What would Jason do?

We have a new series of posts for last minute questions about moving from mobileMe to iCloud. Check them out on the “What would Jason do?” tech blog! Also, if you have an issue that’s got you stumped, tell us about it and we’ll post your question and a detailed response on the blog!

Here are some basic guides for publishing your iWeb site to a web hosting server. Remember, you need to do this before July, if you are currently hosting your site on MobileMe!

Also, it’s quite a bit easier to do this in iLife 2009 and later, so it may be worth upgrading if you plan to stick with iWeb as your web publishing software in the foreseeable future!

For iLife 2008 and earlier…

1) Sign up for a web hosting account and get the following details about your account:

• FTP server address
• Username and password
• Directory/Initial Path (like public_html)

2) Once you have these details, download an file transfer (FTP) application. We like Transmit by Panic Software, but there are many to choose from.

3) Export your website from iWeb:

• Choose File > Publish to Folder
• Select the Desktop and press the Publish button

4) Launch Transmit and choose FTP in the right hand top section of the Transmit window.

5) Enter the details from step 1, above.

Note: If you plan to update your site regularly, you may want to click the blue flag with the + sign to add this location to your favorites. Then you won’t have to renter this information every time you update your site.

6) Drag the contents of your iWeb published folder into the blank window at the right of the screen. This may take some time to copy, depending on the size of your site and your internet connection speed.

Rinse and repeat! You can update your site but repeating step 3 and 6 at any time. Good luck!

For iLife 2009 and later…

This is a little easier if you have iLife 2009 or later. Just follow these steps:

1) Sign up for a web hosting account and get the following details about your account:

• FTP server address
• Username and password
• Directory/Initial Path (like public_html)

2) Launch iWeb and update your website content, if needed.

3) Click the main tab of the website in the left hand side of the iWeb window.

• Choose FTP Server from the “Publish To” pull down menu.
• Enter your FTP settings (from step 1, above) in this “Site Publishing Settings” page.
• Enter your website URL (like http://www.macorama.com).
• Add a Facebook account (optional).

4) Choose File > Publish Entire Site.

Repeat step 4 to update your site anytime you make changes!

–Jason

Since MobileMe is going away at the end of this month, many people will need to move their MobileMe hosted websites to another web hosting service provider. If you made your website in iWeb, you should be asking yourself: Where does my website live?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, you should find out right away! If you need help call us to schedule a time to sit down and research the location of your website. You don’t want to wait until July 1st, when suddenly your website is not available!

If your site is hosted by another company, you’re fine where you are. If your site is hosted by MobileMe, you’ll need to take action to move the site to a new server as soon as possible!

1) Choose a hosting provider: We’ve been using Pair Networks since the 90′s and have always had good service, so we highly recommend them: Pair Networks. Or there are many other hosts out there you can use!

2) Open iWeb and select your website. In iWeb 2008 and earlier, Choose File > Publish to Folder and select a place to save the file (like the Desktop). Then you can use an FTP program such as Fetch or Transmit to to copy your site to your new service provider.

In iWeb 2009 and later, simply click the main tab of the website in the left hand side of the iWeb window. Then enter your FTP settings in the “Site Publishing Settings” page.

If this is all a little above your pay grade, we can help. Just call (775) 626-7751 to arrange a consultation!

–Jason

Only July 9th, the Internet will cease to exist for some users. It is the end of Facebook updates, junk email and banner ads. Wait, this sounds like a good thing!

Kidding aside, I am talking about a piece of malware called DNSChanger that came out in 2007. It affected Windows users at first and then it was so popular (in the making tons of money for criminals category) that the criminals decided to release it for Macs. So, in 2008, Mac users would get these links to enticing videos of questionable content. If you couldn’t reign in your curiosity, you would follow the links and install software “required” to view the videos. After that, your Domain Name Server (DNS) settings would be changed by the malware so that legitimate searches and websites would be redirected to malicious websites that would try to infect your computer more and generate ad revenue for the criminals.

Before I go any further, I wanted to give you a very brief explanation of DNS. DNS stands for domain name server. The Internet uses a protocol called TCP/IP to route traffic and exchange data. This protocol uses funky numbers with terms like base-10 and binary. Basically, it is four numbers separated by decimals, like 216.92.236.13. DNS will translate the more friendly macorama.com to that number. Without DNS, we would have to memorize a bunch of numbers rather than words. Now I could go into more details like IPv4, IPv6, private and public networks, et cetera. Instead, here is a website that tells you all about it.

Now that you know what Domain Name Servers are, you can see what a piece of malware that changes your DNS settings can do. If it changes it to servers that criminals have control of, they can control whatever comes up when you do a Google search of enter a web address in your browser.

There is good news. In Late 2011, the FBI disrupted this fraud ring. They seized servers that were acting as malicious DNS and the FBI actually set them up to act as legitimate servers. Here is an article about the take down. So, back to my hilarious opening sentence. Only July 9, 2012, the FBI will shut down these servers that were set up for people infected with DNSChanger. If you are infected and have not removed the malware, your Internet will stop working. You can easily remove it by downloading a free piece of software written by SecureMac.com to address DNSChanger. Download it here.

If you want to see if you are infected, go here.

- Jason

Hi Mac Users,

This weekend, I had the opportunity to use Find My iPhone to recover a lost iPhone. “Find My iPhone” is a free service from Apple that you can use on your iPhone to locate it, play a sound or message on it, erase all it’s data, or lock it down. You can do this from any Internet enabled computer. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can download the App and set it up. Apple has a wonderful page that shows you just how to do it:

How to setup Find My iPhone (Apple link)

My family and I have hills around our house where we like to hike. My wife’s sister, Alissa had her iPhone in her front pocket. I have always told my wife that women’s pants have useless front pockets because they are half as deep as men’s pants and sure enough, Alissa’s iPhone was sticking halfway out her front pocket.

We had finished our hike and we were at home, getting ready to leave the house and Alissa couldn’t find her iPhone. We tried calling it after we couldn’t find it. We didn’t hear any ringtones in the house. Since we couldn’t hear it, she went to her computer and logged in to http://www.me.com/find to try and locate it. Unfortunately, Find My iPhone was not able to locate it because it said the iPhone was offline. Your iPhone can only be located if it can connect to a cellular network or the Internet. Since we couldn’t find it in the house, we assumed she dropped it in the hills and since it was 96 degrees, the iPhone was too hot and in temperature warning mode.

You shouldn't leave your iPhone on the dashboard in summer

Sidebar: Your iPhone can present you with this screen if the internal temperature of the iPhone gets too hot. This can be done by leaving your iPhone in the car on a summer day. Leaving it in direct sunlight or using it when in direct sunlight, like GPS tracking or listening to music.

If you get this message, it is best to turn off the iPhone and let it cool down by moving it to a cooler location.

We knew (approximately) where the phone was at.

For several hours, we ran our errands and kept checking Find My iPhone to see if it would show up and eventually we got a response.

We started up the trail again. Since Find My iPhone uses Google Maps, we were able to zoom in and get a pretty accurate location. We did have to send a request to the iPhone to start playing a sound so we could follow the sound and finally retrieve it.

Pretty exciting! Find My iPhone is invaluable if you have an iPhone. Even if you lose you iPhone around your house and have it on vibrate, you can send a request to play a sound to locate it. You can also remotely wipe it so that if it is stolen, the creepy thief can’t look at your photos, or just lock it remotely so the thief is presented with a lock code (if you don’t have a passcode turned on).

- Jason

Hi Mac Users,

In between telling the press that Apple has made billions of dollars and that everybody owns an iPhone, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer mentioned that Lion (Mac OS 10.7) is due to hit Apple’s App Store on 7/20/2011. I thought I would give you some insight about Apple’s new operating system and what to think about before you upgrade.

First off, to upgrade to Lion, you must meet these minimum system requirements:

• Your Mac must have an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor
• 2GB of memory or RAM
• 4GB of free hard drive space to download Lion. If you only have 4GB of hard drive space left, you need a bigger hard drive.
• Snow Leopard and the latest update (10.6.8)

To find out if you meet these requirements, you can click on your Apple menu and choose “About This Mac”

About This Mac Gives You the Information You Need

The major change with this upgrade is how you get it and install it. Lion is going to be available through the App Store for $29.99. This means that you will download it and install it, no physical media (DVD) is provided. This is why one of the requirements is to have Snow Leopard. The App Store was introduced in the 10.6.6 update. Since it is purchased through the App Store, you will be able to install it on all the Macs you own and use the same Apple ID on. The Lion installer is 4GB in size, so hopefully tomorrow won’t bring down the Internet.

Here are some things to remember before you upgrade:

1. This is a major upgrade to the operating system, make sure you backup your data before you do this upgrade.
2. Do not upgrade a computer that you depend on and can not be without until you know that your critical applications will work with Lion.
3. Rosetta is no longer supported in Lion. Rosetta allowed PowerPC (remember the G5?) applications to run on Intel. If you are using applications like Office 2004 or Quicken 2007, they will no longer work. To see if you are running any Rosetta applications, launch all the programs you use and then launch Activity Monitor (located in Applications/Utilities/), look at My Processes, and look at the Kind column. If you see an Application with PowerPC in Kind column, you are running a Rosetta application.

Check The Column for PowerPC

What is Lion going to do for you? Well, I’ll leave that up to Apple’s marketing.

Of course, I will be upgrading right away, so you can use me as a guinea pig. I will post what happens to me in the next few days.

Click the button below to purchase Lion!

Happy upgrading,

Jason

Hi Mac Users!

This weekend, I was doing a Google image search looking for butterfly icons (don’t ask). I found an image I liked on Google image search and clicked on it. With just this one simple click, I was able to experience how this new Mac malware tried to infect my computer. I documented it just for you, my loyal readers.

Here is my initial Google image search for “Butterfly”. I found the icon I wanted and clicked on it.

Wow, my Mac has a lot of viruses!

I also noticed that a file called “anti-malware.zip” downloaded to my Downloads folders without any action from me besides clicking on that butterfly icon. After the “virus scan” on my Mac, the web page looked like this.

Looks legitimate?

Notice how the web page is designed to look like a Finder window, complete with the sidebar. Clicking anywhere on this web page downloaded the “anti-malware.zip” file. After I was done playing with this page by clicking around it, I had downloaded the zip file ten times.

So, pretty interesting, huh? In Safari, I don’t have it opening “Safe” files after download, so the infected web page just kept downloading the “anti-malware.zip” file whenever I visited this web page. That is all I needed to do to keep me safe. I went ahead and clicked on the file and instead of MACDefender, the software it wanted to install was “Mac Protector”. I found another piece of malware!

Even though I happened across this trickery, I just deleted the malware and moved on. Here is the thinking that stopped this malware in it’s tracks.

1. Turn off “Open safe files after downloading”. You can do this by going to your Safari preferences and unchecking that box in the General preferences. After you turn it off, items you download from the Internet will go into your “Downloads” folder (or whatever folder you told Safari to download files to) and you will have to manually double-click on them to open them. Firefox users are always asked what to do when a file is going to be downloaded from a web page.
2. Don’t trust the Internet! It doesn’t matter what you do, the Internet is not safe and it is not private. As soon as the web page started “scanning” my computer, I knew it was a hoax. First off, it was a web page and it started accessing my computer without any warning. A legitimate website would at least ask my permission.
3. Be mindful of what you are downloading and what is being installed on your Mac. The Mac will not just install software without you initiating it or confirming it. If I had Safari opening safe files, the malware “Mac Protector” would have tried to install. I would have been presented with the first step and just quit the installation.

Hopefully, these screenshots and my words will increase your knowledge and help you recognize these kinds of threats. We may be seeing more.

- Jason

Hi Mac Users,

Looking at my news sites today, I came across the Mac community all abuzz about a piece of malware that can infect your Mac. I thought I would share some links with you to keep you informed.

Security Bulletin from Intego

TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

Remember, this malware is more like social engineering, it tricks you into installing this software and tries to get you to buy a bogus program. It is not exploiting a security hole in the Mac OS. This happens to Windows users all the time! Fortunately, it is much easier to remove and the TUAW articles shows you how to protect yourself.

Enjoy your day!

- Jason