Thread
What software and functions do you miss in pre-OSX?
Agreed. For me, it almost completely eliminates all the fun when one says not to use a computer online if it's not running the latest and greatest OS. For example, I'm presently using a 2008 MacBook with Snow Leopard, which, based on the fact that it's a discontinued OS that saw its last security updates in 2011 or 2012, would be very unwise. With this in mind, I have enabled the firewall to block all incoming connections, so, while it's not totally immune to attack, it's not wide open, either.
Ideally, I'd run at least Mavericks (though, for some bizarre reason, it's looking like it's no longer supported either), but this MacBook can't run it, and my new MacBook Pro is somewhere in the world waiting to be repaired.
Oh, well. I see Cory's point, but sometimes reality can be boring.
c
Ideally, I'd run at least Mavericks (though, for some bizarre reason, it's looking like it's no longer supported either), but this MacBook can't run it, and my new MacBook Pro is somewhere in the world waiting to be repaired.
Oh, well. I see Cory's point, but sometimes reality can be boring.
c
I'm exclusively Lion and SL with my online machines. Just have to be careful. I don't run Flash, so that eliminates like 99% of attack vectors. :lol:
If we didn't have updated browsers it would be more cause for concern.
If we didn't have updated browsers it would be more cause for concern.
My apologies for the confusion. I was talking to "the scene" as a whole, including the PPC subforum on Low End Mac. Most of the regular posters in that subforum are explicit in that they do all of their work, and put their credit card numbers into their old Macs.
Though, there are plenty (enough for concern, anyway) of people here on 68kMLA.org doing the same thing, not to mention the vocal Windows XP contingent (surprising, given that as you say, this is a Mac forum). We even had a member here in late 2013 and early 2014 who had an unpatched installation of Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10 as their main operating environment. They used the late beta release of Firefox 3.0 as their main web browser. This was before a huge number of exploits was found in legacy code like "bash" and the NTP and DHCP services, among other things. Have you seen the news lately? Security researchers are doing a lot of good work these days.
Most of the time when I talk about security issues surrounding vintage computers, I'm not talking about your personal security. I'm talking about the impact you have on the rest of the world when you run an old machine on a public network. Reflection attacks, open mail relays, mail relays opened by force, privilege escalation to get access to all of these things. Issues like shellshock even (on some systems, admittedly not Mac OS X) could be used to just reset the root password on a machine, no questions asked, using (of all things) DHCP flags.
With more ISPs in the US and elsewhere providing branded networking equipment with known security flaws, that could be a huge issue and it (and the move toward IPv6, which Mac OS X has supported for a very long time and is on by default) is yet another reason why trusting a network border to keep old, unpatched machines safe is such a bad idea.
Enabling the Mac OS X firewall is helpful, but it's not the only solution, and most of the not-really-very-technical users either buying used PPC Macs to use as their main machines, or clinging to something built ten years ago as their main computer.
I get why from an economic standpoint, but it is a cause for concern. Unfortunately, the concern tends to fall upon deaf ears, which is why you've heard a lot less of it in 2015 than in previous years. (Also, my interest in security from that particular standpoint is actually relatively new in the grand scheme of things, I'd say it started in 2013, 2012 at earliest.
Mmmh. I think the phrasing you're looking for is this:Sorry… You're an admin of a Macintosh vintage computing forum, right ? Ok… just to be sure
It's surprising the administrator of a 68k Macintosh web site isn't interested in middle-aged versions of Mac OS X.
Interest is a bad way to put it. I actually liked Mac OS X 10.5 when it was new. It had its fair share of problems, many of which Mac OS X 10.10 has to this day, making it uninsteresting for me as a daily driver.
That said:
- I was probably actually using 68k Macs as a daily productivity computer for a lot longer than most. I have an 840 on my desk as my e-mail/chat/IRC and forum-browsing computer through mid-to-late 2006, while I was still using some G3s (a Pismo and a Yosemite/Blue-And-White) as my main computers for photo processing.
- It's not uncommon at all for retro computing community members to have modern computers that are of a different platform.
You're intentionally misreading things, and/or just aren't on the forum often.
Mac OS X has loads of security holes, and problems and vulnerabilities that affect old versions (often all the way back to 10.3, as in the case of shellshock) come up all the time. Mac OS X, being a completely different OS from OS 9, has different issues, and one of its issues is that it's a complete UNIX system. On any given Mac OS X system, there's lots of stuff to exploit. Not only is most of it on the disk (and it has been by default since 10.3 or 10.4) but a lot of it's active at any given point in time.
Mac OS 9 on the other hand has almost nothing. Anything you don't trust, you can physically pull off the disk. Mac OS 9 didn't even have a system-wide remote control method built in, the only thing there was was network AppleScripts or Events, and you had to be exceedingly specific about enabling it. (Compare with Mac OS X that has three system-wide remote control apparatus built in and has plenty of ways to get privileged code escalation.)
Anyway, point being, you can happily run a Mac OS 9 system online all day long with no consequences. On most of the "old" Apple hardware I have any personal interest in, Mac OS 9 runs better anyway. (For example, when I get my beige and blue-and-white G3s set up in my new home, both are going to be running some variety of Mac OS 8.1-9.2.2 because there's really no good reason for me to run OS X on hardware that old.)
In terms of being uninterested in old OS X: I have been relatively up-to-date on Mac hardware for years. I'd argue from 2003 when I got my PowerBook G4 to today. I keep Macs longer than what I think Apple would prefer, but I generally have something "pretty modern." Maybe it's just because I've rarely gone without, but to me, Mac OS X 10.5 doesn't really feel much different than 10.10. There are the wildly obvious appearance and compatibility differences, but at the core, it's the same operating system with the same design goals, most of the same features, and the same overall concepts.
For me, the only thing to be had by running Mac OS X 10.5 somewhere (Intel, PPC, native, or virtualized/emulated) would be to use older versions of the apps I use today. That's of questionable value, since for the past ten to fifteen or years, most of the creative and pro apps you can get have been really good about being able to bring documents to newer file formats without making any change to the actual content. (It doesn't always work easily or well in reverse though, in my experience.)
This is pretty tangential both to "Let's all misunderstand Cory!" time and to a software thread, but I'll admit that I just can't get into most 2000s Apple hardware. It's during this period that Apple built most of the least reliable systems it has ever built, with just an extremely slim few of them being more reliable than the Apple ///, and where all efforts to increase performance were thwarted by the fact that none of the platforms they were using and designing really had any life left in them, and when they did get their hands on what was essentially a scaled down supercomputer platform, their extreme NIH syndrome made sure that its native USB support was broken and that any other design guidelines IBM may have had for it (for example, a lot of cache) were not followed.
How many of you were Mac users in 2005 and 2006?
I was. The Intel-based Macs were definitely cause for trepidation, but once you had your hand on one, statistically, it was almost certainly faster than what you were already using. If your apps weren't faster, they weren't much slower than they were on your PowerBook G4 (if you had a 1.6GHz PowerBook, it may have felt like using a 1.2 or 1.3GHz model, really) and once your apps did become native, they got a huge speed boost.
Also, a few years after the switch to the Intel platform, Apple gave their professional notebooks a much needed re-design and by the time the late 2008 models shipped with Penryn processors and the unibody design, not only was Apple building some of the most physically reliable computers they ever had, but they were quite performant at the time.
In late 2008 and early 2009, I was using my 2007 iMac and a similarly aged ThinkPad and wanted to condense down to one smaller system. A MacBook Pro was on the table and sometimes I regret not having gone that way, but I just couldn't do it.
That said, I never stopped liking Mac system 7. It's just not practical to use it every day at this point. I could connect to SSH with it and I could generate text documents with it, but doing those things would make my time harder. I do it from time to time, but it's definitely not a day-to-day thing any longer, as it was up through 2006.
Though, I am in a new physical space, maybe I'll get some kind of awesomely huge desk and have the 6100 and/or pb180 on and running all the time.
If you need to feel young, there are products whose entire purpose in life is making you feel young.
https://www.harley-davidson.com
http://www.chevrolet.com/corvette-sports-cars.html
The best part is, unlike with old versions of OS X, you won't endanger everyone around you just by using it properly.
Many Thanks for the suggestion . Great ideas you have.
Now , for endangering everyone with OSX 10.4, please enlighten me . That is very interesting .
Now , for endangering everyone with OSX 10.4, please enlighten me . That is very interesting .
I think I would notice if my Mac was being used as a botnet or mail server.
I'm going to respond here in two parts.
First I'll go after the OP and describe what I can accomplish on a classic Mac OS machine (more specifically a 68K running System 7) and what I can't. I am probably about as good a candidate as any for this exercise because I don't use streaming media services (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) or cloud storage services (Dropbox etc.). I run my own email accounts (both personal and work), which are completely standard-fare setups that should not pose a challenge for an old machine. Breaking things down further:
Text editing, email, and IRC all happen via ssh to my Unix shell server, which works almost as well on the classic Mac OS as it does on any modern non-Unix platform (see: PuTTY on Windows). This also conveniently lines up with how many people accessed networked services on the machines when they were new, just through telnet or rsh or some other precursor to SSH instead. The only problem connecting to modern machines here is character encodings - the PowerPC version of MacSSH supports legacy Japanese character encoding translation (ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP and Shift-JIS), but the 68K version doesn't, so non-Roman system locales on the remote Unix machine are a problem. This means most application strings and content are illegible when I connect from a 68K machine, and are also illegible from a PowerPC machine unless I change the environment to a legacy encoding, although I can issue commands and do some other basic tasks. If we are willing to assume a PowerPC machine, then this issue becomes less severe, but it's still not very practical. I could switch my shell environment from UTF-8 to EUC-JP to allow MacSSH/PPC to display localized messages, but text files and emails I try to view in UTF-8 would still be illegible without conversion.
Music is a bit more complicated, and I probably wouldn't be happy with any classic Mac OS solution. My primary computers today are Unix machines running mpd clients on a FLAC collection, and even Mac OS X is not so great at this. I only know of one dedicated music player for OS X that does FLAC, which was written by a friend and is very much a proof of concept, although I would probably get by on it if I suddenly found myself with only OS X machines. I'm not aware of any classic Mac OS players that handle FLAC, and the disk space required to store the collection is is pushing the limits of hard disks that tend to be available for machines that run it, so I don't think I would ever attempt to use the platform for playing music in the present day.
Network resource access isn't bad - I run netatalk on my Solaris desktop at home and my 7.6.1 machines have no trouble with it. Not needing to use an FTP client or similar to move files between the old Macs and modern machines certainly goes a long way in this thought exercise.
The only thing I use a word processor for at all is my resume, which doesn't get updated often and actually does exist as a Nisus Writer document on my 840AV that I turn into a PDF when I need to send it somewhere. Any other significant text generation for me happens in an editor, which is usually vim and easily done over SSH, but I've been warming up to MPW lately as I hammer away at some hobby projects.
Web browsing is a very sore spot. Classilla and the old Mozilla releases it's based on are okay in a pinch, but Mac OS is really just not very good at handling the gigantic pile of scripts and content that comprise a modern website, and the rendering for many pages is way off. It's adequate for when I am doing something related to old computers and need to look up some online reference material, but I wouldn't suffer through my regular news sites on it, for example.
Where does this leave us? If the question is "would you use a classic Mac OS machine as a primary computer," the answer is an immediate "no," even if that computer were the fastest, most heavily-upgraded OS 9 machine possible. Browsing the web does not work very well unless you're very choosy about which sites you visit, I am not aware of any music player that would do what I need, and video playback is right out because the machines are not powerful enough to play HD video files regardless of OS or player, which is most of my collection by now. I could get a fair amount of work done in MacSSH on a PowerPC machine, but I would have to give up most if not all entertainment, doing research on the web would be a challenge, and I would have to convert many of my emails and other communication from UTF-8 to a legacy encoding before reading it, and then back to UTF-8 to reply. If you change the question to "would you use a classic Mac OS machine as a sidekick for a modern machine," the answer is yes. I like them and they're good at a subset of still-relevant tasks. For the past few weekends I've spent afternoons in my local coffee shop programming on a PowerBook 1400, and that was the only machine I had on me while there. When I get home, though, I might want to play some music or watch a movie, or read some news on a website, and that needs to happen on something newer and running a different OS.
Changing gears - some other issues were brought up regarding the nature of this community and the irresponsibility of having old OS X machines on the internet. The scope of the "old Mac" hobby varies from person to person, and I have seen some people make an unspoken assumption that any community focused on some kind of Apple product is inherently going to champion all other Apple products, or at least all other discontinued ones. For me personally, an "old Mac" hobby means machines that run the classic Mac OS, not OS X, and the appropriate scope of a place with a name like "68kMLA" is about that range - early PowerPC machines get a pass because they're running the same software platform. Old OS X machines to me are a different platform, and simply aren't different enough from a new Mac you can buy today to be interesting as an object of hobby interest. If someone else does think they're worthy of that interest, I'm in no position to criticize (although if someone is trying to get by on an old Mac because they can't or don't want to spend money on a new one, they've chosen the wrong platform). That being said, expecting a community officially centered around 68K Macs to embrace older OS X machines to me is about as absurd as expecting participants in an Apple II hobby community to be into 68K Macs. Some of them might be, but it's not part of the mission statement and one can't assume that they are. Ultimately 68kMLA is about a platform (classic Macintosh), not a brand (Apple). It's also not LowEndMac, whose mission statement has always been "we want to help you be a Mac user on the cheap by getting the most out of your old/used machine." People can talk about G4s and G5s running OS X all they want in the appropriate subforums, but don't ever expect the site admin or any regular user to be into those machines just because of their affiliation with 68kMLA. Some people are, but it's a degree removed from the stated focus of the community and it can't be expected.
The peculiar characteristics of the classic Mac OS that Cory5412 mentioned earlier - not being modern multiuser networked operating systems with a host of exploitable services - have actually helped bring me full circle with my obscure platform interest back to the 68K Macs that I started from. For a while I was more into SGI IRIX machines, but patch support for them ended in December 2013 and I prompty retired them all because it's simply not responsible to have unpatched Unix machines hanging out on the internet. 68K Macs don't have this problem, though, and I appreciate how I can get my old computer fix without having to quarantine them. It's the reason why I have no reservations about letting my Quadra 840AV see the internet, but I don't feel comfortable doing the same with my NeXTstation.
EDIT: Fixed factual error about MacSSH's Japanese character encoding support. I originally said that the PowerPC version can encode/decode Unicode, but actually the PowerPC version only supports legacy encodings, and the 68K version doesn't support any at all.
First I'll go after the OP and describe what I can accomplish on a classic Mac OS machine (more specifically a 68K running System 7) and what I can't. I am probably about as good a candidate as any for this exercise because I don't use streaming media services (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) or cloud storage services (Dropbox etc.). I run my own email accounts (both personal and work), which are completely standard-fare setups that should not pose a challenge for an old machine. Breaking things down further:
Text editing, email, and IRC all happen via ssh to my Unix shell server, which works almost as well on the classic Mac OS as it does on any modern non-Unix platform (see: PuTTY on Windows). This also conveniently lines up with how many people accessed networked services on the machines when they were new, just through telnet or rsh or some other precursor to SSH instead. The only problem connecting to modern machines here is character encodings - the PowerPC version of MacSSH supports legacy Japanese character encoding translation (ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP and Shift-JIS), but the 68K version doesn't, so non-Roman system locales on the remote Unix machine are a problem. This means most application strings and content are illegible when I connect from a 68K machine, and are also illegible from a PowerPC machine unless I change the environment to a legacy encoding, although I can issue commands and do some other basic tasks. If we are willing to assume a PowerPC machine, then this issue becomes less severe, but it's still not very practical. I could switch my shell environment from UTF-8 to EUC-JP to allow MacSSH/PPC to display localized messages, but text files and emails I try to view in UTF-8 would still be illegible without conversion.
Music is a bit more complicated, and I probably wouldn't be happy with any classic Mac OS solution. My primary computers today are Unix machines running mpd clients on a FLAC collection, and even Mac OS X is not so great at this. I only know of one dedicated music player for OS X that does FLAC, which was written by a friend and is very much a proof of concept, although I would probably get by on it if I suddenly found myself with only OS X machines. I'm not aware of any classic Mac OS players that handle FLAC, and the disk space required to store the collection is is pushing the limits of hard disks that tend to be available for machines that run it, so I don't think I would ever attempt to use the platform for playing music in the present day.
Network resource access isn't bad - I run netatalk on my Solaris desktop at home and my 7.6.1 machines have no trouble with it. Not needing to use an FTP client or similar to move files between the old Macs and modern machines certainly goes a long way in this thought exercise.
The only thing I use a word processor for at all is my resume, which doesn't get updated often and actually does exist as a Nisus Writer document on my 840AV that I turn into a PDF when I need to send it somewhere. Any other significant text generation for me happens in an editor, which is usually vim and easily done over SSH, but I've been warming up to MPW lately as I hammer away at some hobby projects.
Web browsing is a very sore spot. Classilla and the old Mozilla releases it's based on are okay in a pinch, but Mac OS is really just not very good at handling the gigantic pile of scripts and content that comprise a modern website, and the rendering for many pages is way off. It's adequate for when I am doing something related to old computers and need to look up some online reference material, but I wouldn't suffer through my regular news sites on it, for example.
Where does this leave us? If the question is "would you use a classic Mac OS machine as a primary computer," the answer is an immediate "no," even if that computer were the fastest, most heavily-upgraded OS 9 machine possible. Browsing the web does not work very well unless you're very choosy about which sites you visit, I am not aware of any music player that would do what I need, and video playback is right out because the machines are not powerful enough to play HD video files regardless of OS or player, which is most of my collection by now. I could get a fair amount of work done in MacSSH on a PowerPC machine, but I would have to give up most if not all entertainment, doing research on the web would be a challenge, and I would have to convert many of my emails and other communication from UTF-8 to a legacy encoding before reading it, and then back to UTF-8 to reply. If you change the question to "would you use a classic Mac OS machine as a sidekick for a modern machine," the answer is yes. I like them and they're good at a subset of still-relevant tasks. For the past few weekends I've spent afternoons in my local coffee shop programming on a PowerBook 1400, and that was the only machine I had on me while there. When I get home, though, I might want to play some music or watch a movie, or read some news on a website, and that needs to happen on something newer and running a different OS.
Changing gears - some other issues were brought up regarding the nature of this community and the irresponsibility of having old OS X machines on the internet. The scope of the "old Mac" hobby varies from person to person, and I have seen some people make an unspoken assumption that any community focused on some kind of Apple product is inherently going to champion all other Apple products, or at least all other discontinued ones. For me personally, an "old Mac" hobby means machines that run the classic Mac OS, not OS X, and the appropriate scope of a place with a name like "68kMLA" is about that range - early PowerPC machines get a pass because they're running the same software platform. Old OS X machines to me are a different platform, and simply aren't different enough from a new Mac you can buy today to be interesting as an object of hobby interest. If someone else does think they're worthy of that interest, I'm in no position to criticize (although if someone is trying to get by on an old Mac because they can't or don't want to spend money on a new one, they've chosen the wrong platform). That being said, expecting a community officially centered around 68K Macs to embrace older OS X machines to me is about as absurd as expecting participants in an Apple II hobby community to be into 68K Macs. Some of them might be, but it's not part of the mission statement and one can't assume that they are. Ultimately 68kMLA is about a platform (classic Macintosh), not a brand (Apple). It's also not LowEndMac, whose mission statement has always been "we want to help you be a Mac user on the cheap by getting the most out of your old/used machine." People can talk about G4s and G5s running OS X all they want in the appropriate subforums, but don't ever expect the site admin or any regular user to be into those machines just because of their affiliation with 68kMLA. Some people are, but it's a degree removed from the stated focus of the community and it can't be expected.
The peculiar characteristics of the classic Mac OS that Cory5412 mentioned earlier - not being modern multiuser networked operating systems with a host of exploitable services - have actually helped bring me full circle with my obscure platform interest back to the 68K Macs that I started from. For a while I was more into SGI IRIX machines, but patch support for them ended in December 2013 and I prompty retired them all because it's simply not responsible to have unpatched Unix machines hanging out on the internet. 68K Macs don't have this problem, though, and I appreciate how I can get my old computer fix without having to quarantine them. It's the reason why I have no reservations about letting my Quadra 840AV see the internet, but I don't feel comfortable doing the same with my NeXTstation.
EDIT: Fixed factual error about MacSSH's Japanese character encoding support. I originally said that the PowerPC version can encode/decode Unicode, but actually the PowerPC version only supports legacy encodings, and the 68K version doesn't support any at all.
I think I would too… But I suppose he suggested I wasn't using old OSXs "properly".
He must know much more than me anyway
maybe he's even hacking my OSX tiger right now...
Modern computers (even going back as far as G4s) are powerful enough that you very likely will not notice unless you are on the watch for it, and even then you still may not find it. We're well past the point where the CPU load of sending out a bunch of bulk email is going to make your desktop environment unresponsive.
Well, for starters, 10.4 is vulnerable to shellshock, and various service reflection vulnerabilities. If somebody gets in -- and there are ways in -- then they can do anything with your computer that they could do with, well, any computer.
I've been attempting to explain about this for two or three years now. Basically, the value of a remotely compromised system these days isn't in the personal data that's on it -- it's in that computer's ability to mine bitcoins or send spam.
On Windows, this gets accomplished by installing a tool such as pushdo, which is essentially a framework that allows an attacker to install additional components on the machine to do tasks. Pushdo could be used to deploy bitcoin agents, or to deploy cutwail, a tool that sends spam and phishing e-mails.
A Mac or Linux computer can also do these things, and if you can get access to one of those systems, it's even easier because the mail server is already built in.
All of this generates the amount of spam and traffic on the Internet, reducing performance for everybody.
You'd be surprised. This post is about a person whose NeXT virtual machine was configured as an open mail relay, and they didn't notice it was spewing spam until it had been doing so for potentially weeks, and only because of a very low RAM situation -- something most Mac OS X machines won't have. They don't go into it, but they really only notice because the whole machine was crashing due to the massive crush loads on one process. The implication was that it took them quite a long time to notice because, well, otherwise, the machine operated at its normal speed and responsiveness.
For as often as I talk about how slow even the fastest of PowerPC macs, a good G4 (something like a single-CPU, 700MHz to 1.2GHz or so, maybe a gig of RAM) can almost certainly handle sending 3500 messages without the user at the keyboard noticing. Probably the one time you'd notice is if you did something else insanely resource-intensive, but even then, there's a good chance if you were only doing one resource-intensive thing at a time, you wouldn't notice, unless you were extremely well-attuned to the amount of time a task should take (in totally insane detail i.e. wow this frame should actually take six seconds less to render.)
If you go down to something a whole lot slower (something most of the PPC/OSX enthusiasts have moved on from, like a 400-600MHz G3 with 512MB of RAM) then you're slightly more likely to notice, but that class of machines was pretty frequently using nearly all of their resources with 10.3 and 10.4, so a crush load of dropping 3500 spam messages onto the mail queue might make you notice. maybe.
Sensitive data worth hacking on 20 year old computers?
Ain't nobody got time fo dat!
Ain't nobody got time fo dat!
My line about using the machine "properly" is more in regards to safe operation of the Harley or the Corvette, because it's literally possible to kill someone if you use them improperly, which would obviously be far more harmful than a PPC Mac in a botnet.
However, some practices with the Mac that would be using them "properly" would be avoiding untrusted software installation, using strong passwords/passphrases, keeping the machine behind a firewall, and installing the latest software updates. Even following those procedures, though, partially because there are no more software updates for PPC Macs, combined with the huge attack surface of OS X, you are at extreme risk for your computer's resources being used against the internet by malicious actors.
Using an insecure Unix-based platform on the internet isn't like using an old Jaguar Mk2 on the road, it's like putting a gun safe with a broken lock outside, and storing firearms and ammunition in it, and expecting that someone won't use them in a crime.
However, some practices with the Mac that would be using them "properly" would be avoiding untrusted software installation, using strong passwords/passphrases, keeping the machine behind a firewall, and installing the latest software updates. Even following those procedures, though, partially because there are no more software updates for PPC Macs, combined with the huge attack surface of OS X, you are at extreme risk for your computer's resources being used against the internet by malicious actors.
Using an insecure Unix-based platform on the internet isn't like using an old Jaguar Mk2 on the road, it's like putting a gun safe with a broken lock outside, and storing firearms and ammunition in it, and expecting that someone won't use them in a crime.
Thanks for these detailled responses .
So, let say I have a Mac 10.4 online. I have the root passwd, and I know it's not changed. I know my user passwd , and i know is not changed.
I've updated Bash. I know what are the services running.
How could this machine be used to send spam mails ?
Note: It's not that I don't believe you if you tell it can be done, But please , so far all I read is things scary like "don't go online, it's dangerous" or "you endanger everyone" and suggestion for cars and motorcycle shoppings. No explanations on how .
Edit: Btw not using a Jaguar Mk2 properly can be very dangerous too… or a fork , or even a teaspoon...
So, let say I have a Mac 10.4 online. I have the root passwd, and I know it's not changed. I know my user passwd , and i know is not changed.
I've updated Bash. I know what are the services running.
How could this machine be used to send spam mails ?
Note: It's not that I don't believe you if you tell it can be done, But please , so far all I read is things scary like "don't go online, it's dangerous" or "you endanger everyone" and suggestion for cars and motorcycle shoppings. No explanations on how .
Edit: Btw not using a Jaguar Mk2 properly can be very dangerous too… or a fork , or even a teaspoon...
It has been explained very clearly and repeatedly in this thread that nobody is talking about old computers being broken into to steal data (sensitive or otherwise). I hope you will give other people the courtesy of reading their posts before replying to them.
And even then, if you were to look to see if your machine is compromised, look for what? Unless you're a Unix type, you probably have no idea what's going on behind the magic curtain. Not only are they likely to disguise and hide it, they might even use rootkits and hide it even from careful eyes.
Once a system is compromised, it can not be trusted. You don't know what they could have done.
Once a system is compromised, it can not be trusted. You don't know what they could have done.
I'd argue that anyone running Adobe Flash (even on the latest and greatest operating systems) is a bigger risk than someone using an old version of OS X at this point.
Ultimately there's no substitute for user caution.
Ultimately there's no substitute for user caution.
My apologies for the delay. It had taken a while to craft a reply, and then I had to step away for a few days to do some house things.
In the time since I wrote the post below, this article came out from Arstechnica. I link it simply to illustrate the point that things are always changing and even a server that looks secure might have been compromised, somehow. I expect to hear more about this incident in the not too distant future. I'll probably be grabbing the report from Eset to look over as well.
User caution is very important. If you have a sufficient amount of it and you're taking all the other technical precautions Galgot mentioned (including some more, such as no Java, Flash, etc), just being careful and aware is a good idea. Unfortunately, that runs counter to what most Mac users, even enthusiasts of outmoded and unsupported OS X systems, tend to have the wherewithal to do. There's a huge perception out there -- and has been for a very long time, that Macs are totally trouble-free and that they're completely rock solid and that they are totally impervious to attacks of all kinds. That causes a really lax attitude and I'd say more often than not, the lax attitude is often what gets malware installed on Macs. This isn't just a problem on old Macs. (In fact, from a pure "malware" perspective, OSX/PPC is probably a lot less likely to get any "malware" than, say, a system running 10.8 or 10.9, and from a pure quantity perspective, there's less of it than on Windows, even with Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 each making Windows more difficult an environment for malware.
The thing is, even on supported systems from vendors that are really active with patches, you're really not ever "done" with security. You have to run patches, if you're really interested you have to find out what those patches are. Once a system falls out of official support, you need to manually start reviewing possible vulnerabilities and essentially look for things to patch or mitigate on your own.
A way to avoid all that is to simply put the system(s) on a non-routable darknet, which is basically my plan should I ever end up with another late PPC system running Mac OS X. It's a good way to reuse old (probably also insecure) LAN equipment, and you can configure your modern file server with two network interfaces, so you can still do things such as share files, telnet/SSH to your server form your old machines, use them to fetch your e-mail, and if that server is running some form of Linux or UNIX on it, you could use Firefox/Thunderbird etc to access public Internet resources using it.(1)
To talk to the issue of rooting a box(2). A few months (almost a year ago?) somebody mentioned that they felt confident that they knew everything there was to know about Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. I didn't say anything about that particular point until shortly thereafter, some new types of reflection attacks were discovered, along with shellshock, and several other vulnerabilities of various types have shown up since then. Many of these vulnerabilities impact old code that has been around a while. (The shellshock vulnerability affecting bash had been around for over twenty years, for example.)
So, if somebody takes the time to essentially review every CVE between when the last security patch for 10.4.11 came out, harden it using typical best practices, and then start re-compiling or somehow disabling every impacted component, it could be a great resource for the community of people using those machines. (At least those who bother to look for that kind of resource.)
So, I can't specifically say today for sure what the risks are going to be down the line in the same way that before September 2014 I couldn't have told you that shellshock was going to be a thing, and with shellshock, it's possible to use DHCP flags to set the root password on a Linux system.
The point there is that even if you've personally audited the entire codebase, vulnerabilities have since been found. Some free operating system projects are involved in an effort to start continuously prune and polish all of the code, which is good and their work should improve everything for everybody.
Some components of Mac OS X (bash, in particular) have been updated by knowledgeable members of the Mac/PPC scene. To my knowledge, that's the only such thing that has been updated. This is because I simply don't have a personal interest in it, but as far as I know, no PPC-focused community (most of the MacPPC-specific sites I've seen so far individuals' blogs) has put together a security resources guide, not only with information about how to harden Mac OS X using what's built in, as well as what to replace and how to either compile new OS components from scratch, or providing installation packages.
(1) This is insanely tangential, but that would be a good way to use a whole lab of G3s or G4s running Mac OS X with a single faster system, simplifying account management, management and security of the Macs themselves, and providing an environment that is actually faster at rendering pages or running more updated versions of heavy software such as GIMP and OpenOffice.ORG.
(2) Actually, setting the root password on Mac OS X has long been considered a bad practice. The fact that Apple keeps root disabled is probably like the one thing that saved a few of the boxes of people who boast about Mac OS X security.
In the time since I wrote the post below, this article came out from Arstechnica. I link it simply to illustrate the point that things are always changing and even a server that looks secure might have been compromised, somehow. I expect to hear more about this incident in the not too distant future. I'll probably be grabbing the report from Eset to look over as well.
User caution is very important. If you have a sufficient amount of it and you're taking all the other technical precautions Galgot mentioned (including some more, such as no Java, Flash, etc), just being careful and aware is a good idea. Unfortunately, that runs counter to what most Mac users, even enthusiasts of outmoded and unsupported OS X systems, tend to have the wherewithal to do. There's a huge perception out there -- and has been for a very long time, that Macs are totally trouble-free and that they're completely rock solid and that they are totally impervious to attacks of all kinds. That causes a really lax attitude and I'd say more often than not, the lax attitude is often what gets malware installed on Macs. This isn't just a problem on old Macs. (In fact, from a pure "malware" perspective, OSX/PPC is probably a lot less likely to get any "malware" than, say, a system running 10.8 or 10.9, and from a pure quantity perspective, there's less of it than on Windows, even with Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 each making Windows more difficult an environment for malware.
The thing is, even on supported systems from vendors that are really active with patches, you're really not ever "done" with security. You have to run patches, if you're really interested you have to find out what those patches are. Once a system falls out of official support, you need to manually start reviewing possible vulnerabilities and essentially look for things to patch or mitigate on your own.
A way to avoid all that is to simply put the system(s) on a non-routable darknet, which is basically my plan should I ever end up with another late PPC system running Mac OS X. It's a good way to reuse old (probably also insecure) LAN equipment, and you can configure your modern file server with two network interfaces, so you can still do things such as share files, telnet/SSH to your server form your old machines, use them to fetch your e-mail, and if that server is running some form of Linux or UNIX on it, you could use Firefox/Thunderbird etc to access public Internet resources using it.(1)
To talk to the issue of rooting a box(2). A few months (almost a year ago?) somebody mentioned that they felt confident that they knew everything there was to know about Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. I didn't say anything about that particular point until shortly thereafter, some new types of reflection attacks were discovered, along with shellshock, and several other vulnerabilities of various types have shown up since then. Many of these vulnerabilities impact old code that has been around a while. (The shellshock vulnerability affecting bash had been around for over twenty years, for example.)
So, if somebody takes the time to essentially review every CVE between when the last security patch for 10.4.11 came out, harden it using typical best practices, and then start re-compiling or somehow disabling every impacted component, it could be a great resource for the community of people using those machines. (At least those who bother to look for that kind of resource.)
So, I can't specifically say today for sure what the risks are going to be down the line in the same way that before September 2014 I couldn't have told you that shellshock was going to be a thing, and with shellshock, it's possible to use DHCP flags to set the root password on a Linux system.
The point there is that even if you've personally audited the entire codebase, vulnerabilities have since been found. Some free operating system projects are involved in an effort to start continuously prune and polish all of the code, which is good and their work should improve everything for everybody.
Some components of Mac OS X (bash, in particular) have been updated by knowledgeable members of the Mac/PPC scene. To my knowledge, that's the only such thing that has been updated. This is because I simply don't have a personal interest in it, but as far as I know, no PPC-focused community (most of the MacPPC-specific sites I've seen so far individuals' blogs) has put together a security resources guide, not only with information about how to harden Mac OS X using what's built in, as well as what to replace and how to either compile new OS components from scratch, or providing installation packages.
(1) This is insanely tangential, but that would be a good way to use a whole lab of G3s or G4s running Mac OS X with a single faster system, simplifying account management, management and security of the Macs themselves, and providing an environment that is actually faster at rendering pages or running more updated versions of heavy software such as GIMP and OpenOffice.ORG.
(2) Actually, setting the root password on Mac OS X has long been considered a bad practice. The fact that Apple keeps root disabled is probably like the one thing that saved a few of the boxes of people who boast about Mac OS X security.
Yeah... Fantastic. My newest Mac is a PowerBook G4 1.67 ghz machine so before long I will feel like I am still using my 540c
In pre-OS X? Chiming out the clock sounds quite neat, and I do like seeing all the extensions that load up when you turn on your Mac after you install loads of software.
The only thing I miss is the ability to install the OS by drag and dropping the System folder. A massive backwards step from the classic MacOS.
The original question was "which features from OS X (and presumably other modern operating systems) that are absent in Mac OS 9 do you miss?" but if you flip the question around to "which Mac OS 9 features do you miss in OS X?" I only have one word:
Finder.
Yes, still, 15 years later.
Finder.
Yes, still, 15 years later.