Today attended more of the Pro Conference sessions:
Internet Security for the Rest of Us : Pretty breezing overview of firewalls (both router and local), virii, flying under the radar, common weak points in OSes, and so on. Actually hoped for more specifics, but got a lot out of this. Choice quote: “FTP is the single biggest security hole in any OS, any implementation, 2nd only to IIS as breach culprit.” That got a nice laugh, followed by a collective gulp.
QuickTime Compression Secrets : You know all those awesome movie trailers at quicktime.apple.com that always look so stellar that you wonder why your own QT stuff never looks half as good? It’s all encoded by one guy, whose job it is to encourage broader QuickTime adoption by making the content look dreamy. He ran this session, and dropped a bunch of hard-won Sorenson and Cleaner tips and arcana on us.
Advanced File Sharing with OS X Server via AFP, Samba, NFS : I don’t have an OS X Server machine, but am saving up info for the day I do. Pretty intense session. Apparently there are now organizations so impressed with XServe and OS X Server that they are buying these rigs just to serve otherwise 100% Windows clients. Ye olde user-friendly Unix. Does that rock or what? For the 2nd time today, got to hear networking gurus implore audiences not to run FTP services of any kind.
Interesting stuff going on at MacWorldSF, wish I could be there!
So what do all these gurus say to run instead of FTP? SFTP? Or does SFTP count as a kind of FTP? Seems EVERYONE has FTP, especially .edu.
Hey Scot,
Care to share those Sorenson & Cleaner tips ?
On a more personal note:
I’m nearly your neighbour now… :)
And Mail is giving me errors on your mail address…
take care !
SFTP would be a step forward as it no longer transmits passwords in the clear; a proven exploit-free ftpd might be ok for anonymous downloads only.
The hoster for my own domain has pretty much disabled all ftp services, all public downloads are now done using http; everything else goes over ssh/scp/sftp.
mrgrape – WebDAV seems to be one of the best ways to do remote file exchange with user-friendly tools and encryption. If you have savvy users, then sftp is the way to go (OS X has an SFTP daemon built in).
Guy – You’re my neighbor? Living where? Too many encoding tips to post here, and don’t have the gumption to organize / clean my notes. What do you mean Mail is failing on my address? Try me here:
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/include/mail.php?to=shacker