02/02, 1:10pm
San Fran's BART gets Wi-Fi
San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) service should soon see the addition of permanent mobile Wi-Fi access, according to the technology's provider. WiFi Rail says it has a signed a 20-year deal to provide hotspots throughout BART's terminal network, and particularly on all commuter trains, where the only alternative has so far been cellular access. Routers and switches are being provided by Cisco, while servers are slated to run Mac OS X.
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01/13, 4:05pm
AFP server problems
Problems with Mac OS X Server are causing some corporate networks to come to a crawl, complaints from network administrators indicate. The problem is believed to stem specifically from Apple File Protocol, as used by Mac OS X Leopard Server; whereas Leopard typically consumes only a portion of the CPU power on an Xserve, some administrators have noticed quad- and eight-core Xserves becoming non-functional due to AFP activity. CPU burden can become as bad as 800 percent, according to one complaint.
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01/07, 11:25am
Intego releases updates
Intego has released new versions of VirusBarrier Server 2 and VirusBarrier Mail Gateway 2, along with ContentBarrier X5. Virus Barrier 2 and Virus Barrier Mail Gateway add improved scanning and bug fixes. Server 2 scans every file that is copied to the Mac OS X server it protects, and scans all files that are launched on the server. If it finds a virus, it quarantines the file or files, and sends logs to administrators alerting them of the activity. VirusBarrier Server 2 can also be set to run scheduled scans of local and network volumes. It requires Mac OS X (Server) 10.4 or higher and is now available starting at $300.
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12/15, 2:05pm
Mac OS X 10.5.6 security
Fresh after announcing the general changes in Mac OS X 10.5.6, Apple has posted a list of the security updates present in the new code. The company has for instance addressed several possible Trojan attacks, launched through images, PDF documents, CPIO archives, ISO files and web cookies. Similarly, Apple has expanded the list of potentially unsafe file types which will trigger Mac OS' Download Validation feature.
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07/29, 12:20pm
Apple slow on DNS bug
Apple has taken an unreasonable amount of time in fixing a DNS bug within Mac OS X, according to security consultant Rich Mogull. The bug in BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) -- which has public code available for a security exploit -- was discovered in February by researcher Dan Kaminsky, and a month later, groups such as Cisco and Microsoft met to determine how to fix it. While BIND was only patched on July 8th, Apple has still had weeks to incorporate this into Mac OS, says Mogull.
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