TagOSX

Objective-See

2017-02-21malware OSX security surveillance

One of the most insidious actions of malware, is abusing the audio and video capabilities of an infected host to record an unknowing user. Macs, of course, are not immune; malware such as OSX/Eleanor, OSX/Crisis, OSX/Mokes, and others, all attempt to spy on OS X users. OverSight constantly monitors a system, alerting a user whenever the internal microphone is activated, or the built-in webcam is accessed. And yes, while the webcam’s LED will turn on whenever a session is initially started, new research has shown that malware can surreptitious piggyback into such existing sessions (FaceTime, Sykpe, Google Hangouts, etc.) and record both audio and video – without fear of detection

Source: Objective-See

Syntax highlighting in less on osx

2017-02-13development OSX terminal

To get lovely syntax highlighting in the OSX terminal (for seeing the output of ‘less’ nicely):

$ brew install source-highlight

Add these your .profile or appropriate dotfile (.bash_profile, .zshrc)

LESSPIPE=`which src-hilite-lesspipe.sh`

export LESSOPEN="| ${LESSPIPE} %s"

export LESS='-R'

Source: Syntax highlighting in less on osx | Putting the fun into Funkworks

OSX Missing Essentials: Time Machine FileGoBack & HistoryHound

2016-03-06OSX utilities

Time machine is a godsend when you need to get back a missing file. You can almost blindly root around through the available dates until it shows up – and count yourself lucky. The rooting around becomes exceedingly more difficult when you’re after a previous version of a particular document though. I’ve just come across an amazingly useful utility that makes this revision search easier, FileGoBack. You can use it like a regular application, but it’s also just a right-click away in your services menu where it really shines. My only annoyance is that this utility has been around for quite some time without me being aware.

Jerry Krinock, the man behind Sheep Systems, also makes some really useful bookmark utilities if you happen to use more than one browser. I like Synkmark for the control it offers in organizing and verifying bookmarks in addition to the main feature of keeping your favorites up to date across Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. It lets me choose a primary browser as the standard and helps to avoid the very evil looping situation it’s so easy to get into when you also use iCloud and Google sync services. I have used the more readily advertised Xmarks in the past, but gave up when the end result was too frequently a universally in sync corruption. I just want the sync to happen when I want it to rather than attempt to trust software to trigger on every seeming change everywhere.

While thinking about browser tools this week I also re-discovered HistoryHound. If you’ve ever tried to find something you remember having seen on some webpage somewhere, this will really help you out. It configurably indexes your cache of things browsed to increase your chances of finding what was found (and omitting what ought not be). This goes well beyond the dated list of URLs available in your History menu since it lets you search your actual recent content ordered by relevance. Bravo to St. Clair Software, who also make the more well-known Default Folder X.

(Since this post may seem overly complementary, I’ll make it clear that the only relationship with any entity mentioned is having bought the software at regular price.)