Staying safe online with your Apple devices is an ongoing effort, and it’s important to keep yourself vigilant and informed about potential threats and risks. While the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, are generally much more secure than their competitor counterparts, that doesn’t mean you should be completely oblivious to risks to your personal information, logins, … Read More
Some Mac users have discovered an alarming message when using macOS Sonoma that says “Unknown is capturing your screen”, appearing in the users menu bar. The “Unknown is capturing your screen” message is not actionable, and typically it appears for a few seconds and then vanishes, making it more concerning. What’s going on that is … Read More
CAPTCHA’s are those annoying “prove you are a human” tests that are common on the web, making you do things like select all the motorcycles, crosswalks, or cars in a series of images, or type out a series of fuzzy characters to match, before you can proceed to login or access a particular website. The … Read More
For users who are concerned about an unauthorized person physically tampering with a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or MacBook, nail polish (yes, that kind of nail polish) can offer a bit of security, or at least demonstrate potential evidence that hardware has been fiddled with. Now of course this does not apply to the vast … Read More
Firewalls serve as a network security mechanism to monitor and control incoming and outgoing traffic to your computer and the network, or internet. MacOS includes a software firewall that can be enabled manually for users who would like to use the feature, or who require it for whatever purpose. The ability to use the firewall, … Read More
The latest versions of MacOS default to automatically installing what Apple calls ‘Rapid Security Response Updates’, which can patch security flaws and issues on the Mac without the standard process of installing software updates on the Mac. If you do not want these security response updates to install automatically on the Mac for whatever reason, … Read More
The “Hidden” photos album on iPhone and iPad offers a place to put photos on your device that you don’t want hanging around in your general Photos camera roll. But since the Hidden album is still visible to anyone who knows where to find it, even if you hide the Hidden album, if you want … Read More
Venmo is a very popular mobile payments app that is used for everything from paying for goods, services, rent, bills, splitting checks, and so much more. By default, Venmo chooses to publicly display all of your Venmo transaction payment history, including both sent and received payments. If you would like to hide your Venmo transaction … Read More
Wondering how you can allow apps to be downloaded and opened from anywhere on MacOS Ventura? You may have noticed the ability to select “Allow applications downloaded from anywhere” has been removed by default in macOS Ventura and other modern versions of MacOS. This does not mean it’s impossible to download and open apps from … Read More
Touch ID for Mac is super useful, and now that basically all modern Mac laptops have Touch ID sensors on their keyboards, and the new Magic Keyboards for Mac have Touch ID, you’re almost certain to encounter the biometric authenticator when using a Mac. We’ll review some handy and interesting Touch ID tricks for the … Read More
Have you ever wanted to unlock your iPhone with just your voice? In that case, you may be excited to learn that it’s possible to do that, thanks to a little known Accessibility feature.
If you’re ever in a situation where you are concerned about unauthorized biometric access to your iPhone, for example, someone holding your iPhone up to your face to unlock it with Face ID, or someone forcing you to put your finger on the Touch ID sensor to unlock the iPhone, you can prevent that unauthorized … Read More
By default, communications through Facebook Messenger are not end-to-end encrypted, which means that theoretically another party could retrieve sensitive information from the chat if they were nefariously minded. It also means that the conversations are basically wide open for reading by Facebook and whoever has access to Facebook data. If you’re a privacy buff (then … Read More
Nearly every hotel nowadays offers free wi-fi, but a surprising number of them use unsecured wireless networks. Most commonly, the unsecured networks use a captive portal to access the wi-fi network, where a splash screen pops-up in a web browser window before you are granted further access to the network. Often there’s some marginal login … Read More
Many CenturyLink users have discovered that attempting to visit certain web pages and websites leads to a giant McAfee cyber security “warning” message that says something to the effect of “Warning! (website URL) appears to be risky. This might be because it is new or may not have the latest security.” or “Warning! This site … Read More
Did you know you can set your Telegram account to self destruct, automatically deleting itself after a set amount of time if you don’t login to it? If you’re a privacy and security buff and you’re looking to gain a unique additional layer of privacy with Telegram, you can set your Telegram account to delete … Read More
You can add secure notes to your iCloud Keychain account and login entries if you’d like to. The notes can serve any purpose, but they can be particularly handy if you want to reference something specific to that login, whether a log of prior passwords, or the purpose of the account, or whatever else. For … Read More
Need to remove a password from an iWork document? Do you find it inconvenient to open password-protected Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents? Do you no longer need password protection on a particular iWork file? You’re certainly not alone in that regard, and fortunately it’s quite simple to remove a password from any Pages, Numbers, or … Read More
