There is a hole... in your mind

If you have a Mac and follow the Mac news, you've probably been reading about all the potential security exploits involving exotic URL protocols that have gotten attention over the past couple of weeks. And you may have read that Apple's latest security update plugs the best-publicized hole, but not all of them. And you may be wondering exactly what to do, in the face of conflicting and hysterical recommendations.

The best, coolest-headed analyses I've seen on the subject are John Gruber of Daring Fireball's posts. He has concrete recommendations for action. Before you actually do anything, though, I'd recommend reading the linked articles in which he explains the problem in detail, and getting some understanding of why the solutions he proposes are the preferred ones.

This kind of sanity check is essential whenever you hear random people out in the Internet wilderness yelling "You have a security hole! Fix it now! NOW! To plug it, do this and this and this!" Otherwise, you've got the biggest security hole of all in your own brain. I'd be especially wary of people telling you to install some third-party system extension you've never heard of.

2+ birds with one stone

Besides letting you plug those URL-scheme holes, the RCDefaultApp preference pane for Mac OS X also lets you set your default Web browser and mail program from outside Safari/Apple Mail.

Update: ...And it gives you the one-stop interface for messing with file type/creator code, extension and MIME type mappings that you've probably wanted ever since you switched to Mac OS X, if you're an old Mac geek like I seem to have become.

One thing RCDefaultApp doesn't seem to have is any means of letting you register completely new mappings; More Internet can do that. (As can the Internet Explorer prefs, but it seems dumb to have to go into Internet Explorer just for that. Also, More Internet and MSIE use the old Internet Config API, which is apparently deprecated and doesn't cover certain protocols, such as the disk: one that opens one of the recently publicized holes.)