A new trojan called Bash/QHost.WB is doing it’s rounds amongst Mac users, the trojan purports to be a Adobe Flash installer for OS X. Whilst secretly hijacking your hosts file, redirecting all attempts to access Google webpages to a fake page hosted in the Netherlands.
The trojan is also designed to bug the user and presumably earn the writer cash by popping up adverts on the victims machine.
Many people believe OS X is immune from virus infection due to its need for elevated privileges in order to install such software. However users are being tricked into thinking this is the real thing, and are installing the trojan.
It’s always best to avoid third party software hosting sites when downloading/installing software, and for Flash you’re best downloading direct from Adobe‘s website. Not only will this ensure you get a true Flash installation, but also that you get the latest available version.
If you have been infected by this, or any other Mac virus you can download a copy of Sophos AntiVirus for Mac for free from Sophos’s website.
Upon account creation you are given access to 5GB of free online storage, with access to more (at a price) In fact a total of 55GB is available, if you are willing to pay the hefty price tag of £50 per year!
iCloud.com features all of the applications/facilitates you’d have expected to find in MobileMe, the first immediate difference is the interface of the apps. They have been designed to look similar to the apps found on Apple’s iPad range.
The iCloud.com‘s calendar and iCloud.com‘s Contacts look similar to the ones found in OS X Lion, with the ‘fake’ leather look and the red tab for a bookmark.
iCloud.com also features iWork, which is designed to sync all your ‘Pages’ documents on your web connected devices.
The opening of iCloud.com to developer means Apple should be on track for their ‘Fall’ public release, which is rumoured to be around September and at the same time as the iPhone 5.
If you intend to sign up to iCloud.com on it’s release its worth remembering to use it to it’s full potential your iOS devices will need to be running iOS 5 and your Mac’s will need to be running OS X Lion!
iTunes, and the Mac App store can be a funny and frustrating place sometimes.. Yes, I understand they need to ‘protect’ less tech savvy people.. However if you are running the pre release Lion Golden Master, perhaps you know what your doing when you attempt to download the released OS X Lion from the app store.
If you try and buy OS X Lion from the AppStore on a mac that’s running OS X Lion Developer Preview the ‘buy’ button will simply say Installed, and you will be unable to purchase it.
That is of course, unless you hold the ‘Alt’ key and click on the lion above the button, it will then change to the expected buy button.
Which takes you to challenge number 2! OS X Lion Golden Master has a higher version number then the one in the app store. Meaning you will get the following window popup:
Now, if you press and hold the Alt key and click the Buy App button it will bypass the version check and Lion will start downloading!
Installing OS X Lion over the Golden Master image may also be a challenge, watch this space for a blog post on how to perform the installation as soon as I have done it!
In a recent blog post I detailed how to use advanced SQL statements to remove applications for OS X Lion’s Launchpad. Which works well, however it can be a little frustrating if you’re constantly wanting to adjust Launchpad’s contents.
Luckily for us Lion users Andreas Ganske over at chaosspace.de has come up with a solution!
Launchpad-Control is a simple straightforward tool that enables you to hide/unhide applications at the click of a button!
LaunchPad-Control Features:
- It’s a system preference pane (update #1)
- Displays a table with all apps that are in Launchpad
- Checkboxes for every app allow you to easily specify apps you want to hide or show
- Backups/Restores your original database file
- It’s completely free!
You can download Launchpad-Control from chaosspace.de or by clicking here
System Requirements:
Launchpad-Control requires OS X Lion (obviously)
There are many POP and IMAP mail checking apps on the market for OS X, some are expensive and clunky, some are free and light.. Much like the one in todays post, Google Notifr by James Chen is a free open source RubyCocoa application.
With a very small foot print, Google Notifr is a set and forget application. Which will happily sit on your menu bar and check your Gmail account or accounts, and notify you upon arrival of new mail via a growl notification, a sound or both!
Google Notifr Features:
- Separate check and notification setting for each account!
- Support multiple accounts!
- Support Google hosted account.
- Check mail at a specified interval.
- Growl & sound notifications.
- Small & fast.
- Sparkle automatic update.
- Mailto handler.
- No background daemon processes installed as Google’s official notifier.
