Tiger’s Latest Roar

Earlier this week, Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.7. This is may be the last round of changes for the 10.4 “Tiger” fork. Leopard will be bounding in at the Worldwide Developers Conference in August.
Mac OS X 10.4.7 is out.

According to Apple’s release notes, numerous issues related to the syncing of tasks, bookmarks and contacts with Apple’s .Mac online network have been corrected. The release also includes better support for Motorola cell phones that sync via Bluetooth as well as iSync.

The operating system now responds to Layer 2 Multicast (Address Resolution Protocol) ARPs, which enable the translation of Ethernet MAC addresses from IP addresses.

Syncing is also improved in the 10.4.7 release, as is Mac OS X’s compatibility with Microsoft’s Virtual PC application.

Apple has made fixes to information disclosure in the AppleShare File Protocol (AFP), which was allowing unauthorized users to get search results for files and folders to which the user did not have legitimate access.

Another fix was made to ImageIO to fix a potential arbitrary code execution risk that could occur if a user encounters a maliciously crafted TIFF image.

The 10.4.7 release also addresses two issues in open source applications that are included in the operating system.

ClamAV, an antivirus scanner, is updated to protect against a potential stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability. And OpenLDAP, which provides LDAP user authentication, is now protected against a potential denial-of-service vulnerability.

Bugs were zapped on the networking side as well.