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June 20, 2019

Apple Issues Voluntary Recall for Certain 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro Units

Apple Issues Voluntary Recall for Certain 2015 15-inch MacBook Pros

Heads up! If you’re using an older 15-inch MacBook Pro—the version with lots of ports that predates the current Thunderbolt 3 models—Apple has started a recall program to replace batteries that could explode and catch on fire. (We’re not kidding.) The affected MacBook Pro models were sold between primarily between September 2015 and February 2017, but to find out if your 15-inch MacBook Pro is affected, enter its serial number into Apple’s recall page. If it is included in the recall, shut it down and stop using it immediately! Contact Apple for a free battery replacement, and if you need any assistance, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

(Image courtesy of Apple)

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June 20, 2019
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Apple Has Disabled Group FaceTime to Prevent Pre-call Eavesdropping

A serious bug has been discovered in Apple’s Group FaceTime multi-person video chat technology. It allows someone to call you via FaceTime and then, with just a few simple steps, listen in on audio from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac while the call is ringing, before you have accepted or rejected it. To prevent the problem from being exploited, Apple says it has disabled Group FaceTime and promises a fix “later this week.”

In the meantime, if you’re still concerned (there were some reports of people being able to invoke the bug even after Apple disabled Group FaceTime), we recommend turning off FaceTime entirely in Settings > FaceTime in iOS and by launching the FaceTime app in macOS and then choosing FaceTime > Turn FaceTime Off. (Or just be quiet when a FaceTime call comes in.) Apple may be able to fix the problem without requiring users to update software; if iOS and macOS updates do prove to be necessary, we recommend that you install them sooner rather than later.

January 29, 2019
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Storage-Management-photo
August 3, 2018

Find Wasted Space with Storage Management

Find Wasted Space with Storage Management

Between photos, videos, music, and downloads, it’s easy to fill up your Mac’s drive, particularly if it has fast but small flash storage. A MacBook Air might have only 128 GB of drive space, and that goes quickly. Numerous utilities exist to help you find and delete unnecessary files, like GrandPerspective, OmniDiskSweeper, and WhatSize, but as of macOS 10.12 Sierra, Apple provides a built-in tool to clean house: the Storage Management window.

Storage Management is hidden inside the System Information app and is most easily accessed by choosing  > About This Mac, clicking the Storage button, and then clicking Manage…but wait! Before you click Manage, look at the About This Mac window’s Storage view.
storage-management-about-this-mac


Hover over each colored bar to see how much space is taken up by a particular type of data. The white space at the end of the bar is what’s still available. You can’t do much here, but the view gives you a quick overview of your drive usage.
When you click Manage, System Information launches, and the Storage Management window appears. (You can also open System Information manually and choose Window > Storage Management.) In the sidebar at the left, ignore Recommendations and look at the rest of the categories. They will vary a bit between Macs, depending on what apps you use, but they correspond to the colored bars you saw in the About This Mac window’s Storage view.

For some, mostly app-specific categories, like Mail and Photos, Storage Management merely tells you how much space the app’s data occupies and lets you either enable space optimization (downloading only recent attachments for Mail, and keeping only optimized photos on the Mac) or if that has been done already, open the app. To save more space, you must delete unnecessary data from within the app itself.

More interesting are the Applications, Documents, and iOS Files categories, all of which may contain gigabytes of unnecessary data. iOS Files, for instance, shows any device backups and software updates that are stored on your Mac’s drive. It’s worth keeping the latest backup of devices you still use, but many people have older backups and unnecessary updates kicking around.

The Applications category shown above lists your apps and is sorted by size by default. But try clicking the column header for Kind and scrolling down. You can probably delete most apps tagged as Duplicates or Older Versions. Similarly, click the Last Accessed column header to see which apps you haven’t launched in years. Many of them can probably go too. Plus, you can redownload anything tagged as coming from the App Store, so you can toss those apps if you want.

In Documents, you’ll see three buttons: Large Files, Downloads, and File Browser. Large Files focuses on files over 50 MB in size, Downloads shows you the contents of your Downloads folder (much of which you likely don’t need), and File Browser gives you a column view that’s sorted by file size and shows sizes next to each item. It’s great for trawling through your drive to find see what’s consuming all that space.
storage-management-documents

In any of these views other than File Browser, hover over any item and you see an X button for deleting the file and a magnifying glass button that reveals the file in the Finder. To delete multiple files at once, just Command-click or Shift-click to select them and then press the Delete key to remove them all at once. Storage Management gives you the combined size of all the selected files and warns you before deleting the files, so you can use this technique to preview how much space a multi-file deletion will save. In File Browser, select one or more files and either drag them to the Trash icon in the Dock, or press Command-Delete.

If your Mac’s drive is filling up—if it has less than 10 percent free space—consider using the Storage Management window’s tools to search out and delete files that are just wasting space.

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August 3, 2018
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Pwned-photo-1080x675
July 12, 2018

Have Your Online Passwords Been Stolen? Here’s How to Find Out.

Data breaches have become commonplace, with online thieves constantly breaking into corporate and government servers and making off with millions—or even hundreds of millions!—of email addresses, often along with other personal information like names, physical address, and passwords.

It would be nice to think that all companies properly encrypt their password databases, but the sad reality is that many have poor data security practices. As a result, passwords gathered in a breach are often easily cracked, enabling the bad guys to log in to your accounts. That may not seem like a big deal—who cares if someone reads the local newspaper under your name? But since many people reuse passwords across multiple sites, once one password associated with an email address is known, attackers use automated software to test that combination against many other sites.

This is why we keep beating the drum for password managers like 1Password and LastPass. They make it easy to create and enter a different random password for every Web site, which protects you in two ways.

  • Because password managers can create passwords of any length, you don’t have to rely on short passwords that you can remember and type easily. The longer the password, the harder it is to crack. A password of 16–20 characters is generally considered safe; never use anything shorter than 13 characters.
  • Even if one of your passwords was compromised, having a different password for every site ensures that the attackers can’t break into any of your other accounts.

But password security hasn’t always been a big deal on the Internet, and many people reused passwords regularly in the past. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if any of your information was included in a data breach, so you’d know which passwords to change?

A free service called Have I Been Pwned does just this (“pwned” is hacker-speak for “owned” or “dominated by”—it rhymes with “owned”). Run by Troy Hunt, Have I Been Pwned gathers the email addresses associated with data breaches and lets you search to see if your address was stolen in any of the archived data breaches. Even better, you can subscribe to have the service notify you if your address shows up in any future breaches.

Needless to say, you’ll want to change your password on any site that has suffered a data breach, and if you reused that password on any other sites, give them new, unique passwords as well. That may seem like a daunting task, and we won’t pretend that it isn’t a fair amount of work, but both 1Password and LastPass offer features to help.

In 1Password, look in the sidebar for Watchtower, which provides several lists, including accounts where the password may have been compromised in a known breach, passwords that are known to have been compromised, passwords that you reused across sites, and weak passwords.

LastPass provide essentially the same information through its Security Challenge and rates your overall security in comparison with other LastPass users. It suggests a series of steps for improving your passwords; the only problem is that you need to restart the Security Challenge if you don’t have time to fix all the passwords at once.

Regardless of which password manager you use, take some time to check for and update compromised, vulnerable, and weak passwords. Start with more important sites, and, as time permits, move on to accounts that don’t contain confidential information.

 

July 12, 2018
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Did You Know Your EarPods Work as a Remote Shutter Button for Photos?

Have you ever composed the perfect photo in the iPhone’s Camera app and then been unable to tap the shutter button without jiggling the iPhone and blurring the image? That can be especially difficult with macro shots that require physical contortions to position the iPhone properly. Sometimes, pressing one of the physical volume buttons on the iPhone to trigger the shutter is the solution. But, even better, connect your iPhone’s wired EarPods and then press one of their volume buttons to take a photo. Bonus tip—the EarPods’ buttons also work to start and stop video recording!

June 28, 2018
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Fix a Frozen Finder with This Quick Tip

Finder freezes. They shouldn’t happen at all, and they don’t happen often, but it’s not unheard of for your Mac’s Finder to freeze, freak out, or otherwise stop responding properly. To bring it back to life, hold down the Option key, click and hold the Finder icon in the Dock, and choose Relaunch. (If the “click and hold” action feels odd, you can instead hold down Control and Option, and then just click.) In theory, you should be able to keep working normally after the Finder relaunches, but we recommend restarting your Mac afterward just to be safe.

May 30, 2018
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Here’s How to Hide All Windows on Your Mac So You Can Work on the Desktop

If your Mac is anything like ours, you end up with lots of apps open, each with one or more windows that obscure the Desktop. For those people who like to save in-progress documents to the Desktop and keep current project folders there, all those windows get in the way. macOS has a solution. Open System Preferences > Mission Control, and in the Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts section, from the Show Desktop pop-up menu, choose a keyboard shortcut. Try the right-hand modifier keys—we’re fond of Right Option—because they’re easy to press and aren’t likely to be used for other purposes. Then, whenever you want to see and work with the icons on your Desktop, hit that key, and do what you want. If you like, you can press that key again to bring the windows back.

May 11, 2018
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iCloud Photo Library Users: Do NOT Turn Off iCloud
March 1, 2018

iCloud Photo Library Users: Do NOT Turn Off iCloud

File this warning under “unless it’s absolutely necessary.” If you use iCloud Photo Library on your Mac, don’t sign out from iCloud. Also, don’t deselect the iCloud Photo Library checkbox in either the Photos options of the iCloud pane of System Preferences or in the iCloud preferences in Photos itself. Why not? Because, when you re-enable iCloud or iCloud Photo Library, Photos will re-upload all your photos, which could take days. (It’s not really re-uploading all of them, but even just resyncing will take a long time.) Worse, if you don’t have enough space in iCloud for your entire Photos library again, you’ll have to upgrade to a larger plan temporarily, resync, and then downgrade to your previous plan. Apple will refund you the cost of the upgrade, but you’ll have to work with support to get reimbursed. Read more at TidBITS.

March 1, 2018
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ThinkstockPhotos-673637256
February 12, 2018

Bye, Bye Server App! How to Run A Secure File Storage Server Without macOS Server VPN.

It’s been coming since 2010—That’s when Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to kill XServe, its enterprise-level server hardware solution.

MacOS Server

Ever since that time, Apple has been slowly backing away from the server market.

This slow death of Apple server ambitions has now come full circle for individuals and small businesses with the release of an Apple support memo that states, “A number of services will be deprecated, and will be hidden on new installations of an update to macOS Server coming in spring 2018.”

What does this mean?

Apple is getting rid of many of the functions that individuals, small businesses, educational institutions, and software developers currently rely on to get things done.

But they aren’t just hitting the “delete” button.

If you already have these functions set up, you’ll still be able to use them with the spring 2018 release. Apple’s just going to make it difficult for you by hiding the “deprecated services.”

Basically, Apple wants us to forget that this functionality was once available, and wean the public off the macOS Server. Eventually, as fewer and fewer users are tied to the functions of the macOS Server, they will be discontinued entirely.

What is the rationale for getting rid of macOS Server functionality?

In its support memo, Apple tells us that they are going to “focus more on the management of computers, devices, and storage on your network.”

Apple ran the numbers and realizes that the money lies in selling and serving the iPhone, iPad, and Apple computers – not in server functionality.

The functionalities that are going by the wayside with the new macOS update are as follows:

  • Calendar
  • Contacts
  • DHCP – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
  • DNS
  • Instant Messaging
  • NetInstall
  • VPN
  • Website Hosting
  • Wiki

Apple provided a list of “potential replacements” in their support memo.

But the BIG question is: How can we get secure file access without the macOS Server VPN?

These macOS Server changes impact system admins who will lose some or all of the macOS Server tools they depend on, and the businesses they serve could be negatively affected.

At one time, Apple claimed that the macOS Server was, “so easy to use, you don’t need your own IT department.”

Now you’re going to need an outsourced IT professional, like those at {company}, to help you figure out your next steps and how to allow secure file access.

To help us out, Apple has provided three options for VPN alternatives to the macOS Server VPN function:

OpenVPN

This network tunneling VPN software option is compatible with iOS, Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux. Regarding security, it allows for granular remote access and connects to either your cloud assets or your company’s internal network. One of the prominent features of this VPN option is the onboard, fine-grained access control.

SoftEther VPN

This open source VPN option works across platforms (FreeBSD, Solaris Windows, Linux, and Mac) to deliver multi-protocol VPN functionality. SoftEther gives you mobile device compatibility through L2TP/IPsec server function. Part of the attraction of this VPN option is the low latency, fast throughput, and Nat-traversal firewall resistance.

Tcpcrypt

This software is used to encrypt traffic to and from high volume servers. It protects the user against passive attacks where criminals are eavesdropping on communications. Part of the attraction of Tcpcrypt is that they claim it, “requires no configuration…has no NAT issues…has very high performance (up to 25x faster than SSL).”

So, how do you run a secure file storage server without macOS Server VPN?

Apple certainly hasn’t given us much to go on in its recent support memo. The third-party VPN and encrypted traffic software options provided by Apple are certainly useful to the IT professional and systems administrator, but not to the home-based business owner or individual user who was enjoying the macOS Server VPN capabilities.

With Apple’s announcement to phase out macOS Server functionality, it leaves us with the question of file collaboration for small to mid-size businesses.

There are several ways that an IT professional – such as the IT support team at {company} – can enable the Mac users in your business to access and edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases in-house or on the move. Here are just a few of those alternatives:

  • Cloud-Based File Sharing Applications – These applications have become increasingly popular. You likely already use a home version of at least one of them – like DropBox, Google Drive, or com.
  • Office 365 – Office 365 is compatible across platforms and was built with secure file collaboration in mind. No need to go to the office to get your data – it’s all there at the touch of a button. Businesses worldwide have moved away from VPN and now rely solely on Office 365.
  • Remote Access Models – These popular cloud-based applications allow access to your home or office computer through a web interface. Options include companies like GoToMyPC, RemotePC, and LogMeIn.

As Apple takes its final walk away from server offerings, we realize that it is no longer a competitor in enterprise-level computing. Sure, Apple devices will always be used, but for now, they are peripheral to the server and cloud assets that are at the core of enterprise computing. However, Apple still holds the market share – and the hearts – of creative individuals and industries that have relied on Macs for years.

The experts at {company} will show you how to store data securely, access it freely, and collaborate instantly with colleagues. Enjoy the freedom of mobility while having everything you need at your fingertips – wherever you go. Contact us at {phone} or send an email to {email} to get started.

February 12, 2018
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Swipe Back and Forth between Web Pages for Easier Navigation
February 1, 2018

Swipe Back and Forth between Web Pages for Easier Navigation

For navigation, every Web browser offers back and forward buttons, generally represented by arrows in the upper left of the toolbar. You can also navigate by choosing menu commands and typing keyboard shortcuts—did you know that Command-Left arrow and Command-Right arrow work too? But if you’re using a Mac with a trackpad, you can move back and forth between Web pages—in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox—with a two-fingered swipe left (for back) or right (for forward). If you prefer, you can switch to a three-fingered swipe in System Preferences > Trackpad > More Gestures. Or, if it’s difficult for you to keep exactly two or precisely three fingers on the trackpad, you can choose to swipe with two or three fingers.

February 1, 2018
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