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TidBITS#767/21-Feb-05

Glenn Fleishman follows up on last week’s article about the homograph security exploit, and Matt Neuburg contributes a pair of articles: a look at QuicKeys X3 and a review of Zengobi’s curious Curio. Then Adam explains what happens if your email address rejects a TidBITS issue or bounces it back – and how to recover if you stop receiving issues due to too many bounces. In the news, our server moves are nearly done, and we look at the release of LaunchBar 4.

Adam Engst No comments

Server Moves Almost Complete

Server Moves Almost Complete -- We were one-for-two with our server moves last week. I had specifically asked Chuck Goolsbee of digital.forest to move our main Xserve during the day so I could baby sit the shutdown and startup procedures (he was initially going to move it at what would have been 2:30 AM my time to reduce the impact of the downtime)

Jeff Carlson No comments

LaunchBar 4 Lifts Off

LaunchBar 4 Lifts Off -- Objective Development has released LaunchBar 4, a major improvement on its highly regarded utility that opens files, bookmarks, and more using adaptively generated keyboard shortcuts (see "Tools We Use: LaunchBar" in TidBITS-671) The new version adds more index scanners (such as the capability to search iTunes and iPhoto libraries, Sherlock channels, etc.), search templates that let you search Web sites like Google and the Wikipedia directly from LaunchBar, the capability to browse database records (iTunes playlists and Address Book, for example) without leaving the LaunchBar interface, and a new multi-threaded indexing engine

Glenn Fleishman No comments

Homographic Responses

In the last issue of TidBITS, I wrote about how non-English characters that resemble or are identical to Roman letters could allow scammers to spoof well-known sites by registering domain names that look identical even to the trained eye and then obtaining SSL certificates to make them look secure (see "Don't Trust Your Eyes or URLs" in TidBITS-766). Over the past week, there's been some motion on a few fronts worth reporting. First, the Mozilla Foundation will disable the internationalized domain names (IDN) support as a default in Firefox 1.0 releases

Matt Neuburg No comments

QuicKeys X3 at the Crossroads

CE Software, after some years of financial losses and questionable acquisitions, sold off its QuickMail product (to Outspring Inc.), and then went private in April 2004, under the name Startly Technologies, LLC

Matt Neuburg No comments

Curing Clutter with Curio

The world is not a tidy place. That's why I'm constantly discovering new and interesting ways to store and retrieve information on my computer. Typically, those ways involve imposing order through hierarchical arrangement, or retrieval through sophisticated searching: I'm drawn to outlines, databases, keywords, indexes

Adam Engst No comments

Take Control News/21-Feb-05

We're on the verge of releasing more titles, and this week brought a little extra encouragement to get them out the door in the form of a nice review of "Take Control of Mac OS X Backups." MacGuild Gives "Take Control of Mac OS X Backups" an A -- The Macintosh Guild, which bills itself as "the ultimate Apple user group for corporate America," has reviewed Joe Kissell's "Take Control of Mac OS X Backups," giving it a grade of A (Outstanding)

TidBITS Staff No comments

Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/21-Feb-05

The second URL below each thread description points to the discussion on our Web Crossing server, which will be faster. How are you managing your headphones/headsets? There are music headphones and earbuds, and phone headphones, but do any of them work for both listening to music and talking on the phone? (5 messages) Mac mini impressions -- Now that Apple's Mac mini is getting into customers' hands, how well does it perform? Readers look at memory limitations and using wireless peripherals