A new survey conducted by Yankee Group Research Inc. of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives revealed that nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house. This number is up from the last survey in 2006 which indicated that 47% of businesses had in-house Macs.

Two interesting details of this survey are:

1. 21% of the firms surveyed reported having delpoyed more than 50 Macs (some ranged into the thousands)
2. 28% of the firms reported running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs

Clearly, virtualization software has helped catalyze this trend towards Mac delpoyment. The two leaders in virtualization software are VMware Inc. (their product is Fusion) and Parallels.

In business and in education, there is an increasing trend towards making the Mac the platform of choice. The one unfortunate side-effect from this trend may be the increased (although minimal) exposure of the Mac OS to hackers’ efforts.

I usually refrain from posting “theoretical” OS X exploits since they rarely pose any real threat to Mac users. However, several sources are now reporting multiple Mac Trojan horses in the wild. These Trojans exploit a root vulnerability in Apple Remote Desktop Agent in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

This exploit has been rated as “critical”, but it does require that a user download and open the Trojan file.

Pay attention, folks. We knew that Macs would come more and more into hackers focus as market-share grew.

See more information at the SecureMac site.

Apple announced OS X 10.6 named Snow Leopard as more of a performance release rather than a feature release.

Some of the announced changes include a smaller footprint (giving back some hard drive space), Microsoft Exchange support, extended 64-bit support to allow a theoretical 16TB of RAM, faster clock speeds with the multicore “Grand Central” technology, and QuickTime X which includes optimized support for the latest codecs.

It’s not known yet whether Snow Leopard is the beginning of dropped support for PowerPC by Apple. Several developers are reporting that their developer preview copy runs only on Intel machines.

The rumors are that this will be a free upgrade, but that hasn’t been announced yet.

It’s been around for awhile now, but I don’t see much mention of it. GOOG-411 is a great 411 service that is free and convenient.

From any phone you dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), when you connect to the system you say out loud the city and state. Then you say the name of the business or the business type. The system quickly returns the top listings, letting you choose one. Then it automatically dials the number for you.

Like most of Google’s services, it’s simple, elegant and very useful. GOOG-411 is on my iPhone’s favorites and is a service I use often.

For more information, check out their site and the quick video: GOOG-411

It appears that identity theft has hit Apple’s iTunes store.

ComputerWorld is reporting in their article Phishers point scam at Apple’s iTunes that some people are receiving email messages telling them that a problem must be corrected in their iTunes account. The email contains a link to a bogus iTunes billing page, requesting the user re-enter their information, including credit card number, security code, and other information for identity theft.

iTunes Store users beware.

Several sites are now reporting that Apple will launch the 3G iPhone sometime in June, 2008.

This is really no a great surprise since rumors of the 3G iPhone have been around since before the last iPhone release. The interesting buzz is about the possibility that AT&T may offer subsidies of as much as $200 on this phone for a two-year contract. If that’s the case, this would bring the 8GB down to $199 and the 16GB down to $299.

The other buzz is that the new phones will have a slightly different form factor. Early rumors suggested the phone would be slightly thicker. But more recent rumors suggest the new iPhones will be 9.2mm thick, compared to the current 11.7mm thickness. So, I guess this means that they’ll either be thicker or thinner. Such is the nature of rumors.

Unfortunately, I just bought my 16GB iPhone a few months ago. So. I’ll not likely be getting one of these next generation iPhones this year. Perhaps it’s better to first hear reports of the 3G network,  and determine whether or not it will make a difference in my area.

The cover story on last week’s Business Week was about the Mac’s growing presence in the corporate world.

While this trend is not particularly surprising to most seasoned Mac users, it’s notable for the fact that Apple has spent very little resources directly targeting this market. And yet, March, 2008 sales for Macs exceeded all forecasts, climbing 51% over the previous year. The article points out that combined Mac, iPhone and iPod sales grew from $5.2 billion in fiscal 2002 to $24 billion in 2007. Apple’s share price has risen 2,300% over the past 5 years.

It appears that a number of factors are at work here, including cross over from iPod and iPhone sales. However, one major factor may be the troubled Vista operating system, which seems to have been a dog from the start. Microsoft’s own Steve Ballmer calls Vista a “work in progress.”

As most of you know, the Mac OS is a UNIX-based operating system. UNIX systems have a way of maintaining themselves through scheduled maintenance routines that clean up a variety of system logs and temporary files. These automated scripts generally run in the wee hours of the morning (somewhere between 3am and 5am). However, if your Mac is turned off or in sleep mode during these hours, these maintenance routines will not run.

A healthy Mac is a regularly maintained Mac. So if you don’t leave your Mac on and awake over night, it’s best to run these maintenance routines on a regular basis.

You can do this manually by typing the following into a Terminal session:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

Using Maintenance Applications

There are a number of 3rd party applications that do this work (and more) for you. Some of these are free, some cost. Check them out:

• Cocktail
• Onyx
• Maintenance
• MacJanitor

My current preference is Cocktail, which has a free version and a paid version.

I’d like to hear from folks who have other opinions and experience with these types of applications.

ATVFiles is an application (or plugin) that lets you browse part of the ATV file system using the Apple Remote. This allows you to navigate to files that do not normally sync to the ATV. ATVFiles allows you to play any of your media (with the proper codecs installed) right from the Apple TV interface.

Note: These steps assume that you’ve already enabled SSH on your Apple TV using the procedures in this post: Hacking The Apple TV to Enable SSH.

The first step is to download the ATVFiles package. Unpack this file to the ATVFiles-1.1.0 folder. In this folder you’ll find another folder called ATVFiles.frappliance. Copy this folder (see this post for using Fugu) to the following folder on your Apple TV:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns

Now restart your Apple TV (hold down the ‘-’ and ‘menu’ buttons on the Apple Remote for 6 seconds).

You should now see the addition of a Files menu item on your Apple TV. This will allow you to navigate to any files placed in your /mnt/media directory.

Once SSH is enabled on your Apple TV, the world is your oyster.

Note: These steps assume that you’ve already enabled SSH on your Apple TV using the procedures in this post: Hacking The Apple TV to Enable SSH.

CouchSurfer is a web browser created to work on the Apple TV. To get CouchSurfer, point a browser on your Mac to Brandon Holland’s site for the download. By the way, this guy has done some great work here and I encourage you to support his efforts. For our purposes, you’ll want to download CouchSurfer 0.3(2.0) Installer (circled below).

Once it’s downloaded, unzip the file to reveal a CouchSurfer folder with 6 files inside. You will copy this folder over to your Apple TV before running the installer.

If you are comfortable with the UNIX command line, you can upload and tweak your Apple TV from a remote Mac using the Terminal application. I find it much easier to use an SFTP program to move files. My SFTP application of choice is Fugu. Fugu is intuitive, it’s fast, and it’s free.

Setting it up to move files back and forth from your Apple TV is easy. Enter your Apple TV’s IP address, enter “frontrow” as the Username, and check the box next to Force SSH1 connection to server. Then click the Connect button and enter “frontrow” as the password.

Copy the CouchSurfer folder to your Apple TV. It can be copied anywhere, but I suggest the home folder of the Frontrow user. Next, you will need to open the Terminal application on your Mac and type the following:

ssh frontrow@<your_apple_tv_address>

When prompted for a password, enter ‘frontrow’.

Now navigate to the directory where you copied the CouchSurfer folder on your Apple TV.

Note: Basic navigation in the command line is done with the ‘cd’ command. For example, to navigate to the CouchSurfer directory in the ‘frontrow’ home directory from root, you would type the following:

cd /User/frontrow/CouchSurfer

Once there, you can verify that you are in the right place by typing the following to see a listing of the files:

ls -al

You should see a listing similar to this:

Now type in the following command to install CouchSurfer:

sudo ./installcouchsurfer

Again, use the ‘frontrow’ password when prompted.

Once this finishes, reboot your Apple TV using this command:

sudo reboot

When your Apple TV menu reappears, you’ll notice the addition of CouchSurfer in the Menu items. Now you can surf the web freely just like on your computer!

Note: CouchSurfer is still a work in progress. The Settings menu has not been implemented yet. Brandon claims that this installation allows you to use a USB keyboard and mouse plugged into the USB port on the Apple TV. I have not tested this yet. Also, while CouchSurfer allows you to bookmark pages, I have not found a way to delete bookmarks from the user interface. For that, you’ll need to navigate to the /Users/frontrow/Documents/Bookmarks.plist directory and edit by hand.

Happy surfing!