Version 1.7.6 now available

[Holman, W. Timothy]

VUWER users,

Version 1.7.6 is now available for download. The version resolves a lot of additional bugs introduced by El Capitan. In particular, if you are using a non-U.S. English character set, VUWER may have been crashing when you tried to use it or install it. This update should (hopefully) resolve these problems.

Tim

[Cees Gieling]

Hi Tim,

thanks a lot for the recent El Capitan updates of vuwer.

Installed them both without any problem.

I think it's time for a donation, but could not find any advertisement or howto on your .edu site.

So please tell me where to look or how to donate, so I can get rid of this guilty feeling.....

Regards,

Cees

Op vrijdag 4 december 2015 03:12:07 UTC+1 schreef Tim Holman:

[Holman, W. Timothy]

I do not accept donations for VUWER, since I develop it and host it on my employer’s computer system, although I appreciate the offer.

If you do want to contribute, I suggest that you donate a little money to the developers of ImageSnap, sendEmail, and Platypus, all of which are used by VUWER.  Here are the links to their webpages, with donation links.  Toss a few dollars or euros at each of them instead.

http://iharder.sourceforge.net/current/macosx/imagesnap/

http://caspian.dotconf.net/menu/Software/SendEmail/

http://www.sveinbjorn.org/platypus

Thanks,

Tim

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[gmail vuwer]

Hi Tim,

thanks for your suggestion, I will do just that.

Instead of donating I will hereby praise you for the good work you’re doing for the the vuwer users community.

Any idea of how much users of vuwer there are ?

I started using vuwer somewhere in 2010. Experimented before with some other similar software. But none had the transparency that vuwer offered.

Setup of vuwer may be a bit complicated at first. But you are rewarded by not being bothered by adds, commercial pitfalls, upgrade plans, per-station licenses, and so on.

In 2010 there were some Macs stolen out of my house (I fix them in my spare time). Only one of the three working ones (my dailly used Mac) had vuwer installed (yeah, I know).

Never received vuwer’s snapshots or other data, though. Because when I went out for a walk at the same night of the robbery, I found 2 of my Macs hidden under a chair in the park behind my house.

From that day on, every Mac, unless broken, gets vuwer installed, of course.

To my opinion, vuwer is much better than FindMyMac, although the latter also works for iOS. Vuwer can be set to send messages where FMM has to be polled. 

Vuwer is not limited to 5 or 6 Apple devices. But FMM can remotely erase or lock your Mac, or sound an alarm, when the dumb thief connects to the internet, without reinstalling OSX. 

Taken that you will never get back your Mac, what about a RSTF feature for FMM (remotely set to fire) ?

Keep on going Tim.

Thanks a lot.

Regards,

Cees.

[Holman, W. Timothy]

My best guess is that VUWER has several hundred users (at least) worldwide, although I have no idea of the exact number.  Not that it matters to me; I wrote VUWER to install on my own computers.  All the rest of you get to use it as a side benefit.  :-)

As to adding a feature that wipes and locks your Mac, there’s no need to do that with VUWER because Find My Mac already does it.  Why re-invent the wheel?  I have VUWER installed on all my Macs, but I also have Find My Mac activated on them as well.

Some possible new features I have been working on, however:

(1)  A way to replicate random system failures (e.g. Mac randomly locks up and goes to sleep)

(2)  A way to remotely erase your personal data on your admin account, while keeping the guest account active so the thief will keep using the Mac

(3)  A way to remotely record audio from the Mac, and have the audio files emailed to you

(4)  Adding a key logger function (may be impossible to do in Applescript, but I keep playing with the idea)

So VUWER continues to be a work in progress.  It all comes down to how much time I can devote to it.  My job keeps me very busy, but I am making progress on the next big revision.

The best advice I can give to anyone is this:  install a firmware password on your Mac!  That way, no one can erase the Mac and reinstall the OS, and VUWER will keep running no matter what.  I’ve had people contact me after their Macs were missing for months, and tell me they were getting emails.  As long as the hard drive cannot be wiped, sooner or later someone may start using your stolen computer again.

Tim

[gmail vuwer]

I much agree on your advice to install a firmware password, but make shure you will remember it and to switch it off when selling/donating your computer. On newer Macs there is no way (only resoldering a chip I guess) to get around it.

Without a FW password you can’t boot from another volume/partition (including recovery). 

I’m not sure though if it is possible to take the drive out, reformat and reinstall OSX (all same volume and account names) and reboot the FW password protected Mac, without vuwer running. 

Maybe the reformatted same drive and volume has given another volume ID, which should be detected by the FW protection.

I have my vuwer Macs auto-login with the ‘’thief’s'’ account without password. When the Mac is on WiFi, I set Ethernet unactive and set System Preferences Changing to have the admin password (also for WiFi on/off switching). No admin password should be reqd for connectiong to another network. When unplugged and powered on it always logs into the theif’s account and the admin account is password protected. 

I experimented with locking-out the thief’s account from the Applications/Utilities folder (e.g. no access to Disk Utility or Activity monitor). This made OSX hang totally on boot up and auto logging into the thief’s account, when auto-starting an app from the Utilities folder. So beware.

Vuwer is not invisible and a thief could do a search for software like vuwer and could kill the processes. Without Activity Monitor, Terminal, and without admin rights, things get very complicated.

When you have Little Snitch installed, and logging in on the thief’s account, please wait for vuwer to have send all the emails, and set always allow internet access rules for all the vuwer subprocesses (platypus, google and some more). 

This way the thief won’t get notified that vuwer is working in the background.

I may never need vuwer to get a stolen Mac back, but it’s a good feeling to have it installed and setup for a maximum level of security. 

Also messing and testing vuwer is just fun.

A key logger feature could be nice, but the privacy and security of Mac users could be in danger. Vuwer can already be used for spying on someone. 

What if somebody installs vuwer and sells the Mac without telling? 

Maybe you should notify a user (with admin rights) that vuwer is installed.

[Holman, W. Timothy]

You are correct - it is certainly possible for someone to use VUWER to spy on someone, but the same potential for abuse exists for many types of security software.  Ultimately, you can only trust the computer that you configure yourself.  If you buy a used computer and do not reinstall the OS, then you are taking a risk.  If you buy a Mac and do not confirm that you can boot into the recovery partition before paying for it, then you have only yourself to blame for the consequences.

Like all software tools, VUWER can be abused, but the benefits far outweigh the risks.  If someone wants to spy on someone else’s Mac, there are several commercial programs you can buy that will do the job.  It is far more likely that the person doing the spying will use a program like Realtime-Spy, rather than VUWER.

Tim