Re: Should apple be making fun of Vista UAC?

Should Apple be making fun of Vista UAC? by ZDNet's George Ou -- Windows Vista UAC (User Account Control) has an additional security feature called Secure Desktop that hardens the UAC privilege escalation prompt, but some people seem to be upset with this feature because they say it's annoying. Apple has even gone as far as making a new TV commercial out of it with "PC" being bossed [...]

I disagree, what you have shown here is how UAC shows up when installing an application, however installing an application on Mac OS X can be as simple as drag and drop. Most of the software I download is downloaded in a DMG which you can mount. I can drag it into my Applications folder, and if I have Administrator rights, I won't get asked anything. If I don't have Administrator rights, I can run it right from the DMG or move it into another folder in my home directory aptly named Applications and run it from there. Mac OS X does not ask me for a user-name and password in both those cases, whereas the UAC will ask you if you want to run it as Administrator to install it, even if you would like to place it on your Desktop in a folder named Program Files.

The Mac OS X commercials also seem to refer to the Windows firewall, which asks whether you want to allow incoming or outgoing. When I ran Vista I had disabled the firewall, so I can't say if that is true or not, however I do feel that the Apple advertising is fair. Nothing about it is unfair. I as a user of Windows Vista am unable to run a setup program under any user rights other than that of an Administrator, which allows the installer full access to my entire machine, which is unacceptable to me. In Mac OS X I can drag it to any folder and execute it from there, and it won't have privileges above that of what the user is running at.

Even most .pkg's in Mac OS X can be installed in an alternate location as to not require Administrator privileges, however most if not all .pkg's are .pkg's since they need to install something in /System which is the guts of Mac OS X. For example, SMCFanControl requires this to install a kernel extension.

X11 mouse button pressed

For a Rube Goldberg device I needed a way to know if a mouse button was pressed on the root window of an X11 screen. Here is the code for it:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

#include <unistd.h>

#include <X11/Xlib.h>
#include <X11/Xutil.h>

int main() {

        Display *dsp = XOpenDisplay( NULL );
        if( !dsp ){ return 1; }

        int screenNumber = DefaultScreen(dsp);

        long eventMask = StructureNotifyMask;
        XSelectInput( dsp, DefaultRootWindow(dsp), eventMask );

        XEvent evt;

        eventMask = ButtonPressMask|ButtonReleaseMask;
        XSelectInput(dsp, DefaultRootWindow(dsp), eventMask); // override prev

        do{
                XNextEvent( dsp, &evt );   // calls XFlush()
                if ( (evt.type == ButtonRelease) || (evt.type == ButtonPress) )
                exit(2);
        } while( 1 );

return 0;
}

Compile:

gcc -lX11 -L/usr/local/include x11.c -o x11-mousebutton

Upon a mouse button being pressed it will exit 2, so using that return value in some script you can execute a command. For example, to open a CD rom drive so a domino falls over.

Boooo

Surprise!!!

It seems I have not blogged in a while. I don't know how many of you know that I have moved into a house with 6 other guys, which is going great. THe house is awesome, however with that also come some responsibilities which people do not seem to want to take. For example, cleaning the kitchen after using it. Currently it smells really bad, like foul. I need to go clean it since others will not do so, however I am not happy about that, off course. Since the kitchen is really mine, as I am one of the only ones that really cooks I am going to set some new rules. I don't know if I will be able to enforce them or not, but I can try can't I?

School is great, like always, recently did midterms, which were okay, nothing too hard. I am loving this semester, unfortunately our room 244 (Yes, our room) is being renovated so we were kicked out, however that did mean I got to take home quite a bit of free wire, solder and other cool toys to play with over this break. I went and visited the Phoenix FIRST Robotics competition together with Kris, a room mate of mine. That was rather fun, this years game was definitely a challenge for the different teams, and many of them played it extremely well, which was surprising. Then again, I did not get to see the pre-quarter finals matches, so my perspective may be skewed. I am considering going to visit FIRST robotics at nationals this year just to be there to watch the games!

Well, I am off to clean my room, which is currently in the state of mess. I need to send out the 4"x4" sample of my old air mattress which broke (long story, will explain later, perhaps) so I can get the replacement shipped to me so that I can sleep on something comfortable again. The floor is kind of hard and does not really feel all that great.

RegisterFly.com -- A nightmare story

As most of you know, I gained control of Spammers-paradise.com and spammersparadise.com from Casey when he decided it was not in his best interest to keep going with the site. I know many of you have been pissed off about the fact that the site has been down, however now that the domains are safe at GoDaddy I am not afraid to speak out about what had happened, and why our beloved site is not back up and running.

Just as I had all my domains at RegisterFly, as did Casey. I had slowly started moving my domains away from them for the reason that their website was always slow, and their customer support sucked balls. However Casey stuck with RegisterFly, and why should he not, they at the time provided a service, and that is all he needed. After he handed the domain over to me by pushing the domains into my account, I have had nothing but trouble. I was unable to change the registrant address on the domain to be ICANN compliant, and I was unable to unlock the domain.

The trouble started on January 8th when I noticed the domain was up for renewal in just a few weeks time, I paid GoDaddy to transfer the domains to them, and started setting everything up on the RegisterFly site, that is when I walked into the unlock of domain problem. It took them all of 25 days to unlock my domain, which at the time was around the 2nd or 3rd of February. After that was completed they did not answer my support ticket about the EPP code I required so that I could transfer my domain, on February 12th they made a change to their website, and now the EPP code was listed underneath the registrant info, on the page where you could modify that information. However, the code was invalid, and yet another support ticket was opened. On February 13th I got the new EPP code, and put in the transfer with GoDaddy.

Now, when a transfer is about to happen, they have to provide a link to a page where you can either deny or confirm the transfer, however this webpage that they provided was broken in one big way, if no support personal was at a desk, it would refuse to let the transfer happen automatically, so I had to wait 5 days for the auto "Hey if you don't contact us we will let it be moved" thing to work, after which now the domain is back under my control at GoDaddy.

I am happy to see that there is a community based around the way RegisterFly is stealing from customers, and trying to figure out why the company is slowly destroying itself. I hereby will remove any future recommendations to them, as well as nullifying any old statements about them.

One site that is actively trying to let RegisterFly hear people's complaints is http://registerflies.com/. As a funny side note, they are an SSL certification seller, however their logged in section of the website is using an old certificate that expired 3 days ago. That just makes it look even more as a shady company than it currently is.

spammers-paradise.com should be up and running shortly, definitely will need the sp.com community to help me out and to get it back up and running as it was before. I apologise for not coming out and saying something sooner, however RegisterFly has been known to lose customers domains randomly, just do a Google on RegisterFly to hear the horror stories.

Technorati tag: RegisterFly (To more easily find more horror stories)

SCALE 5x

SCALE 5x is coming up this week. I will be driving to Los Angeles with a group of other UAT students to go have fun at the parties :D. If anyone else is going to be going, please send me an email if you would like to come meet me in person, if you are unable to find out who I am without actually contacting me first :P. I will most probably have one of my Mac's with me, and my Toshiba Portege. I will also probably be around people wearing UAT Tech Ninja shirts, so if you see a group of people walking around with black shirts, and or UAT hats, come over and ask for me :D.

Well, I am excited to go as you may have noticed, I am really looking forward to the conference, to hear great people talk about Linux and other open source stuff, and to play with new products as well.