Phishing on the Mac

We all know that the Mac is a very secure operating system and that there are hardly any viruses, spyware, adware or other type of malware programs. However, phishing is another thing altogether and Mac users are just as liable to be caught out as Windows users. A phishing scam has nothing to do with the operating system you have and it works on everything.

Phishing scams usually target users of online banking, payment services, auction sites, and so on. What happens is that an email will arrive in your inbox describing a problem. It will urge you to click a link in the message to take you to a website where you can log in, entering your username and password, and solve the problem.

The message is a fake and it's not from the real company, the website is a fake and isn't the real company, and when you enter your username and password the perpertrator of the scam will use them to log on and empty your account, buy themselves a Porsche using your money or whatever.

Recently Apple has morphed its .Mac online service into MobileMe and it has had some problems. Steve Jobs admitted as much in an email and Apple has extended some users' trial accounts for several months as compensation.

MobileMe problems were great news to phishing scammers because it's an opportunity to rip people off. They wrote an email stating that there was a billing problem and urged anyone with a .Mac or MobileMe account to click the link in the message and update their payment details - a fake Apple site asked users for their credit card details. The scammers could then run up huge bills on other peoples' credit cards.

• Always regard emails as suspicious - they are easily faked
• Never click links in emails - they may take you to fake websites
• Always run your web browser manually and type in addresses
• Use a web browser with anti-phishing technology, like Firefox

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iPhone/iPod Touch dead spots

When the iPhone came out I wanted one like everyone else, but it simply costs too much money. It wasn't just the price of the phone itself, it was the contract. In fact, the phone isn't that expensive when you consider that it's also an iPod and a personal organiser too.

However, just don't make enough calls or texts to make the monthly payment worthwhile. For this reason I decided to get an iPod Touch. What made it even more tempting was that a trip to the US meant that I could get it for £40 ($80) less than in the UK.

They say that you can lose 70% of your hearing before you actually notice anything seriously wrong with it. No, I haven't gone deaf, but I think the same must be true of earphones. A couple of months ago I suddenly realised that there was something wrong with the iPod's sound. It was poor, lacked bass and stereo separation.

I plugged in some other earphones and wow, what a difference! The sound was amazing - crystal clear treble and thumping bass. It now seems that the original earphones had been very gradually failing. Each day they must have been very slightly worse and the change was so slight each time that I hadn't noticed until it was really bad. The original earphones were obviously broken and were thrown out.

Now the touch screen on the iPod Touch has dead spots. What happened is that a horizontal strip across the screen about 1cm high near the top just stopped responding to the touch. This means that you can't select anything in this area and it disabled many functions on the iPod. A search at Google revealed that lots of other people have had dead spots too, with both the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Considering the number of devices sold, however, it's probably not a large percentage.

It appears that Apple knows about this problem and after demonstrating it at an Apple store they'll replace it on the spot if they've got your model in stock, or they'll order it if they haven't. Mine came in just 24 hours. Full marks for customer services then, but I wonder how serious a problem it is. How many have Apple replaced?

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The problems of DRM music

Yahoo! has had a music download service for a few years, but there hasn't been sufficient interest in it and now it has been announced that it is to close. This is just yet another online music service that's closing and others include MSN Music and Sony Connect.

The problem is that all these online music services were supplying DRM protected tracks - DRM (Digital Rights Managment) is basically copy protection that limits what you can do with copyright music. Anyone that has bought music tracks from Yahoo! will still be able to play them, but the DRM servers will be closed down at the end of September.

This will prevent anyone from moving their music to another computer. The tracks are stuck on the computer they are on and there's no way to transfer them to another computer. Computers date very quickly and eventually they break down and when this happens you'll lose all your music.

This is just one of the problems associated with buying DRM protected music over the internet and there are others. For example, a disk fault could wipe out your whole collection that you paid a lot of money for. Would any of the online music services let you download all your music again? Not likely. Of course, you could back up your music, but hardly anyone bothers to run backup software.

It seems to me that the best way to build up a music collection is to buy the CDs and to rip them with your favourite music player/organiser. If your computer develops a fault or you buy a new one, you can simply rip your CDs again. If you have the original discs it solves a lot of problems.

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New web browsers are excellent

I spent some time recently looking at the latest web browsers and the improvements in security are excellent. Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox have anti phishing features built in, but IE8 and Firefox 3, and Opera 9.5 take security to a new level.

When you go to a website like PayPal or eBay a section of the address box turns green and shows the company name. Clicking it displays brief details about the company and more information is available by clicking a button. This won't be available on a phishing website, that's if the browser lets you go there, and probably it won't. It'll warn you before even displaying the home page.

The security is excellent and you should definitely get one of these web browsers. You do need to be careful though. The problem is that only known phishing websites can be blocked by a web browser and if you visit an unknown phishing site it might seem OK. When a phishing website is created someone has to go there, discover it is a fake, and then report it. It then gets added to the database of known phishing websites accessed by the browsers.

There's a short period of time in between the site going live and it being reported and you might visit the site during that period. So even if your browser doesn't block a site or report anything wrong, always be suspicious. Never ever click links in emails.

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