New Mac Virus Detected

A new Mac OS X exploit was discovered Friday morning by Kaspersky Labs which propogates through a zipfile attachment. The attachment tricks the Mac user into installing a variant of the MaControl backdoor via point-and-grunt. Embedded in the virus is an encrypted IP address belonging to a server in China which is believed to be a C+C server.

Chrome Dev channel has been updated to 14.0.835.0 for Mac and Linux, and 14.0.835.2 for Windows.

Google has updated the alpha “Dev” build of Google Chrome to 14.0.835.2. This minor update is notable largely for the amendment of one of its multi-touch features to avoid a conflict with Mac OS X Lion, which was released last week.

Security holes in Apple MacBooks :Vulnerable To Battery Firmware Hacks

Charlie Miller, Apple security expert with the consulting firm Accuvant, found a new way to hack into Apple's MacBook computers -- with the battery.

If exploited, Miller’s newly discovered hack could force battery overheating, or render it inoperable, transforming the computer into an expensive paperweight.

First Day :Apple reported 1M OS X downloads.

Apple in its press info announced that it had 1 million downloads of its newest operating system, Lion.

Thanks the the ease of downloading it through the App Store, this was the biggest OS launch in Apple's history.

This is what the Press info says :

Installing OS X 10.7 Lion

The optical disk is dead. Or at least it is for Apple fans. The company had been dropping DVD drives from its latest hardware and its new operating system, OS X 10.7 Lion, is now available in digital form only, via the Mac App Store . 

On one hand that's great — upgrading is just a matter of clicking a button and you're done, everything is handled seamlessly behind the scenes. 

However, the App Store method means you'll have to be running Snow Leopard (which is the only other OS that supports the App Store), and you'll have to download a nearly 4GB file, which can take quite a while if you haven't got a fast internet connection. 

The other problem is that the App Store install doesn't offer the opportunity to do a "clean" install — that is, wipe away your old system and install a fresh copy of Lion. To do a clean install Apple would have you wait until August, when the company will be begin shipping Lion on USB sticks for a whopping $70, more the double the $30 App Store price. 

However, despite what Apple says, there are in fact other ways to install Lion. Here's our guide to the various ways of installing Apple's newest OS on your Mac without waiting until August or paying double for the USB stick.

Downloading Lion

The simplest way to install Lion is to download it from the Mac App Store and then run the installer. If your connection is too slow to make a 4 GB download practical, head to your nearest Apple Store which will allow you to download a copy via their speedy wifi connection. It'll still take a while, but at least you can play with fancy new Macs while you wait. 

 

Don't have fast broadband or live near a Mac store? Make friends with someone who has the broadband you need, or be patient and wait several days for Lion to download. Alternately you can wait until August and pay a premium for a USB copy.

Build your own install disk

Just because Apple wants everything to be digital doesn't mean you have to oblige them. In fact it's dead simple to create your own DVD or USB Lion installer. When Lion installs it will create a hidden recovery partition on your harddrive. Should anything ever go wrong with your installation you can always hold down the option key at start up and boot from the emergency partition to re-install Lion.

Given the new hidden disk failsafe, why bother creating an installation disk? Well, you'll need it if you want to do a clean install and it's not a bad thing to have around. If your hard drive fails the hidden partition will fail with it and you'll be stuck downloading Lion again. 

Fortunately creating an install disk from the Lion installer is pretty easy. First head to your Applications folder, where you'll see the freshly downloaded Lion installer app. Right-click on the app and select "Show Package Contents." That will open the installer bundle in a new window where you'll see a folder called "SharedSupport." Inside "SharedSupport" there's a disk image called "InstallESD.dmg." The "ESD" bit stands for "Emergency Startup Disk," which is what we'll use to create a new Lion install disk, so copy "InstallESD.dmg" somewhere else.

Now insert your disk — a DVD, a USB stick or an external hard drive will all work — and launch Disk Utility . Select the drive you're using and then click the "Restore" tab. Make sure your backup drive is set as the "Destination," and then just drag and drop the "InstallESD.dmg" into the "Source" box. Click "Restore" and wait for Disk Utility to work it's magic. Once it's done, eject your disk and you're finished. Use that disk as you would any other installation disk.

Over-the-air "clean" install

If something goes catastrophically wrong with your Mac, Apple has a new hidden option in Lion that will allow you to wipe your drive and do a clean install via the internet. That's great for recovery purposes, should something go wrong with your install. 

To get to the new options, just start up your Mac holding down command-R and you'll be greeted by a menu that will allow you to restore your system to any point in time from a Time Machine backup, run Disk Utility to check, repair or partition disks and connect to Apple via Safari. That's the hidden recovery partition kicking in.

Lion's so-called Internet Recovery mode lets you start your Mac directly from Apple's Servers, as per Apple's tech note:

Note: If your Mac problem is a little less common — your hard drive has failed or you've installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically. It downloads and starts Lion Recovery directly from Apple servers over a broadband Internet connection. And your Mac has access to the same Lion Recovery features online. Internet Recovery is built into every newly-released Mac starting with the Mac mini and MacBook Air.

Conclusion

As with in OS upgrade be sure to make complete bootable backups (and test them!) before you begin installing OS X Lion.

Updated MacBook Air released

Apple updated the MacBook Air with new high-speed Thunderbolt connections, a backlit keyboard, and Mac OS X Lion, the newest version of the operating system that also became available today.

 
Starting at $999 for the U.S. market,Students can expect to pay £730 through the Education Store, and U.S. students will find the costs to be knocked down to $949, according to the website.

Mac OSX 10.7 codenamed 'LION' to be launched next week: Features

We know On June 6, at WWDC 2011, it was announced that the official release for Lion would be in July 2011 and that, unlike previous versions, which were released on a set of CD-ROMs or a DVD-ROM, Lion would only be available as a download from the Mac App Store for US$29.99. The only prior version of OS X that supports the Mac App Store is Snow Leopard, implying that any machines that support Lion currently running Tiger or Leopard will first have to be upgraded to Snow Leopard, as opposed to allowing a direct upgrade to Lion. The Server portion of Lion will be available as a separate download from the Mac App Store for US$49.99.

Features that we can expect :

Multi-touch gestures:

An input system already existed in iPhone and iPad.

Inverted scrolling. As you'd imagine, slightly tricky to get used to, but makes a lot of sense 15 minutes in. The mental switch has already happened and Snow Leopard now feels wrong.

Full screen applications

Expand any application so that it fills the screen - meaning no distraction from others.

Mission control

This brings together full-screen apps, Dashboard, Exposé, and Spaces in a new feature that gives you a bird's-eye view of everything on your system.

New Mac app store

Already available but it is Now more closely integrated into the system, and becoming a major source of apps for download. You can still get apps by downloading from the web, though.

Launchpad

Launchpad is a new, full-screen home for all the apps on your machine, brought up by clicking an icon in the Dock: open windows fade away, to be replaced by a full-screen display of all your apps.

Resume

A feature that start the machine back at exactly the same place that you turned it off - preserving the state of the documents.

Autosave and Versions

Using this feature documents created by certain apps will be saved automatically at set periods. You can revert to an earlier version or compare it.

Airdrop

Airdrop is a on-the-fly peer-to-peer wireless networking between any two Macs.

Developer viewpoint: "Have been unable to test this yet."

Mail

Mail has been redesigned with a three-pane interface borrowed from the iPad. Also has enhanced search and conversation threading. 

Bye bye scroll bars

Bye bye scroll bars is a radical change to the interface. (You can also resize windows from any part of the side, as Windows has offered for years.)

New MacBook Air with 400 mbps flash storage

     New MacBook Air to hit lightning speeds with 400 mbps flash storage.

It looks like Apple's expected Macbook Air refresh could put its ultra-thin laptops at the top of the charts when it comes to speed. 

According to Macotakara.jp, parts manufacturers for the new Airs are using 400 mbps NAND flash storage chips. So what exactly does this mean? Well the chips are soldered straight onto the Airs' motherboard, doing away with any connection whatsoever and bringing with it a possible 100 times performance increase over past models. This coupled with the possible i5 and i7 update could mean the new Apple lightweights are no longer disappointing in the specs department. 

A MacBook Air refresh is expected to arrive alongside the mid-July release of OSX Lion. The new ultra-thin laptops are rumoured to sport the high speed Thunderbolt port, Sandy Bridge processors and the same design as current generation MacBook Airs. 

  via:[BGR]: