With Snow Leopard, I rarely last much over four to five days without needing a reboot to restore some function or another. If you’re absent-minded like me, it’s often useful to know exactly how long it’s been since your last reboot. You can find out using the terminal and some command line syntax, but a much slicker way to check your uptime status is with a little application you can make yourself and access from the Scripts menulet.

It’s been called the “Chinese Democracy” of the Apple community by Andy Ihnatko. The book that we all knew Sal Soghoian, Apple’s product manager for AppleScript, would someday write, though we waited and waited. Well, that day has come, and thankfully it doesn’t share a whole lot more in common with Chinese Democracy. For instance, you won’t regret buying it. It also won’t get you a free Dr. Pepper. So are you ready to automate away repetitive tasks?

An enormous Mac OS X selling point has been it’s rock solid security, so one would be pretty enraged to find there is a gaping hole sitting in the operating system that has been reported many times and marked as “behaving normally,” while enabling anyone with GUI access to run as root and do basically anything they want to your computer. Apple has obviously been made aware of this issue, and the worst part is, it has been around at least since Panther—over five years ago.

What exactly is this issue? Well, the issue in and of itself may not seem incredibly malicious. The problem lies in AppleScript, and the fact that Applications running as “root” (which basically gives complete access) can accept AppleScript commands from applications which are not running as root. Developer and MacNN forum member Charles Srstka notes that he has sent this in as a bug to Apple many times, and yet it has been labeled as “Behaves Correctly” and dismissed. Furthering the issue is the fact that all Cocoa applications automatically have basic AppleScript support, so any Cocoa application running as root can recieve these malicious AppleScript commands.

More after the break.

Adium 1.2 is just around the corner, with a download available from the beta page. The team have added many improvements into the next version of the popular messaging client, specifically Bonjour improvements. Bonjour, Group Chat, XMPP, AppleScript and many minor features have been fixed and improved, resulting in a less-buggy version of the app. more »