Last week Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") would not be available until October of this year, a slip of about 6 months from its previously announced date of "this Spring." We'll leave it to others to discuss the ramifications of this slip, and in particular the slip's stated reason (resources were needed for the iPhone).

Here at Open Door, we have been evaluating development releases of Leopard and have been working on updates to our security products, in particular the book, "Internet Security for Your Macintosh: A Guide for the Rest of Us" on which this blog is based. Book updates have included two major components: Leopard changes and changes for other new Apple products and security issues. Since we were anticipating Leopard shipping by June at the latest, we planned to rev the book for everything at the same time.

With Leopard now shipping in October, in some ways we'd like to put out the book update right away, since it contains important information on Apple's new AirPort Extreme Base Station, Apple TV, evolving wireless issues, etc. Unfortunately the new book text also contains lots of changes for Leopard, and it would be very hard to back those out. So we're going to wait for October with the update.

We also have this blog, however, which we established to be able to provide even-more-timely updates on relevant Mac Internet security issues. So we're going to take advantage of it to publish new non-Leopard sections of the book ahead of time, over the next few weeks. So be on the lookout for those.  For now, here's a brief “teaser,” from the end of Chapter 4:

1. A related option is so-called “two-factor” authentication systems, which combine a traditional password with a physical item associated with you, such as a “smart card.” Your ATM card and PIN are an example of such a system, as are some of the newer devices containing radio-frequency IDs (RFIDs). Mac OS X provides some support for smart cards, for instance with keychains.