Another occasion to thank myself for not being an early adopter. Last week, along with the OS X 10.7.3 update (which itself has proved to be bug-plagued), Apple released Security Update 2012-001 for those of us who are Lion skeptics and continue to use OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I actually downloaded the Security Update more »

NetMarketShare’s desktop Operating System Market Share metrics for January 2012 show the Mac OS gaining a minuscule three tenths of a point on the month, with Windows falling back slightly. In the Mobile/Tablet category, the iOS was still well out in first place, and recovering some of the ground it gave up in December.

Fetch is one of the oldest Mac OS applications, dating back to the early days of the Mac OS Classic era, but it’s still one of the best at doing what it does. A full-featured Mac-only file transfer (FTP) client with a clean, simple, easy-to-use interface, Fetch supports both FTP and SFTP, the Internet’s most file transfer protocols on the Internet.

Apple has launched a firmware update for their Thunderbolt Display in Snow Leopard/ The update addresses an issue in which some users were bothered by an intermittent black screen, and it also improves stability for Thunderbolt devices. The Thunderbolt Software Update 1.1 comes at a file size of 53.23 MB, and you will Mac OS X v10.6.8 in order to install it.

Some third party hardware telephone modems do work with Lion, so there is a workaround, but it irks me mightily to have to buy a new one to replace a less than three-year-old unit that still works just fine with OS X 10.6. More arbitrary forced obsolescence from Apple. I’m sure the very notion of dial-up Internet seems quaint to the folks at Cupertino; not so much in this rural Nova Scotia backwater I call home

NetMarketShare’s desktop Operating System Market Share metrics for October 2011 show the Mac OS continuing its advance significantly by nearly a half point, Linux up a smidge as well, and Windows off by a little more than half a point, most of which went to Apple’s OS. The NetMarketShare researchers note that Mac usage share generally rises in late summer and fall, this year rising another half-point plus in October to reach 6.45% of worldwide desktop usage.

NetMarketShare’s desktop operating system market share metrics for September 2011 show the Mac OS up significantly by more than a third of a point, Linux up a smidge as well, and Windows off by roughly a third of a point, most of which went to Apple’s OS. In the Mobile/Tablet category, iOS gained another point and a half of share, JavaME was still in second-place but down more than two points, and Android gained just over a quarter point.

The OSX/Revir.A trojan downloader works by downloading and constantly launching a PDF file containing offensive political statements in Chinese, and then installing a backdoor (known as “OSX/Imuler.A”) onto the victim’s Mac to potentially allow malicious access to it. The backdoor then sets up a launch agent on the victim’s Mac which keeps the malware active and sends the infected Mac’s username and MAC address to a remote server.

I would prefer that Apple continue offering the option of traditional scrolling in the Mac OS for those of us (many) who like it better. Conversely, if you’re holding off upgrading to Lion but want to get acclimatized in Snow Leopard, you can download a freeware utility from PilotMoon called Scroll Reverser that will switch your Mac’s scrolling to emulate most of Lion’s scrolling features.

A new trojan affecting OS X has been discovered by security firm F-Secure, disguising itself as a PDF and setting up a backdoor in a Mac user’s hard drive after displaying Chinese characters (shown above) once executed. The backdoor, at this point, isn’t much of a threat as it doesn’t currently do any harm, although that could change at any time at the discretion of the trojan’s creator(s).