Has Apple finally gotten too secretive for its own good? The company at last addressed the DNS security hole that remained open for months after the company was alerted to it, but its silence on the issue has damaged its reputation. And, despite the fix, Mac users may still be vulnerable to attack, as Glenn Fleishman details. There are other examples too: the lingering MobileMe mail problems have supposedly been resolved, but iTunes 7.7.1 was released with the barest of release notes (Adam manages to track down some of what was fixed). In other news this week, Matt Neuburg looks at how Panorama Enterprise provides an unusual but highly useful approach to sharing databases across the Internet, and Adam notes the releases of VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 and The Missing Sync for Symbian, as well as the capability in Google Maps to display walking directions. In the TidBITS Watchlist, we note the appearance of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, Aperture 2.1.1, and Lexmark Printer Driver 1.1.
Apple isn't saying what was fixed in the just-released iTunes 7.7.1, but we dig through the discussions to find details on five areas in which the program may address significant bugs.
Apple says that its MobileMe mail outage for 1 percent of users has been resolved, and archived messages restored.
Install Security Update 2008-005 now! Apple has finally released a security fix for a serious DNS flaw that's being exploited in the wild. The update also includes fixes for other serious vulnerabilities.
The SANS Institute finds that Apple's patch for a flaw in the DNS protocol doesn't fix client resolver software, leaving Macs vulnerable to a far-less-likely outcome.
Although Google has added walking directions to Google Maps, don't assume it will necessarily know the most enjoyable way to walk, or even about common pedestrian-only pathways.
VMware has released the second public beta of VMware Fusion 2, adding features to the Unity Mac-Windows integration technology, virtual machine snapshots, better video performance, support for Leopard Server, and more.
Mark/Space brings their synchronization tool to Symbian-based smartphones, adding Bluetooth-based syncing whenever the phone is within range of the Mac.
ProVUE's Panorama database is already insanely fast (because all the data is kept in memory), easy to use (because you can always see all your data in a grid), and incredibly powerful (because it basically lets you wrap a GUI application around your data). So where can it go from here? Database sharing over the Internet, that's where!
Notable software releases so far this week include Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0, the Lexmark Printer Driver 1.1 and Aperture 2.1.1.
This week's discussions focus on recent Apple news, from the DNS security update (and Apple's response) to MobileMe fixes, the iPhone, and iTunes 7.7.1. Also, we learn how to extract images from PDF files, use Time Machine across a network, and upgrade Leopard, among more.