Scary, huh? It's you on the internet! Well, not really - its just looping back locally. But still. I blatantly stole this cool trick from this guy.

(For those not on an iSight equipped Mac: the above box shows the video feed from the Mac's built-in webcam).

But seriously, I am a little concerned about the iSight. It's fun and has the geek factor and everything, but there also are security and privacy issues that I think Apple seems to have pretty much ignored.

This morning, I was on a WebEx. The WebEx software and the iSight both decided that video of me should be transmitted. The WebEx software provides no way to disable this. Apple provides no way to disable the camera. A control panel? A shutter? Better yet, a removable camera? A BTO option to skip it entirely? Something? Please?

And yes, I do know I could fix this with a 1 sq cm of electrical tape. But then how am I going to get that consulting gig at NORAD if they won't let me through the 20-foot-thick door with my machine?

Back in January, I experienced the dreaded Deaded Lower Ram Slot Problem on my 1.5ghz PowerBook.

Well, it seems to have happened again. Not sure exactly when it happened, but it may well have been right around the time I upgraded to 1.4.8. But it also has been running hot for long stretches of a time, lately - maybe that's the cause. Ugh, who knows?. Back you go to Apple for a new logic board, little PowerBook.

This all got me wondering how I could make my machine make an assertion at startup about how much memory it has. That in turn got me googling, which in short order produced a handy answer courtesy of one Matt Comi. Thanks, Matt.

And yes, I do need to get a new machine. I have needed one for months, but just can't bring myself to do it knowing that the Core2 Duos are just around the corner. Any day now, right?

Another OS X gripe: a lot of people have mentioned how wonderful OS X's 'keychain' feature is. I guess it's pretty nice to have integrated, centralized management of my secure information, but it has one big problem: it's completely insecure.

Apple's operating assumption seems to be that the only thing I care about securing are my passwords, because anyone can use "Keychain Access" to look at all of my accounts and account names/number without entering a password. The only thing that you have to type in a password to access are the account passwords. I can find no setting to make it more restrictive.

This is ridiculous. I don't even want to make it easy for a laptop thief to know what bank I use, or what insurance I carry. Getting a valid username is half the battle for any hacker. And worse, half of the account numbers for these places ARE MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. Gee, I wouldn't want that to be secured, now would I?

Really stupid, Apple.