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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 3:53 am 
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We know Apple are lax in their communication, leaving users to work things out for themselves, so wondering about updates to 10.6 looking at past Security updates and Java updates, the longest gap is 4 months for (Apple written)Java and 3 months for Security updates, the last of either was Oct last year.
Based on past trend, that suggests 10.6 is forgotten, not counting some App Store update thingy which I ignored as App Store is not something I use in 10.6.

I have 10.9 which I boot into occasionally to use a Java based graph app and slowly slowly I probably will be using it more and more. Currently I still use 10.6, 95% of the time but accept change even if it is inferior.

Not really a question, just a marker along the way for the slow demise of a favourite Mac OS.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 4:22 am 
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It does seem that it's EOL for 10.6, doesn't it, especially now that 10.7 through 10.9 got updates recently, and nothing for Snow. I had started running Sophos in Snow, but that still didn't take care of any unpatched OS vulnerabilities. I've started dual booting 10.6/10.8 now, with Snow for older PPC apps, and ML now my main OS for almost anything online. (And decided to run Sophos even there, since I know that Apple has been very lackadaisical about updating XProtect definitions.) 10.8 doesn't seem like much of a long term solution, though. I'm feeling like a polar bear on a small melting chunk of ice. At least 10.8.5 got most of the buggy stuff out. I wouldn't want to be forced to use 10.9. Even by the time of its replacement, I don't think there will have been enough updates to take out the buggy stuff, and I have no interest in all its "features." Not that I'm interested very much in all the "features" of ML, except for maybe Notifications, which I have set for Mail only.

BTW, just installed free LibreOffice in 10.8, and it's able to open all my old Appleworks and Word stuff.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 5:55 am 
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Apple hasn't said anything officially but the other day a Mac App Store update popped up in software update on SL.

Apple should come out and say one way or another if SL is unsupported. Being the last Rosetta capable system I would like to see Apple give SL special status. After all, the security fixes are there to fix problems (defects as it were) that were present at the time of shipping. In some way I'd like to think they have a moral duty to fix these things once the system is in the wild. The 'update to fix' line doesn't work because Apple dropped they software that has made many people continue to use SL in the first place.

If something major pops up we might see a surprise from Apple but it would have to be some big threat.

Apple has a very good idea of how many people are using SL and it seems it's a not insignificant minority.

Thanks for the heads up on LibreOffice and Appleworks WZZZ. Are those only Appleworks 6 documents or earlier versions too?

_________________
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Last edited by Avon B7 on Fri Mar 28, 2014 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 6:09 am 
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Quote:
Apple has a very good idea of how many people are using SL and it seems it's a not insignificant minority.

Thanks for the heads up on LibreOffice and Appleworks WZZZ. Are those only Appleworks 6 documents or earlier versions too?

Last I heard, 10.6 user base was around 20%. Can't answer the AW question, as I only have AW 6 stuff.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 8:03 am 
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For the longest time I stayed on Snow because I couldn't make some things work on 10.8 or 10.9. Now that I've solved most of them, I'm down to just plain application compatibility issues which are slightly easier to deal with since the school has to constantly update their software to keep current with their constantly updating hardware.

At home I'm still using 10.5, though I make a point to not use anything that Apple bundled with the OS to connect to the internet. No Safari, no Mail.app, none of that. At that point it's as hardened as a Mavericks system, since the software I'm using on it is regularly updated and current, and it's sitting behind a hardware firewall.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 10:05 am 
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MonkeyBoy wrote:
At home I'm still using 10.5, though I make a point to not use anything that Apple bundled with the OS to connect to the internet. No Safari, no Mail.app, none of that. At that point it's as hardened as a Mavericks system, since the software I'm using on it is regularly updated and current, and it's sitting behind a hardware firewall.

Does that take care of unpatched 10.5 OS vulnerabilities? What's the hardware firewall exactly? Is that the router firewall?


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 10:14 am 
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I do think they'll kill 10.6 & 10.7 ASAP. :(

Not particularly sad about 10.7, but for some users that's as high as they can go.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 11:06 am 
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A hardware firewall basically means a piece of hardware that has a firewall on it that sits between you and the internet. Routers running Tomato fit the bill. Most consumer routers do.

I try to avoid saying "router" because technically all a router does is route data between networks. You can have a public IP address on the WAN port of the router and another public subnet on the LAN port(s) of the router, and it's still a router even though there's absolutely no firewall in the mix.

The only way 10.5 would be vulnerable in this situation is if an unpatched vulnerability was exposed to the internet. For example, using Safari, you expose the entire WebKit, Security, etc. frameworks to the internet as you go around browsing websites. Similarly Mail.app exposes a similar number of vulnerabilities just by the very act of receiving & reading email. If you enable Remote Login and have ports forwarded on the hardware firewall to your system, so random internet addresses can talk to the SSH server on your system, then that would expose the old SSH daemon to the internet. Internet Plugins are probably the biggest concern, since none of them have been updated in ages and they're accessed by any website which wants to access them, but TFF 24 has killed them (to be honest the only time I notice them missing is when I visit YouTube and other video sites). Firefox is a pretty self-contained, with its own TLS, SSL, web page rendering, etc. so that's why TFF is the safest option since you know it's all been updated.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 1:32 pm 
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I'm completely moved over to 10.8.5 now, but to be safe, I'm guessing I should probably stop using Mail 4.6 in Snow, which I was still doing in order to keep that updated?


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 2:57 pm 
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I'll have a look at LibreOffice, WZZZ though it is really only spreadsheets I'd like to maintain from AW6. I notice LittleSnitch for Mavs now costs money. I miss LS's little window at the top showing the name of the network application in play. I do like to see what is connecting to the internet so maybe I'll fork out for the upgrade.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 12:00 am 
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I'm fully on Mavs now. LibreOffice swung it, thanks WZZZ. However I found I had to first use AW6 to save as Excel and then LibreOffice was able to keep all the formatting - just lost any colours and some dates were weird, but were easily restored.
The LittleSnitch upgrade to LS 3.0 was AUD$19.

I found some comfort in being able to re-colourise the Finder bar with the free app Side Effects.
http://macmatrix.blogspot.com.au/p/sideeffects.html
The author says it is beta software. I haven't found any problem with it.

I have lost the PowerPC (games) of course, but they are there on an external if I want.

This iMac came with 10.5 in 2008 with originally 512Mb RAM (now 4Gb), and to be running 10.9, six years later is pretty cool for hardware.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 5:21 am 
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What do you think of 10.9? Yeah, LibreOffice is a real life saver.

For the time being, I'm not going any further than 10.8. Wish there was something to bring back the spinning gear for Get Mail in 10.8. It does sound a very quiet ping when it's finished checking for new mail, but with my poor hearing, I don't hear it unless I turn up the volume very high, and then the regular ping alert when new mail is received is too loud. So, no idea if checking for new mail is working or not.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 7:25 am 
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In Lion there was a sys. pref. option in Accessibility/Audio where you could have a "flash the screen" option instead of /or with, a system beep for poor hearing.
Perhaps it's still there ?


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 7:33 am 
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It's there in ML, but doesn't work to show when get new mail has finished checking. Besides, even if it did, don't think I'd want it for the new mail alert, since I don't have a problem hearing that one at ordinary volume. That would get old fast. Just that, for some reason, the ping alert when new mail checking is finished is very quiet, and can't be set to anything other than the ping sound. Would set it to a lower frequency sound, where my hearing is better, but no option for that.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 7:50 am 
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here's a month old article on the topic
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... to_attacks
a more up to date figure of mavericks adoption is 50%
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/27/os- ... option-50/


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 9:05 am 
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Interesting articles, now if they had a way to tell what percentage of 10.9 users wish they could easily go back to an earlier OS & simply feel sucker punched by the freeness of MavX.

I wonder how many people would go back to iOS6 if they could?


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 6:40 pm 
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I have always been a late adopter, preferring to stay with what I have long after most have moved on. 21 months ago my highest OS was 10.5 Leopard, and thought I’d better get that ’new’ 10.6 while it was still available.

My printer, as some may remember is a HP4L that still works fine. This June is its 20th anniversary!

10.6 is an excellent OS, and I preferred that coherent desktop model to the newer Mac App Store ‘walled garden’ models that followed. I think a factor that pushed me forward was the Snowdon revelations of how compromised our computers are and of his suggestion that their frailty was with tacit complicity of the big corporations themselves.

I have always tried to be fairly careful with security as much as an end user can know, but I now lean to the fact that having the latest is probably worth the inconvenience of change. Sure there will still be worms provided in the apple for our Lords and Protectors, but hopefully their exploitation passes over my insignificant presence.

The freeness of MavX was a ‘selling’ point BDAqua, to get the latest and more secure software being the attraction. I make of use of Java a fair bit and it is no longer supported in 10.6.

WZZZ, I find 10.9 pretty fast in general. Opening Calendar connects to iCloud which I have not activated, and used LittleSnitch to block the connection to iCloud, so currently the only annoyance is a Software Update reminder which is a bit of a nag. This is only the third day on this full time so it is all pretty new but I’ll wrangle that bit into submission in time.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 11:44 pm 
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Quote:
The freeness of MavX was a ‘selling’ point BDAqua, to get the latest and more secure software being the attraction. I make of use of Java a fair bit and it is no longer supported in 10.6.


I understand, but wouldn''t it be much easier for NSA,CIA, & OHS if everybody ran one OS???

I trust Apple with security about as much as I trust Apple not to break everything with every new OS version when they can't really fix the previous version. :fishsmack: :nothappy:


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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 3:14 am 
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I have not considered your ‘one OS’ view before. Yes maybe. I already presume government agencies have access to our computers if they desire, for they have access to everything else. Internet technology is basically a U.S invention so maybe it is all overseen by one party anyway.

When I was a young man, and read Orwell’s 1984, I saw a flaw in his dystopia, in that TVs were one-way mediums, hence they could not spy on anyone. This was in the eighties when computers were unheard of here and little did the author have any concept of computers when he wrote that book just after the second world war. Yet Orwell was an inspired devil who imagined a technology not yet invented.

Today his vision is reality. Once we get on the internet, we are as good as walking down the street naked in a dream whispering into our pillow our secret thoughts and wonderings.


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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 2:06 pm 
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I saw a flaw in his dystopia, in that TVs were one-way mediums, hence they could not spy on anyone.

I guess you never saw George Burns spying on Gracie & friends on his TV in the '50s then!

I thought it was hokie at the time! :roll: :confused:


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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 3:43 pm 
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No I never saw that show, but I do have a bit of tape stuck over the camera hole on this computer. :D


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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:05 pm 
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Mine was taped before I pulled out of the box! :fishsmack:


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PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 7:32 am 
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Hmmmm…

This, reminds me of the time when I thought I would close off that little camera hole at the top of my iMac, just in case .

I have a dual monitor on the left where my focus was for a while, but when I went back to my main iMac screen, it had dimmed to a point where it looked like I was back in the world of a gray-scaled only screen, quite dark too !
For a moment or two, I panicked and said, uh-oh what happened ?

Apparently, this opening also works as a light sensor for the main screen brightness, IF you have the "Auto adjust brightness" box checked in SysPrefs/Display.
Once I realized this, I took off the tape and installed a make-shift adjustable window flap out of small piece of paper with a tape hinge for those times when I am feeling a little paranoid.


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PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 12:23 pm 
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Usually the light sensor is a separate part, but placed so closely to the camera that it's easy to cover it with the same piece of tape. If you cut a square of tape precisely the size to cover up the camera but not the surrounding area, the light sensor should work. They're normally on the same circuit board, which is why they're spaced closely together.

Then again, I could be wrong in your model, there's a lot of variation in how Apple does things. Using the camera as a light sensor is actually harder than it sounds, which is why they normally use a different part for it.

I had the same problem with my iPod Touch, most cases covered up its sensor. Finally found one that doesn't cover it up... and they've stopped making it.


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PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 1:52 pm 
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Ah, right you are, upon closer inspection.
Although very hard to see, just to the left of the Cam is a separate sensor.
My iMac is a Late 2012


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