Macking 46

OSX Server Price Drop
OSX Server is getting cheaper: previously announced at $995, it will retail to the educational market for just $249. Apple will also offer a special developer program to "capture some of the appeal of the open-source Linux" while dropping the price below $500, depending on configuration. OS 8.6, due to be released this spring, will be a FREE upgrade. Beta testers are reporting that this version is SO stable, and includes many new features, that they recommend that people who have been holding off upgrading to 8.5 can go ahead and move to this version.
Of course the same caveats apply: you will have to give up or upgrade your favorite utilities, panels and extensions to be compatible with the new system. Fortunately, Suitcase, one of the most popular, has been acquired by Extensis and the upgrade is available. Others you need are Norton Disk Doctor 4.0.3, Virex 5.9.1 (better than NAV), and, for those who like to be able to change file attributes, Snitch 2.6.2 is out. Older productivity software still works fine, including Quark 3, PageMaker 5.0a, Photoshop 3.0.3 - 3.0.5, ClarisWorks 3.0 (but 4 is better) and many others besides. Best news is that Word 5.1, the last good Microsoft product, still works under 8.5 and should not die under 8.6.

MS Helps Find Melissa author
Wouldn't the job be easier for the police, the FBI, the NSA and the Secret Police if only all our phones could be bugged and a TV camera placed in every home? Well, Microsoft might want to sell them the software, but we are probably a few years away from in-home monitoring.
However, Microsoft Word documents (6.0 or later) contain information that helped the police find the guy. In the original document, and the ones forwarded many generations after, information was invisibly stored that included the Global User ID (GUID), Ethernet address, pathname and other stuff that helped them find out who created the original.
There has been comment on how personal information is stored in Microsoft documents on MacInTouch lately:
"I opened some documents I got from a PC user running Word 95 and the GUID was in there." [Alan MacDougall]
One reader, outraged at what he found when he examined the contents of MS Office documents, said they not only included his name and computer's Ethernet MAC address but also "the ID3 tag on a MP3 that I was listening to while I was writing this file. I was running MacAmp at the time, so somehow it must have harvested that data from MacAmp, because there is no other way that that information could have gotten into my lab report that I wrote."
"After reading the comments re OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), I tried rebooting my Mac with all extensions OFF, then creating a blank MSWord98 document. The GUID field was still there, but now the hardware address was INCORRECT. I then rebooted with extensions ON and rechecked the same Word document in BBEdit. The GUID field was still incorrect. Finally, I reopened the Word document, added some text to it, and saved it. Now, in BBEdit, there is a *second* header containing the GUID -- BUT IT IS STILL INCORRECT. Apparently, the GUID must be recorded with extensions (incl. OLE) ON when the document is first created." [Michael McLaughlin]
"Microsoft informed us (MacInTouch) late last night that it will create its own patch to remove invisible "fingerprint" data from MS Office 98 documents (to be posted "as soon as possible" on the company's web site.) As we had noted, Angus McIntyre already has posted BillBlocker 0.1a, an "early and untested" drag-and-drop application to zero the "GUID," which typically contains a computer's Ethernet hardware address.
It's not clear that Microsoft's latest patch will address other parts of this particular privacy issue, as noted by Wilbur Sitze:
"With all the furor over the Office GUID issue, I've not seen one word about the fact that within the same hidden block of information containing the GUID is also your registered name at least 3 times, and the complete path name of the subject file, including your hard drive name."
So the bottom line is this: MS Word documents secretly store your GUID, the Ethernet address of your Mac (which is meaningful only if you are on a network, not a simple home network), and possibly the path of the document, including the name of your hard drive. To check this for yourself, download a copy of BBEdit Light, which is free, and use it to inspect your Word documents. You will also find embedded in the document other data that was previously written to that sector of your drive, which could be anything. Financial data from Quicken, email messages, anything. Chances are it will just be garbage - coded data from the resource fork of an application, for instance, but this is a security hole that could cause you real trouble. Like people who listen to police scanners to hear the action, some Mackers like to process all received Word documents through BBEdit just to see if they can find anything interesting. No, I am not one of them; I have too much else to do!

I'm Getting Tired of Microsoft
I am getting tired of all the Microsoft noise lately. I am just glad we Mackers didn't have to care about Melissa, can upgrade our systems without requiring half a day per machine from a technician, and are almost 100% Y2K compliant (QuickBooks is the worst offender, due for June upgrade). Note: although Macs are not subject to Melissa, we can harbor the virus and possibly pass it on later.
So what happens at the last PMUG meeting? Microshaft comes to try explaining to the user group that the Mac division of Microsoft really cares about us, really puts effort into making their Mac products real programs instead of cheap ports, really wants our business on merit. I will concede that part of that is true: MS is now the largest employer of Mac programmers, including former Apple employees, shareware authors and others known within the Mac community. They really do care and want to produce good products in spite of who their employer is. Then, at the end of the meeting, during the drawing, I wound up winning a copy of Office 98.
Well, I have been running a Microsoft-free zone for years now, and this little glitch from the gods won't change that. The package is busy displacing air in my office right now, and by the time you read this I will have sold it off. I might have even considered it (Naaah) but for the security issues, above.
If only Corel would release an upgrade to WordPerfect I would trade in a minute. (I am glad I don't need Excel or PowerPoint.) But this column is written and spell-checked in ClarisWorks 5, although at the moment I am typing it as a text file in a window in Eudora. Corel has even released a version for Linux (only $40; ours was $199) yet there are more Mackers than Linux users by far. Please stop by the Corel site and give them a yell for an upgrade to WordPerfect for Mac.
One small bash, though. <sarcasm> For the benefit of Wintel users, </sarcasm> MS has declared that they will not support a migration from W95 directly to Windows 2000 (W2K). If you want to move to W2K, you will have to upgrade to W98 first. That would be like Apple telling you that if you are running OS 7.6.1, you won't be able to upgrade to 8.6 next month without buying and installing 8.1 first! If your Mac is a PowerMac capable of running 7.5 or 7.6, all you will need to do is buy 8.5 and install it, then run the free updater to 8.6. I recommend a clean install, of course, and a reinstall of your software, to save the headaches that a "dirty" upgrade can cause.
Even a worst-case scenario, a dirty upgrade that causes your Mac to freeze on startup, can usually be fixed by a technician or advanced user in an hour or two at most. EDS (Ross Perot's company), on the other hand, running as many as 100,000 Wintel boxes with four variations of W95, will have to spend about $1,000 per machine to make their systems Y2K compliant. That story is unusual only in its scale. Think how much they could have saved had they gone Mac in the first place. According to MacInTouch, the government of South Australia is facing the same problem, and they used to use Macs extensively. I hope Apple makes sure the taxpayers know of this.

Don't Get Too Smug
Apple has also started storing user information without our knowledge. From MacInTouch, "Several readers note that Apple is now storing computer serial number and other information on hidden areas of new Mac hard disks, displaying that information in Apple System Profiler. Reformatting the hard drive reportedly erases the information."
"I discovered that the LaserWriter 8.6 driver (running on OS 8.5.1) automatically inserted my email address in the header of a PostScript file I had it generate. I presume it got the address from Internet Config or somewhere. This is clearly another case of hiding information in a generated file without the user's knowledge or permission. It also sticks other information, like my name, in there, but I already knew about that." [Steve Jenks]
Well, Steve may have known about that, but I didn't, and now so do you.

3-Button Mouse for iMacs
A press release from Kinetic Computer, Inc. offers us the UniMouse by Contour Design, the first USB 3-button user-definable mouse to offer all 5 iMac flavors: Blueberry, Grape, Lime, Tangerine, and Strawberry for a perfect match to iMacs and G3s. See them at http://www.kinetic-online.com/unimouse.
The UniMouse offers a Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface and 3 buttons for the iMacs and G3s. Drivers are available which allow several button definition combinations which include double click, control click, option click and drag lock.
The UniMouse is $39.95. Contact: 877.733.2010 or 513.733.2008 or email to place your order.

Need Odd Parts?
The MacTreasures website is a repository for PowerBook batteries and chargers, Newton 2000 parts and batteries, odd software, obsolete titles and other items rarely carried by other catalog sites. Check'em out.

Use Find more often
I am amazed at the number of Mackers who do not use the Find feature built into every MacOS since 7.5, instead choosing to open folder after folder, trying to locate a file that they misplaced.
It is so simple there is no excuse not to force yourself to type Cmd-F whenever you want to locate something. Don't even try to manually locate it; Find is faster than you can click. Type Cmd-F and before the window even appears start typing the filename of the document you seek. If you can't remember the exact name, but can remember part of it, that's enough. Find File (and Sherlock under 8.5) will display in a window all documents matching the name you typed in. If you see the one you want here, select it and then either double-click to open it in the program that you used to create it, or type Cmd-E (for Open Enclosing Folder, also located under the File menu) and a Finder window will open, displaying the item. This is a handy way to locate something you want to trash or copy somewhere else. You can also drag ONE item directly from the Find Results window to the Trash, or to another folder or drive.
If you get in the habit of using Find this way, it will take care of 85% of all your searching needs. For the remaining 15%, notice a "More Choices" button at the bottom of the window. You can add Date Created or Modified, Size, Kind, Label, Version, Type an. Creator. You can continually add options with the More Choices button until you have all the criteria you need to locate your document. Searching on Date Created - Is After will let you locate all files you created yesterday.
If you want to search for files created between April 1 and 4, click More Choices and set the first to Date Created - Is After - 4/1/99 and the second field to Date Created - Is Before - 4/4/99. Alternatively, you could select Fewer Choices (one criterion) and set it for Date Created - Is Within 3 Days Of - 4/4/99. If you use today's date because you know you created the file within the last three days, it will search backwards. If you want a file created a couple of weeks ago, tell it to search within a few days of the date most likely to be the one you created it on. You can even add Size to the search criteria so it won't look for anything larger (or smaller) than, say, 4K for a small text file.
Find File is fast and powerful. Get to know it.

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.)