You said — “I’ll pass on the Pirate Bay recommendation, that’s one of the few places that’s known to carry Mac trojans like the iWork 09 one.”
Well, it was overblown... There wasn’t a real big problem. I actually seeded the iWork 09 there at The Pirate Bay. It was taking so long to download it, that I just went to the Apple site, got the disk image downloaded and inserted it into the torrent file (in Transmission) and started seeding it to a lot of others. It really was no big deal.
The very same file that was on Apple’s site, which they were giving out for free — was on The Pirate Bay. I’m not sure why there were a lot of people getting it there. Maybe Apple’s servers were overloaded the first few days.
I ended up getting another security program, as a result of that story which checks for trojans and other hidden programs on your computer. I ran it and nothing came up. I always keep at least two full hard drive backups that are bootable and I can clean something off relatively quickly, if I have to.
And, the one thing you have in your benefit at the Pirate Bay are the comments from the users on each particular file there. If there is a problem, you’ll get comments from other users in a matter of hours. If you see a file that has been there for a few days or more, there’s no problem. It would have shown up in the user comments right away. So, you really can’t go too wrong there...
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And then you said — “Good idea on the Clean App though, one of the very first things I installed was App Zapper, based on the recommendation of others and the great reviews online, and while Little Snitch actually includes and uninstaller apparently it leaves active daemons behind, do you know if either of these clean up programs will clean those up as well? Worst case is probably having to go down to the command line.”
I’ve never removed Little Snitch, so I don’t know if it won’t actually remove all the processes. But, if it doesn’t, you’ll see the process and you can kill it. But, I’m sure you would want to get rid of the file that was originating it, too... :-) ...
In regards to whether those programs will clean out those files... well... “they’re supposed to...” but I’m not going to go out on a limb and say they always do it... :-)
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And lastly, you said — “Thanks again for your recommendations.”
Well, one more recommendation...
You can change your DNS server lookups to — OpenDNS [ http://www.opendns.com/ ]
It will block phishing sites and other problem sites for you. I’ve been using it for a while and haven’t run into any problems. It’s easy to use, just changing some IP numbers. The website will tell you how...
You can set this hard-coded IP number in a particular “setting” and name it, so you can easily switch back and forth from using it, to not using it, in a matter of seconds. So, if you think it may be causing a problem, you can switch back to the original settings for DNS lookups and see if it’s really the problem.
I hope you’re having fun on your Mac. I’m always glad to see people using Macs. They’re a lot better, I think. Maybe one of these days I’ll also get to be a UNIX geek, too... LOL...
Thanks, this is a great machine, as is, which is why I don’t want to change much, at least not yet. I was disappointed I couldn’t change the mouse color though, which was the first thing I tried. Knowing me one weekend when I have time, I’ll make a backup, then load everything I can find and test it, then go back to the backup and install just the things I really want. Right now though I’m just running the basic provided firewall, but turned on Stealth and set allowed incoming to only essential, from the default of allow all. I’ll eventually load some more security filtering and blocking, but that takes resources and time, and right now this thing will boot up completely in about 15 seconds, and shuts off in less than 5, and I’m enjoying that.