![]() Or keen on security and ready to update right away?įollow on Twitter for the latest computer security news.įollow on Instagram for exclusive pics, gifs, vids and LOLs! ![]() Keen on new features, and willing to wait for 10.9.1? If you’re an Apple fan, where do you sit on Mavericks? While that’s happening, I’m sorting out my backups – always a good idea anyway – and installing the 50MB Safari 6.1 update on my Mountain Lion system.Īnd, I hasten to add, I’m getting ready to make a copy of the Install OS X Mavericks.app package out of the /Applications folder as soon as the download finishes, so I never need to download it again I’m still waiting for that 5.29GB to turn up. In short, it sounds to me as though Mavericks is probably an update you do want to get, though I can’t put my hand on my heart yet and say, “She’ll be right.” Mavericks also includes a brand new release of Safari, version 7, that includes a raft of security fixes published to pre-Mavericks users as Safari 6.1. The “ Require an administrator password to access system preferences with lock icons” setting wasn’t always honoured.The Mail app would sometimes detect that secure password exchange was possible when configuring a connection, but then fail to use it.(Or, to quote Apple’s own delightful oxymoron, “under unusual circumstances, some random numbers may be predictable.”) You could sometimes return from hibernation mode without needing a password.The lock screen sometimes didn’t activate after the interval you had chosen.The display’s lock screen didn’t always stop window contents from appearing on top of it.Safari’s Reset function didn’t always clear your session cookies, which could leave you logged in to sites you wouldn’t expect.Apple’s application sandbox could be bypassed by software that it was supposed to have locked down.The OS X application firewall had a bug so that applications to which you thought you’d blocked network traffic might nevertheless receive it.(CVE-2013-3954.)īut there are other important operational fixes, notably for security features that gave a false sense of security, because even when turned on, they didn’t always work. (CVE-2013-0249 and CVE-2013-1944.)Īnd there’s even a fix for an RCE hole in the kernel itself, caused by incorrect bounds checking, which implies that there was an exploitable buffer overflow. There’s a patch for curl, the web download utility, apparently sorting out multiple vulnerabilities including some that could lead to RCE. There’s a fix for dealing with “a format string vulnerability existed in Screen Sharing Server’s handling of the VNC username.” (CVE-2013-5135.) If you’re looking for Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities, or RCEs, you won’t be disappointed – you’ll find several. In fact, the list of security fixes is, to me, the most interesting part of 10.9. There is one thing that neither Graham nor Lifehacker took into account, however, and that’s the fact that Mavericks (the first OS X release not named after a type of cat) is a security upgrade, too. ![]() It’s just that at 5.29GB, over a mobile network, I’m still waiting for the Mavericks installer to download itself. I’d love to tell you that Graham is just being a scaredy-cat and Lifehacker merely stirring, but I can’t – and not for want of trying. Mind you, the site also says, with doubly ironic orotundity, that “you should have no trouble work under the new OS without trouble.” Graham still seems to think it needs beta testing.ĭigital lifestyle site Lifehacker also warns you to stay clear, saying without giving data that Mavericks “suffers from a speed decrease” (you or I would probably just have written that it was slower), and calling it “imperfect.” Industry veteran and former Naked Security colleague Graham Cluley, for example, is dead keen on staying away – so much so that he’s even retweeted himself (I didn’t know you were allowed to do that) to tell us so. Will Mavericks go wrong if you install it right away? → In my vocabulary, a major release would be OS X to OS XI, a dot release something like 10.8.5 to 10.9, and a point release 10.8.4 to 10.8.5. The negative spin is that since this is a dot release, there might just be more to go wrong than in a point release – just like happened in the uplift from Windows 8 RT to Windows 8.1 RT, which caused trouble for some early adopters. ![]() Just like the uplift from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, shifting from Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) to Mavericks is free. The positive spin is that the $29 fee Apple has charged for previous OS X “dot releases” has vanished. The burning question for OS X fans everywhere, of course, is, “Should I or shouldn’t I?” Apple’s OS X 10.9, better known as Mavericks, is officially out.
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