Articles about Mac

If you've been thinking of investing in a new computer, Microsoft has an incentive that might just help to convince you that the time is right. You've probably got an old computer laying around that you need to get rid of, and Microsoft will happily take it off your hands and give you cash into the bargain.

The Trade Up program offers a minimum of $200 for a laptop trade-in, up to $300 for a MacBook. The caveat? The Windows 10 computer you buy must cost at least $599. The deal is running in the US and UK -- but people in the UK have a different, and somewhat less impressive, deal available to them.

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While I was a bit old for the Harry Potter books when they first came out (so I thought at the time), I did enjoy the films. As someone who is extraordinarily average, I can understand the allure of a character like Harry, who goes from nothing to greatness.

Reading the series has been on my to-do list for quite some time now, as many people tell me it is not a children's-only affair. Today, Apple announces that it is enhancing the Harry Potter books on iBooks only. If you own a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, you can experience the stories all over again, or for the first time, in the best way possible.

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As an IT professional by day, it's a question that has confounded me for some time. I've tossed it around in my technical circles, trying to get a feel for what true reasons exist for Apple's double standard when it comes to not allowing OS X onto other platforms -- but gladly allowing Windows to run natively via Boot Camp.

How come Apple doesn't allow PC users to install and run OS X on the hardware of their choice?

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While the world was oohing and ahhing (or yawning) at the latest Google Nexus devices, an arguably far more important announcement hit the Internet. The long-awaited, and much-anticipated, OS X 10.11 El Capitan got an official release date. Guess what? You do not have to wait long, as that date is tomorrow. Woo-hoo!

How much do you expect to pay for this upgrade? Well, if you said anything larger than zero, you would be very wrong. While Microsoft recently gave Windows 10 as a free upgrade to some users, Apple has been doing this for years. In other words if you own a compatible Mac (all since 2009 and some from 2007 and 2008), you can be enjoying the latest and greatest operating system tomorrow at no charge.

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Having to enter a password to unlock your Mac is recommended practice, as it helps keep your private data safe. But it is also annoying, especially if you are the security conscious type, who uses a longer, more complex password. So what can you do to make things easy, without exposing your Mac?

Well, if you have an iPhone or iPad that is equipped with Touch ID, or even an Apple Watch, you should take a look at MacLock. It lets you use your fingerprint to unlock your Mac. Here's how it works.

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Taking notes and making lists is something almost everyone does, and lists can become almost compulsive. For the task you need a good tool. Preferably one that works everywhere -- yes, paper covers that, but this is the technology era.

Evernote is one of the most popular alternatives to paper, as it runs on just about any platform, be it a computer or mobile device. While it all works well together -- create a shopping list on your PC, have it appear on your phone while you're in the store -- the company wanted to clean things up and modernize a bit. It has been working on an update and it's now ready for beta testing by Windows and Mac users.

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With OS X 10.11 El Capitan set to launch at the end of the month, Apple has already started working on the first update for its latest Mac operating system. The early OS X 10.11.1 build was released last week for developers, and is now also available to those of us who are enrolled in the public beta program.

Given that it is a relatively minor update, OS X 10.11.1 El Capitan is not expected to introduce any major changes. Nonetheless, let's take a look at what's new.

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More and more devices now either connect through, or are powered by, USB connections which means you can easily find yourself running out of ports. This is especially true of the latest slimline ultrabook type systems.

Adding a USB hub is an easy way of expanding your number of ports and these latest offerings from Inateck give you a choice of solutions as well as a handy way of accessing wired networks.

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Macs have around six percent of the business endpoint market and Mac specific malware is on the increase. In the rapidly evolving world of malware and security, Mac users can no longer afford to be complacent when it comes to protecting their systems.

To tackle these threats Kaspersky Lab is updating its Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business suite with Endpoint Security 10 for Mac. This offers a combination of deep protection, efficiency and manageability, designed to serve the needs of protecting diverse IT environments.

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It's no secret that Chrome for Mac (OS X) is a mess. It eats a ridiculously high amount of memory, energy and shortens the battery life. Google announced earlier this year that it was working on a fix. And now it is delivering on that promise. The latest Chrome build -- available via Canary channel -- is significantly less resource hogging, and surprisingly faster at the same time.

The company has been hard at work improving the memory consumption in its Web browser while also making the tabs snappier. You can read about the development process and feedback at Chromium's developer website. The build dubbed 45.0.2454.46 is also significantly lighter on the battery and is no longer making the laptop crazy hot. In a recent build, the company was testing interesting internal processes like tab discarding in the background. The idea behind it is simple: make the tabs you haven't used in awhile idle automatically. This would, under the typical condition, free up a significant amount of memory.

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Two zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple’s OS X, that have been discovered  by an Italian teenager, could potentially be used to gain remote access to a computer.

Luca Todesco, 18, found that there are two bugs in the OS that can be used to corrupt the memory in the OS X’s kernel. Once the memory is corrupt, the attacker can then circumvent the kernel address space layout randomization (kASLR), which is a defensive technique of the OS to protect itself from giving the attacker the root shell. But once the attacker circumvents through the kASLR, they can gain a root shell.

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We all know that virus infections are a pain, not only do they disrupt your work they can also be hard to remove as they often prevent you from downloading or running cleanup tools or even from accessing Windows.

If you don’t have access to a friendly geek with the right tools you can be faced with hours of work or even having to wipe out and reload your machine.

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A lot of security systems are based on random numbers, prime numbers, or a combination of the two. But generating random numbers is not as random as you might expect -- or hope -- and it relies on sources of broadly random data that can be used as a starting point. The problem is that these sources of data are not large enough.

The entropy of data generated by Linux servers -- which are the backbone of much of the internet -- is, says security expert Bruce Potter, too low. Speaking at Black Hat USA 2015 -- an event which has already seen the unveiling of the Thunderstrike 2 firmware malware and the Stagefright-beating Certifi-Gate Android vulnerability -- Potter warns that the low entropy problem means that seemingly random numbers could in fact be easier to guess or crack than first thought.

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One of the main benefits to owning a MacBook is the superb battery life. Apple's laptops can work for a great deal of time on battery power alone, thanks in no small part to the numerous improvements made to OS X in recent years. Take my 2013 13-inch MacBook Air for example: it gets well over six hours of battery life on Yosemite, despite being nearly two years old at this stage. I rarely have to worry about plugging it in.

In fact, it could last even longer. The trick is not to use Chrome, which, despite Google's recent efforts to lower its power consumption, continues to be the most power-hungry major browser on OS X, more so than Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox.

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Apple has promised it will fix a major vulnerability which recently cropped up in its OS X Yosemite operating system.

The worrying zero-day vulnerability allows malware authors to modify a hidden configuration file to get root permissions on the victim machine, security firm Malwarebytes explained in a blog post, allowing for the installation of adware and other assorted malware nastiness.

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