, which means that my address was able to be continued at bottom of next page 4 5 WelMac Web Watch www.welmac.org.nz This months WelMac Web Watch is are being posted to the website regularly shorter due to the length of the two articles so keep checking back. contained in this issue. New Articles added to Web Site Ar- A note to new members and a reminder chives to those members who have not recently One additional article detailing the re- accessed the group’s web site. The site can lease of the latest version and changes to the be found at <http://www.welmac.org.nz> database application, Filemaker, has been All sections of the web site can now be added to the article archives section of our viewed by the public including the Article website, since last month’s magazine was Archives. This page can be reached from published. <http://www.welmac.org.nz/ the WelMac Article Archives link on the article_archives.htm>. Each new article is links page. Details of all current articles listed and linked from the home page for a appears later in this update. New articles short time after they have been posted. continued from previous page This means that I have to browse address (which will be a major under- through my junk mail folder every day taking) and don’t publish the new one to check for “false positives”. It is a major electronically. waste of time, and it is likely that a few Signing off real messages slip by unnoticed, so my If you wish to contact me for any apologies if I’ve lost a message anyone reason, you can do so at (04)475-9755 has tried to send me. (home), E-Mail to <president@welmac. At this point, my only options are org.nz>, or write to me at P O Box 6642, to grit my teeth, or change my E-Mail Wellington. 4 5 Mac OS X Trojan Technique: Beware Geeks by Adam C. Engst <[email protected]> merely popped up a dialog box, but it obvi- ously could execute any sort of code. It’s By now, assuming you pay any atten- a clever hack that takes advantage of both tion to the Macintosh media in between the way Carbon applications work and the your weekly doses of TidBITS, you’ve un- ID3 tag portion of the MP3 file format to doubtedly heard of the hubbub brewing run executable code from within a legiti- around the announcement last Thursday mate MP3 file. It’s worth noting that all of of the first Trojan horse to target Mac OS the programming techniques used by Bo’s X.