Schneier on Security

Cupertino, Calif.—The Mac developer community has been bubbling with speculations, questions and, in some cases, fear since Apple last month gave its blessing to Symantec Corp.’s Bedrock cross-platform development framework.

Not surprisingly, developers who have followed Apple’s often-repeated advice and adopted its current application framework, MacApp, have the most questions.

“There is a lot of concern” among MacApp developers, said Jeff Alger, a Palo Alto, Calif., consultant and former chairman of the MacApp Developers Association (now MADA). “Apple is being secretive about Bedrock in ways that they haven’t been [with MacApp].”…

The QuickRing architecture, announced last month at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., could have a profound effect on many areas of high-end Macintosh computing, such as video processing and high-speed networking.

QuickRing is a communications system that lets plug-in NuBus cards exchange data with each other or external equipment at rates of up to 200 Mbps. This is more than 10 times faster than non-burst-mode speeds available in the existing NuBus architecture and opens the door to new applications that Mac developers could only dream of before…

Business cards used to be simple: name, company, address, telephone number and maybe a logo. Then came facsimile numbers. Now something with an @ in it is appearing on more and more business cards. It’s an Internet address; you probably have one already, although you may not know it, and sometime during the next couple of years you will have to learn it.

With an estimated 25 million users, the Internet is by far the world’s largest electronic-mail network, and its reach is extending to more private and public mail systems every week.

“If [people are] serious about electronic mail, I can get to them via the Internet; if they’re not, I probably don’t have time to figure out how to reach them,” said Bob Halloran, network manager at AT&T Co.’s Universal Card Services in Jacksonville, Fla…