Practicing Good Digital Hygiene on Apple macOS

Keep macOS and software updated to block malware. Notice slowdowns or pop-ups? Act fast: disconnect, run antivirus, and report. Stay protected and secure.

Digital Privacy and Relationships

From sneaking a peek at a partner’s texts to logging into their Facebook account while they’re sleeping, people will go to surprising lengths to see what their significant others are doing online.

Checklist 64: Safely Shopping for Technology This Holiday Season

The holiday shopping season has arrived again — and with this episode, we’re turning our attention to some security issues specific to this time of year. With Christmas coming up, you might be looking at all kinds of electronic gadgets for your friends and family. From tech-based toys to Internet of Things products, retailers have more web-connected devices available for us every year.

While it’s certainly a fun time of year, opening some of these gifts during the holidays could also mean opening up your loved ones to a …

What To Do When You Encounter App Problems

You’re encountering problems with a program on your Mac, and you think it’s a bug, glitch, or potential security issue. What should you do next?

Five Easy Steps for a Safer Mac

Those of you with a small or home business probably use your laptop or personal computer to send invoices, receive transactions, and deal with incoming or outgoing mail related to running your company. If that’s the case, there’s probably plenty sensitive information passing through your computer, and you need to ensure that it’s well protected.

For the Mac users out there, you might have heard that Macs are naturally less susceptible to viruses, hacks and other security breaches than PCs. And at some point in the past, that may have been …

Apple Releases Series of Patches for All Operating Systems

If you haven’t updated your Apple devices in the past month, now would be a good time. On May 16th, Apple unveiled security patches for not just one of its operating systems, but for all of them. Last Monday, Apple unveiled security patches for not just one of its operating systems, but for all of them. The patches represented the first across-the-board updates that Apple has released for its operating systems since March 21st.

These patches apply to OS X El Capitan and iOS, as well as to the …

Outdated Git Version in OS X Puts Developers at Risk

Update: May 4, 2016 –  Apple has released an updated version of Xcode to patch this vulnerability. Users can download Xcode 7.3.1 directly from Apple’s developer site at: https://developer.apple.com/xcode/download/

An outdated Git client in Apple’s Command Line Tools Package is putting OS X developers at risk by opening them up to remote code execution. According to a report from MacWorld, developers will typically use Xcode when developing apps for OS X or iOS, which means they are working on Macs that use Apple’s Command Line Tools package. The issue is that the …

The DataVault Password Manager: A Review and Basic How-To Guide

Available for $9.99 from the Mac App Store, the DataVault Password Manager from Ascendo is a robust password management application that is worth the modest price of admission. The program allows you to store passwords, login details, credit card information, membership information, insurance details, vehicle information, and more—all in one secure spot on your computer.

The program uses 256-bit AES encryption to protect your passwords and other sensitive information and has a range of other security features that will help you feel safe, as well. You can even …

The First Things You Should Do after Getting a New Mac

So you’ve just purchased a new Mac computer, be it a laptop or a desktop, and you can’t wait to dive in and start moving all of your files and data over to the new machine. Before you do any of that, though, there are a few steps you should take to ensure the overall safety and security of your new computer.

One of the great things about Mac is that Apple really designed them to be used right out of the box, providing users with a range …

Steps for Cleaning Your Mac before Selling or Donating It

For the 2021 version of this guide, covering both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, click here.

So you’ve decided to sell your old Mac, give it away to a friend or relative, or donate it to a school or nonprofit. Regardless of what you are planning on doing with a computer you don’t want to use anymore, there is one thing you definitely don’t want to do: sell it or donate it without first cleaning out the hard drive.

If you’re like most people, your Mac is a …

Safely Downloading from the Internet

If you are using a Mac (or any computer, for that matter), it’s a concrete fact that you are eventually going to download something from the Internet. Whether it’s a new app from the App Store, a piece of free software from a third-party source, a movie or TV show, a song or album, an eBook, or even just an email attachment, the act of downloading and uploading files is something that most of us do every single day.

But how can you be safe about downloading from …

Newly Discovered OS X Security Flaw Could Give Hackers an Easy Way to Take...

If you by chance haven’t updated to Mac OS X 10.10 just yet (e.g., the Yosemite operating system update that first became available in October 2014), then you may want to hold off. According to a recent blog post by cyber security researcher Stefan Esser, Apple added a few features to the code of OS X 10.10 that have introduced some pretty serious vulnerabilities into the system. The issues, Esser noted, are present in both the current Yosemite release (OS X 10.10.4), as well as in the beta version …

Monitoring Your Children Online

Modern parents face at least one challenge that their parents probably never had to deal with: the Internet. Kids these days spend a lot of their time online—whether researching for school assignments, playing games, or chatting with friends on social media—and all of this time spent in the digital world makes it more difficult for parents to know what their kids are doing at all times.

It used to be that parents could always be aware of where their kids were, what kind of activities they were participating …

How to Select a Strong Password (and Password Manager App)

Let’s just call a spade a spade: passwords are among the most irritating things about living in the digital age. Trying to remember even one or two passwords—let alone a different password for every device, site, and service that you use, as is usually recommended—can be a real test for the more forgetful among us. But passwords are also essential. Often, they are the one safeguard protecting your computer, your social media accounts, your email inbox, or your online banking page—to name a few—from everyone else on the web.

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