Cleaning Up After the Theft

I recently blogged about our house being burgled, and then some issues about canceling our credit cards.   Here’s an update on all this.

Hints, learned the hard way

• I recommend having a spare credit card somewhere safe and isolated, but active, and not associated with your regular accounts.  If you have your wallet stolen and you call in your cards to have them deactivated. you may be left without cash.  Think about this happening at the beginning of a long holiday weekend.  Without any working credit cards, how do you manage to buy food, gas and essentials with everything in your wallet gone? Without an ATM card, how do you get cash? Without ID, how do you cash a check?   I had such an “emergency” card stashed away, and it was a huge help while we awaited replacement cards and ID.  I buy lunch with it every few months to keep it active, and the bill paid immediately.  In this instance it covered the cost for my replacement driver’s license, bought gas for my car, and covered some expenses at the post office and grocery store.  (My replacement AmEx cards arrived 22 hours after I reported the originals stolen; other cards took 5 days to a week to get replaced.)
• Make up a list of credit card numbers and the toll-free number to call if they are stolen (usually on the back of the cards).  Keep a copy of this in a secure location, such as in a safe.  You can store it online, but make sure it is encrypted and not stored only on the disk of a system that might be stolen!   I had an encrypted list stored online at Purdue, so I was able to quickly call each credit card company to cancel the cards.  With one exception they were all canceled within 90 minutes of discovering them missing.
• It might not be a bad idea to keep a list of serial numbers and model numbers of electronics along with the list of credit card numbers.  If the police recover the items, having the serial numbers will help to prove they are yours.   Having copies of the sales receipts somewhere helps, too.
• If you had extended warranties on items stolen, see about getting a pro-rated refund.  I had AppleCare on my daughter’s laptop.  I am getting a refund of most of it — almost enough to cover the AppleCare on the replacement!
• If you have a theft, be sure to check your checkbook.  Not only do you want to ensure it is still present, but that a check or two haven’t been removed from further down in the checkbook.  Apparently this is something that more professional burglars might steal.
• Don’t assume you have documented everything missing and file all the insurance claims right away.   We discovered, a week after the theft, that another item was missing — a canvas bag with sheet music in it.  We surmise that it was used to carry away the laptops.   We don’t use it every day, and it wasn’t something we immediately noticed as missing.  But the bag and music in it were at least $100 and are going on the claim.

More to the story

Luckily, my passport was not stolen, so that along with the spare credit card enabled me to get a replacement license printed.  My stolen license was only about 8 months old, so all they did was reprint it — I didn’t need to get a new picture or retake the eye test.

However, while getting the license replaced, I discovered that my passport was due to expire in 2 days!   That was close, because the license bureau (and other places) will not accept an expired passport as ID.  Consider that it was valid a few days ago, and that is a laminated picture of me inside, and it thus should still work in an emergency, but the clerk at the license bureau told me they could not accept it.  So, I applied for a renewal passport a few days ago…another chunk of change.  Sigh.

My Purdue ID was also reprinted much the same way as my driver’s license.  I went into the office, gave them the PUID number (I keep that in an encrypted data file on my iPhone), and the card was reprinted in under 2 minutes.   My photo matched, so I got to leave with the card.   A bit of info for those of you with Purdue ID cards — the “0″ (usually) after your 10-digit PUID on the card is the issue number.  My card now has a “1″ there.  I don’t think they check this for anything.

My Starbucks card was also easily replaced.  I had registered it online, so I went to the WWW site, logged in, and cancelled the stolen one.  A new one was issued to me and arrived in the mail 5 days later — with my remaining $12 in credit loaded into it.  I immediately bought a grande no-fat mocha to celebrate.

Worst card to lose?  My CAC.  It is a longer story than I will relate here as to why I have one, but it has to do with advisory boards I’m on.  The problem is that the military is worried about security rather than privacy, so the cards (of the series I have) have the Social Security number and birthdate printed in big black figures on the card face: it is an identity theft kit in card form (the SSN is the military serial number for those in uniform, of “name, rank, serial number” fame).   Plus, once invalidated (right after the credit cards), it means I now need to make a special trip to get a replacement card before I need it next.   And I must present at least two forms of government photo ID before I can get the replacement — so I need to wait until my new passport arrives.   Annoying.

Three days after the theft, we got a phone message that some of Kathy’s wallet contents had been found: scatted in mud at a park in a town about 50 miles east of here.  The parks department there checked all around and in the trash bins to see if her wallet or purse had been dumped, too, but no joy.  They very nicely cleaned off the cards and mailed them back to Kathy (kudos to the nice people at Parks & Recreation in Kokomo!).  The mud had ruined any chance at fingerprints, and we had already canceled and replaced all the cards, but it was interesting nonetheless.  In particular, the thief (or thieves) had kept the AmericanExpress and MasterCard, but abandoned the merchant cards (e.g., Sears, Macy’s).  I’m told that many of those stores videotape all the registers and keep the records for a long time, so that could be it.  Or else the main target was quick cash opportunities.

One of my credit cards had an attempted usage at a gas station in the same town, for $1.  It was denied.  The credit card company has learned that $1 purchases are often a means of testing if a stolen card is active.  If it works, the card is then used to buy expensive items to resell.  In this case, the charge was denied and the card never used again; it is probably in a landfill somewhere.   Two of Kathy’s cards were used to buy items in Kentucky before we shut them off.  According to MasterCard, they could not tell me the merchant where the cards were used — only the type of store, and town.   When I called back 5 days later, they no longer had a record of the charges!  (This fits with my earlier post about the cost of fraud.)

A suspect was arrested last week who may have been involved in this case.  There were a string of almost a half-dozen similar burglaries in the neighborhood.  The suspect was caught in possession and trying to use credit cards taken from one of those robberies.  The investigation is on-going but there seems to be a strong suspicion that this suspect was behind our burglary, too.   That doesn’t help recover the items or the peace of mind, but these kinds of thefts in the area are rare, and this helps.   I have had multiple encounters with the West Lafayette police over the years (never in an adversarial position) and I have always been impressed with their general competence and good will.  They really are a part of the community, and they also know how to do good police work.

I’m using my daughter’s old MacBook from early 2006.  I installed a new battery and a new, larger disk, and it is a passable substitute, although verrrrry slooooow compared to my missing machine.  I am going to use this until January, when Apple is rumored to refresh their MacBook Pro line with newer processors.  Then I will order a replacement.   Purdue’s insurance will cover about half the cost whether I buy it then or now, so I figure I will wait.  In the meantime, I will be stuck without all my files and programs, and without all my email capabilities.  Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing after all?

The Magnitude of Fraud

Yesterday morning, after discovering the burglary, I called American Express, cancelled our cards, and asked for new ones.   They arrived today via courier (AmEx has been quite reliable for me over the 30+ years I have used their cards).

There was a small problem activating one of the cards, so I ended up getting bounced to manager-level and we had a conversation while we were waiting for a computer update.

I asked if there was any way to find out when/where the cancelled cards might have been attempted to be used.   The police here could use that info to try to pull videotapes from the merchants to identify the thieves.  (Cards are often used at gas stations, but most stations in the area have installed video to use proscuting drive-offs.)  The AmEx person informed me that once a card is reported stolen, it is deactivated and AmEx does not record attempted uses because they “do not wish to get involved in law enforcement.”

So, I posited, if we wanted a better chance of catching the scumbags who stole our stuff, it would have been better to NOT cancel the cards, wait for them to get used, get the video, and then deny the charges?   The rep agreed that so long as we did that within the challenge period (30 days?) that would probably work better.   As it is now, we cannot use the cards to try to track the thieves.

But wait — there’s more!   I pressed further and found that their average loss per fraudulent use before a card is shut off is around $1000.  This is why they don’t bother pursuing cases — that threshold is too low for the Feds to be interested, and neither are most local law enforcement agencies.   Often, the cases lead outside the country.  Thus, it is cheaper for them to charge back to the merchants (because, after all, the merchant didn’t appropriately validate the identity of the cardholder) than for the card company to pursue it (my conclusion, which the rep did not deny).

Going further, the rep works in one of (note: one of) AmEx’s call centers.  I was told they get 25,000 reports per week at that call center of lost and stolen cards.  Now, let’s do a little math, shall we?  Figure that 20,000 of those calls are for stolen and fraudulent use.   20,000 times $1000 per instance is $20 million per week in fraud.   Take that times 52 weeks in a year, and you get over $1 billion a year in fraud…now take that across all their call centers.   Then, figure fraud with more cards for Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and all the rest; I don’t know their average losses before discovery, but I suspect the industry average is around the same amount.

This is an area related to computer crime, and often co-mingled with it, because theft of card numbers via phishing and trojan software is a big source of card number theft.   It also exemplifies the problem.

Consider  - fraudulent use of US credit cards would seem to be in the tens of  billions of dollars per year.  I don’t know about the policy for investigation and prosecution is by the various other card-issuers, but it is probably similar for many — charge back to the merchants, and the individual cases are too small for law enforcement to get involved.  Thus, tens of billions of $$ a year with effectively no law enforcement follow-through.  Is there any surprise this is a growth business?

A phrase I used about 7-8 years ago when giving talks was that we were about to be “pecked to death by ducks.”  No single duck is more than an annoyance — a single duck is not a real threat and can be fought off easily.  But if you are constantly attacked by a huge flock, eventually you will succumb.   (I now see that it is more like leeches, but the duck image is more colorful.)

And this is only one form of financial fraud that we are facing.  It comes back in higher prices and lessened user confidence.   Even if my estimates are off by an order of magnitude, billions of dollars in fraud per year is a lot.

And that is only one form of fraud facing us, partially in cyber.   It is growing.  And it is largely not reported because no one bears a large enough part of the cost to really cry out for remedy.

Terrorists might kill a few of us now and then, but the criminals are bleeding us all, all the time.   Which is worse? Which is it the government chooses to focus the majority of law enforcement resources on?

Sometimes, Stuff Happens

So, I’m sick with bronchitis, and trying to recover. The doc has given me medicine with great juju, but it makes it difficult for me to concentrate and a bit dizzy.

Kathy asked me to bring in the garbage can from the street. She left the garage door open for me to do so. I spaced on it because of the medicine, and we all went to sleep with the garage open.

While we were sleeping, someone came in to the house thru the garage. They went through the main floor and took my wallet, Kathy’s purse, all our laptops, and all the iPods. And Kathy’s iPhone. About $5000 in replacement costs. The main desktop computers got left, so we’re not completely disconnected.

No one was hurt — in fact, we never heard anything and were undisturbed.

We’ve been with the police all morning. I have all the serial numbers, and several of the items were engraved in spots, so there is a better chance we may identify them. The credit cards are all cancelled. The police got some physical evidence that may be useful. We shall see.

And yes, I have backups of the computers. Offsite backups of my mail computer, in fact.

Now, we have to chase around and get replacements to wallet items, such as driver’s licenses, Purdue ID, bank cards, and so on. I also need to talk to people at the cell phone store about replacement options.

I’ve had stuff stolen before, so I’m not really freaked out about this. I am quite annoyed, however.

However, it’s a learning experience, too. From now on, the alarm system will get set every night. And I’m probably going to get that firearm license after all. Not that having a gun around would have helped in this instance, but it might be useful in some future instance. Not to mention that having weapons handy gives me something to discuss with Elizabeth’s dates.

My life is one set of joys after another.

My reflection on 9/11

This is really two posts in one: some reflections on where I was on 9/11, and some of the follow-on effects.

Irony

Eight years ago this morning, I was sitting in a conference room at the National Security Agency with a number of colleagues from university programs in infosec education. We were awaiting a speaker to address us on the topic of counter-terrorism. The speaker was late, and then someone came into the room and told us the schedule had changed – and turned on the TV to CNN’s live coverage of the burning World Trade Center tower, hit by flight 11 a few minutes earlier. We watched as flight 175 crashed into the second tower. Our hosts seemed unable to determine what we should do next, until the order came to evacuate the buildings – all nonessential personnel were told to evacuate.

As we were exiting the building, Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

The ensuing traffic jam was a nightmare. I sat in my rental car with Peter Freeman, then the dean at Georgia Tech, for nearly 2 hours as traffic crawled out of the parking lot and towards our hotel in Linthicum. Our group reassembled in the restaurant, watching TV, trying to get a cell phone signal to call our homes, and discussing what was happening.

Personal Impact

My personal experience with this was confounded by having my father in a hospital in Alexandria, having suffered a stroke on 9/8. Unbeknown to me, he was moved to another facility that afternoon as part of a regional disaster plan, to make room for more potential victims if there were other attacks. It took me a day to find him, and several more days to complete arrangements for his care after I went home. I then drove all the way back to Indiana in a rental car, as air travel was still not operational.

It also changed my own personal plans in several major ways. When I returned to Purdue, I found the completed forms for my planned sabbatical, awaiting only my signature ….to go be the first CTO at the NSA. General Mike Hayden (then DIRNSA) and I had discussed a project to examine how to modernize some of the computing internally, and to get a sense of what would be good to build into the university curriculum to train for a new era of computer threats around the world. As a result of 9/11, Gen. Hayden recommended that I cancel my plans, as the environment would not be the same (obviously), and would not likely be something I would enjoy or benefit from.

I basically lost my sabbatical. It was too late to cancel with the university, and I was unable to make alternate arrangements, so I resolved to stay at home and catch up on reading and writing. Within the next few months both of the most senior staff at CERIAS had left for better arrangements (for them) and I ended up working more than my regular position simply to keep the center going. It was not pleasant, and although I was able to hire outstanding replacements, it was not immediate.

It was the second of three of my sabbaticals that have all been occupied with external events such that I did not really get a sabbatical. And each time, Purdue has charged me for the time and I have ended up more drained than refreshed. Ah well, that is minor compared to the world events here.

Cyber

9/11 changed the attention that we were beginning to get on cyber security, too. Our meeting that morning of educators and researchers was enabled by interest generated by Richard Clarke and Mike Hayden (among others). Soon thereafter, everyone was focused on issues related to further (non-cyber) attacks, and momentum was lost on the efforts we had spent years to build. That is not to suggest that such a focus was incorrect, but one wonders what our cyber security would be like now without the 9/11 incident? (Dick Clarke kept some focus on our community, and I visited him several times in the following two years before he left government. He always understood the role of cyber security, but the policy environment was all focused elsewhere.)

The Scholarship for Service program started up around that time, and the public concern and a desire to “do something” led many people to enroll in the program. We had a large number of students in our program over the next few years (although it tapered off to only one remaining student this year). Most of our former students are still working in the government, some in senior positions. That clearly was one ray of sunshine in the gloom.

It is only now that some focus has really returned on Cyber from the Congress and the White House. Even so, it is primarily directed towards “cyber war” and “cyber terrorism” as boogeymen, rather than the more general problems of crime, fraud and abuse. We continue to be drained by cyber crime, with some estimates of the damage as high as $100 billion per year. That is a heavy burden to continue to bear.

Some Numbers

I was asked to give a talk at Tufts University yesterday, and to look at the 9/11 incident as part of my talk on security. I came up with some some numbers, and an interesting quote.

It is generally understood that the Al Qaeda goal of the 9/11 attack was to try to foment unrest among Muslims around the world, to rise up against the West and re-establish the Caliphate. They completely misunderstood the overall world reaction to the attack. Although there was celebration in a few places (such as by the Palestinians), there was near universal outrage, and great solidarity of purpose. The invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and get the leadership of Al Qaeda had widespread support.

Then, for reasons that still do not make sense to many of us, before we (as an international community) finished the task at hand, President Bush & company initiated the invasion of Iraq – despite no threat from Iraq, and no connection with Al Qaeda. Rather than editorialize on that, let me simply list some numbers:

• Number of casualties from the 9/11 attacks: 2974 (and 19 hijackers)
• Number of US casualties from all domestic terrorism from 1900 to 2000: about 250
• • People killed by Timothy McVey 4/19/95 in Oklahoma City: 168 (about 2/3 of total)
• Deaths of US military personnel since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq: 5130
  • With deaths of coalition forces and US military contractors included: 6508
  • Wounded: over 100,000 and perhaps as many as 300,000 US troops with brain injuries and PTSD
• Estimated number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan from military operations: 1,339,771
• Estimated direct cost of the military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan: $908 billion and growing.
• • Estimates of indirect, eventual costs to the US: $1-$2 trillion more.
• Refugees from Iraq as a result of hostilities: 4.7 million. Another 1 million from Afghanistan.

Yet, we have a paradoxical response to losses that happen regularly, over time. Consider:

• 443,600 people will die this year as a direct result of smoking.
• Approximately 20,000 people die a year because they do not wear their seatbelts.

And yet we have people fighting to be allowed to smoke and go without seat belts.

I wonder how each of the 2974 victims of the 9/11 attacks would react to hear that, as a response to each and every one of their deaths, the US and its allies spent $675 BILLION apiece to kill 450 people in the Middle East and cause another 1916 to be refugees from their homeland. Oh, and for each of those victims, 2.2 coalition military personnel died, and as many as another 1000 suffer permanent injuries.

And the architects of the 9/11 attack are still free and plotting more mayhem.

I have no grand, sweeping conclusion from all of this. Terrorism is clearly a bad thing. So is untimely death. I fear the greater tragedy, however, is losing sight of how we, as civilized society, treat the lessons of the 9/11 tragedy and its aftermath. Osama bin Laden was quoted as saying:

“All that we have to do is send two mujaheddin to the furthest point east with a flag on which is written the words al-Qaeda, and the Americans will panic and send a general and an army there, and engage in military operations which cost them blood and money and political capital, and then we’ll just do it again. … so brothers, we’re pursuing this strategy of bleeding the United States to exhaustion and bankruptcy.”

As a country, we tend to react violently when attacked overtly – we remember the Maine, we remember the Alamo, we remember Pearl Harbor, and we certainly remember 9/11. We grieve for those who lost their lives suddenly. We condemn the evil deeds that caused their untimely deaths. We seek some justice and retribution, usually in the form of war.

Let us pause to mourn the fallen, but focus on a better future for all, because we seem to be doing what the terrorists want. And that does not bode well for a peaceful future. I have lived through one 9/11 catastrophe. I do not wish to see another.

is on his way home a

is on his way home after a pleasant (but too short) trip to Boston.

awakened at 6am by t

awakened at 6am by the elephants upstairs at the hotel. Off to breakfast with my lovely hostess, and then on to Tufts for the day.

is heading to Boston

is heading to Boston to give a Distinguished Lecture at Tufts University on Thursday.

has resumed the rat

has resumed the rat race. Unfortunately, the rats about about to lap me. Again.

Nice Kitty II

Here are some further observations about Snow Leopard (read my first post if you have not yet done so).

• Any Appletalk printer you were previously using now needs to be reconfigured as an IP printer or directly connected in some way. It appears that Appletalk is no more.
• The “Services” menu now needs to be configured for the services you want. It has changed quite a bit so pay close attention the first time you try to run it.
• Any previous icon changes get un-done. I used CandyBar to change my icons before. Version 3.2 of CandyBar works under Snow Leopard, but now I have to figure out what changes I want to reinstall.
• All my rules in LittleSnitch appear to have been reset or lost. It is annoying to have to reenable them all again. THis also caused a bunch of things to not work correctly when I first tried them.
• My Marine Aquarium screensaver, version 2.6, doesn’t work any more. The vendor appears to have been caught by surprise and is researching how to fix it. The current revision is at 3, so I guess I need to buy an update eventually.
• Remote Desktop needs to be reinstalled.

I didn’t install Rosetta, so I am now discovering many ancient programs that were not compiled as universal binaries. Most of them I can live without, and others have updates I should get (and/or purchase).

Other than the runaway hdiutil process, the systems have been behaving well and performance seems quite good.

Oh, and one nice thing about the widgets on Dashboard is that they seem to load an order of magnitude faster than under 10.5. The response from calling up Dashboard to actually useful widget is now short enough that I might start using the feature!

Nice Kitty

Last week, I heard about the impending release of MacOS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard. So, being the early adopter, bleeding edge kinda guy I am, I pre-ordered a family pack from the Apple Store online. Apple moved up their release date, and lo, my copy was delivered via UPS to my doorstep Friday morning.

Installation

I have 5 Macs in the family: three Intel-based, and two-PowerPC. The PowerPC Macs aren’t capable of taking Snow Leopard, but the other three are. So, I went through my usual steps for an upgrade to my main MacBook Pro (late 2007 model):

• Ran DiskUtility to check the disk and fix permissions
• Upgraded all my applications with VersionTracker Pro
• Uninstalled PGP (see note)
• Ran DiskUtility again
• Ensured I had a fresh backup of the disk

And then I inserted the install disk. Unfortunately, this resulted in no great joy, as I got an error message about

Mac OS X cannot start up from this disk. Mac OS X cannot be installed on [my disk], because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer.

Huh?

This is my regular disk! I’ve been booting the system from that disk for nearly 2 years!

The same error occurred when I booted from the DVD and tried the install. I ran the DiskUtility repair several times, to no avail.

A quick check of posts on the Innertubes revealed that several other people had the same problem, and the Apple techs they consulted were not able to help much. I was not at all keen on blowing away the disk with a reformat and install, which I assumed would have fixed things.

Then I saw a note on one of the Apple forums. It suggested that there was something wrong in the disk label or volume header that was causing the problem. So, I tried the following:

1. Booted from the install DVD
2. Selected and ran DiskUtility from the Utilities menu
3. Within the utility window, highlighted the physical disk that my startup partition was on
4. Selected the “Partition” tab
5. Clicked on the little tab at the bottom of the partition window and shrunk the partition
6. Then I moved it back to the same size with a new mouse click
7. Clicked the “apply” button
8. Quit DiskUtility

This works because of the allocation scheme used in the OS. If there is free space at the end of your partition, you can shrink or split it without difficulty – you don’t lose data. However, had my disk not already been formatted with a GUID volume header, this wouldn’t have been enough, but GUID is the default format for any Intel-based Mac boot disk.

The same partition “jiggle” procedure was required for my iMac install (early 2008) but not my new MacBook Pro install.

I then reran the installer and everything worked as it was supposed to work.

Tip: When you are doing your own install, be sure to click on the customization button at the lower left corner of the screen before starting the install on its merry way. You will find that there are things selected that you may want to omit, such as all the language versions and some of the printer drivers. This can save install time and a lot of space on your disk.

Apres-Intall

The installation took about 45 minutes. When it was done, I had regained about 9Gb of space on my disk! That alone was a good reason to upgrade.

Lots of little things don’t work now, and I need to wait for updates (if they will be released). Almost none of the programs I use on a regular basis are a problem – it is only some of the gadgets and little shortcuts that seem to need tweaking, along with some items that have start-up issues that are solved by reinstalling. Overall, the major software vendors have had releases out that were Snow Leopard-ready.

There are only a few programs I use regularly that don’t seem to work right and no updates yet available:

• PGP
• Mail Template Editor
• 1Password (there is a beta that seems to work)

PGP explicitly does not work, and the folks at PGP send out email recommending uninstalling it before the upgrade, which I did. Judging from their past behavior, they’ll charge a hefty charge for the new version. However, I have not had good luck with GPG in the past, so I’m willing to pay the cost and either have the university cover it (for my work machines) or write it off as a business expense (home machine).

I have had one problem with VersionTrackerPro, which hangs when installing anything from the Omni Group (e.g., OmniWeb, OmniFocus). It may be because when mounting the disk image of the installers, those programs put up an interactive license agreement that somehow VersionTracker no longer notices. If I force-quit the VersionTracker program, it leaves a hdiutil process cranking away in the background using up 90%+ of one of the cpu cores. That requires termination with extreme prejudice (using a Unix kill -9 from a terminal window). My temporary workaround is simply to download the updates using VersionTracker and install them manually.

Oddly, a few old things showed up in my Dock and startup items — things I thought I had deleted months or years ago. I am not sure where they were or why they reappeared, but they were easy enough to delete.

There are a few noticeable changes in the interface to a few things, such as the Dock, that I am still getting used to. So far, I would judge that all the changes are good because they seem to add features that I wish had been there all along.

From a perception standpoint, 10.6 seems a bit zippier. It is definitely faster to startup and shut down, seeming to be at least twice as fast (no, I don’t have experimental times). Mail and Safari are also faster. Time Machine still seems to slow everything down when doing a backup, but it is tolerable.

By default, 10.6 boots into the 32-bit kernel. I tried booting all three machines into the 64-bit kernel by holding down the 6 and 4 keys while booting. It seems to work on the new MacBook Pro, but not on the older 2 machines. How to tell? Run the System Profiler from the “About this Mac” menu item. Click on the “Software” label and you get something like the following:

If the line with 64-bit Kernel and Extensions says “Yes” then it is running in 64-bit mode. I guess I’ll need to update these machines before too long. I usually do that on a 24-30 month cycle, so perhaps Santa will have a new MacBook Pro for me…..unless Apple comes out with their rumored tablet by the end of the year. Even so, I think a MacBook Pro with a large SSD instead of regular disk might be better for me.

Overall, with the exception of the disk volume header issue, the installation went smoothly and everything seems to be running fine. It took me about 4 hours (with other distractions and work) to get all three machines converted and running fine.

I will post followups if anything else interesting shows up.