We discuss January anniversaries for some of our favorite Apple gear, and then a look at what new devices Apple may be planning to introduce during the year.
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Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac podcast—the voice of Mac security—for Thursday, January 16, 2024. This week’s Intego Mac podcast security headlines include some January anniversaries for some of our favorite Apple gear, and then a look at what new devices Apple may be planning to introduce during the year. Now here are the hosts of the Intego Mac podcast. Veteran Mac journalist Kirk McElhearn and Intego’s chief security analyst, Josh Long.
Kirk McElhearn 0:36
Good morning. Josh, how are you today?
Josh Long 0:38
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk.
Kirk McElhearn 0:42
I’m doing okay. You know, we’ve been having a lot of anniversaries lately, 20 years, 25 years, you know, around Apple, at least, we had one last week. It was 20 years of the Mac mini. And this makes me feel old. We were just talking before we started that. We’ve been doing this podcast for seven years, and it feels like yesterday, 20 years of the Mac mini. I remember when the Mac mini came out? This was in that period when Apple decided that they wanted to get people to switch from Windows to the Mac. And the Mac mini was the by km, bring your own keyboard and mouse. Is what they called it. It was you just had a little computer in a box. And then it got smaller, and then they shrank it again last year. The Mac mini is probably, I think it’s the most impressive Mac, not because it’s the most powerful or anything, because it is so small.
Josh Long 1:29
Yes, I remember when this came out, so it was $499 so they got to that sub $500 price point, right? Which was, which was really big, because Apple had never really had a good computer that you could get that was a Macintosh that could be at such a low price point. So it was kind of tempting to somebody who had always bought PCs. Now with being a GeForce, like you said about the only thing you could really do is bring your keyboard and your mouse and your monitor from your PC, but it still saved you money, right? If all you, if you were been kind of thinking that it would be nice to use Photoshop on the platform that you know most graphic artists are using, wouldn’t it be great if I could switch to Mac? But oh, Max are just so unaffordable. Well, now they weren’t anymore. And that was big. That was a really big move for Apple.
Kirk McElhearn 2:24
I think what’s even more impressive is that the Mac mini today starts at $599.20 years later, it’s only $100 more expensive. I think it’s fluctuated. There was a period when the base model was 599 and went back down, etc. I’ve had several Mac Minis. One was my main computer, and I don’t remember exactly which one it might have been one of the early ones. I currently have an m2 Mac mini, which I use as a file server, Plex server, etc. It’s just this little thing that sits there and does its stuff. And if it’s your main computer, you can do a lot. And if not, it just sits in the background and does all its stuff. You know, we have another anniversary today. It’s not a round number. It’s 17 years ago, that Apple introduced the help. Help me out here. It’s a computer. It was an Apple computer, and it was the most impressive Apple product reveal ever when Steve Jobs stood on stage and pulled a computer out of a vanilla envelope.
Josh Long 3:14
Oh, the MacBook Air. Okay.
Kirk McElhearn 3:17
Yep. Seventeen years ago, 2008 I can’t imagine anything at the time, laptops were bulky and pretty thick and heavy. And when that came out, arguably, the MacBook Air today is slightly thinner, I think, and the one back then had the sort of air foil type, so it was thin in the front and thicker in the back. But just that image of Steve Jobs opening that manila envelope and pulling the computer out was just groundbreaking at the time.
Josh Long 3:42
Apple used to do a lot of big product announcements in January because of the Macworld Expo, which doesn’t exist anymore, but Apple revealed a lot of products in January, and so I’ve been noticing lately on social media, a lot of people have been posting about This is the anniversary of this product coming out or being announced? And I’m like, Yeah, well, it’s January, so that makes sense.
Kirk McElhearn 4:07
Yep. Okay, so MacRumors has had an article last week talking about eight new low cost devices that Apple is going to release in 2025 it’s actually interesting to look at this list of devices to see the extent of Apple’s product line. Now, I wouldn’t say they’re all low price, because the MacBook Air, they’re talking about an M for MacBook Air, is not entirely a cheap device. You’re talking well over $1,000 but other devices on the list include an iPhone, se, an Apple Watch, se, I wouldn’t be surprised if they both came out at the same time, the 11th generation iPad. So that’s the basic iPad. They’re probably going to put an a 17 chip in that so it can run Apple intelligence. There’s discussion of a HomePod mini, an Apple TV, 4k command center, which is this HomePod with a screen, which I don’t think is going to be very successful, and a product which is, I think Apple’s cheapest product that does anything. In other words, it’s not like a cable. Or a Dong or a connector, which is the air tag. And if you think about it, if you’re all in on air tags, and you’ve got all your keys and your kids backpacks and your bicycle and your car with air tags, you’re walked into the Apple ecosystem. That really inexpensive product keeps people using Apple devices.
Josh Long 5:18
You know, that’s actually a really interesting point that I hadn’t really thought too much about Apple makes a little bit of money off of air tags, right? I mean, they probably don’t cost 25 bucks to manufacture a tiny little thing like that. It’s in yet another thing that locks you into the ecosystem, right? You want to be able to use iMessage, and you can’t really get that on an Android device. You know, we’ve talked before about some attempts by third parties to be able to put my message unofficially on Android, and that always gets shut down. But this isn’t yet another thing that kind of locks people in and makes people not want to give up all of their Apple devices, at least it keeps them tied to that Apple ecosystem somehow. Now this sort of thing also has a tendency to sometimes get Apple in a little bit of trouble from regulatory agencies in various countries, in particular in the UK and the EU, which don’t typically like it very much when you’ve got products that sort of lock you into a particular manufacturer or particular ecosystem. But so far, the air tag has not gotten Apple in hot water, so we’ll see if that does continue.
Kirk McElhearn 6:28
Okay, so I’ve been seeing on social media and on BlueSky, someone who posted about this got like two and a half 1000 replies. The person says, well, Apple snuck something dirty in our phones last night settings apps, pick an app, Siri, learn from this app. Toggle off. You have to go through each app, my garage app, my banking apps, others had this turned on automatically. This is a setting in the Siri settings. It says, learn from this app. Now this person is showing a screenshot of the Siri settings. That means she does not have an iPhone that does Apple intelligence because on the iPhone 15 Pro or 16, it would be Apple intelligence and Siri. This is a feature for Siri suggestions on the iPhone, which have been around, I believe, since iOS 12, if not earlier. This is something that’s really been around for a long time. I think this person thinks, in fact, some of the comments were like, Apple is snarfing up all your data and reading what you’re doing and everything it has nothing to do with that. We’ll have an article on the Intego Mac security blog. This is used for a number of features that are called Siri suggestions. You’ll see these in a number of places. The easiest place to see this on your iPhone is to go to a home screen, drag down to bring up a search field, and you’ll see series suggestions. You’ll generally see four apps, and the four apps you’ll see here are apps that you have used around the same time of day, or that you use often, or that you’ve used in the similar location, etc. What Apple says, and we’ll link to the iPhone user guide page about this. Oddly enough, we can’t find a US English version, so we’ll link to the British English version as serial earns your routines. You get suggestions for just what you need at just the right time. Siri suggestions also auto complete email addresses for people who have been in previous emails and events. If you receive a call for an unknown number, Siri let you know who might be calling based on phone numbers included in your emails as you enter text when you’re typing, Siri can suggest movies, places, anything you viewed on your iPhone recently, and it can confirm a appointment or book a flight on a travel website. In other words, what’s happening is Siri is looking at your apps and your personal data of contacts and phone numbers and things like that. But all of this is on device. This is not sent to Apple. It’s not learning anything from the apps about what you’re doing and sending it to some, you know, massive cloud server to be AI or whatever. It’s very, very limited. And the iPhone guide page says your personal information, which is encrypted and remains pirate, stays up to date across all your devices, etc, etc. This is not nefarious. This this is a feature that’s been around for a long time now, 2.1 of the annoying things is if you do want to turn it off, you have to go to on an iPhone, 16 Apple intelligence and Siri scroll down, you get to apps, and you have to toggle it off for each app. What I find particularly surprising is that it is almost impossible to find this setting on a Mac, and I challenged Josh to find it, and he was unable to. So if you’re on a Mac with an ever series chip, you will have Apple intelligence and Siri in system settings. You can hook on there. You won’t see anything about apps. You have to click a button that says about Siri dictation and privacy to see the list of apps. And when you click that, you get a screen with another button at the bottom about Siri dictation, privacy, they mislabeled this button for some reason. Anyway. The point is, there’s nothing evil going on, and this is spreading on social media, so don’t worry about it, right?
Josh Long 9:50
You know this. Kirk pointed out this sounds like the kind of thing that you would see in a TikTok video, so maybe that’s what happened here. Is this person who posted on BlueSky me. Maybe saw a TikTok video that said, here’s this nefarious thing that Apple just added to your iPhone. And so she’s like, Oh my gosh, last night. Yes, last night. Apple snuck something dirty in our phones last night. Okay, so whenever you see something like this, you should automatically have a level of skepticism. Right. Now, this person also didn’t even say what this supposedly is doing, because, of course, they don’t know what it’s actually doing. And as Kirk pointed out, there’s nothing nefarious going on. The screenshot in this particular social media post showed that this was enabled for Apple’s Passwords app and so and they mentioned their banking app, but this is not something where you know it’s not. It doesn’t mean that Apple is stealing all of your passwords, or knowing your bank account, or being able to hack into your bank account like it’s nothing anywhere remotely like that. So yeah, everyone needs to take a chill pill. Take a step back.
Kirk McElhearn 10:59
You know what? All your passwords and the Passwords app, they’re already stored on iCloud, but you know what else? They’re encrypted and Apple can’t get at them. It’s like, this is not you know, there’s nothing wrong with this. The one useful place you can find this, though, is in these series suggestions of apps. And you can see this, as I said, if you pull down to do a search, you can add a series suggestions widget to your home screen on your iPhone or iPad, and if the setting is on, you can see it in the app library. Now, when I look at mine, I see specific apps that I use regularly or particularly at this time of day, the one I used to charge my car, my banking app, things like that. This is all it’s really doing. It’s trying to make your life easier by showing apps that you’re likely to use at specific times and locations. I think it does take into account location. So if you’re at a place where you often use your parking app, right, it will show the parking app when you’re there. It just saves you time. So I’m going to do some searches and find if this was a TikTok video that’s been causing this problem, and if so, I’ll put it in the show notes tomorrow. But I don’t know. We have to just stop getting outraged by things that people don’t understand. We’ve got a weird Apple bug, and I haven’t seen it, and I don’t keep reading about this on social media. We’re linking to an article on the verge. It says Apple’s weird. iPhone alarm problems are still happening. Apparently, for some people, iPhone alarms go off at the wrong time, like an hour later, or two hours later, or whatever, and well, if you use your iPhone to wake yourself up in the morning, well this is a bit of a problem. I don’t use my iPhone for this. I use my Apple Watch because I find that getting haptics on my wrist wakes me up better than the not very loud iPhone alarm sound.
Josh Long 12:41
I haven’t particularly experienced this either. Now I usually set alarms on my iPhone, not on my watch. I’m usually charging my watch overnight for the most part. But yeah, I haven’t experienced this either. So if you have experienced something like this, where you set an alarm on your iPhone and it goes off at a completely different time. Let us know, send us an email podcast@intego.com and let us know what your experience has been with this.
Kirk McElhearn 13:07
Okay, the Verge, writer who mentioned this says, luckily, I’ve got a Google Pixel eight Pro as a backup. That usually gets me going, and I’m trying the Nintendo alarm. Oh two, but my wife has had enough of Zelda yelling at link to wake up. Apparently, Nintendo has just released an alarm clock. You do you right? All right, we’ll take a break. When we come back, we’ll talk about some malware, a macOS vulnerability, and more,
Voice Over 13:32
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Kirk McElhearn 14:44
Okay, we want to talk about a macOS vulnerability that’s really serious, except it’s already fixed. This was announced a couple of days ago. I think it was Microsoft actually who discovered this, but it was fixed in the macOS 15.2 update. So you were telling me that sometimes this happens. Us that there’s a vulnerability that’s patched, but they don’t tell us about it until later. And do we need to care about this? I mean, we’ve seen articles about this in the Mac press, but now that it’s fixed, it’s not a big deal, right?
Josh Long 15:14
Well, yeah, and you. So I only thought this was worth pointing out for two reasons. One, because this happens a lot, where Microsoft researchers find a vulnerability, and what happens is they report it to Apple. Apple patches it, and like clockwork, a month later, Microsoft publishes a blog post explaining the details of this vulnerability that they found. So they give people about a month to install the patches, and then they release the details about it so it so that’s something that you’ll probably see a lot, because this happens just about anytime Microsoft finds a new vulnerability in Apple products, about a month later, you’ll you’ll start seeing headlines about this because someone reads the Microsoft blog article.
Kirk McElhearn 15:58
You’re saying this is specific to Microsoft finding vulnerabilities?
Josh Long 16:02
Um, yeah, I mean my so Microsoft has a team of researchers that do find some really good vulnerabilities, but because Microsoft is high profile and because they do regularly blog about these things, they do get a lot of press coverage because of that. So the other thing, though, that I thought would be worth mentioning about this particular one is that the the vulnerability that they found is actually pretty interesting. So there’s something called system integrity protection, which keeps your Apple devices safe, safer than it would be otherwise, right? This has actually been a feature that’s been built into macOS for many years, and so what this vulnerability did is it allowed a potential attacker to bypass system integrity protection by exploiting third party kernel extensions. Kernel extensions are not used as often anymore, and you know it’s it’s all part of Apple’s effort to make macOS and Macs more secure, so they’re kind of discouraging the use of kernel extensions, but you can still install them as Apple insider puts it. This particular vulnerability showed how attackers could bypass system integrity protection by loading malicious third party kernel extensions called RootKits. The term root kit is interesting because it usually refers to some sort of malware that’s deeply embedded in the system that hooks in lower than sometimes even antivirus is operating right. So we don’t hear about RootKits on macOS very often. It’s not as big of a problem as it used to be on computers, but RootKits are a potential threat as well. So in any case, this vulnerability was only patched in macOS Sequoia. So if you are running an older version of macOS I strongly recommend that you upgrade to macOS Sequoia, if your Mac is compatible with it, if your Mac is not officially compatible with macOS Sequoia, consider reading the article on our blog about how you can unofficially upgrade to the latest version of macOS on older Macs.
Kirk McElhearn 18:06
The word root kit reminded me of something that was almost 20 years ago when Sony put RootKits on copy protected CDs. 22 million CDs were sold that installed RootKits on Macs and Windows PCs. And this was a huge scandal, and it should have been a bigger scandal than it was. There were lawsuits. There were attorneys general who went after Sony. They had to release software to remove it. I mean, this was a very serious thing that they did just because they were worried about people copying CDs. I guess you’re not old enough to remember that, right, Josh?
Josh Long 18:35
Oh no, no, no, I remember that story. Yeah, it was. It was definitely a big deal. There were a lot of people in the tech press that were talking about it at the time, but I agree with you, it didn’t really get as much mainstream coverage, I think, as I would have expected, for something as serious as it was.
Kirk McElhearn 18:50
Okay. Speaking of malware, that Banshee Steeler, malware is back again. Is it doing anything different this time?
Josh Long 18:57
Yeah, so I there were a lot of headlines about this. Last week, a security company posted some research that they say they’ve been doing since September about Banshee Steeler, which I thought was kind of amusing, because we originally wrote about Banshee Steeler the month that it was discovered, in August. So like, they’re like, well, we’ve been tracking this new variant since September. It’s like, Well, okay, it’s not really new. That was four months ago now, but okay, whatever. So yes, Banshee stealer has continued to be out there in the public. There have been some new variants and one of the so there were a couple of things that really were picked up in a lot of headlines in the Mac press talking about Banshee stealer. One of them was that they were using some fancy new encryption algorithm, and basically what they did was they borrowed the same string encryption algorithm that Apple uses for its x protect technology. X protect is sort of a rudimentary anti malware technology. That’s built into macOS that does not protect you as comprehensively as actual antivirus software does, but they borrowed Apple’s string encryption algorithm, which is, okay, that’s kind of funny, but somehow that got headlines as though it’s like, oh my gosh, they’re stealing Apple technology to use it against you. So, yeah, they did that. The other thing that was kind of interesting is that these researchers said that this malware went fully undetected for more than two months. Well, that’s maybe not entirely true, so let’s talk about that briefly. There’s this misconception that if when you scan a file on a website called virus total, which scans a file with 60 plus different anti malware engines that if it comes back with a zero detection rate, that means that no antivirus in the entire world knows about this malware. So that’s not true for a number of reasons. One, a lot of times anti malware software uses behavioral detections, and it also might use machine learning and other things like that that might not be on in the default settings that virus total has been asked by the vendor to use. So that’s one thing, but the other thing is, they don’t include every anti malware engine and Intego virus barriers engine is not one of the 60 plus that is included in virus total. And it just so happens that Intego never had any gap in coverage. You’ve always been protected from Banshee Steeler if you’ve been using Intego Virus Barrier to protect your Mac. So that’s I think the other notable thing about this story is that it’s not actually true. In this particular case, you’ve always been protected, as long as you’ve been using Intego Virus Barrier.
Kirk McElhearn 21:47
Okay, we have a scam story this week, and this is actually the person who’s been scammed has been ridiculed about this in France. And we need to think about this in a realistic sense of the way people who don’t have a lot of experience with online scams act. So it was a 53 year old woman who believed that she was in a relationship with Brad Pitt ended up paying 830,000 euros to help for his cancer treatment because his accounts had been frozen during divorce proceedings with Angelina Jolie. Now she had never used social media until February 2023 when she joined Instagram to share some pictures of a skiing holiday in the French Alps, she got contacted by someone claiming to be Brad Pitt’s mother, who said she would be a good match for her son. And for a year or so, she was in this text relationship with this person. After she admitted this she was she became a meme in France, and the TV station took the program off their online site because people were mocking her. We shouldn’t mock people who get fooled by this. It just shows that you really need to be aware of what goes on online. This person had no experience online, so didn’t know she got aI generated pictures of Brad Pitt in the hospital and with requests to pay for his kidney treatment. And these, I saw some of these photos online. We’re going to link to an article in The Guardian that doesn’t have these photos, but I saw in another one, it’s Brad Pitt in a hospital. Looks like Brad Pitt, and you know, it’s not that hard to make deep fake photos of someone in a hospital bed. So the message here is, don’t laugh at these people. Understand that people who don’t have experience with this sort of scam can be fooled. And be very careful.
Josh Long 23:29
Right. If it seems too good to be true, well, it probably is. That’s you should always take a step back if you’re ever tempted to believe something that you read online or even in a conversation that you’re having with somebody take a step back and think, Is this a scam, or is there a possibility that this could be a scam? If so, approach it with extreme caution, because you never know. There are a lot of people out there who are trying to take advantage of other people and Well, this was just one of many, many examples of somebody who got caught up in and believed something that they wanted to believe, when if they’d taken a step back, they probably would have realized this seems like it’s a little too good to be true.
Kirk McElhearn 24:10
You got to think about that poster that Fox Mulder has in his office. (I want to believe, right?) Okay, a number of people online have been talking about deleting their Facebook accounts. We’re not going to go into details why. You’ll have seen Mark Zuckerberg and what he’s said about fact checking. We have an article on the Intego Mac security blog, how to delete your social media accounts, where we talk about deleting Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, X, whichever you want to call it, LinkedIn, etc. Many of these are easy to delete, but Facebook’s a lot more complicated. So if you do want to delete your account, check the link in the show notes, and you’ll find out how to do it. We’re recording this on the 15th. We’re releasing this on the 16th and on the 19th. I believe TikTok is currently scheduled to be banned in the United States, and we don’t know if this is going to go through or not. All of a sudden, a number of people started using an app called red note, which is a Chinese. App. Well, red note is how it translates into English, Xiaohongshu. Apparently it is. It’s a very popular app. Red note seems to be a TikTok alternative because it had videos, but it also seems to be really just about shopping in fashion, and it’s not as broad as TikTok. A lot of people think that if, well, if we can’t use TikTok, let’s use another Chinese app to share our videos, whereas they could be using Instagram or YouTube shorts or other things like that.
Josh Long 25:28
Even X, believe it or not, of all things, has has a feature where you can load a video and then swipe through them, just like you can on TikTok, so you you pick your poison, whichever platform you like watching short form video on. You know, there there’s other apps that you probably already have installed that can do the same thing. You don’t need to go seek out a special app developed by hit Chinese company just to replace TikTok.
Kirk McElhearn 25:55
But these apps only work if they have critical mass. That’s the thing. You could have 100 apps for videos, but it’s not going to do anything. My question about TikTok is, if it is split up, what’s going to happen to TikTok? Let’s say this US TikTok and a TikTok in the rest of the world, will they be able to communicate? I doubt it, because it’s complicated. Anyway, we won’t know until the 19th and I’ve read that there may be an extension as well, so we’ll find out soon. It was Patch Tuesday, again, wasn’t it? They had like eight zero days. That’s a lot of zero days for one month, right? We like to bring this up usually around. We like to bring this up to reg on Microsoft for having so many zero days, right?
Josh Long 26:36
Well, I think it’s worth mentioning, just because, you know, there’s a pretty good chance that our listeners know somebody who uses Windows. If you’re not also using a Windows machine, you’re probably using a Mac, but you probably know somebody who uses Windows, or maybe you use Windows at work. And so Patch Tuesday comes up every month, the second Tuesday of the month, and Microsoft patches usually a lot of vulnerabilities. There were about 159 vulnerabilities that were patched across all of Microsoft’s products, eight of which this time around, were zero day vulnerabilities, meaning they were actively exploited in the wild. So if you’re using any Microsoft software, make sure to install updates as soon as possible.
Kirk McElhearn 27:18
Okay, that’s enough for this week until next week. Josh, stay secure.
Josh Long 27:22
All right, stay secure.
Voice Over 27:25
Thanks for listening to the Intego Mac podcast. The voice of Mac security with your hosts, Kirk McElhearn and Josh Long. To get every weekly episode be sure to follow us in Apple podcasts or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, and if you can leave a rating, a like or a review. Links to topics and information mentioned in the podcast can be found in the show notes for the episode at podcast.intego.com. The Intego website is also where to find details on the full line of Intego security and utility software. intego.com.
