Changes is a new file mod­i­fi­ca­tion appli­ca­tion. Looks to be really nice. It’s Leop­ard only, so I’m going to have to wait until I upgrade to try it out.

I’ve been look­ing for a good appli­ca­tion like this ever since I found my self writ­ing a diff-​based app in Automa­tor to check for dif­fer­ences between my iTunes libraries. This one looks like it will do that and a lot more. It also inte­grates with my favorite text editor, Text­Mate. For the old school folks, it works with BBEdit as well.

Wow. From the Asso­ci­ated Press:

Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slump­ing Inter­net icon Yahoo Inc. with an unso­licited takeover offer of $44.6 bil­lion in its bold­est bid yet to chal­lenge Google Inc.’s dom­i­nance of the lucra­tive online search and adver­tis­ing markets.

That’s nuts. I don’t use Yahoo, but I’m already seeing it infil­trated by little rain­bowy but­ter­flies spread­ing craplets.

Via Daring Fire­ball.

Update: The more I think about this, the bigger it is. I was just think­ing about Yahoo search mostly. What’s going to happen with Flickr if this goes through? YUI? I can’t imag­ine Microsoft not screw­ing these things up. I’m not trying to bash Microsoft, they just don’t have a very good track record. Hot­mail anyone? Gruber has some more artic­u­late thoughts (as usual).

News­Ga­tor, the com­pany that owns Net­NewsWire, has just announced that it will now be offer­ing all of its prod­ucts for free. This is great news for the world of feed read­ers. Net­NewsWire is a fan­tas­tic reader that I’ve been using for sev­eral years. They have a shiny new ver­sion too. I’ve heard that Feed­De­mon is a good Win­dows client, although I haven’t used it myself.

Get the new and improved free down­load of Net­NewsWire here.

One of my biggest com­plaints with the secu­rity indus­try in gen­eral, is that they seem to thrive on FUD. I find it to be par­tic­u­lar­ily frus­trat­ing, because there actu­ally is a lot of really impor­tant infor­ma­tion there. Unfor­tu­nately, to find it you usu­ally have to dig through layers of junk.

It pisses me off that some­one like me, who is gen­er­ally knowl­edge­able about such things although by no means an expert, can find fre­quently arti­cles that are either com­pletely wrong or very mis­lead­ing. While this is merely annoy­ing for me, the real­ity is that most people just lack the knowl­edge about com­put­ers and secu­rity to under­stand that often­times the infor­ma­tion they are get­ting is just crap.

I was par­tic­u­larly annoyed by a recent arti­cle in ZDNet. Basi­cally a Win­dows XP machine was set up on an unse­cured wire­less net­work and a secu­rity expert demon­strated a hack that down­loaded some infor­ma­tion from the com­pro­mised com­put­ers My Doc­u­ments folder. It took about 11 minutes.

Get­ting onto the unse­cured wire­less net­work, ping­ing pos­si­ble IP addresses of other com­put­ers on the net­work, find­ing Andy’s unpatched com­puter, scan­ning open ports for vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, using the attack tool to build an exploit, and using the mal­ware to get into the XP com­mand shell took six minutes.

Fright­en­ing, yes. Sur­pris­ing, no. The impor­tant part of the arti­cle is the fact that the com­pro­mised com­puter was run­ning with SP1 and no pro­tec­tion whatsoever:

[They] con­nected a machine run­ning Win­dows XP with Ser­vice Pack 1 to an unse­cured wire­less net­work. The machine was run­ning no antivirus, fire­wall, or anti-​spyware software…

This arti­cle isn’t really news at all. It simply demon­strates that if you put a default Win­dows XP SP1 install on a net­work, it is likely to get hacked (and fast). In fact, the “unsecured wire­less network” part of this arti­cle is com­pletely irrel­e­vant. Granted, it may make hack­ing easier, but the fact remains; a default install of Win­dows XP SP1 will get hacked.

So, yes every­body, if you do not have SP2 on your Win­dows XP install, get it now. If you don’t have it because you pirated Win­dows, buy a frak­ing copy, or at least start using some free linux os (like Ubuntu).

I sup­pose there is no harm in reit­er­at­ing the point that every­body, regard­less of oper­at­ing sys­tems, should be upgrad­ing their ser­vice packs. I do how­ever take issue with the sen­sa­tion­al­ist tone of the arti­cle. Using FUD to increase page views or sell soft­ware doesn’t help anyone. This arti­cle could have just as easily been writ­ten about hacks for XP SP2 or Vista with patches installed. The hack prob­a­bly would have taken a lot longer and had a lot of things line up per­fectly, but that’s not to say it can’t be done. At least that type of arti­cle might have been news­wor­thy or even help­ful. Even John Dvorak knows this arti­cle is crap.

Mozilla’s Alex Faaborg announced a week or so ago that Fire­fox 3 would focus on visu­ally inte­grat­ing with the oper­at­ing system:

Visual inte­gra­tion with Win­dows and OS X is our pri­mary objec­tive for the Fire­fox 3 refresh.

This is great news for Fire­fox, because as I have men­tioned before, its user inter­face has really been the achilles’ heel of the browser, espe­cially on the Mac.

Mozilla’s user expe­ri­ence team lit­er­ally wants to do a better job of visu­ally inte­grat­ing with Win­dows than IE, and a better job of visu­ally inte­grat­ing with OS X than Safari. I don’t know if we will be able to pull that off, but that’s the goal.

I’m glad that they’ve rec­og­nized this as an issue and I can’t wait to see what they come up with. If Fire­fox actu­ally did look as good or better than Safari on a Mac, I might use it as my pri­mary browser.

Via Beauty And The Geek: Fire­fox 3’s Visual Makeover.