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Posts in macOS
Locking down the OS X firewall
I attended Jay Beale's Discovering OS X weaknesses and fixing them with the new Bastille Linux port at Defcon last week. Jay did a great job presenting, and pointed out several HUGE flaws that are present with the default OS X "stealth" firewall rule set. The first major problem Jay pointed out was the fact that all UDP datagrams with source port 67 or 5353 are allowed in (this allows you to talk to ntpd and cups, which have a rocky security history). The second major flaw is the fact that the default configuration blocks ICMP type code 8 (ICMP echo requests), but allows all other ICMP traffic in…
$ read more →Microsoft Word is broadcasting on my network!
While performing some basic traffic analysis on my home wireless network, I noticed the folllowing broadcast traffic: Gak! I disabled rendezous on my laptop to avoid polluting the ether, and the applications that were running shouldn't be broadcasting messages! I was curious to see what was causing this, so I went into discovery mode. After reviewing ktrace, netstat and lsof data, I realized that the traffic was coming from Microsoft Word…
$ read more →Implementing backoff timers in RSS readers
I have recently been on a quest to find a new RSS reader for OS X. NetNewsWire looks to be the leading candidate, since LifeRea doesn't have a native port to OS X. One thing I noticed in the clients I tested, is that they have fixed times when they will check ALL feeds for new content. This time increment can be in minutes, hours, days, weeks or months…
$ read more →What are all those OS X processes?
This background-process reference will tell you.
$ read more →Thermal problems with macbook pro?
I came across the following post that discusses some of the thermal issues currently found in the macbook pros. According to the poster, Apple (or their suppliers) is incorrectly applying thermal paste to the CPU dies in the macbook pros, which is leading to higher than expected operating termperatures. The picture he presents from one of Apple's training manuals is amusing, and if they are following the suggestion in the picture, they are clearly misappropriating thermal grease. Great post, and good analysis!
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