The ZFS filesystem which was being used by developers at Apple for a possible future update to the Snow Leopard OS or future OS X systems has been stopped indefinitely according to an official statement by MacOS Forge.

The statement couldn’t be anymore clear:

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

While many rumors about the reasons for the work stop have surfaced, there’s speculation that the purchase of Sun by Oracle added to those issues. Oracle owns their own filesystem (BTRFS) which is still under development and which would have competed against the ZFS system. While ZFS has also faced patent issues that could have potentially led to lawsuits and other development issues down the road. [AppleInsider]

ZFS File System Development For Future Snow Leopard OS Update “Discontinued” is a post from: The Inquisitr

It appears that Apple’s Snow Leopard has gotten itself an appetite for your data under certain conditions. The issue; which cnet wrote about back on September 19, has to do with how Snow Leopard handles guest accounts.

What happens according to all accounts so far is that shortly before the bug appears a Guest folder appears in the /Users directory. Interestingly enough previous to this point no such folder existed. Now when the computer is restarted you are somehow logged in as a guest and all your files stored under you main account get deleted.

As Ed Oswald at Technologizer notes the only way to recover from this requires that you have a full backup available.

Moral of the story here? If you’re on Snow Leopard, start backing up your home folder regularly.

Apple is currently looking into the issue, however has not provided any guidance as to when the problem could be fixed.

Watch your data get eaten – bad Microso… err .. Apple is a post from: The Inquisitr

The latest version of the Mac operating system OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) hit shelves Friday, and although it’s receiving no where nearly as much hype as previous versions, I still none the less couldn’t resist buying it.

The lack of hype for Snow Leopard is directly related to what it offers: instead of a range of new features, Snow Leopard mostly offers under the hood improvements, including speed and general usability features that many won’t notice, at least not initially.

Installation

Installation was straight forward. Some sites recommend a full backup before installation; my main machine is running Time Machine, so I did nothing extra before running it.

Installation time does vary between machines. So far I’ve installed it on an early 2007 Quad Core Mac Pro with 4gb of RAM, and a 8 week old 13″ Macbook Pro with 2gb of RAM . Install times were 45 minutes and 1 hour, 10 minutes respectively.

There were no hiccups at all in installation. Straight forward, click on a few options (and give it your system password upfront) then sit and leave. At the end you get the standard OS X welcome video that came with Leopard.

Speed

The most noticeable change in Snow Leopard is speed. Both my machines were running Safari 4 before hand, so I didn’t expect to see any significant difference there, but I was wrong. Safari 4 was already quick, under Snow Leopard it’s noticeably quicker again. It’s hard to qualify how much faster, but sites load seemingly in half the time they did before (probably not by measurement, but that’s the feeling it gives.)

Spotlight is also noticeably quicker, particularly on a machine where you’ve got a ton of documents and programs installed. Leopard was an improvement on Tiger, but Snow Leopard feels instantaneous.

The overall system takes up less room on a hard drive (I’d love to see Windows do that) and everything feels more sprightly, even if the difference isn’t as noticeable as Safari and Spotlight.

Hard to get a screenshot of, but preview is there up top

Preview feature

Clicking down on an icon in the dock now shows every window opened for the program, Expose of sorts for each program. It’s a nice feature that makes accessing windows easier, particularly on my little 13″ Macbook Pro that doesn’t exactly offer a lot of screen space.

Bug fix

The biggest bug fix for me was with my Macbook Pro. Despite owning the current model, my Macbook Pro randomly hung/ froze out of sleep, seemingly at random times, and I can’t tell you how annoying the spinning color wheel appearing is when you’ve dished out good money for the latest Apple machine (note that the frozen times were never permanent, usually 5-20 seconds at a time.) 18 hours later, and purposely closing the machine multiple times, and it hasn’t hung/ frozen once.

New bugs

The only issue so far (and it’s an odd one) is that I can no longer copy and paste out of Firefox into Safari. I use both; it’s an old habit dating back to when Safari use to bork the admin side of WordPress, and back before Safari offered WebInspector (I still like to use Firebug.) I can cut and paste from Firefox into TextEdit, then cut and paste from TextEdit to Safari, but not directly.

Summary

There’s no overall compelling reason to go out and buy Snow Leopard immediately, vs say previous upgrades to OS X, but there is very good argument against not buying it, and that’s price. The family pack cost AU$59, and single AU$39 (for memory it’s $29 in the US); and that’s not a lot of money by any stretch. For the price, it’s worth it. If you have hanging issues with your current Mac, then it becomes a must have.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard: First Impressions is a post from: The Inquisitr

There’s a lot of talk going on in the tech blogosphere about the newest release of OS X, Snow Leopard, coming to market with a built-in malware scanner. Now that it has shipped we are seeing exactly what lies behind the real thing and it turns out to be not much more than an XML styled file called XProtect.plist that at this point only contains the signature information for two trojans.

Interestingly enough the files detailed are for trojans that hit the web earlier this year, there is nothing for more current exploits. While security experts may be divided on the actual usefulness of such a limited scanning the reality is that at this point in time the Mac doesn’t need the same type of malware definition file that Windows does. This is because for the most part Mac doesn’t share the same market share or interest for malware creators.

For much of the life of the Mac computers there has been no real need to worry about things like viruses, trojans, or other types of malware because the truth of the matter is that as a platform it held no attraction for those people who create malware. This unfortunately has given Mac users a deluded point of view that Mac’s are some how immune to malware. Many a flamewar has risen over this fact with people who try to point out that Mac’s real security has been one of market share rather than true security baked into the operating system.

It isn’t just Windows users who have been trying to say this in defense of their operating system of choice but is also coming from die-hard Apple fans who use Mac systems day in and day out. Such a person is Dino Dai Zovi who has been hacking Mac’s for almost as long as he has been using computers. The winner of the PWN2OWN hacking contest in 2007 said recently that “the Mac is not magically protected from malware”.

Charlie Miller, co-author of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook with Dai Zovi,  who is a multi-year winner of the PWN2OWN hacking contests said in an interview

"I had a feeling that Mac was easier (to hack) than Windows," he said. "If I can find the Safari bug or exploit in a few days and it would take me 10 times as long for IE, why would I do that? I go after the easiest guy."

Even in light of what people like Miller and Dai Zovi are saying there is still a large contingent of Mac users who truly believe that they are invulnerable to malware by virtue of the Unix base that OS X is built on. It is also the same type of opinions held by the Linux community as well. As much as these people like to believe this they are ignoring a fundamental law of our world – whatever mankind creates someone will find some way to figure out how it works and then subvert it.

Pick any technology created by man at at some point some-one finds a way around it, a way through it or some way to break it. It is an inescapable law and just because Mac users would like to think that OS X is above all this they are living in a dream world.

Apple though may be coming out of their dream state fugue with Snow Leopard and the inclusion of a malware scanner. For Mac security experts like Dino Dai Zovi though this initial step may not go far, or deep, enough as he recently put forth his wish list when it comes to Snow Leopard

In June, Dai Zovi reported on a new local privilege escalation vulnerability researchers had discovered that gives local root access on Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. He offered up a wish list for Snow Leopard that included: real" ASLR; "full use of hardware-enforced Non-eXecutable memory (NX);" default 64-bit native execution for security-sensitive processes; sandbox policies for Safari, Mail.app, and third-party applications (akin to what Chrome has); and Mandatory code signing for kernel extensions.

At this point Dai Zovi also adds Leopard has a security level akin to something between Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Vista and it still remains to be seen where Snow Leopard will fall.

Right now the Mac only has about 5 percent market share worldwide with half of that being US users but it is a share that is rising, from 3.73 percent to 4.86 percent in one year. With that rise though also comes the increased visibility of OS X as a target for malware creators so the dreamland that many Mac users live in when it comes to security is in danger of crashing down around them.

As Charlie Miller said

"No computer or operating system is more or less secure when it comes to users being tricked into downloading something,"

image courtesy of Mac Magazine Brazil

OS X’s changing security landscape is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Apple Online store has officially offered a release date of August 28th 2009 for OS X Snow Leopard, an OS that was originally set for a September release date. The new OS has promised extra functionality along with improvements to such popular Mac apps as Time Machine and the Finder App.

The upgrade cost is a mere $29 and comes with free shipping, while Mac families can pick up a five license package for only $49 with free shipping. The current upgrade requires an Intel-based Mac device, at least 1GB RAM and 5GB Storage space.

So what does the upgrade offer? How about 64-bit compatibility, faster overall processing, 7GB less space than Leopard and even Microsoft Exchange support for all your business email needs. [via Apple]

Apple Officially Confirms OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Release For August 28th is a post from: The Inquisitr

Yes the weekends can get boring around the old tech blogosphere which is one of the reasons why starting Friday mornings the more experienced tech bloggers start hunting up something – anything – to get a good old fashioned bitchmeme going. After all what’s the point of just have the same old boring stuff to constantly re-hash for two days and a fresh news cycle starts.

However sometimes that desperation for a weekend bitchmeme really does nothing more than show how shallow we can all be sometimes; and this weekend was no different with the appearance of a snow leopard as the background picture for Live.com search page. Now for those that might not grasp the humor behind this it should be pointed out that the next update/release of Mac OS X is codenamed snow leopard.

Ha ha ha ha.

Gizmodo was the first it appears to question why this beautiful picture of a snow leopard made the Live.com search page background; which lead to a whole discussion on Twitter about the meaning behind Microsoft doing this. Of course not one to let a chance go by the folks at LiveSide had their little bit of fun with it suggesting that it was nothing more than a sly wink at Apple.

Now as humorous as this all might have been up till this point it was Ina Fried at c|net who just had to throw some whoopee cushions on the fire to see what would result by suggesting that this was a hint that Microsoft and Apple had cut a search deal

But another crazy thought crossed my mind. What if Microsoft has landed a deal to make Live Search the default in the next version of the Mac OS. For a long time now, Apple’s Safari has had a Google search bar built-in. I don’t know how much traffic that generates for the search giant, but it would seem to be at least as significant as some of the PC deals that Microsoft is paying good money to get.

But thank goodness for saner heads like MG Siegler over on ParisLemon who quickly and succinctly put the kibosh on that idea

Uh, you should have stopped at “But” Ina. Forget for a second that it’s the whole Microsoft/Apple thing — Do you really think Apple would ever think Live Search, which next to no one uses, is good enough to be an integral part of their OS? No. Let me repeat: No.

All in all though on a scale of 1 to 10 for bitchmemes this might rate a 5 for humor but definitely doesn’t even move the bar in regards to being a good old fashion bitchmeme – in fact it was pretty pathetic.

[picture courtesy of Gizmodo]

Bitchmeme desperation leads to snow leopard silliness is a post from: The Inquisitr