Consultant’s Canary
for 10.5-10.6
The first thing you usually ask a person who’s complaining about their computer’s performance is “have you installed anything new recently?” The answer you receive is almost always a resounding “no,” even if their dock and menu bar are both overrun with colorful, continuously animating icons you know didn’t come in the box.
Originally written to oust shoddily constructed HP AIO printer drivers, Consultant’s Canary is a handy Python script which will ferret out much of the aftermarket malware (including app-specific QuickLook and Spotlight plugins!) which might plague a user’s otherwise healthy system, saving you the trouble of having to ask the question in the first place.
It doesn’t actually do anything to the filesystem since the heterogenous pedigree of OS X’s hardware drivers make false positives rather common, but just getting a list of every potentially suspicious looking piece of code that’s hooking itself into a user’s machine can still save you hours of boring re-installation work, and make you look smarter than you really are in the process. Sadly, it cannot make you look thinner or less bald, but one out of three ain’t bad.
Comes bundled up in a nice double-clickable app wrapper so you don’t even have to know what a Python script is to run it. If you’re working on a multi-user system, just fish around for the dispatcher.py file in the bundle’s resources and run it as root.
