Category: OS X

Apple released its 10.4.9 update today,

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Following up on yesterday’s announcement of the “Month of Apple Bugs”, Crazy Apple Rumors Site is pleased to announce that in January it will host the “Month of Security Dicks”.

Editor in Chief John Moltz said today that the “Month of Security Dicks” will highlight one complete and utter dick from the world of professional security a day.

“From George Ou to HD Moore, the professional security world is clearly rife with absolute pricks whose egos are matched in size only by their rapacious desire to get a fictitious Mac user they’ve constructed in their heads,” Moltz said.

Each profile in the “Month of Security Dicks” will provide a detailed list of the dickish security professional of the day’s feverish rants against the supposed cabal of brain-washed Mac users who believe OS X has no bugs. Each will also receive a relative rating of his ego using the technology industry-standard Ebrahimi index.

“Frankly, we were a little worried that a month might be giving the topic short shrift,” Moltz added. “There are apparently a lot of security dicks. But, at the same time, having to cover these jackasses for a month will be like a dose of the clap.”

Moltz said that he hopes the dicks in the security profession learn something from the “Month of Security Dicks”.

“If I had to pick one thing, I guess I’d like them to learn that they’re dicks,” Moltz said.

“That’d pretty much be it.”

The “Month of Security Dicks” will run from January 1st to January 31st 2007 on Crazy Apple Rumors Site, unless the point’s already been made.

OS X was hit by a proof-of-concept virus today that has left many in the Mac community shaken.

Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Macarena
Que tu cuerpo es pa’ darle alegria y cosa buena
Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Macarena
Ehhhh, Macarena!

While the virus itself does not contain a payload and is therefore harmless, its name has deposited a deadly payload on the more seasoned veterans of the Mac community who are old enough to remember the mid-1990s pop dance scene.

Macarena tiene un novio que se llama
Que se llama de apellido Vitorino
Y en la jura de bandera del muchacho
Se la dio con dos amigos
Macarena, Macarena, Macarena!

“I was there,” said TidBITS editor Adam Engst. “I saw it.

“It was hell.”

Que le gusta los veranos de Marbella
Macarena, Macarena, Macarena!

Blankly staring off into space, MacInTouch editor Rik Ford said in a far-away voice, “The Macarena. God damn it. Why did it have to be the Macarena?”

Que le gusta la movida guerrilera
Macarena suena con el Corte Ingles
Y se compra los mnodelos mas modernos
Le gustaria vivir en Nueva York
Y ligar un novio nuevo

“All those baby-boomers… all that un-ironic lameness…” Engst said.

“Horrible. Horrible. I thought I had finally gotten over all that pain… but now, to have it dredged up again…

“They’ll say this virus is harmless. It’s not.”

Apple declined to comment for this story, but numerous employees were heard singing to themselves “Ehhhhh, Macarena!“

After George Ou’s posting of Apple’s responses to his questions about the wireless controversy (aka, Security Bitch Watch), Ou followed up in the comments on his blog by claiming that Apple was lying.

Evidently Ou’s sources at SecureWorks claim to have time-stamped data that proves they provided information to Apple – information Apple says they never received.

But Crazy Apple Rumors Site was able to determine the cause of the entire controversy: Mail’s spam filtering.

SecureWorks’ David Maynor sent numerous emails to Apple engineer John Vink which included packet captures, driver disassemblies, crash dumps, exploit code and a humorous MPEG of William Shatner singing “Rocket Man” with the subject line “Funny! ;-)”

Sadly, Vink’s spam filter was set to move messages containing the word “dump” into his spam folder.

“I… was getting some… gross… spam mail,” Vink said. “You don’t want to know.”

Regardless, Vink said, the materials sent by SecureWorks did not indicate any flaws in OS X.

“Yeah, turns out it’s Ubuntu. For some reason they thought we made Ubuntu. I just got off the phone with them. I told them we don’t. They said ‘Oh, really? Because it’s really nice so we just thought it was yours.’ But it’s not. We had a good laugh over it.”

At ToorCon this weekend, SecureWorks is expected to express their desire to stick a lit cigarette into the eyes of Ubuntu enthusiasts.

When asked to comment on the recent Security Bitch Watch controvery (now concluding day 8!), the usually inscrutable Apple spokesperson Lynn Fox made several telling comments about the state of Mac security.

Many hours have been spent poring over Fox’s comments of a week ago Friday and whether or not they represent an outright refutal of SecureWorks claims or are just so much PR speak. Indeed, many of Fox’s comments in today’s interview might have gone unnoticed by less seasoned reporters.

Fox began by reiterating the company’s statement that SecureWorks has not presented Apple with any evidence that the Airport firmware and software supplied with the MacBook is suceptible to the attack shown in their video demonstration.

She added, however that “What surprises us is that Maynor and Ellch completely missed the massive security flaw in our Bluetooth stack.

“For instance,” Fox said, “Simply pairing a Bluetooth headset with Mac OS X for Intel causes the system to turn on remote access, remove the root password, and erase several key user-data files.

“And don’t get me started on USB,” she said, her words slurring.

“I don’t even want to talk about USB. Listen, if you mention USB, I’m going to hit you so hard you won’t even remember that plugging in a camera to a USB connection on the Mac automatically sends browser caches to the NSA.”

Fox stopped to take a slug from a small, opaque bottle she carried with her.

“Now, I’m not going to talk at all about the TCP/IP problems. Not all. So I won’t even explain that attempting to connect to AppleShare over IP with the user name ‘sjobs’ exposes the entire contents of all attached drives, all networked drives with stored passwords, and initiates password cracking against all computers on the ISP’s attached network.

“No, sirree,” Fox said, slumping quietly to the floor. “No, sirree.”

Apple declined to comment for this story, shortly after Fox passed out.