No

If you equate real searching with regular expressions then no. However the same (nested) Boolean, wildcard, case and date stuff carries over. So the search is glob-like, which I guess also doesn't do a real search by your criteria.

For documentation, see http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/SpotlightQuery/Concepts/QueryFormat.html

@Dan 55

I stand corrected, but in my defence I was thinking of a careless security mistake in a piece of software that was actually exploited. As the article you link to says "Having the passwords will not do anybody any good for the moment [...] nobody even seems certain that the accounts access the machine at all". However it was my mistake to conflate the two things and to claim that you were wrong.

As to the rest of my original post, I'm still uncertain as to how one would put damaging software onto an Apple battery. I don't deny that there's a potential security problem here (though if the battery firmware could be altered only by a piece of software already running as root on the machine then I might, since then logically the number of attack vectors isn't increased, just the number of attacks) but I'm curious what a prudent person should do in response.

@Dan 55

Minor correction: Apple have never hard coded the root password for iOS devices; certain jail break tools used to do that, creating a security flaw for users of those tools only.

I otherwise agree with you mostly, Apple's attitude seemingly being that security updates aren't very urgent.

One thing I'm unsure of from the article: how do you perform the attack? Do you need physical access and/or root permissions? Anything of that nature that comes through Software Update requires an administrator password - does this flaw get around that somehow?

They've a vested interest in upsell, though

As will anybody else that enters the market. And once Windows for ARM is out, somebody else will have exactly the same motivations that they did during the period in which Intel netbooks mysteriously doubled in price.

@ Someone has used "a handle is required"

If your only complaint against Objective-C is the manual memory management (which is reference counted so as to keep all management decisions local, but that's about the only positive thing you can think of to say about it), then you're behind the times. A garbage collector was added in 10.6, albeit that it was a hassle to write suitable code, and automatic reference counting is added in the new compiler and 10.7, which does it all for you at runtime via [a limited form of] static analysis. It's so easy to use and so trusted that it's enabled by default for new projects. You can even enable or disable it file-by-file so as to migrate existing projects and to continue to interface with standard C and C++ code without problems.

Of course, most people's complaints against Objective-C go a lot deeper so you probably have other concerns, but that's the only complaint I've ever agreed with and now seems to be solved.

InDesign being the exception to the rule?

The reason InDesign took so much market share from Quark Express, even before the Creative Suite, was that it worked on OS X a lot earlier. It's a shame Adobe didn't seem to learn very much from that early embrace of a new technology.

I think it's the sandboxing that makes the story

The story is quite clear, as you point out, that ASLR and full disk encryption are areas in which OS X has now caught up with Windows and Linux (or Ubuntu as it seems to call it). It then suggests that sand boxing processes and designing the applications (and daemons) that come with the system to isolate different logical parts into different processes within different sandboxes constituted a step in advance of any of the competing operating systems. So that's the leapfrog jump — the fact that the supplied browser, email app, PDF viewer, etc are all now aggressively using sand boxing, for which there is now high level API support.

Whether or not that's a valid assessment is one thing; just repeating what the article already says about areas where Apple have played catch up is quite another.

Re: pre-emptive multitasking, citing Apple's failure to transition to a modern OS until around 2000 feels a bit disingenuous as a comment on the OS they transitioned to.

Re: 64bit, that's been a feature since 2005. The difference in approaches has been that Apple have uncharacteristically gone for a gradual transition, though I think that's because the hardware has made a gradual transition.

iOS is behind on some of the features listed

For example, jailbreakme.com uses a PDF exploit — a buffer overrun or some other flaw that allows a maliciously crafted PDF to perform arbitrary code execution. The cat and mouse with Apple from that specific method of jailbreaking has surrounded finding exploitable flaws in the PDF renderer and fixing them.

In Lion, PDF parsing and rendering is devolved to one or more separate, sand boxed processes that don't have the ability to read or write to files or otherwise communicate very widely with the outside world. So Lion takes a big step forward in trying to secure against that type of exploit.

Of course there are likely to be further flaws and exploits, but Lion is a step up from iOS in terms of overall security. Since iOS and OS X use the same kernel and share many of the system APIs (though the user interface stuff is deliberately very different), the general rule is that whichever was released most recently has Apple's most up-to-date security. I expect the new OS X stuff will migrate to iOS in the near future.

A fluff piece, but too much hyperbole on your part

"OSX was the worst security offender in the world with 1500 vulns as per securnia"

Secunia issue advisories. Each advisory may mention multiple related vulnerabilities.

They lists 1555 vulnerabilities for all versions of Mac OS X between 2003 and 2011 combined. In terms of advisories, they are aware of 8 unpatched advisories from a total of 155 in the full 8 years they've been tracking the OS. The most severe unpatched advisory is rated by them as "Moderately critical".

Compare to Windows, which is broken down by release. Like all versions of OS X added together, Windows Vista has 8 unpatched advisories, from pretty much the same all-time total (157 versus 155, but whatever). The most severe unpatched advisory is rated as "Highly critical".

Windows 7 has only 5 unpatched advisories of 76 to date but the most severe is again "Highly critical".

Linux is broken down by distribution, which makes it hard to compare. But that's not just a statistical tabulation difference, it's a real on-the-ground difference so fair enough. For the record, Ubuntu 10.10 has been the subject of 133 advisories to date but all have been patched. So kudos to the Linux crowd.

But to go from that to "OSX was the worst security offender in the world" feels like overreaching. It requires you to compare eight years of Apple's problems with two years of Microsoft's, to ignore the advice Secunia are actually giving as to the seriousness of the problems and to conflate problems that were solved with ones that remain an issue.

@AC: not quite that simple

OS X's sandboxing is exposed for use of all applications via a high-level API and is implemented across all applications that the OS comes with. So those are both huge steps, but the sand boxing doesn't apply to software that isn't written to use it. So your existing applications aren't sand boxed, at least in the sense that the term is being used here.

Apple have stated that applications must use the sand boxing to be accepted onto the App Store as of some date later in the year, so there is a carrot and stick aspect to it, but you can still download any old application you want from the Internet and it can still do whatever it wants (or, more relevantly, expose exploits that allow malicious agents to use it as an agent to do whatever they want).

Is it usable outside of Windows?

The Steam system requirements list Windows 2000/XP/Vista but also "Sound Cards Supported: AdLib compatible cards, SoundBlaster compatible cards and the Roland LAPC-1". So does it come in a form where I could transfer it to DosBox on another platform?

You're not allowing for the separate educational store

"University and college students or students accepted to university or college" qualify, and educational pricing for the MacBook Air is "from £730" (though I'm not sure exactly what you get for being in the student category, as you can't access the store other than from your campus network).

The original MacBook also lives on for bulk educational purchasers, much as they had exclusive access to the eMac for quite a few years back in the early-to-mid 2000s.

Not quite right on the facts

Small correction: Mini DisplayPort and Thunderbolt have the same physical connector and any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac can use the exact same accessories as a Mini-DisplayPort-equipped Mac for connection to external displays.

Obviously you can also connect any old DVD drive you want, no need to buy an Apple-branded one.

I'm a hawk on eliminating the optical media drive from all computers on the grounds that I barely use mine and don't recall ever having used one away from my home. So investing in a single, external drive and keeping that with the USB floppy drive on my shelf feels like an acceptable way to reduce the cost and size of any future computers I buy. You know, across the whole industry, irrespective of whether specific individual manufacturers pass savings on.

It's not a video port; it is backwards compatible

The new port, codeveloped with Intel, can be used to interface to displays, storage (at better-than-eSata speeds), peripherals, external graphics cards, etc. That's why it has been developed. The objective is to further shrink the number of ports on computers, and a secondary benefit taken advantage of by this monitor is that the monitor can act as a break-out box since it provides USB, Firewire, ethernet and Thunderbolt ports while connecting to the computer via a single cable.

If you have any mini-displayport peripherals, you can plug those directly into your Thunderbolt port instead. It's backwards compatible.

@Jolyon

I think some people can be oversensitive, given how often Flash support is used as a proxy by those that determine in advance that they want to say something negative for its own sake and only subsequently pick through the feature list to find something specific to say.

I also don't think the comment deserved any down votes.

Allowing for VAT...

... UK prices are actually cheaper. 69p - VAT = 57.5p. 57.5p converted to USD is 92 cents. The 99 cents doesn't include sales tax because there is no national US tax; if you live in a state that collects tax on digital downloads then it'll be added to the $0.99.

Not sure where the £120 comes from...

... but you can upload e-books from any source to your Kindle, subject to file format restrictions. Its most native format is mobi, not the more common epub, with plain text and PDF support also available, though panning and zooming on a PDF is very, very painful due to screen response times so you ideally want one formatted for A5 or smaller.

It'll confirm everything you secretly suspected about open source user interface design, but Calibre (and others I've forgotten the names of) can do conversions for you if you have any suitably non-DRMd epubs about. Project Gutenberg will give you mobi files directly, but that's generally unnecessary since Amazon seem to have grabbed them all and put them into their shop already. Though you often have to navigate thirty chancers who have opportunistically uploaded the same content with a price tag.

Not such a great plan

In that it would create unpredictability for every other party wanting to use HTML5 that has played properly and hence doesn't have patents to trade with W3C.

But, yes, I support the sentiment that Apple's hand should be forced somehow.

Wishful thinking

Android devices have been on the market for about 75% as long as iOS devices, Android phones outsell iPhones in several major markets, yet they manage only about 50% as much traffic per this article. And that's seemingly discounting the iPod Touch.

My feeling is that because Android is flexible and open, a lot of people are getting Android phones with expensive data plans, and in terms of quantities shipped it's still primarily a phone operating system. So there's no real one versus the other conclusion to be drawn, other than - as I say in my title - claiming pretty impressive market share based on little time in the wild doesn't add up.

My guess...

... they probably had someone much cheaper doing the ordinary "social networks, telephones and other social-engineering vectors" testing, or already had them done. Or the point was to prove to somebody that those aren't the exclusive points of attack rather than that the system is safe.

To be fair though...

... Android has probably just reached its stable share, having reached it very quickly because growth was so incredible last year. Apple will obviously want to try to chip away at that because gain from anyone is good for them, but it's not a fight to the death. Markets can contain more than one leading brand and market share generally doesn't operate like a game of Risk. While we're talking the realities of the real world, is it also safe to point out that open versus closed ideologies are basically a fringe debate?

@AC: you're arguing a different point

The contentious statement was "People have been opting for android because of apple and the company ethos", which even you don't agree with, instead citing considerations about the actual product. The other posters have similarly supplied a bunch of reasons that people — including well educated people with no other motivations — choose an Android handset over the iPhone. To try to boil this conversation down into Apple fanboys versus the world requires incredible blinkers.

Pros and cons though

While I'd prefer to keep myself insulated from News International, The Telegraph Group, etc, and Apple already have my details, I'm quite against Apple for imposing the price match condition. Fair enough if they want to impose a 30% charge on subscriptions, if that's what they've calculated the market will tolerate then good luck to them, but to then say that even if the iOS App Store isn't the most cost effective way to deliver to consumers then the extra costs can't be passed on puts far too much of a burden on producers.

Disagree on a bunch of points, but by no means all

Specifically:

(c) and (h): these extra features tend to be things that people don't actually care about, outside of a tech blog niche, and in any case can generally be found on Android phones too — with similarly few people particularly interested.

(e): I attended a Nokia development day recently, where we were given free phones and lots of information, and told about the latest cash prize development competitions. The Nokia employees were very nice and are clearly trying very hard.

(g): actually, I think quite a lot of people can tell you that Nokia phones come with Carl Zeiss lenses. They just also (very erroneously) think that it's a made-up brand ala Matsui. So this hits the (c)/(h) point of people not being particularly interested. On screens they're not really any better. The iPhone still has the leading DPI, and I think that Samsung's AMOLED screens provide the best overall colour. I have the feeling Nokia use a similar OLED technology at the top of the range, but they're definitely not ahead on that front.

On the purely technical/internals front (which I think people definitely don't care about at all, whereas I accept that some people do care about whether they can connect up via HDMI), Nokia are almost alone in being yet to produce an ARMv7 phone, and tend to go with the less powerful Broadcom GPUs rather than the good PowerVR stuff. So I wouldn't say they're technically brilliant.

That said, you're completely right that they do the phone stuff brilliantly. I used a Nokia phone up until 2008 and was very often the only person able to get a signal, especially when I lived in Cumbria. However, I find the OS a bit confused and inconsistent (eg, on the N8, just talking about built-in apps, some scroll areas require you to touch and pull a scroll bar, some are direct manipulation with no inertia, some have inertia but it varies from app to app), have never understood their holy devotion to having just one slightly peculiar font — especially as it makes web pages look really awful.

So, ummm, conclusion: hardware very good in some areas, good enough in all others, software definitely needed a change.

@Jolyon

It'd just look like the TV is constantly halfway between a fade from one to the other, surely?

@AC

If it follows the normal App Store rules, then you can have unlimited downloads for as long as the product is available. Which, I appreciate, answers only one of your very minor concerns, but there you go.

Might be smart to do a completely clean install, grab a Time Machine backup right then, and any time you want to refresh just chose 'restore from Time Machine backup' via the recovery disk that came with your machine (which was also the OS disk, at least up until now).

Who are you talking about?

You seem to have some sort of confirmation bias. Scroll up the screen and look at the comments posted before the 31st of May at 13:28 and there's nothing like a flock of anyone in particular, and almost no whining.

It's 70% of those returned

Since the overall proportion returned is probably, I don't know, 10% at the absolute worst, the average smartphone punter isn't imputed at all. What they're probably trying to do is put pressure on Google by stating publicly that Marketplace policies have given them a dramatic increase in returns.

Like you, I suspect that this isn't much of a problem at all to most people.

Fingers crossed for new development tools

Javascript isn't very nice, but quite a few people are working on that without any need to change the infrastructure underneath. The specific examples may not be to your liking, but e.g. Objective-J and CoffeeScript are both languages that attempt to improve on and compile down to Javascript.

Microsoft do some of the best development tools in the world and have in-house language design expertise. They've also got a pretty good HTML engine nowadays. So if they decide to go with HTML+CSS+Javascript as a replacement for native code, I'm optimistic they'll be able to deliver a fantastic toolset that isn't in any way limited by the semantics of Javascript, and retain good end-user performance.

You're probably quite safe

Demographic differences are the most relevant thing I think - amongst the Mac demographic is a significant group of people with no technical grounding. A desktop Linux user is unlikely to believe that there's some magical piece of antivirus software installed that they didn't know about, and weirdly never saw before becoming 'infected', or alternatively that you can virus scan from within a browser, and is very unlikely to act without secondary confirmation (by manual inspection of the filing, possibly) and without first checking the web for suitable open source tools.

At a guess...

... they'll adapt the x86 emulation code they bought with Virtual PC and deploy on the XBox 360 when running XBox games. Obviously it'll need some work because the target processor is ARM rather than PowerPC but it's probably easier than starting from nothing.

Quite the opposite

Per the Bloomberg article you link to: "Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, will showcase the interface running on hardware with an Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) Tegra chip, the people said last week, declining to be identified because the plans are confidential."

So that would make it sound like they're interested in doing tablets with ARM and ARM only.

One more difference

Apple got out of its funk by abandoning the existing software platform, bringing in external management and merging in an external development team, then segueing into a brand new market and then several other new markets.

Nokia already switched management and are outsourcing a large part of the software stack. But they're effectively ceding a significant part of their destiny, something Apple have always managed to avoid.

That said, I agree with the article. Nokia's nothing like finished, its old strategy was on a crash course long before Elop turned up, and the platform switch gamble is the only workable way forwards. You can argue about the decision to use Windows Mobile versus other comers, but its hardly the most significant of his decisions.

There's a difference in approach though

Apple assume everything to be malevolent until they've discovered it to be otherwise. Google assume everything to be benign until they've discovered it to be otherwise. And that's without getting into the tests each applies to determine what they think shouldn't be made available to customers.

They're trojans though

So OS security doesn't really come into it. That's the whole point of the trojan horse — the security is sufficiently onerous that you just get someone trusted to let you in.

@Rich 30

... or you could just copy and paste the file URL from the 'Activity' window to the 'Downloads' window. No need to include bit.ly or anything similar, whatever happens. Or install the ClickToFlash extension (from about halfway down the page you go to if you click 'Get Extensions'), right click on the youtube video and select 'Download Video'.

Then go back to doing whatever you were really browsing for in whatever browser you like.

@xyz

The inclusion of an anti-malware tool with versions of the OS since 2009 — per the article — would appear to make your comment a little late.

@Levente

You're accusing iTards of ad hominem attacks? Surely some sort of satire?

I'm of the opinion that the 'i' has outlived its welcome, but I guess it makes it very easy to come up with brand names that are legally protectable and which associate new products with a person's existing perceptions of Apple.

I was sort of hoping that MobileMe indicated a move away from iEverything, with the iPad getting the name because the similarity to iPod was just too alluring, but I guess that wasn't the case. Oh well, they're just names.

@AC

From the article, Apple's complaints — and my guesses at the reasoning behind them are:

"infringed upon patents and violated its trademark", i.e. manufactured (if he was painting them himself as other commenters allege) and sold equipment with the Apple logo on without permission.

"using deceptive practices in the creation and sale of the product", presumably by making some sort of claim that these were authentic Apple parts for genuine white iPhones rather than genuine black parts, repainted.

Though it's ironic that Apple appear to be using (amongst others) laws with the purpose of allowing a company to protect is reputation to sue a 17-year old who through significant initiative managed to fill a gap they'd created when they failed to ship a simple product for an extended period of time. I think they're being really stupid on this one.

@Cameron Colley

The "rabid fanboi" of your imagination doesn't exist. It's just a cheap caricature, calculated to inflame, that you've conveniently picked upon to be a scapegoat.

See above

The default user is an Administrator in OS X parlance. Such privilege is not the same as and is significantly less than root.

@Brian

Safari defines 'safe files' as: movies, pictures, sounds, PDF and text documents, and disk images and other archives. It doesn't include executable files. Having read some other sites on this issue today, it seems that the program comes as an installable application archive. So the OS launches the standard package installer, prompting the user to click onward to install the app. They have a few screens to click through, including one where they select a target drive and then confirm the installation location.

Anyway, 'execute' is the wrong verb. Safe files are opened. You can't throw arbitrary executable code onto a Mac using Safari's built in, designed behaviour.

It doesn't mean what you think it means

All the stuff you would need administrator privileges to adjust on another UNIX requires the entry of the user's password in a default OS X install. However, write privileges to /Applications are gifted without password.

Acting as the default user, if you have to sudo to do it in Linux or BSD, you have to sudo to do it in OS X.

@Paul_Murphy

Allow me: OS X contains a BSD layer, derived from BSD. Because it has a terminal, it also contains a bunch of open source components that you commonly see included in Linux distributions. WebKit is notably a fork from KHTML and KDE is generally closely associated with Linux distributions. There's even a rootless X11 manager if you want to use it (though I don't think it's a default install).

So, fine, technically it's not Linux-derived because its original development predates that of Linux and Linux is just a kernel, whereas OS X explicitly uses a completely distinct kernel. But it's quite accurate to say that it shares a large code footprint with what people idiomatically call 'Linux' and that at least some components were part of idiomatic Linux before they were part of OS X.

I'm sure that you could find a bunch of BSD, Linux or OS X people that would be angered by the statement, but hopefully not at as irreverent a site as this.

As above, my guess is...

... downloading to another folder is achieved by supplying an archive with an absolute path, and one of the built-in extractors failing to validate that properly. bsdtar is safe, so I'll guess it's a zip problem. The default set up also doesn't allow users to write to absolutely anywhere on the system, but it does allow them to write to /Applications, so whatever they're doing probably doesn't allow a write to anywhere.

Yes, though, it's a big gaping hole.

They were confused

"Administrator privileges" tends to be synonymous with unfettered access to anything on a computer. A default install of OS X will require a password be entered for a bunch of tasks, such as viewing things stored on the keychain, making changes to certain system preferences and some other things.

However, you're quite right because on a default install, and I'll wager on 99.9% of machines out there, the single user has a tick against 'Allow user to administer this computer' and can write whatever they want to /Applications, whenever they want. Combine that with Safari shipping with 'Open "safe" files after downloading' ticked by default and it's easy to see how this program installs itself, given that archives are considered safe and I guess one of the archive formats doesn't properly guard against absolute paths.

All of the proper, internal paths should be properly locked down by default, so in theory this program shouldn't be able to do anything to stop you from just dragging it to the trash and hence uninstalling it. That said, it should still be a major embarrassment that it can install itself in the first place.