EFiX USB Dongle Off To A Rocky Start

September 12, 2008 by Joey Celis 2 Comments

According to InsanelyMac forum member [qbattersby] the EFiX USB dongle he just received doesn’t seem to live up to expectations. We covered the EFiX when it was announced back in June. It’s designed to let you install OSX unmodified on commodity hardware. While using a MSI G965M motherboard, instead of installing OSX [qbattersby] was greeted with a flashing cursor with no option to continue onward.

A quick glance at the EFiX hardware compatibility chart does not list the MSI G965M as a board verified to work with the dongle and could explain [qbattersby] results. To his defense, he does explain that he will be testing it on a supported motherboard along with a retail copy of Leopard in the future. Hopefully, he will be able to post back that it works and his experience with the installation of Leopard.

While the EFiX seems to be shipping in some countries, enthusiasts in the US will have to wait a bit longer till distribution channels can be worked out.

One thing is for sure, if you do plan on going the EFiX route, make sure that the hardware you plan on using is listed on their site.

[via Engadget]

Mac Tablets Made By Fans

July 14, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

Macintosh makes a lot of wonderful pieces of technology, but they do not make a tablet. Pictured above is the Modbook, the closest you can currently get to a Mac tablet. Though not officially built by Apple, they are an Apple Premier Developer and that isn’t too shabby.

Several people have taken it upon themselves to fashion Mac tablets of their own, varying from extremely professional looking finishes down to duct tape and wire. Lets take a look at some of the more popular ones out there.

Continue reading “Mac Tablets Made By Fans” →

ARDAgent.app Still Vulnerable

July 5, 2008 by Eliot 1 Comment

When Apple pushed their most recent security update, the first thing we checked was whether the ARDAgent issue was fixed. It’s not. This vulnerability lets anyone execute code as a privileged user and versions of this attack have already been found in the wild. While several Ruby, SMB, and WebKit issues were addressed it, ARDAgent is still unpatched. [Dino Dai Zovi] has published the method by which ARDAgent actually becomes vulnerable: when it starts, it installs its own Apple Event handlers and calls AESetInteractionAllowed() with kAEInteractWithSelf. This should restrict it only to its own events, but for some reason that’s not the resulting behavior. He also pointed out that SecurityAgent has displayed similar weirdness; it is vulnerable to Apple Events even though it doesn’t calls an Apple Events function. We can see how this unexpected behavior could make patch development take much longer and may end up uncovering an even bigger problem. Check out [Dino]’s post for more information.

Build A Twitter Client With Fluid

June 25, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

The Fluid Site Specific Browser (SSB) is one of our favorite pieces of kit for Leopard. You can use Fluid to give web services you use constantly like Gmail, Facebook, Wikipedia, or Pandora their own icon and a browser tailored to that site’s specific workflow. Fluid based on WebKit and has plugin support among many other features. Embedded above is [Eric Eggert] showing how to create a reasonable Twitter client using it. The initial setup is identical to any other Fluid app: point it at https://twitter.com/. The clever bit is leveraging Fluid’s GreaseMonkey style userscripting support. He created a userscript to autorefresh. A second userscript is used to strip off all of the extraneous page elements leaving just the text field and the timeline. Every time you get a new message it generates a growl notification and you can even attach it to the status bar. Best of all: it avoids all API limitations since you’re accessing through the web interface.

Neutering The Apple Remote Desktop Exploit

June 19, 2008 by Eliot 5 Comments

Yesterday, Slashdot reported a privilege escalation vulnerability in OSX. Using AppleScript you can tell the ARDAgent to execute arbitrary shell script. Since, ARDAgent is running as root, all child processes inherit root privleges. Intego points out that if the user has activated Apple Remote Desktop sharing the ARDAgent can’t be exploited in this fashion. So, the short term solution is to turn on ARD, which you can do without giving any accounts access privileges. TUAW has an illustrated guide to doing this in 10.4 and 10.5.

EFiX Boots Leopard Retail DVDs On Generic Hardware

June 12, 2008 by Eliot 8 Comments

On June 23rd, EFiX is planning on releasing a USB dongle that will let any PC boot and install OSX from a retail DVD. The commercial device is supposed to take care of all patching and other woes OSX86 enthusiasts have had to deal with. Very little information is provided other than a statement that the development process took a lot of time and that they overcame “sabotage”… so, it’s got that going for it. Major OSX86 contributor (and Psystar hater) [Netkas] received a device to test and was pleased with the results. We’re just going to wait and see what happens. Not that it matters; they have no plans of releasing it in the US.

[via InsanelyMac]
[photo: Mario Seekr]

XBMC For Your Mac

May 12, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

XBMC (formerly Xbox Media Center) has always been a popular choice for retiring an original Xbox. Maybe people install it for lack of something better to do or maybe it’s the pride in having better media support than the 360. The XBMC team has found another device that has a pretty weak television experience, the Mac. Lifehacker took the latest XBMC for OSX beta build for a run now that it supports remote controls. It seems like a much more functional than Apple’s built in Front Row. There are a few things that don’t quite work yet, which you can find in the FAQ. We’re definitely going to try this on our old Mac mini… once we upgrade it to Leopard, which is an unfortunate caveat that might prevent people from running XBMC on legacy hardware. There is no Apple TV support planned because of limited horsepower and the hacking hurdles that might be required. If you’re interested in repurposing your old Xbox with XBMC, check out Lifehacker’s install guide.