Thanks for the appreciation. There are folks in the tech press and even some FReepers, who love to exaggerate the significance and potential hazard of various flaws in Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, etc. These days, there are darn few that merit freaking out over. But the folks who love attention are desperate for it and will make any molehill into a mountain for self-aggrandizement.
This Shellshock Bash bug is real, but it's not the end of the world, and certainly not the huge mess it's being made out to be, with regard to Macintosh machines. Apple will produce a patch in a few days that will take care of it, and that will be that.
It's actually a much bigger problem for Linux and Unix servers, and as a system admin I've got a LOT of those to patch.... ugh.
Well, with respect, it is kind of a mess, if only because certain Apple users are a little naive with regard to security. I’ll be spending next week with certain users (and I could name them right now) cleaning the whole thing up. The ones I’m worried about are the ones who simply refuse to believe there could be a problem, and won’t take even the most rudimentary measures to prevent it. That’s the real problem with this whole OS holy war thing: it blinds the participants to the cold, deadly fact that no OS is perfect and that they all need vigilance.
It's actually a much bigger problem for Linux and Unix servers, and as a system admin I've got a LOT of those to patch.... ugh.
It's a real bug, but of much more concern only to those who run webservers. If your linux box is just a workstation, and you don't run a webserver, it's not really an issue, but you should update bash regardless. Fortunately it's an easy fix... "yum update bash" or something similar. If you have automatic updates turned on, you don't even have to do that.
No reboot required, though I'd probably HUP my webserver if I had one just for the hell of it.
I run a webserver locally for my own purposes, but since it's not exposed to the internet it was never an issue.
You’re welcome. I’m not one of those who blithely believe that my OS X is immune from everything forever, but as I am utterly ignorant of computer stuff, the best I can do is read what those more knowledgable than myself say, and follow the advice of those who sound the most reasonable. I already do the basics-keep up with patches and updates, don’t go to “iffy” sites, never click obscure links or links from emails etc. My browsing is in a pretty narrow window, I mostly go to the same sites I’ve gone to for years. There’s more of course, but I remember as I need to do or not do it :)