Article by George Norman

On 13 Aug 2009

Good news from the Apple camp for all the Mac OS X users out there – two pieces of good news to be precise. The first one is that the yet to be released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has reached an important milestone in its development process: Gold Master Edition. Exciting news indeed, as the Gold Master Edition is the stage before the RTM (Release To Manufacturing) edition, which is also commonly known as the Gold Edition. This means that work on the Snow Leopard is very close to coming to an end – and once that happens the Mac OS X 10.6 will be released to the public.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the next iteration of the Mac OS X-based operating system is due to be released sometime this September (no actual release date has been provided so far, but rumor on the web has it that Apple might pull one on Microsoft and release it on the 15th of September, the date when the Zune HD goes on sale, but I think that's just people being mean towards Microsoft). The software, which is already available for pre-order on Amazon, will set you back $29 if you are already running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and $169 if you are running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on your machine.


The second piece of good news for the Mac user is that Apple has released Security Update 2009-004 to fix a solitary BIND DNS Server problem affecting the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard as well as Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Mac OS X Server. The BIND vulnerability, if exploited by a person with malicious intent could cause the DNS server to terminate unexpectedly.

“A logic issue in the handling of dynamic DNS update messages may cause an assertion to be triggered. By sending a maliciously crafted update message to the BIND DNS server, a remote attacker may be able to interrupt the BIND service. The issue affects servers which are masters for one or more zones, regardless of whether they accept updates. BIND is included with Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server but it is not enabled by default. This update addresses the issue by properly rejecting messages with a record of type 'ANY' where an assertion would previously have been raised,” explained Apple.

It should be noticed that this security update follows in the footsteps of the Mac OS X 10.5.8 update released by Apple the other week. The update comes with several improvements for the operating system, including a long list of security fixes. Speaking of security, it should also be noticed that Apple rolled out Safari 4.0.3 the other day, yet another security update.

If you would like to get Security Update 2009-004, you can grab it straight from Apple here.



Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Leopard, Snow Leoaprd, Update, Gold Master Edition

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