First Execution of a New Program

I had read in a Mac magazine somewhere that OS X was capable of detecting the FIRST time you had EVER run a new proogram, and warn you of this fact. This is to get around Trojans, like the Loomp-A or whatever it was called, where there was a program buried in what you thought was a zip file of images. Mac OS X would intercept this (unintentional) first run of a new program and make sure you were OK with it being run.

This would be a killer feature, but it doesn't seem to work on my Mac, which is only a month old and fully up to date (Tiger 10.4.6 with all the latest Apple updates). I have downloaded lots of new apps off the web, most recently ImageWell, and they run cleanly the first time I fire them up (which is the first time EVER on this Mac) without a safety query from Mac OS X.

Is there someplace to enable this feature? It sounds like a really useful defence. Thanks.

OS X does this by default, not when the user launches an application, but when it is launched by a file or external process.

Say you've downloaded new app to handle a certain file format. If that app sets itself to open certain file types, you'll be warned when you first launch the app by opening an associated file.

Even happened to me on 10.3.9.

So, if a .zip or any other apparently innocent file ACTUALLY has an executable inside, MAC OS X will be fooled into running it without warning the user? Poop!

Yep, that's why Leap actually worked.

...and why I added a .profile that asks "Are you sure you want to open Terminal?" before executing scripts...

Neat idea with the .profile, but as a long time Linux user, I use Terminal way too much for that. Terminal is one of the things that makes Mac OS X so amazing. Its like the power of Linux (well unix actually) and the Mac OS X GUI all rolled together into one product. Amazing! All my favorite open source programs plus all this Mac OS X goodness. Truly excellent.