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Secure your Mac: Do as the Federales do



More security notes from the underground TUAW vault. Up until Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, you could see your tax dollars at work very readily, as the National Security Agency published OS-specific guidelines for hardening your OS X installation -- mostly commonsense items like "use strong passwords" and "turn off unneeded services," but it was nice to have a document with the imprimatur of the US Government's most professional paranoids that you could show to your spouse/boss/Russian friends and say "See, it's secured!"

As of Tiger, however, the NSA has handed over the security stick to Apple and endorsed the vendor guides to securing both OS X and OS X Server as "[tracking] closely with the security level historically represented in the NSA guidelines." You can download the Server version of the PDF from the NSA's website, but oddly the client version seems to hang on download (spies! saboteurs!), so you can grab that one directly from the mothership. Between the two guides you have over 500 pages of security reading, so save the whole weekend.

Oops, thanks Derek!

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Tip of the Day

To find out what version of Mac OS you are running, go to the Apple logo in the top left corner, click it and choose About This Mac. From that window you will see the version number, processor, memory and chosen startup disk. Clicking Software Update will check for updates, and More Info... will open up an extensive list of everything on your machine.


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