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 »

Apple issued a statement today that more than 100 million app downloads were generated from the Mac App Store since its debut on January 6th, 2011. Mac owners can easily access the Mac App Store via OS X Snow Leopard and OS X Lion, and all that’s required is an iTunes account in order to download or purchase software. Apple’s promise was mainly to make it an easier way to browse, install and maintain apps for OS X, and that seems to have been a success.

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.

Apple seems dedicated to updating its OS X software to support its iCloud service when iOS 5 hits the consumers around this fall. Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard will let its users enjoy seamless integration with the iCloud service, allowing users to store data (music, photos, apps, calendars, documents) in the cloud while seamlessly wiring them across all your ios devices.

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant installs a Lion Recovery partition to the external media in order to allow a user to create another boot disk. In order to use the app, you’ll need to plug in the external media, ensuring that no data is on it as it will be erased during the process, and then allow it to create a recovery drive. Lion Recovery Disk Assistant is available for download through from Apple’s support site.

Apple has just released a series of updates for OS X v10.6.8, dubbed a “Supplemental Update”, both revising the OS version and patching systems that have already updated to 10.6.8. Apple recommends the Supplemental Update for all users running OS X 10.6.8

Apple has released iTunes 10.4 alongside OS X Lion (now making sense of the version number for the 10.5 beta), featuring support for full screen in Lion and 64-bit support as a Cocoa application. Apple released an iTunes 10.5 beta that also had 64-bit support, although now users won’t have to wait for that upcoming version to go public to enjoy the support for Macs with more than 4GB of RAM.

Apple Computer released OS X v10.6.8 yesterday, which is very likely to be the last version of Snow Leopard before OS X 10.7 Lion. It’s recommended for everyone and will improve the general performance of your Mac as well as making it easier to upgrade to Lion and includes the fixes in all of the previous updates. You can download the update from Apple’s OS X v10.6 download page, or via Software Update.

With the release of Final Cut Pro X and updates to Motion 5 and Compressor 4 on the Mac App Store, Apple also updated its support documents for these programs. The strange thing about the latter is that the company advises users to upgrade to OS X 10.6.8, which is not yet available to the public. This can only indicate that the Snow Leopard update must be coming in the very near future (likely within the next few days)

Less than eight hours (time stamped 9:24 pm last night) after Apple released Security Update 2011-03 for Mac OS X Snow Leopard to deal with MACDefender and related malware, the developers behind the apps created a new variation that is able to slip paste Apple’s updated security. To avoid having your Mac infected, use caution when downloading suspicious software.