TidBITS#706/17-Nov-03
=====================
It's a grab-bag week! Charles Arthur explains why dialup users
need the spam-fighting tool PostArmor, Tom Gewecke looks at the
new, improved, and still-buggy aspects of Panther that relate to
using Mac OS X in languages other than English, and Geoff Duncan
makes a rare appearance to bury MP3.com and bemoan its passing. In
the news, Bare Bones releases BBEdit 7.1, we report on our Panther
upgrade poll, and we announce our newest sponsor: Dr. Bott!
Topics:
MailBITS/17-Nov-03
Indie Digital Music: Ending with a Whimper?
New Panther Language Features
PostArmor: Stopping Spam at the Server
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/17-Nov-03
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-706.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2003/TidBITS#706_17-Nov-03.etx>
Copyright 2003 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
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This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
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MailBITS/17-Nov-03
------------------
**Dr. Bott Sponsoring TidBITS** -- We're pleased to welcome our
latest long-term sponsor, the Macintosh peripheral manufacturer
and distributor Dr. Bott. Most people, and I was among them
initially, don't realize that the company name wasn't chosen for
its pleasant geekiness: at Macworld Expo a few years ago, I was
surprised to meet in person Dr. Roderich Bott, a German Macintosh
developer and former chemist who joined forces with Portland-based
Macintosh consultant Eric Prentice to found the company. The
pair's goal is to provide high-quality, innovative products to
the Mac community, something they accomplish both by developing
their own products and by distributing other companies' products.
Dr. Bott is well known for devices like the MoniSwitch, a
keyboard/video/monitor switch designed for use with the Mac,
and, more recently, the ExtendAIR antennas for AirPort Extreme
Base Stations. On the distribution side, Dr. Bott particularly
tries to serve the smaller resellers who would have trouble buying
from multiple manufacturers or dealing with large distributors who
prefer higher-volume merchants. All in all, Dr. Bott has proven
itself a thoroughly Mac-like company, and we're happy to have them
further supporting the Macintosh community through their TidBITS
sponsorship. [ACE]
<http://www.drbott.com/>
**BBEdit 7.1 Adds Live HTML Preview and SFTP** -- Bare Bones
Software has released BBEdit 7.1, a free update to the company's
powerful text and HTML editing program that adds a handful of
welcome features. Most notable is the Preview in BBEdit command,
which displays the HTML page you're working on in a BBEdit window
using the WebKit rendering engine that's also at the heart of
Safari. The truly cool part is that it's a live preview, with
updates appearing automatically seconds after you make a change
to the HTML code. Though the page may not look perfect due to
missing graphics or server-side processing, BBEdit's Preview makes
tweaking Web pages far faster and easier than before (though
you'll really want a second monitor to hold the extra windows).
Also new in BBEdit 7.1 is support for SFTP (SSH File Transfer
Protocol), which provides encrypted FTP sessions when there's
a compatible version of sshd running on port 22, as is true of
Mac OS X machines when Remote Login is selected in the Sharing
preference pane. Lastly, if you're working with FTP servers on
your local network, BBEdit's FTP dialogs now support Rendezvous
for discovering FTP and SFTP servers. BBEdit 7.1 is a 15.2 MB
download; it's free for registered users of BBEdit 7.0. New copies
cost $180, with a variety of upgrade and cross-upgrade discounts
available. [ACE]
<http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/>
<http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/current_notes.shtml>
<http://www.barebones.com/support/updates.shtml>
**Poll Results: Panting for Panther?** In last week's poll, we
asked, "When do you plan to upgrade your main Mac to Mac OS X
10.3 Panther?" It turns out that about half of the TidBITS
audience (at least those who respond to our polls) are essentially
early adopters, since 45 percent of respondents have already
installed Panther, and another 6 percent plan to do it as soon
as they get around to it (they must be overworked early adopters).
Another large chunk (30 percent) said they'd upgrade once Panther
stabilizes: well-publicized problems with FireWire hard drives
have engendered appropriate caution for many people. A smaller
number don't see Panther as a necessary upgrade: 7 percent plan
to upgrade once their work or programs require it, and another
11 percent will upgrade by default once they buy new Macs. And the
number of people who don't plan to upgrade at all? A vanishingly
small 1 percent, or only 4 people from the total of nearly 700
respondents.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbpoll=82>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07432>
Interestingly, Karelia Software, makers of the Watson Internet
searching and reference tool, can track the operating system
version of Watson users and found that 62.7 percent were running
Panther, 36.2 percent were still on Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, and 1.1
percent were still running Mac OS X 10.1 (codenamed Puma). It's
possible that the difference in results comes from the fact that
we're actually reporting on Panther's strengths and weaknesses,
thus ensuring that our audience is perhaps somewhat more aware
of problems than Karelia's users are. [ACE]
<http://weblog.karelia.com/MacOSX/Followup_on_users_s.html>
Indie Digital Music: Ending with a Whimper?
-------------------------------------------
by Geoff Duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Last week CNET announced its purchase of "certain assets" of the
once-ballyhooed independent music distribution company MP3.com for
an undisclosed sum. Those assets appear to be mainly the domains
and any clout the MP3.com brand may still carry: as of 02-Dec-03,
the existing MP3.com will shut down and the company will delete
and destroy the hosted music and materials of an estimated 250,000
artists from all over the world. The company also says it won't be
giving CNET any information about its customers or users. CNET
hasn't announced its plans for MP3.com, but I expect it will
create a new site focusing on the technologies and news of the
digital music world, much as it has done with the video-game-
oriented GameSpot.com site.
<http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5107696.html>
<http://www.mp3.com/>
<http://www.gamespot.com/>
Although MP3.com's heyday passed long ago - following substantial
legal setbacks, the massive popularity of the original Napster,
and MP3.com's ill-fated acquisition by Vivendi/Universal - the
final demise of MP3.com marks a milestone in these early days of
online music distribution: the one major, centralized outlet for
independent, unsigned artists is no more.
For the sake of disclosure, one of my non-TidBITS alter egos is
a professional musician, and I once maintained a page of freely
downloadable music on MP3.com (as did several of my colleagues and
clients). I mainly used MP3.com as a means to provide downloadable
demos without consuming my limited bandwidth: I never attempted to
sell CDs or earn money via MP3.com. This last was probably true
for the vast majority of MP3.com artists: with a few notable
exceptions, most never earned much or tried to sell anything.
Nonetheless, for several years MP3.com was the most recognizable
and most-used online music distributor, search engine, directory,
and clearinghouse for independent online music - and even for
some signed artists who had online rights to their material or
reasonable contracts with their distributors. It was still wise
for artists to maintain separate Web sites (particularly once
MP3.com's user experience began to decline as the site was
"monetized"), but having a presence and even just a single
recording on MP3.com was a great way for listeners and other
artists to find you. Part of the joy of using MP3.com was
searching for previously unknown artists and tracks, whether
local acts or artists from the other side of the world.
I remember finding some neat electronica from a British duo (wish
I still had it!), wonderful modern bossanova from a Brazilian
teenager and his grand-uncle, and some truly horrendous rock from
a local high school band - to be sure, much of what was on MP3.com
wasn't all that great. But also I received numerous notes and
inquiries from listeners around the world who would never have
encountered my music otherwise, and the MP3.com page directly
and indirectly helped me land a number of paid jobs. In fact,
just this weekend I sat in with a band I first encountered via
the site's regional charts - go figure.
There are still other independent online music distributors -
prominent among them are 1Sound, SoundClick, and Ampcast - but
none of them have captured the mindshare or experienced the
massive artist adoption of MP3.com - and certainly none of them
have approached MP3.com's levels of budget, resources, or
staffing. There are also hybrid distributors like the seemingly
very savvy CDBaby, which may emerge as a preferred way for
independent artists to get into online services like the iTunes
Music Store - over 5,000 albums are lined up right now at CDBaby
if Apple ever opens its doors!
<http://www.1sound.com/>
<http://www.soundclick.com/>
<http://www.ampcast.com/>
<http://www.cdbaby.com/>
There's no question MP3.com was an unwieldy behemoth, but without
it the community of independent online artists becomes a much more
unnavigable, fractious morass. Enclaves of outstanding artists,
music, and even online music distributors will survive and even
thrive without MP3.com, but the means of discovering these things
will be known to only a precious, clued-in few.
Make no mistake, I come to bury MP3.com, not to praise it: MP3.com
made many tragic errors, broke many promises, alienated countless
users and artists, behaved poorly, and ultimately suffocated under
its own weight. But MP3.com nonetheless played an important role
in the world of independent online music, and for that, it will
be missed.
New Panther Language Features
-----------------------------
by Tom Gewecke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
With Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Apple made sweeping changes to the
operating system's language handling and internationalization
features, which are key to the Mac's acceptance throughout much
of the world and for many people who regularly work in multiple
languages. Three weeks of working with the foreign language
capabilities of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther reveals a number of
interesting new features. Although the changes are not as great
as those we saw in Jaguar - and a couple new bugs have been
introduced - the experience is on balance overwhelmingly positive.
**Input Improvements** -- When it comes to entering text in other
languages, Panther features a number of welcome additions,
including 14 new languages (with input keyboards and fonts),
raising the total number to over 50. Panther adds Estonian,
Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Serbian, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek,
Armenian, Cherokee, Faroese, Northern Sami, Inuktitut, and Welsh.
Also new are some new keyboards (often QWERTY or "Extended"
versions) for languages that existed in Jaguar. Some people could
be confused by an inability to access non-Roman characters in
Cherokee and Inuktitut. The trick is that you must activate Caps
Lock to access non-Roman characters. Why? I'm told that's what
"native users" expect.
Apple also revamped the input methods for Asian scripts
(Chinese/Japanese/Korean) for the first time in a decade or so.
The changes are primarily cosmetic though, with the old "pencil"
menus now at the bottom of the "flag" menu. That said, the
Japanese input method, Kotoeri, is thoroughly reorganized, with
the six input options formerly buried in the "pencil" menu now
listed separately in the "flag" menu, and the old "operations
palette" gone. Unfortunately, Chinese users had a long wish list
of input features that weren't implemented in Panther.
In Panther, the venerable Key Caps application has disappeared
entirely, being replaced with the floating Keyboard Viewer
palette, which has no text input field but which types characters
clicked on its graphical keyboard directly into the frontmost
window. Another new floating Input Mode palette shows activated
keyboards. Apple also modified the keyboard shortcuts for
switching scripts and keyboards in ways that some people will find
more efficient (but you still cannot disable using Command-Space,
which some applications want to use for a different function,
to switch between input scripts).
**Display Improvements** -- Panther also offers a number of
improvements on the display side, including the squashing of
several bugs in Jaguar relating to the display of Devanagari and
Arabic text. Most notably, though, Apple's Mail can finally set
the character set encoding for outgoing messages. This is a
critical addition because, left to its own devices, Mail often
chose the wrong encoding, resulting in messages that nobody could
read. The encoding list for both incoming and outgoing messages
is extensive, and if the one you need isn't listed in the Language
tab of the International preference pane, just click the Edit
button and add it.
Panther now selects default fonts according to the priorities set
in the Languages preference pane, so there should be less need to
disable fonts to prevent inappropriate use. For instance, if you
have Chinese above Japanese in the Language preference pane's
list, Panther should use Chinese fonts in preference over
Japanese, even if another language is actually first in the list.
One caveat: it's possible that this new font fallback logic may
require application support, so it may not be in effect in all
applications yet. The number of languages supported for such
prioritization and sorting operations has been increased to over
100, up from 64 in Jaguar (send me email if you want a list).
The Character Palette (accessible by choosing Characters from the
Action menu - the "gear wheel" pop-up menu - in the Font palette)
has a new pane that shows all the variations among fonts having
a specific character, which is very useful for non-Roman scripts
(it's also an extremely cool way to see how a specific character
looks in different fonts). Also, you can now access special
capabilities of advanced fonts relating to ligatures, diacritics,
glyph variants, and other features. Select the desired font in
the Font palette and choose Typography from the Action menu.
Lastly, the Date/Time/Numbers tabs in Jaguar's International
preference pane have been replaced by a new Formats tab, which
supports many more locales for the ways these items are expressed.
**Eh? What Was That You Said?** As welcome as the improvements
discussed above are, Panther doesn't address some of the
limitations present in Jaguar, and it also seems to have
introduced some new bugs.
Despite all the new keyboards, Panther doesn't sport any new
system languages. I expected that Apple would at least add
Russian, since Apple Computer Russia used to provide a Russian
localization for both Mac OS X 10.1 and 10.2 as a separate
download. Greek users will also be disappointed at the lack of
a Greek localization. Note that you must perform a custom install
if you do not want all the system localizations, or if you do
want all the available fonts. However, you can add the system
localizations and "Fonts for Additional Languages" afterwards
by running the appropriate installers from the second and third
Panther installation CDs.
<http://www.apple.ru/>
In the category of actual defects, a text bug makes it impossible
to input certain accented characters using the U.S. (and other)
"Extended" keyboards in Cocoa programs. The Simplified Chinese
input system has a new pinyin engine which doesn't deal correctly
with certain input combinations. And Mac OS X still does not
work correctly with Greek in certain OpenType fonts like Adobe
Minion Pro.
The significant improvements in Panther unfortunately cannot
change the fact that AppleWorks, all Microsoft products for the
Mac (aside from MSN Messenger and the MSN 8 integrated browser),
along with several important desktop publishing and Web publishing
products are not yet Unicode-savvy, and thus cannot handle a
number of languages. But this situation is bound to improve with
time, as can be seen by the recent updates of Adobe InDesign CS
and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. Also, new programs like the
word processor Mellel can help fill the gap.
<http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/>
<http://www.adobe.com/products/golive/main.html>
<http://www.redlers.com/>
**Additional Info** -- For more extensive information on Mac OS
language issues, visit the Multilingual Mac and Chinese-Mac
Web sites.
<http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/mlingos9.html>
<http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/>
PostArmor: Stopping Spam at the Server
--------------------------------------
by Charles Arthur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The other day I logged on to my mail server directly to have a
look at what was awaiting me. A total of 115 messages - of which
only 45 actually had any relevance for me, the rest being either
spam, viruses unwittingly spread by Windows users, or viruses
bounced by servers configured by unthinking admins believing my
email address's presence in the From: field meant I was the
sender.
A typically depressing day on the Internet - and pretty average
too, given that spam and similar junk is now reckoned to make up
more than 50 percent of all email, having grown roughly tenfold in
the past two years. So we're all on the lookout for weapons to use
against spam. For those of us on dialup Internet connections (as
I am at home, with absolutely no prospect of broadband due to my
rural location), the problem isn't sorting the spam out when it
gets to us. No, the goal is to prevent the spam from starting the
journey down the narrow phone line from the mail server to our
computers. That's why, although spam filters in products like
Apple's Mail, Eudora 6, and SpamSieve interest me, they seem
a misplaced effort for my problems. Time is precious, as is
bandwidth on a dialup, and I don't want to devote it to spam.
**Blocked at the Mailbox** -- Checking your mail while it's still
on the mail server is the first step. Over the years I'd used
programs like Mail Siphon and POP Monitor (both are available
for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X). But the problem with these programs
is that you must manually decide what's junk and what's not.
I can tell at once that an email entitled "Something wrong with
the website xfsdksjk" is spam (spammers add the randomly
generated extra letters to avoid ISP spam filters that look for
bulk email with identical titles), but neither Mail Siphon nor
POP Monitor does. So you end up deleting all the junk mail by
hand, which still leaves you cursing spammers.
<http://www.maliasoft.com/>
<http://www.vechtwijk.nl/dev/popmonitor/>
Then one day I stumbled across PostArmor and realised I'd found
exactly what I wanted - a program that could automatically filter
spam before downloading it.
<http://www.postarmor.com/>
PostArmor examines only the headers of messages, but in my
experience that actually yields enough clues to identify spam
almost without fault. It works by allocating points to each
message, based on certain clues in the headers, and only those
that don't rack up too many points will be allowed straight
through to your mailbox.
**Using PostArmor** -- The program, written by Paolo Manna,
a programmer based in Holland, is intended to sit and run
continuously as a proxy for your principal email program - whether
that's Mail, Eudora, Entourage, Mailsmith, or any other IMAP-
or POP-based system. You tell your email client that PostArmor is
your mail server; PostArmor in turn queries your real mail server
and decides, based on its built-in rules and those you set (all of
which can be changed) which messages to pass on, which to delete,
and which to quarantine.
How does it decide? Particular dirty words (or parts of them - it
will also filter using regular expressions, as I'll explain later)
or adult subjects, "privacy" subjects (such as "government" or
"tax" or "spy software") or domain subjects (containing the words
"your domain" or "quality internet" or "saw your site") and a host
of others will all set its whiskers a-tingle. If a message picks
up more than a certain number of points (which you set), PostArmor
deletes it from the server right away. If it gets more than a
threshold figure - again, you decide what - it won't be deleted,
but it won't be passed on either: it will show up, highlighted in
yellow, in PostArmor's mailbox window. Those which don't hit the
threshold zoom straight through to your email program. You can
also whitelist and blacklist certain senders and generate "fake
bounces" from the server. (The idea is that the fake bounce will
persuade the spammer your address is dead; it's a pointless waste
of bandwidth, since spammers couldn't care less about removing
bouncing addresses from their lists.)
**Customizing PostArmor** -- "But," you're probably saying, "I
have people who legitimately send me messages with prohibited
words or phrases like 'saw your site' or 'government' or 'tax' -
I'm in charge of my government's Web site!" That's fine; you can
tweak the numbers and words to your heart's content, and most of
all create your own filtering rules.
PostArmor is remarkably flexible: you can search on the Subject,
From, To, Cc, Bcc, Content-Type, Reply-To, Date or "Any" headers
(though not the title of the header itself); you can choose if
that field contains, doesn't contain, starts with, ends with, has
your address or doesn't have your address; and then you choose
what data string you want to check it against.
One of the program's best features, to my mind, is its capability
to let you use regular expressions for that data string. These
are tools familiar to Unix users that allow you to search for
particular patterns of text in a larger body. Thus for the example
email subject title above - "Something wrong with the website
xfsdksjk" - I'd set up a "regex" search which looks for a
subject line that has a number of spaces followed by a number of
characters or digits. If you're unfamiliar with regexes (like most
Mac users), don't worry: PostArmor's ReadMe file - whose step-by-
step, well-illustrated style is an object lesson to anyone looking
to produce software that real people, not wonks, will install and
use - contains useful links to online manuals. (For those using
Mac OS X, I'd recommend downloading the text editor Tex-Edit and
reading its useful guide on regexes, and experimenting with its
regex-savvy Find function; the Mac OS 9 version does not offer
regex.) You can use regexes, for example, to catch email
originating from Chinese (.cn ), Taiwanese (.tw ) or Russian
(.ru ) servers: note there's a space after those letters, which
is critical to catching spam rather than email from your friends
at CNET, or Twingo, or that nice <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
all of whom would run afoul of these filters if those trailing
spaces weren't present.
<http://www.tex-edit.com/>
PostArmor is initially set to delete only the most egregious junk;
most dubious stuff is quarantined, after which you can decide its
fate manually. As you gain in confidence, you'll create new rules
and tweak the old ones to create a smooth-running system that -
if my experience, dealing with 200 email messages a day on two
different addresses on a high speed connection at work, and about
a quarter of that at home on a third address - will entirely
change your reaction to spam. Where it used to be hugely annoying,
you'll now find yourself grinning at those yellow-tinged messages
unable to reach you with their false promises of a bigger body or
smaller debts. (In my work as a journalist, it also catches a huge
number of rubbish email messages sent by PR companies; that
certainly eases the burden of keeping up with the world.) Plus
when a new virus rolls around and generates pointless bounces of
the form "Mail Delivery Failed: ...." you can create a new rule
deleting any mail that starts with that phrase. So long, SoBig.
**Chinks in the Armor?** Has it any flaws? I haven't run into any;
the reason I logged on directly to my mail server the other day,
as described as the start of this article, rather than letting
PostArmor do the heavy lifting, was because the program kept
timing out when I tried to check my mail. I contacted Paolo Manna
to point this out - and he reacted quickly, sending over a new
build (version 1.3.1) of the program which both uses the newer
1.4.1 version of Java available for Mac OS X, and extends the
timeout for a login from 20 seconds to 45.
That didn't solve my problem - but I then discovered this was
because my ISP's spam-overloaded mail server was taking up to
90 seconds just to react to a request to log on. (Usually it's
a couple of seconds.)
Otherwise, the only problem you're likely to run into with
PostArmor is incorrect configuration - if you create a filter
incorrectly or without care, you could end up deleting legitimate
mail - but you can set wide limits between "allow directly to
my mailbox" and "delete as definite spam". You can then check
it in the window PostArmor provides to decide, and either allow
or destroy it. Thus, I've found PostArmor quite safe to use; and
it will optionally provide a report on what mail it has blocked
and deleted as often as you like, so you can tweak your filters
further.
PostArmor is free for a single email account; for more than one
you'll have to pay from $15 upwards (there are discounts for
multiple users). As it's a Java program, it can run on Mac OS 9,
Mac OS X, and even Windows, which can be handy: when my iBook
was being repaired recently I happily downloaded it on a Windows
machine for work and set it to work chomping up those email grubs.
[Charles Arthur is technology editor of The Independent
newspaper in London and editor of UKClimbing.com, a British
climbing Web site.]
<http://www.ukclimbing.com/>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/17-Nov-03
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
**EyeTV review comments** -- Readers elaborate on what's good and
what's lacking in the EyeTV. (9 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2109>
**TiVo/ReplayTV/EyeTV alternatives** -- In addition to these three
options for recording television programs, TidBITS readers suggest
Formac's Studio DV/TV and other options. (14 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2110>
**Zip compression in Panther** -- People report problems with
Panther's archive format and using StuffIt Expander, leading
to a discussion of different .zip flavors. (11 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2111>
**Query about iChat availability states** -- If your status is set
to Away, are you really away? And why can people still send you
messages? (17 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2112>
$$
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