I have not yet taken the time to talk about Mac OS X 10.4.3. The new update is almost a hundred megs and includes a ton of features and bug fixes (as you’d expect from a 100M download). First off, the most important is that Safari now passes the Acid2 test, so if your web page doesn’t look good or work in Safari it only means that you suck. Another update which I’m really glad to see is iChat encryption. Now, unfortunately iChat encryption only works between two .Mac members. I haven’t exactly figured out how this works because I don’t use my .Mac account for iChat, but it would appear that there is somehow a type of key exchange. If I were designing it, and based on observations I have taken then it should work something like this:

• The client connects to server and requests encryption availability, creates public and private keys, and sends the public key to the server.
• The server then stores the public keys attached to each user’s account and signs the key (thereby creating a trust chain).
• When two clients who have public keys stored on the server begin a chat the server will initiate key exchanges between the users and encryption begins.

Now, this rocks. It is too bad that it is only limited to .Mac chatting. It would be nice if iChat could create arbitrary keys and perform key exchanges itself, or it was able to import x.509 certificates (like these or these) which would allow any iChat user to securely talk to any other iChat user regardless of which server they are using (.Mac, Jabber, AIM or Bonjour). Although iChat creating its own unverified keys causes a lack of trust in the keys. This could be mitigated in the same what that PGP keys are trusted.

The other feature I have found worthy of much note is that Disk Utility now supports creating case sensitive journaled HFS+ volumes. No more OS X server or Disk Utility hacks required. Now if only application designers would get with the program and program their programs to work correctly in case sensitive filesystems (yes, game designers this means you).