The top news for this week is Apple’s failure – despite plenty of notification – to fix a critical flaw in DNS that’s already in the wild. Rich Mogull and Glenn Fleishman explain the problem and the possible workarounds for those running DNS servers; the full fix will require an update from Apple. Apple also comes in for criticism from Glenn on their handling of the MobileMe transition and on their response – a tepidly worded status page. Adam piles on with an examination of a bug that causes iTunes 7.7 to corrupt accented track and artist names, and some workarounds to prevent an updated iPod touch from beeping constantly. On a more positive note, we cover Apple’s stellar financial results, Neale Monks reviews the watermarking and image prep tool iWatermark, and Adam passes on a link to a hilarious video about fonts (really – go watch it!). In the TidBITS Watchlist, we glance at updates to Firefox, Default Folder X, Typinator, PDFpen (and PDFpen Pro), Keyboard Maestro, Skype, iLife ’08, and AirPort Extreme.
Check out this hilarious video of "fonts" at a conference.
Is your iPod touch beeping constantly after being upgraded to 2.0? Adam explains the problem and passes on two somewhat unsatisfactory solutions.
Apple posted a $1.07 billion profit on revenues of $7.46 billion, a significant improvement over last year's profit of $818 million on revenue of $5.41 billion.
iTunes 7.7 contains a subtle bug that can convert accented characters in artist and track names into other characters, rendering the names incorrect or even unreadable. Never fear, though, since there's a workaround.
Google at last enables always-on security for its Gmail service, while also revealing the locations from which your account has been accessed recently.
Apple's veil of secrecy remains largely intact in a non-apology that provides information for MobileMe users whose stored email is unavailable.
Looking for a tool that will put textual or graphical watermarks on your photos or other images? Check out Script Software's iWatermark, which provides useful watermarking tools along with a number of other image prep capabilities, such as resizing, thumbnail creation, and file conversion.
Apple has made its biggest security stumble ever by not releasing a necessary patch for a serious DNS exploit that allows any domain name to be redirected to any IP address.
Notable software releases so far this week include Firefox 3.0.1, Default Folder X 4.0.7, Typinator 3.1, PDFpen (and PDFpen Pro) 3.5, Keyboard Maestro 3.3, Skype 2.7.0.330, minor changes to iLife '08, and AirPort Extreme Update 2008-002.
This week's discussions cover continued problems with MobileMe, how to cope with the theft of a laptop, synchronizing iPhones, and more.