I predict that Apple’s iCloud will have the same problems inherent to every other mass “cloud” effort to date: no awareness of family.
If you share a computer or device with others, you know what I’m talking about. It’s not just my photos, music, and books. It’s OUR photos, music, and books. And yet, they are always tied to just one user account in these services, with any sharing happening manually or through clunky workaround interfaces like iTunes Library sharing (ugh!).
Businesses are in a similar situation, of course, but employees get paid to transfer data between silos.
What am I asking for? Give me (us) a way to set up groups and sync information and files across multiple user accounts. Based on recent history, I fear that this is not even on the radar at Apple (or Google) (or Amazon). But we’ll see.
I just got an interesting 419 letter purporting to be from the Lagos office of the FBI. Unlike most such, it came as a PDF (screenshot above).
It’s obviously not credible on several levels, but what gave me pause was this: Apple mail automatically rendered the attached PDF.
We have been hearing about PDF attacks for years, where a maliciously crafted PDF can lead to arbitrary code execution when opened. Most of these have been in Adobe’s abominable Reader, but there have been necessary patches to Apple’s PDF code, too. Some day, an enlightened 419 scammer will realize that a maliciously crafted advance letter may be all they need to get your bank account details the easy way, via keylogger. It won’t matter that the email looks bogus; Core Graphics has already opened the PDF.
There needs to be a setting in Mail Preferences to prevent this, just like the setting to prevent downloading of remote images. Until there is, or they disable this sketchy practice by default, you can use the following Terminal command.
How to turn off inline attachments in Mail.app
defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes
Thanks to Micah Gilman for the tip.
It’s easy to forget how powerful the unix su command is. You can have it launch a different shell than the one specified in /etc/passwd, and tell it to run a particular command.
This comes in especially handy when adding startup tasks in /etc/rc.local, when you want to launch a server or some other process as an unprivileged user:
su -s /bin/sh - edarwin -c "/usr/local/erasmus/startup-debian.sh"
That is, as user edarwin, use the /bin/sh shell in a fresh environment to run the script startup-debian.sh.
Via this forum post.
In the future we shall all be assimilated.
I use Handbrake to extract video from DVDs all the time, as part of my job. And being old-school, I like to use the deinterlace filter to remove the field lines from the video so that it doesn’t look like it was shot in the 1980s.
But it turns out that it’s better to use the decomb filter instead, because it is smarter and less invasive. This page on the Handbrake wiki explains it all, with examples.
