Macking 122

Phishers Getting Really Skilled
I got a phishing message allegedly from ebay that looked absolutely believable. Yet the end result is the same: Follow the instructions and they get your financial info.
There is one and only one way to determine the legitimacy of a message that appears to be from ebay, PayPal, your bank or anyone else that wants you to update your information: There is nothing in the message to click on.
Most banks will never send you email at all, but sometimes ebay does. Legitimate messages will simply tell you to log on to your account in the normal manner, and will not make it at all possible to do it from within the email message.
Anything else, repeat ANYTHING else, is a criminal act. Protect yourself.
And never buy anything from a spammer, even if it is a really cool product. Find it somewhere else.
I don't need to remind you Microsoft victims out there about worms, spyware and viruses. You already know. Just be sure you visit your parents now and then and update THEIR virus definitions and clear the garbage out their machines.

Toss That TechTool Pro
For some bizarre reason, Apple keeps supplying an old customized TechTool Pro CD with every copy of AppleCare. This continues in spite of the fact that the AppleCare TechTool absolutely corrupts any 10.4 system it attempts to work on.
Since AppleCare is a warranty program, the CD is unnecessary. Go ahead and throw it out, even if you are not yet using Tiger.
This is not to be confused with the commercial version of TechToolPro from MicroMat. That product is updated frequently, and comes with a scheme that lets you use a downloaded update from their site and your CD burner to create a new bootable CD with the latest version.
Unfortunately you get none of that with the AppleCare version. Somebody is asleep over there.
I recommend everyone running OSX buy and have available in an emergency Alsoft's "Disk Warrior." It should be 3.02 or later if you have a Mac less than 6 months old. The current release is 3.03 and an upgrade is available from the company.
If you buy a fresh copy and it is older than 3.0.3, contact Alsoft about a replacement CD. They also have a similar make-your-own-updated-CD function.

FCC Ruling May Raise ISP Costs
As usual, the Bush administration takes an action that favors megacorporations over individuals and small companies. The latest ruling that phone companies are not required to wholesale network space to independent ISPs will probably lead to a Concast/Verizon situation where the consumer will be required to use the provider as their ISP or pay full price plus a second charge if you want a local ISP to handle your email, web hosting and other internet services.
Verizon has already done this. They charge more to use them as nothing more than a link to an independent ISP than if you buy their service complete with the verizon.net account. Further, they make it difficult to use a different return address even if you have their mail server selected as your SMTP (outgoing) mail server. Their tech department denies this, but they make no effort to employ people who know anything about Eudora or other email programs, and barely know anything about Macs at all.
I guess since you are violating the Official Order to use nothing but Outlook on a Microsoft computer, they don't care what happens to you.
For now, Qwest is pretty good about it. One wonders just how long that will last, now that the FCC has given them the green light to act like the others. Longtime Qwest employees who served as organizers and liaisons to independent ISPs are no longer with the company.
By the way, I am running into more people who are experiencing the Concast slowdown, which usually happens when everyone in the neighborhood has Concast Internet, and they are all online at the same time, downloading lots of big files. This is why your performance sometimes drops to a crawl when it was just fine, earlier in the day. Silly me, I believed Concast when they claimed that it was not a problem for their customers any more.

FEMA Is Run By Idiots
But you knew that if you have watched or read the news, even Fox, in the last month. What has not gotten as much coverage as their arrogant, heavy-handed screwups is the fact that their Web site, where hurricane victims are to file for emergency help and compensation, blocks anyone not using a Microsoft computer running IE6.
That not only excludes Mackers and Linux users, it also excludes older PCs running Windows 2k, 98 or 95 which, as you might guess, are mostly used by people too poor to upgrade. Hey, they didn't die like they were expected to, they certainly aren't gaining access to FEMA's precious web site. If you place a phone call to FEMA, the cold-voiced robot tells you that all agents are busy and to go to the web site, ending with "This call will be disconnected now."
More bizarrely entertaining is the fact that if you have your browser lie to the servers (Opera, Firefox, Safari will do that) and pretend to be IE6, it lets you in and appears to work. Unfortunately that gives false credit to Microsoft in their server logs.
Even Microsoft should be ashamed enough of this to do something about it. A mandatory service-pack repair to their IIS server products would be the first step.

Mighty or Meekly Mouse?
What a waste of effort. Apple seems to have a blind spot regarding mice. They have fought multi-button mice since day one and now that they finally relent and release one, it's horrible.
First, notice the wire coming out of the end. Like their previous no-button (rocker) mice bundled with every Mac since the abominable Hockey Puck Mouse was dumped, there is no reinforcement of the wire. Users who have a cramped desk and keep running the end of the mouse into something will discover their mouse dies after repeated flexing breaks one of the internal wires. Every other mouse designs around this, either with a piece of plastic reinforcement or exiting the wire in a less sensitive place.
The Modest Mouse goes one worse. There are still no buttons, just touch-sensitive strips, which will activate when the user inadvertently touches them instead of hovering his fingers right above them. Worse, the right button does not even have a switch (but has space for one) behind the touch strip; it depends on where the left-click finger is. People who mouse with their left hand without reversing the buttons (me, for instance) will find this almost unusable.
I like the idea of squeezing it to invoke the Exposé window-minimization trick, but it could still have been done much better and probably will, by Kensington or MacAlly, real soon now.
The Wall Street Journal's tech editor compared it unfavorably to the Microsoft Mouse. Both mice work on both platforms, except the Microsoft one is rated more ergonomic and better designed overall, a shock in itself, with a Windows-only feature of an active-zoom magnified area on the screen to make life easier for aging eyes. Be nice if we had that feature.
What's good about the Mickey? The scroll ball. Replacing the scroll wheel with a ball I can finger to scroll web pages or large photographs sideways as well as top-to-bottom is brilliant and long needed. Hopefully that will be quickly ported to a good mouse. It needs to be larger and easier to clean, though, and some users are reporting first-time-ever repetitive stress injury from using this mouse.
Some are complaining that it should also be wireless. Me, I don't care; I have no problems with wired keyboards and mice. Wireless ones are less responsive and are useless when booting from a CD. The only wireless device that looks hot is the $249 Wacom bluetooth tablet. This was demoed at the August PMUG meeting and it looks like the most useful implementation of Bluetooth yet.

Tablet Monitor
Speaking of Wacom, they also showed their $3,000 displaying tablet, resolution 1600 x 1200. Not only is this almost as big as Apple's 20" display, the entire surface is designed to be drawn upon with their graphics pen like any of their tablets. It's color-corrected and protected by a hard surface. They have been making graphics-display tablets for a few years now, but this is the best ever. If I were a Photoshop or Illustrator artist I would be hocking my soul for one. It will work on any Mac that supports an external display, including the Mini and PowerBooks, or the G5, G4 and even some G3s. It takes DVI or VGA cards and can serve as a standalone monitor.
Wacom (pronounced "walk-'em") is a great company and local to boot: just across the Columbia from here. They maintain driver support for every tablet they have ever made and update drivers on any tablet that can be plugged into a modern Mac. They even employ local humans to answer the tech support lines and don't refuse to talk to you after a year (or even 90 days) like some other companies that come to mind.

Credit Where Due
Last month I excoriated Mini-Cooper for eliminating useful features between 2003 and 2005. Well, I have found a few more missing, but one important one called "summer mode" was fixed. I asked the tech department at the local dealer if there was a fix and she checked it out. There was: All they had to do was plug into the car computer and set preferences and I got my summer mode back. (Hold down the Unlock button on the key while you are walking toward it and the windows roll down and the sunroof opens to let out the hot air.)

Don't Update iTunes
It's probably a bit late for most of you, but if you are running version 4.7.1 (which shipped with Panther and most iPods) stick with it unless you want to take advantage of the embedded support for podcasts.
Under the usual orders from the RIAA, Apple has installed some screw-with-you-ware in iTunes that makes it difficult to move songs back out of people's iPods.
Specifically, when songs are copied onto a 'Pod with iTunes version 4.9, all the tracks are renamed with random numbers. You would never notice unless you used one of the available hacks that make songs on a 'Pod visible. Normally you never see the music on a 'Pod when viewing it in hard-disk mode on your Mac (or Microsoft) desktop.
Now there is a version 5.0, but I don't know if it still randomizes song names. It's needed to support the new iPod Nano (nanu?) and the iTunes ROKR Phone from Motorola and Cingular. Apple and the RIAA want you to stay current with whatever DRM scheme they foist off on us, which includes a 100-song limit on the phone, even if you have more RAM space available. I won't be buying that phone, even though I need a new one. The 5.0 update itself is generating a huge number of complaints from users about lost libraries, deleted podcasts and STILL a failure to include album artwork with songs accessed from the Internet Music Database (Gracenote).
Don't let the Software Update function, which offers to update iTunes for you whenever you log onto the Net, do it for you. In fact, you should select the iTunes updater in the list and then choose Ignore Update from the Update menu. Then it will quit bothering you any more. Also don't accept the iPod Updater because it may make the iPod require you to update iTunes! The same can be said for the System Update to 10.3.9; it introduces problems for too many people to be trusted so it's better if you stick with 10.3.5 or 10.3.8. If you have any other version installed and running, find someone who saved one of the above updates and run that. And as always, open Disk Utility and repair permissions after ANY major update or new software installation, especially Quark XPress.
These problems are all the more reason you should be checking MacFixIt every day. Three minutes should be all you need to determine if the info applies to you. Note: See Macking 123 where this info and the following letter is repeated with updates. Sometimes the column contains repeats because the older version had the info edited out in the printed edition of Chips.

Letter
A correction to your comments about Verizon. I've had Aracnet/SpiritOne DSL through Verizon since February 2000. The Verizon service has always been only offered as a "business" service. When Verizon started offering (and promoting) ISP service to home customers several years ago it was less expensive than than their pass-through charge I was, and continue to, pay. Even more insulting is that the Verizon DSL ISP is faster. However it (apparently) blocks servers and they don't offer static IPs. I would guess it is also PPPoE. So there are advantages to SpiritOne, and I intend to stay there until they are forced out of business next year by that recent court decision. At that time I will probably change to Covad. I understand that Verizon business service (which has static IPs) is $100/month, which is much more expensive than Aracnet or Covad.
On a completely different topic, that of burning CDs from iTunes to create MP3 files, this is an excellent idea no matter what. If you read the ITMS license agreement (or the license agreement of any music store) you would find that they reserve the right to change the DRM at any time, including discontinuing the service. This would make any purchased (?) music totally inaccessable. Thus it is an excellent idea to burn to CD and optionally rip to MP3's any purchased music from any online service.
Perhaps you do realize the precarious license when you state that iTunes allows burning protected files "for now." Indeed they could disallow that tomorrow.
Tom Almy
Indeed. It would be bad PR for Apple to do so, however. If they do it will be under orders from the RIAA. Be sure to also set your iTunes Preferences for Importing to MP3 instead of AAC, and set the bitrate to 256 for best quality sound and still have a degree of compression.

Bad Installers
It isn't just Quark. According to the Labor Day edition of Macintouch, the Palm Desktop 4.2.1 (revision C) installer does serious damage to permissions in programs not related to Palm.
"After the program files are installed, the installer runs a shell script called "postflight" that attempts to "fix" any permissions issues which may prevent the program from running properly. Unfortunately, the script violates the most basic programming principle in the universe - thou shalt not alter the files of programs other than thyself - and it does it so blatantly that I can only assume malicious intent.
"The "/Library/Application Support" directory is where many programs place critical system-wide configuration and program files that are referenced on an as-needed basis. This is a directory whose permissions should NEVER be changed or altered, lest you end up breaking many of your installed apps. In particular, all sorts of system-level programs such as Anti-Virus and Disk Utilities place parts of themselves there, and any changes to their permissions will prevent them from loading at boot time. Even more dangerous, some programs place symbolic links from that directory to "/System/Library", and running a chmod command that recursively drills down that directory could end up completely trashing your entire system.
"In short, this is the most irresponsible and potentially dangerous Mac OS X install program of all time. I have never seen anything this egregiously idiotic, and I have seen some pretty bad install programs. I am placing this in the category of a Trojan Horse, and warning anyone and everyone NOT to install it."
I placed a call to Palm to inquire about this before warning ComputerChips readers about this issue, because there is no direct email address to contact them, not even for Press Relations. I heard from their contracted PR department, who gave me an email address to forward these concerns to. Stay tuned; there will probably be no answer until next issue. so I suggest holding off getting a new Palm until then.

Old Macs and Parts
Keeping that old Mac around for whatever use you can make of it? Go to Low-End Mac for advice, information and links to places that stock parts. For instance, I am selling a NuBus card holder for the 6100. I didn't want to just toss it and it's too obscure even for Ebay. So I wrote off to a couple of the dealers listed and got a bite.
I also needed a new PRAM battery for my old MacPlus, which expired in 1996. No one uses that model battery for anything else, but Norvac Electronics in Beaverton found that it can be ordered.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)