The Mac Sucks!

According to an OSNews article, Intego discovered a new Trojan circulating in copies of Apple’s iWork ‘09 found on BitTorrent networks.  It’s also been found in Adobe PhotoShop CS4.  According to the article, “When installing iWork 09, the iWorkServices package is installed. The installer for the Trojan horse is launched as soon as a user begins the installation of iWork, following the installer’s request of an administrator password… The malicious software connects to a remote server over the Internet; this means that a malicious user will be alerted that this Trojan horse is installed on different Macs, and will have the ability to connect to them and perform various actions remotely. The Trojan horse may also download additional components to an infected Mac.”

According to the article, at least 20,000 Mac users have downloaded the infected software.  If you’ve recently pirated iWork 09 or Adobe PhotoShop CS4 for you Mac, you might want to give some thought as to whether you are unknowingly running an infected Mac… and asking yourself if the “free” software is worth the risk you’re taking.

According to ChannelWeb, a flaw in QuickTime and iTunes paves the way for a malicious attack on the Windows platform. The new vulnerability was discovered a week after Apple updated QuickTime and iTunes. Security firm Intego says that the QuickTime tag fails to properly handle long strings of data, resulting in a heap overflow flaw in both QuickTime Player and iTunes, as well as other Mac OS X programs that stream media via the QuickTime plug-in. The error also affects the web browsers on both Windows and Mac OS X.

Reportedly, an attacker could add a QuickTime media file to a web page that executes arbitrary code and launches a malicious attack on affected systems. Blogger “securefrog” published a proof-of-concept exploit on the website Milw0rm. ChannelWeb reports that “the most recent QuickTime vulnerability is one in a long line of serious errors, particularly in its real time streaming protocol, that have left users susceptible to remote code execution attacks.”

Again, we remind Mac users that just because no one has exploited a vulnerability on the Mac in the wild doesn’t mean the system is secure… only that it’s been lucky.

Apple’s television ads portraying the “PC” as
virus-prone, spyware-ridden, constantly crashing, etc., may be coming
back to haunt it.  According to CNET , Symantec has found the first
evidence of an Apple QuickTime exploit in the wild (i.e., on the
Internet where it can infect a user).

The article states that:
“Symantec is advising concerned IT professionals to run Web
browsers at the highest security settings possible, disable Apple
QuickTime as a registered RTSP protocol handler, and filter outgoing
activity over common RTSP ports, including TCP port 554 and UDP ports
6970-6999.”

The information available to us as of this
writing doesn’t indicate if this is a Windows-only, Mac-only, or
cross-platform vulnerability.

According to Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer, Apple has released
a security patch for QuickTime which patches seven bugs in the product
for both Mac and Windows.  In an effort to shore up the security
for QuickTime for Java, Apple decided to just completely disable the
feature, essentially giving up on trying to fix it.

As the
Computerworld article reports, “Java has been a major problem for
QuickTime. Apple has repeatedly patched the program against Java
vulnerabilities, including a May answer for a bug that was used by a
researcher to claim a $10,000 hack challenge prize,
and a July update that fixed four more Java
flaws.”

For more information, click here to see the full Computerworld article.

I wouldn’t base that remark solely on one
user’s experience, so take this with a grain of salt…

According to “Skipper” on osx.tribe.net, he’s been using Safari 3.0.3 for
some time on his iMac G4 with Mac OS X 10.4.9 and thinks it’s
severely flawed because, when he visits certain video sites (like VEOH,
Stage 6, or Boxsweeper), Safari unexpectedly quits. When he switches
over to FireFox, the same thing doesn’t happen.

Readers of his posting offered several comments, like being able to
watch MPEGs but not WMVs in Safari, whether Skipper had the latest
version of flash, and removing Windows Media Player from his Mac.

What’s interesting to me is that if he has only been
experiencing this problem in Safari and not FireFox, why he bothers to
use Safari on these sites at all. A simple click on the Dock (assuming
he’s put the icon there) would bring up FireFox and lead
(presumably, based on the post) to trouble-free browsing. Why stick with
a browser that’s causing you trouble?

For that matter,
with so many good browsers out there running on OS X, why is Apple
bothering to create Safari in the first place? They don’t need it
for the platform to be successful. They used to bundle IE and Netscape
with Mac OS 9. Why not save all that development effort and bundle
FireFox, Opera, or some other browser with OS X? Is this another example
of Apple’s extremely arrogant “Only we can make good OS X
software” attitude? Is Apple that self-centered that they MUST make
their own OS X (and iPhone) browser?

What’s funny is
that Apple HASN’T developed many of the products that people
associate with them and with OS X. What’s my evidence? What are my
examples? Glad you asked:

• Final Cut Pro: This was originally created by Macromedia as
  “KeyGrip” but Macromedia couldn’t release it for
  contractual reasons. When Apple saw a Windows and Mac version
  demonstrated, they purchased the development team as a defensive move.
  When they couldn’t sell the team, they continued the development and
  released Final Cut Pro in 1999.

• iTunes: The software that forms the basis of iTunes
  was developed for a 1999 Casady & Greene product called SoundJam
  MP. Apple purchased it in 2000, gave it a new user interface and the
  ability to burn CDs, removed its recording features, took out the
  skinning support, and released it as iTunes.

• Keynote: While developed internally as an
  application for Steve Jobs to use in his Macworld presentations, Keynote
  is said to be patterned after the Lighthouse Design Concurrence
  presentation software that Jobs is believed to have “appreciated
  greatly” in his days at NeXT.

• Safari: Safari is based on KHTML, an
  HTML layout engine developed for the KDE (Linux) project. It’s the
  same engine used by the Linux Konqueror web browser. Its JavaScript core
  is based on KDE’s KJS JavaScript engine.

• Multi-Touch Screen Technology: Used in the iPhone
  and iPod Touch, this technology is also not an Apple invention.

And of course there’s the fact that OS X is based on the BSD UNIX
operating system, which Apple certainly didn’t develop, and that
there are many, many utilities available through the OS X command line
that Apple has “borrowed” from the open source community to
enhance OS X functionality with little or no development on their part.

I’m not saying it’s wrong for Apple to acquire
third-party products and improve them. That’s done all the time.
I’m also not saying there’s anything wrong with them
commercializing open source software, which companies like Red Hat have
done to great effect. All I’m saying is that Apple gets a lot of
kudos for “creating” things like iTunes, Final Cut, and the
like when in fact they weren’t created entirely by Apple. That, by
the way, is one of the points of this site… to remind those who are
stuck inside the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion field that it really IS a
Reality Distortion field. Above are five products I could quickly and
easily identify as not entirely Apple inventions, which Apple often says
ARE their own invention. If you believe that they are, well, your
reality is a distorted.

Once again, Adobe shows us where the graphic arts market is today, and
it’s not with the Mac. On September 24, Appletell reported that Adobe has released PhotoShop
Elements 6.0 for Windows. The Mac version isn’t set to release until
early 2008, and may or may not include the same improvements found in
the Windows version.

I remember a time, back when I was
one of the Mac Faithful, that Adobe always released for the Mac first
because that’s where their bread was buttered. Not anymore. Windows
seems to be winning over the graphics world.

For all of Apple’s attacking of Microsoft
Windows security and its lip service commitment to patching security
issues quickly, it’s sad to see that a QuickTime flaw discovered a
year ago is making both PCs and Macs vulnerable to attack, and that the
onus is now on browser makers to prevent those attacks.

As
reported in ComputerWorld today, when the current
version of QuickTime is used in conjunction with FireFox, an attacker
could (depending on the permissions of the user running the browser)
“do anything” with the browser “like installing browser
back doors – and the operating system”. The vulnerability was
reported to Apple in September 2006 (and again in December 2006) and
nothing has been done to fix it. As a result, FireFox is being adjusted
to “sanitize” the XML it hands over to QuickTime to ensure
that its flaw can’t be used to exploit a system.

While
FireFox is making the change, “Petkov noted that the bug is in
QuickTime and affects users of other browsers, including Microsoft
Corp.’s Internet Explorer. ‘It is not Firefox-specific,’ he
wrote on his blog. ‘It works for IE as well, although the impact is
less critical. This is due to the tightened security policies IE
implements for local zone scripts.’”

The article
also reports that “Not surprisingly, though, various Mozilla
developers found fault with QuickTime in their ongoing Bugzilla dialogue
about a patch strategy. ‘I don’t see what on our side would need
to be fixed, if QuickTime didn’t have this flaw,’ said Gavin
Sharp.”

ComputerWorld also reports that “Whoever
needs to fix code, however, should get going, intimated Greenbaum. He
agreed with yesterday’s take by the DeepSight alert — which said
in-the-wild exploitation is likely, and soon — and said, ‘Mpack and
other hostil drive-by attack kits are always looking for new
exploits.’”

According to eEye Digital Security,
“The best form of mitigation is to disable the QuickTime plug-ins
for each affected browser”.

So far this year,
ComputerWorld reports, Apple has issued four QuickTime security updates.
Time for number 5?

Again we remind you that Apple boasts about its
products’ security. They boast about the superiority of Safari over
other browsers. Yet, as we point out again and again here, their
products are no better than the competition. Another case in point – The Register points out that it’s easy to steal music
from MySpace using Safari.

When it comes to
protecting digital content holders from the hordes of naughty file
grabbers, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more zealous partner than
Apple. So we were surprised to learn that Apple’s Safari browser makes
it easy to download MP3 files hosted on MySpace that are supposed to be
limited to streaming only.

MySpace programmers have taken
pains to obfuscate the location of the MP3 file music artists embed into
their MySpace profiles. Until now, pirates had to use programs like
Ethereal or Burp to divine where a tune was stored. But thanks to a
Safari feature called the Activity Window, that cumbersome process is no
longer necessary.

We read Dave Shanley’s writeup of the technique and were
able to replicate the process, although with a few minor
modifications.

They then go on to explain the process in
detail, explaining how to steal an MP3 of a tune from a MySpace site
using Safari, in spite of the protections placed on it by MySpace.

Who would have thought that Safari would become a copyright
infringement tool? Only those of us who know Apple’s penchant for
putting locks on the door but leaving the garage wide open…

As an article in Computerworld Singapore points out,
ten years ago Microsoft considered discontinuing development of
Microsoft Office for Macintosh. The expense of developing for the
declining Macintosh market, combined with the fact that Apple already
had a competing product in AppleWorks, led to that line of thinking.
However, Apple and Microsoft got together and did something a bit
unexpected. Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple and agreed to keep
releasing new versions of Office for the Mac.

Had
Microsoft not made that step, the Mac might have been finished. However,
Microsoft would have been in trouble as well, since this was around the
time of the big anti-trust hearings. It appears that to save itself,
Microsoft had to save Apple.

Fast-forward to today. Apple
is running commercial after commercial, blasting the Windows environment
publicly. AppleWorks is still on the shelves, though it hasn’t been
updated since 2004. In the meantime, Apple releases iWork ‘08 which
reportedly reads Microsoft Office documents. Microsoft, at the same
time, has delayed the release of Office 2008 for Macintosh due to
quality concerns. The next several months could be very telling.

If Apple’s iWorks product begins to seriously challenge
Microsoft’s 84% share of the Macintosh office productivity marketplace,
it may inspire Microsoft to discontinue the development of Microsoft
Office before the 2008 release. While Mac fanatics would probably
rejoice at their “freedom” from Microsoft, what they fail to realize is
that the rest of the world is still working with Microsoft Office
documents. While iWorks ‘08 reads those formats, the odds that their
output is 100% Office-compatible are pretty low. That means iWorks
documents are going to be a thorn in the side of corporate IT
departments. The existing resistance to new Macintosh purchases will
increase due to those compatibility issues.

More likely,
though, is “more of the same”. As ComputerWorld Singapore notes,
although the $79 price for iWork ‘08 may seem attractive at first blush,
the suite is underpowered compared to the Microsoft offering. Further,
with reseller, student, and teacher versions of Office being widely
available at discounted prices, the price differential between iWork and
Office isn’t that significant. Most people will probably continue to
stick with Microsoft Office. This is what Chris Swenson, an NPD analyst
and Mac user, thinks will end up happening. He suspects that iWork is
something Apple wants in its back pocket in case Microsoft decides that
harming the Mac’s sales by killing Microsoft Office for Macintosh is
worth more to them than the revenue they get from the product.
(Microsoft can certainly afford to do without the sales.)

With the number of people who claim to be buying Macs to dual-boot with
Windows, it may actually be to Microsoft’s advantage to stop developing
Office for Macintosh. This would force those Mac users who want to
continue using “real” Office to buy a Windows license and use a solution
like Boot Camp or Parallels to run it. In the process, some of those Mac
users who haven’t looked at Windows since the 3.x, 95, 98, or Me days
might come to realize that it’s made substantial improvements since
then. The move to “switch” might then swing back the other direction…
if indeed there is any actual “switching” happening. (Personally, I
suspect that as many people switch to Mac as there are Mac users
switching to Windows.)

Steve Jobs touted the speed of Safari 3 on the Windows platform as
one of its best features over Internet Explorer and FireFox. 
Problem is, the folks over at Wired took a look at it and figured out
that FireFox
2 is still faster than Safari 3 , especially on Ajax-intensive web
applications like those from Google (Gmail, Google Calendar).
 

In Wired’s tests, Safari 3 took 2-4 seconds LONGER to
load pages than FireFox 2.  Internet Explorer even beat Safari 3 on
2 out of 3 tests.  Once again, Apple seems to be making claims that
don’t stand up to detailed scrutiny.

According to this article on PrivacyDigest.com,
Apple’s QuickTime Update last week has caused problems for a number of
programs. Intuit’s TurboTax software, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, Age
of Empires III, Full Tilt Poker, and others are affected by the update.
In many cases, the QuickTime “fix” is preventing these programs from
launching. The article says that the problem seems to be limited to
users of 10.3.9 and earlier. The article also discusses a QuickTime bug
that allowed a computer worm to attack MySpace.com users, which Apple
quietly issued a patch for but refused to discuss with the media. As a
result, users don’t know if other web applications or users are at risk.

The article asks a simple question of Apple at the end:
“Could you create a simple blog that offers suggestions or workarounds
for high-profile problems affecting your customers, or at least assure
users that you have heard their concerns and are investigating the
problem?”

This is more evidence, along with the over 30
bugs I’ve personally reported to Apple since February 16, 2007, that
they don’t seem to be very effectively testing their products before
releasing them on unsuspecting customers. This from the company that
tries to portray Windows PC users as “all business” and with concern for
the user. Microsoft has lots of internal blogs and announcements about
what’s coming. Apple doesn’t, I suspect primarily so Steve Jobs can
protect his precious “one more thing” at the next press conference. />

Here's one of my favorite recent stats about the home computer
industry.  The href="http://www.technologyuserprofile.info/pages/info/tup_dates/tupan05_tde01.htm">recent
MetaFacts customer opinion survey asked home computer users several
questions about their attitudes toward technology.  They broke the
responses down by 3 different Windows versions and counted the Mac
separately.

Mac users were less likely to respond positively to
the statement "Low prices are more important to me than brand
names" than PC users.  I'm sure that Apple is keenly aware
of this when setting its prices on new Mac equipment.

Mac users,
interestingly, were more likely to respond positively to the statement
"Using photos and images on a personal computer is too
complicated".  What does this say about the much-vaunted Apple
iPhoto software, which is supposed to make manipulating photos easy for
everyone?  If you think maybe the users were thinking
"PC" instead of Mac, let's look at a similar question they
asked "I do not enjoy using photos and images on my personal
computer".  In this case, Mac users responded positively to
this statement 16.1% of the time versus 8.3% to 11.1% for Windows
users.  This seems to imply that it's much easier to work with
photos and images on Windows than on OS X.  I'd say the
evidence is very much against iPhoto.

DVD Jon, the programmer responsible for cracking the CSS scrambling
system used on commercial video DVDs, has set his sights on cracking the
Apple FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) software.  From href="http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/02/dvd_jon_apple_fairplay/">
this article on Reg Hardware:

style="margin-right: 0px">

DVD Jon, better known to his parents as
Jon Lech Johansen, has set up in business with partner Monique Farantzos
in San Francisco’s Mission District. Called href="http://www.doubletwistventures.com/">DoubleTwist Ventures,
their company "focuses on the development of interoperability
solutions for digital media and the reverse engineering of proprietary
systems for which licensing options are non-existent or
impractical".

Their idea for Fairplay, first href="http://featured.gigaom.com/2006/10/02/dvd-jon-fairplays-apple/?www.reghardware.co.uk"
target="_blank">reported by Giga-Om's Liz Gannes, is to
"replicate the technology to companies that want their content
(music, movies, whatever) to play on Apple devices. This may not be good
news for iTunes the store, but it could make the iPod even more
popular".

[snip]

The words 'Apple',
'notorious' and 'litigator' fit like a glove. And, when
it comes to its own DRM, the company has never shown any laissez-faire
inclinations. Fairplay hooks iTunes users into iPods when they are the
move. So why would Apple yield on DRM interoperability, unless it was
forced to – by an important regulator, for example (the US or the EU,
not the href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/29/apple_norway_row/">Nordic
countries)?

[snip]

In 2003, we exclusively reported
how Johansen had unlocked href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/22/dvd_jon_unlocks_itunes_locked/">
iTunes' locked music. Since then, his work on Apple's DRM
has attracted several news stories.

 

Apple brags about its iLife applications in the Mac vs. PC
commercials.  The reality is that these applications only work well
"to a point".  As Scott Hacker found out, there is a
"glass ceiling" in both iTunes and iPhoto that cause the
applications to begin to "choke" when they process too many
files.  To quote href="http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2003/01/iphoto_itunes_falling_down_on.html">
Hacker's article:

• I’ve got 1GB of memory in
  my 867MHz PowerMac. But at 15,500 tracks, iTunes is starting to become
  difficult (not quite impossible) to use. It hums along fine if I
  don’t touch it. But simply selecting a track can result in 20
  seconds of spinning beachball. Editing an ID3 tag can take more than 30
  seconds. Dragging tracks to a playlist, same. Trying to use iTunes as
  the music database it’s designed to be has started to become more
  chore than fun.
• iPhoto is even worse. At around 800 images, it
  started to bog down on me. At 1,000, it started getting confused, and
  refused to allow me to add more images (or rather, it would add them to
  the library, but would not create thumbnails). 800?
• I’m
  not steamed because there are bugs. I’m steamed because Apple
  announced a whole raft of target="_new">iLife features today — great features, no doubt
  — but made no mention of addressing the one thing that thwarts the
  very people who take the digital hub sales pitch seriously.
• So
  I spoke to an Apple employee about this today and she agreed 100% – it
  makes no sense to add new features before basic scalability is taken
  care of. She was steamed too (but asked to remain anonymous)

That last bullet is the most telling.  It's a virtual
admission by Apple that they are willing to release products with known
bugs rather than sacrifice the opportunity to brag about "one more
thing" that's new in them.  This is entirely the wrong way
to treat existing customers, and is intended only as a way to woo in new
ones.  This approach is bound to fail eventually.

Apple may think that its "iLife" applications are so
wonderful as to be untouchable, but the open source community has
already begun replicating them in Linux.  Take iPhoto, for
example.  This is one Apple brags about in its PC vs. Mac
ads.  Here are some open source clones of iPhoto:

• href="http://lphoto.com/">LPhoto
• href="http://picasa.google.com/">Picasa from Google
• href="http://ktown.kde.org/kphotoalbum/">KPhotoAlbum

As usual, there are others. These are just the results of a quick
search.

We've maintained for a while on this site that Apple prefers to
shove "cute" little bits of eye candy in OS X in order to
justify pulling $129 a year out of customers' pockets, rather than
making the kinds of real, deep-down improvements the OS needs in areas
like performance, file copying in the Finder, and bug fixing. 
Dashboard Widgets are one of these bits of eye candy that Apple touted
as something "revolutionary" but which are relatively simple
to produce.  As such, they should mean nothing to a user and
shouldn't help justify a $129 upgrade.

First, it bears
mentioning that before Apple announced Widgets to the world, there was
already a product on the market for the Macintosh which delivered
precisely the same thing – Konfabulator.  Konfabulator not only
worked with the Mac, but also Windows.  It was also relatively
inexpensive.  Apple killed that product by adding Widgets to OS
X.  The fact that the product existed before OS X came along shows
you that Apple doesn't care whose company it kills, whose ideas it
steals, or anything else but the sale of more upgrades.

Second,
it should be noted that many novice programmers are making Widgets and
Konfabulator applets.  It doesn't take highly-skilled engineers
and designers to do this.  Widgets are relatively simple programs
that can be easily cranked out without a lot of skill or cost. 
They are, however, something Apple can splash up on a screen and tout as
a great revolution… Just before they ask for another $129.

Third, as we've talked about in the past, because Widgets can be
(and probably are being) cranked out by lower-level programmers at
Apple, there is a tendency for them to be written without system
performance and resources in mind.  We documented an issue last
year where the World Clock Widget will, if left on the screen for a long
period of time, consume most of the system's resources.  All
this to draw a clock?

And now, just to show us how insignificant
Widgets are, Google is providing a very similar tool to web site owners
called " href="http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news.php?newsId=5026">Gadgets". 
Google already offers over
1200 of these Gadgets – far more than Apple offers in OS X – showing
how easily this kind of stuff can be cranked out.  And the fact
that they're offering the gadgets for free should prove to you how
little value these applets represent and how little they add to justify
a Mac OS X upgrade at $129.

As our sole Mac Administrator, it is my duty to have to help a number
of Mac users migrate their files from Mac OS 9 to a Windows
Server.  Some of these files reside on a FireWire drive. 

Since Windows and Mac OS X don't support all the same characters
in filenames, I've had to rename some of the files to take out
characters the Windows Server doesn't like, such as "*" or
"/".  (Before you Mac users get all superior and start
spitting on Windows filenames, try putting a ":" in one of
your Mac filenames. You can't.)

Doing this by hand is not
really feasible.  There are 100GB worth of files on the FireWire
drive, many of which contain characters Windows doesn't
support. 

Enter Automator, the tool included in OS X. 
I created a "workflow" that knew to remove all invalid
characters from a filename for me.  It worked fine in my initial
tests.  I fed it the entire FireWire drive and waited.  Soon
it told me that it was done.  I tried copying the files over, and
was immediately shocked to see that the copy was halted with an error
due to a filename that didn't convert using Automator.  This
filename was just one level below the files and folders I fed the
Automator.  Apparently it wasn't smart enough to realize that
when it's given a folder that it should crawl through the contents
of that folder, and its subfolders as well. 

I tried using
Spotlight to find all the files that contained characters that are
invalid on Windows.  No dice.  Spotlight doesn't find
ANYTHING on the drive if I ask it to look for files with "*"
or "/" in the name.  Why?  I have no idea. 
It's a valid search.  The search works on network drives
I've mounted and on internal IDE drives, but it doesn't work on
the external FireWire drive.  The external drive was partitioned
and formatted by OS X 10.4, and Disk Utility gives it a clean bill of
health.  So why can't Spotlight search it?  Beats the heck
out of me.

What I've now been reduced to is going a
sub-folder and sub-subfolder at a time to copy stuff over and wait for
an error to pop up. When it does, I feed the contents of that folder to
Automator and let it fix them, then try copying the files again. 
If I get another error, I go a level deeper.  What a pain!

The only alternative I have is to copy a folder to the local hard
drive, run the search, fix the filenames, then copy it on to the server
across the network.  This extra copying adds time to the process
but seems the only workaround here.

OS X hasn't been any real
help here, either.  Several times it's complained about being
unable to copy a folder because, for instance, the file
"OpenFolderListDF" can't be copied.  You also
can't find that file/folder using Spotlight or Find, even if you ask
for invisible files.  So you're stuck with a folder you
can't copy as-is because it contains an invisible file you can't
find in order to remove.  I could probably locate it from a UNIX
command line, but the person who organized all these files has as many
as 5 levels of subdirectories in a directory tree and I really don't
feel like digging through all that to locate a file that Apple ought to
have ignored or made visible so it could be deleted.

Even the
command-line "find" command couldn't locate that
"OpenFolderListDF" file, but it stops the Finder dead in its
tracks.  I also couldn't use the "Find" command to
find "all" of the invisible files on the FireWire drive. 
Attempts to do that came back with no files found, though there were
clearly invisible files on the drive.

I also tried to use
Automator to copy the files from the FireWire drive to the server. 
That failed for much the same reason the renaming did.  Automator
has a bad habit of ignoring errors during file copying and moving on to
the next folder/file.  As a result, of the 44GB of files I asked it
to copy (many of which had the filename problems mentioned above)
Automator copied only about 11GB.  But, it didn't display any
errors or give any indication that there was any kind of an issue with
the process.  Just a green "complete" message.  Had
I "believed" Automator and wiped that FireWire drive clean,
thinking it had copied the files to the server, I'd have lost
two-thirds of the user's data.  I'd look like the bad guy,
all because I expected Automator to behave in a logical, sensible
manner.

From a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/12/AR2006091201445_2.html">
recent Washington Post article:

style="margin-right: 0px">

Scientists, scholars and others planning
to use their Macintosh computers to submit grant proposals to the
federal government in the months ahead should be prepared for a rocky,
or at least error-message-littered, road ahead.

Luckily, Mac
users are used to it.

[snip]…a central manager of the
Grants.gov system — promised that by November the system would be
compatible with Macs, which are popular among scientists and academics.
That was based on promises from Northrop Grumman Corp., which has been
paid tens of millions of dollars to run Grants.gov for the
government.

But a new twist emerged this week when HHS announced
that Grumman had lost its bid to win a renewal of its contract and will
be moving on as of Nov. 1.

[snip]…Mac users will have to wait
until the new system comes out at the end of March.

Hawk Wings, a pro-Macintosh blog, recently covered a story about how
Apple's ".Mac" service has been suffering from href="http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/08/01/mac-problems-hit-the-big-time/">
a lot of problems.  They quote the following from CNet:

Over the past four
days, .Mac users have struggled to get its Web site publishing features,
iWeb, and related file-share capabilities, iDisk, to work. Users have
complained not only about the length of the outage, but also what they
say is a tardy response from .Mac’s technical support team.

Perhaps this is a repercussion from the fact
that during OS X installation, the installer all but forces you to set
up a .Mac account.