Chester Wisniewski of Sophos writes:

My screensaver password lock was disabled after upgrading. Another change to my security settings without notification or permission? Some changes are necessary and difficult to migrate, but PLEASE tell me about things that affect my safety when using my computer.

Odd thing for Apple to overlook.

Check your version of Flash at Adobe’s site here (the newest is 10.0.32.18). Download the latest version from Adobe here. I first heard of this from The Cult of Mac, who talked to Graham Cluley of Sophos who writes more here about why this is important. Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team acknowledged the problem on their blog here.

UPDATE: Apple updates the old version of Flash in the 10.6.1 update here, or through Software Update.

From a few days of testing and regular use, Snow Leopard is fine. Noticeably faster, takes up less space on the drive, and plenty of pleasant surprises feature-wise. No important applications broke in the transition. Amazon now has it for $25. I might be annoyed if this was a $100 update but I’ve almost forgotten the $30 charge (with free overnight from Apple).

And, you don’t need 10.5 installed on your drive. I had 10.5 installed and the 10.6 disk tried to upgrade 10.5. I didn’t want that. I booted from the 10.6 DVD, wiped the drive and installed a fresh copy of 10.6 without incident.

And, there is a great new mountain wallpaper.

If you try to run TextEdit as root in OS X by typing ’sudo open /Applications/TextEdit.app’ you will get ‘open’ running as root, not TextEdit. TextEdit will run as the user you issued the command as.

Instead, try ’sudo “/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit”‘ and you’ll have TextEdit running as root.

[Adapted from something by user gatorparrots on Mac-Forums.com]

Anyway, at some point the procedure for enabling the root account changed. In Snow Leopard, you open Directory Utility in /System/Library/CoreServices. Click the lock, enter an admin password, and Enable Root User in the Edit menu. Enter your root password, click the lock again and you’ve got root.

Apple makes this hard to find on consumer Mac OS X because it’s almost always a bad idea to have your root account enabled. It’s a big security risk. You should be able to do whatever you’re trying to do with sudo.

[via Snow Leopard Tips]

The glass trackpads on Macbook Pros make Photoshop and Illustrator almost unusable. Constant unintended rotation and zoom.

[Original image from Notebook Check]

I reinstalled Windows once and reinstalled the Boot Camp drivers a bunch of times from the retail DVD. Nothing.

Somewhere on the internet just now (I can’t remember where, unfortunately), a single sentence fixed it. “Use the install DVD that came with the computer.” I uninstalled all Boot Camp stuff from the Retail DVD, popped in the DVD that came with the MacBook Pro, and magically, everything is working.