Articles about Big Sur

Apple makes much of the security of its products, but vulnerabilities are certainly not unknown. SSD Secure Disclosure has revealed details of a zero-day flaw affecting Finder in macOS. It can be exploited to run arbitrary commands without displaying any messages, prompts or warnings.

The vulnerability was discovered by independent security researcher Park Minchan, and it is present in macOS Big Sur and earlier. The flaw relates to the way macOS processes .inetloc (internet location) files and Apple has made a poor, easily circumvented attempt to fix it in the most recent version of its Mac operating system.

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Apple has issued a couple of important security updates for its desktop and mobile operating systems. The company has released iOS 14.4.1 and macOS 11.2.3, both of which are described as being "recommended for all users".

The reason for this is simple -- these are important updates that patch a memory corruption bug that could be exploited by malicious websites. This is in addition to the vulnerabilities that have already been patched in another iOS update last month.

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We recently wrote about a serious vulnerability in the sudo tool which could be used to gain root access to Linux systems. Now a security researcher has found that the security flaw also affects macOS Big Sur -- including on new M1 Macs.

The Baron Samedit vulnerability -- or CVE-2021-3156 -- is a heap-based buffer overflow bug that was discovered by cybersecurity firm Qualys. While it was initially thought to only affect Linux systems, researcher Matthew Hickey (who also goes by the name Hacker Fantastic) found that macOS is also vulnerable with only very minor changes needed to the original exploit.

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The launch of Apple's new range of Macs with its own M1 chips was met with excitement -- and benchmarks showed great performance even from base models. There was just one problem for some people: an inability to run Windows.

For anyone used to running Windows alongside macOS -- and, for that matter, Linus Torvalds and his desire to run Linux on an M1 MacBook Air -- there's good news. A team of developers have been able to get both Windows 10 and Linux running on Apple silicon.

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With any big update to an operating system, there are usually warnings to hold off for a bit and make sure there are no bugs that you might be affected by. When Big Sur was released last week, there were similar warnings about not immediately installing the biggest update to macOS in years.

And it seems that those warnings were justified. People running some older MacBook Pros are finding that installing Big Sur bricks their laptops. It seems that the late-2013 and mid-2014 13-inch MacBook Pros are most problematic.

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For some people, transparent elements are a key component of any UI. Apple clearly thinks so, having introduced a new transparent menu bar in Big Sur.

But transparency is not to everyone's taste, and if you're not a fan of the new design language, you will be pleased to hear that there is a way to disable transparent menus in Big Sur.

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