Aunty Spam compares the new Mac OS X Tiger to Konfabulator (and yes, the similarities are many) and shows the potential dark side (sorry to use that cliched word again) of Dashboard widgets in WidgetJacking: Zaptastic Shows Us the Big Hole in Tiger’s Dashboard:

That gaping hole in Tiger’s Dashboard is no air vent - it’s a wide-open, highly exploitable security threat for users of Apple’s newest version of OS X for Mac. And we have Stephan.com’s Zaptastic and Goatse widgets to thank for showing us the big hole.

FrancisoIV is ahead of the curve on this story too writing yesterday:

All those smug Mac OSX Tiger users better start installing virus protection, firewalls and all the stuff windows users have grown to loathe

The thing is that these Widgets can’t just get on one’s system without user manual downloading– yet, anyway. Also, they don’t run as root, so their privileges are limited. But I sure hope by saying this I’m not becoming one of those “smg Mac OS X Tiger users.”

I’ve been blogging about my Tiger experiences in more depth over at my Mac blog. TV Tracker is the most recent BENIGN Dashboard Widget I tried out. That will figure out what’s on TV at any moment in time. I almost put the screenshot up here but then I thought in light of the story that wouldn’t be very kind to the developer. There are plenty of benign widgets, just — as with anything else running on your computer — it’s a downloader beware web world.

Update: Almost immediately after publishing I have decided to add the words “can be” to the headline. Again, not all Dashboard widgets are bad. It’s important that this theme is not lost in the translation.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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