Adding GCC, Git, and friends to Path after Installing XCode 4.3

My hard drive died this week, so I decided to purchase an SSD. Best decision ever—my little old macbook is a bazillion times faster. It's always a great feeling to start fresh; I love reinstalling all my apps and getting organized. It's a very empowering feeling to reintroduce order to one's life.

Since I was starting fresh I decided I didn't want to install the old XCode, and so would just skip straight to the new XCode 4.3 Preview, which requires no installers and just comes completely self contained.

However, many of us like to develop outside of XCode from time to time, and woud like to have our compilers, debuggers, and Git available to us. I knew XCode 4.3 was providing these things, because I was able to compile my projects, but they were not showing up when I tried to run them from the terminal.

After a little digging, I finally found the bin folder with all our friends in the package contents of the XCode app. To use GCC, GDB, Git, and other various utilities from the command line, just add this to your path:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin


Enjoy.

Mac Hacker Interview

Today, thanks to Technocrat, I read an awesome interview with two of my hacking idols: Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi. Read it.


Things I liked/found interesting:

• Mac security is far from perfect
• Google Chrome is good
• Education is good—the good guys need to know. Bad guys tend to already know.
• Apple needs to treat researchers better
• Apple's security (like everyone else's) depends on how much it will protect their wallet.
• "As for whether I have an exploit in my pocket, a gentleman doesn't discuss such things, but I'm not a gentleman, so yes." - Charlie
• These guys are smart

Apple_Security++

Recent hires by Apple reveal an increasing emphasis on security. The rise of mac malware, botnets, and research in mobile attacks indicate the need for Apple to take security seriously. Genius hackers like Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi have already been researching Mac vulnerabilities for some time now, and many more are on the way. Hopefully this influx will introduce more tools. Good tools are already available—IDA Pro was recently released natively for OS X—but we need more freely available tools to fuel research and open the doors to more researchers (such as poor students like myself). OS X needs tools like OllyDbg and Immunity debugger. Paterva needs to hurry up—I can't wait any longer. It's an exciting time to be a Mac. Let the fun begin.