Intego Mac Security Podcast

The Macintosh Turns 40 Years Old – Intego Mac Podcast Episode 328

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Josh and Kirk take a look at the latest security patches released in Apple’s newest operating system updates, and explain how Apple’s new Stolen Device Protection feature for iPhone can keep your data safe. A popular brand of Wi-Fi router just got important security enhancements for its firmware: we’ll tell you what to check. And we have a look back at the Mac on the 40th anniversary of Apple’s Macintosh computer.


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Transcript of Intego Mac Podcast episode 328

Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac Podcast—the voice of Mac security—for Thursday, January 25, 2024. This week’s Intego Mac Podcast security headlines include: a rundown of the latest security patches released in Apple’s newest operating system updates; how Apple’s new Stolen Device Protection feature for iPhone can keep your data safe; a popular brand of Wi-Fi router just got important security enhancements for its firmware—we’ll tell you what to check; and we have a look back at the Mac on the 40th anniversary of Apple’s Macintosh computer. 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 0:51
Good morning, Josh, how are you today?

Josh Long 0:54
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?

Kirk McElhearn 0:55
I’m not too well. You can tell by my voice. I’ve had the worst cold ever for the past week. Oh, fortunately, my voice is good enough to be able to complete this podcast. But he’s just gonna have to deal with my rough voice today.

Josh Long 1:06
Well, I’m sorry to hear that and hope you feel better soon.

What security patches were released in the latest Apple operating system updates?

Kirk McElhearn 1:08
Thank you. So today we want to talk about the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh. We’ll get to that in the second part of the podcast. First. We have a security update trifecta. Apple did their usual thing of updating all the operating systems. This week. They did it on Monday. When was the last time they did it Monday. They’ve been changing the day of the week, haven’t they? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, it depends. So Monday, they released updates for everything. There were some new features. This time in addition to updates, there is collaborative playlists in the Music app, maybe we’ll talk about that on a future episode. It’s a little bit clunky, but it’s interesting, you can invite you can create a playlist, invite someone, they can each add tracks and they can add emojis to say thumbs up or on fire or things like that. It’s really cool if you’re into that. And they also added a feature called Stolen Device Protection for the iPhone. We’ll talk about that after we get through our three security update stories. So this update included the first exploited vulnerability of the year. And in the notes you made for this episode, you say that Apple is apparently no longer using the term “actively exploited”. That just saying exploited? Are we sure that that’s meaning the same thing? Or is there some nuance here?

Josh Long 2:19
No, it seems like this is the same thing. For whatever reason, Apple is just dropped the “actively” maybe, maybe for clarity sake, because they don’t want to imply that there’s ongoing campaigns or something that are using these vulnerabilities. It’s just that they have received a report that at some point, somebody has exploited this vulnerability. They don’t say in the wild, they probably should say that. So it’s a little bit more clear. But then I guess maybe they would be worried that people would assume that they were just necessarily using them against everybody. And maybe it was only used in targeted attacks. So Apple has just decided we’re going to call it exploited vulnerabilities. So they’re just going to keep it as simple as possible.

Kirk McElhearn 3:00
And this is a WebKit vulnerability. And since the browser is really the platform these days, this is probably the most dangerous kind of vulnerability.

Josh Long 3:09
Yeah, WebKit vulnerabilities usually do affect multiple Apple operating systems, because of course, they all pretty much all of them have to render web pages at some time or another. Yeah, WebKit vulnerabilities are definitely things that need to get fixed, especially if you know that somebody is exploited than they need to be patched pretty quickly.

Kirk McElhearn 3:28
Anything else we need to know about these updates?

Josh Long 3:30
I guess one other thing that we could note is that Apple went back and updated some older operating systems as well. Apple updated iOS 15, and iPadOS 15 with a new update 15.8.1. That includes that language that we talked about, where now they’re just saying “exploited”. These are a couple of vulnerabilities that were patched a while back and are finally being patched now for iOS 15. As I’ve mentioned, many times, if you’re running an older operating system, regardless of whether that’s on your Mac, or on your iPhone, or iPad, you are not getting all the security updates. And even if you do get updates for these exploited vulnerabilities, they’re not necessarily coming very quickly either. So it’s just not very safe to stay behind on an old operating system.

Kirk McElhearn 4:19
What would be the logic for them to not update the older operating systems for “vulnerability x” in I don’t know, December and then come out in January and update the older operating systems that same vulnerability.

Josh Long 4:33
I have no idea. I mean, it’s very weird, right? Like if you’re gonna patch it and patch it for all of them at the same time, like, maybe it has to do with developer resources, you know, maybe they are prioritizing the newer operating systems. That kind of makes sense maybe. But then the other thing and somebody asked me this on social media the other day, they replied to one of my posts about something like this and they said, why is it that Apple doesn’t just patch all the things for previous operating systems to? And honestly, I don’t know. It’s, it’s one of those things that like if you’re going to patch some things, then patch everything because if you’re not doing that, then you’re kind of just giving people a false sense of security.

Asus Wi-Fi routers receive a firmware update

Kirk McElhearn 5:16
Okay, the second update in our trifecta is a company whose name we were debating how to pronounce, that has released an update for each router app with security enhancements. So I always thought the company was called ASUS. You think it’s called Asus? Maybe it’s a Asoos, as us, Asus, it’s got to be Asus. So it’s called Asus Taiwanese company makes all sorts of stuff. They make laptops, they make tablets, and they make routers, although you would say they make routers.

Josh Long 5:46
Yeah, exactly. There’s like, I think four official, semi-official pronunciations in English. But I think Asus is the most correct pronunciation, if you want to call it that. Anyway, if you happen to use one of their Wi-Fi routers, they have a new update for their iOS app that just came out yesterday. And it only mentions briefly in the, in the notes, the App Store description. It contains security enhancements, which is really vague. It’s not a CVE number. So we don’t know of a specific vulnerability that’s being patched but it says it contains security enhancements. So okay, so if you have an Asus brand, or ROG brand router, I always thought it was “ROG”. But apparently, according to a CES keynote, it’s R-O-G. So I can’t pronounce anything related to this company right.

Kirk McElhearn 6:41
I just want to ask you one thing. You said none of these have CVE numbers. But not all security fixes have CVE numbers, right?

Josh Long 6:48
That’s true. In fact, it’s kind of funny that you mentioned that because there was another update that I just noticed came out, I think today, we use Zoom for recording this podcast. And the Mac version of Zoom, just got an update today that also uses the same exact vague language security enhancements. And I checked, Zoom actually has a page where they list security bulletins. And they don’t mention anything about this, they’re probably because it doesn’t have a CVE assigned. So possibly, what this is, is maybe it’s a less severe vulnerability that they didn’t think really needed to have a CVE assigned, maybe it’s not something that might apply to other products. It’s not necessarily something that the bad guys can easily exploit. But they thought, well, maybe in combination with other attacks, maybe chained together, they could do something with this. In any case, they didn’t feel it was worth assigning a CVE number. But both of these apps have gotten updates. So make sure if you use those apps that you update them.

What is Apple’s Stolen Device Protection feature and how does it work?

Kirk McElhearn 7:47
Okay, I mentioned before that there was a new feature in the Apple updates. And actually, it’s only in iOS, it’s called Stolen Device Protection, which is actually quite a clear name for this feature. Let’s explain what it does, it’s a little bit complicated to understand what it does. But when you realize how it works, it makes a lot of sense. You can access your iPhone using touch ID or Face ID, if it has one of those technologies and using your passcode. If Touch ID or Face ID don’t work, you can still use your passcode, right. And every once in a while you have to reuse your passcode if you’ve restarted it, or when you’ve done certain things, so you do have to eventually use the passcode. If someone gets your passcode, and they can get into your device, and we’ll talk about how in a second. They can then change everything your Apple ID password, they can get access to all your passwords and everything. The Stolen Device Protection prevents people from doing this. If you turn this on, and please turn it on, we have an article on the Intego Mac Security Blog, it’s the easiest thing in the world to turn on. It’s just one toggle, you don’t have to wait for anything to happen. If someone does get your passcode. And this is active, they can’t use a whole bunch of features without additional biometric authentication. So Touch ID or Face ID, they can’t use passwords saved in keychain autofill payment methods in Safari, they can’t turn off Lost Mode, they can’t erase the device, which is really important because if they could erase all content and settings, then they could sell it someone else could use it. Because it wouldn’t be linked to your Apple ID.

Josh Long 9:13
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. But in a way, it’s sort of the exact opposite of what we’re used to where the backup the thing that they rely on more than anything else is your code, your passcode. But now, if you want to do certain things and you’re not you know, at home or someplace that you normally go, then now there’s this extra step that actually does the reverse. So now it also will require biometrics for those things.

Kirk McElhearn 9:41
Now you mentioned if you’re not at home or someplace where you normally go, your iPhone records familiar location so for me it would be at home because I work at home I don’t have a home and a workplace. Same for you Josh but for other people, you’ve got a home you got a workplace maybe got a gym that you go to often. Maybe have a friend’s house you visit often. These are familiar locations. And it knows that if you’re not in that location, that there’s something wrong, and that’s when it’s going to ask for you additional authentication. Now, for even more serious actions, there’s what’s called a security delay. So let’s say you want to change your Apple ID password, and you are not in a familiar location, you need to authenticating using touch ID or Face ID, then wait one hour before you can change the password. Also sign out of Apple ID add or remove Face ID Touch ID change your iPhone password, a whole lot of options there. Now, this is really useful, except for there are a couple of use cases where this can be problematic. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this. But a couple of times I’ve traded in old iPhones at Apple stores. And they look at the iPhone they check to make sure it’s okay then they say Okay, turn off find my an erase the device. Well, if that’s not a familiar location, I have to wait an hour when I want to turn off find my an erase the device. So I wonder if Apple is considering retail stores as familiar locations if somehow they’re superseding that, but that would mean that anyone could take a stolen iPhone into a store if they have the passcode. And it gets a little bit complicated like that.

Josh Long 11:12
Right. That’s true. I have had similar experiences before where I’ve had to turn off find my when I’m turning in a device to get it repaired. So there are times when that could be a potential problem. Now Kirk and I were kind of discussing before the show like wouldn’t it be interesting if Apple just kind of excluded at known Apple Store locations, you know, made those familiar locations. The only problem with that that I can imagine is that, well, if somebody steals your iPhone while you’re at an Apple Store, then I guess you’d be out of luck. Anyway, Apple’s not doing that as far as we know. But it is kind of an interesting thing to think about because that could be problematic if you’re getting taking your device in for repair.

Amazon ends warrantless access to Ring videos

Kirk McElhearn 11:54
Okay, one last thing before the break. We’ve talked a lot about Ring cameras and doorbells, in part because Josh and I both have ring doorbells. And we’ve talked about how police in the US have been able to access videos from users pretty much easily I think ring just as a tool, where the police can log in and say I want the video from this street. Well, Amazon is changing this and police now who want to access video from users will need a warrant.

Josh Long 12:22
That’s a good thing. The EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sometimes when they have booths at conferences, I’ve seen stickers that say “Come back with a warrant!” I think that’s one of my favorite stickers I’ve ever seen. This is one of those things where it’s kind of like, you know, I don’t necessarily mind that you have access if you’re actually tracking down a criminal but let’s like, you know, do the due process like let’s make sure that you actually have a legitimate reason to be accessing camera data.

Kirk McElhearn 12:49
Okay, we’re gonna take a break when we come back, we’re gonna talk about 10 important milestones in the history of the Mac because today is the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh Can you believe it’s that old?

Voice Over 13:01
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What are some of the important milestones in the 40 year life of the Macintosh?

Kirk McElhearn 14:17
So today we’re recording on Wednesday, January 24. You’ll be hearing this podcast on the 25th or later today is the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh. It’s kind of interesting when you think how far it’s come from back in the day from that first 128k Mac in beige with the funny looking mouse with the all in one device which was quite prescient because that would evolve into the iMac eventually. It was an expensive device. It was very limited and just a few days from now. We’ll mark 40 years from the only national broadcast of Apple’s 1984 commercial which probably anyone familiar with Apple has seen that on YouTube or whatever but it was only broadcast once during the Superbowl in 1984 It kind of marked. If Apple had failed, we wouldn’t even know about this. But when we look back at it, we see the commercial we see the, the 120 8k MAC, the first Macintosh. And we see how important a milestone it was, along with the many others in the history of the Mac. We have 10 milestones in this article. And the first one is the original Macintosh, which not a lot of people actually had. To be honest. I mean, it didn’t sell that much. But it did sort of set the ball rolling, right. And over the years when they got to the Macintosh Plus, which was in 86, it started to be less expensive. I think there was more software available at the time. And that’s when it really took off.

Josh Long 15:40
I didn’t have a Macintosh in 1984. But I actually do have one of the 128k max. Now, somebody had an old Mac and they said, Do you want this thing? And I was like, Oh my gosh, yes, of course. Of course I want that. I like to put it on display in my office. At that time, I was actually still using an Apple two. Eventually, my family adopted Macintoshes. I think the first Mac that I had was several years later it was a Macintosh LC two, it was a pizza box shape. Mac, you would kind of you could open up the case, kind of like a pizza box.

Kirk McElhearn 16:16
You were way ahead of me because my first Mac was in 1991, the PowerBook 100. I want to go to another milestone before that was System 7 that came out in May 1991. We think about a System 7, I guess it was once per year, right from 84 to 91. The big difference about this is it had the multifarious he could run more than one app at a time. It had virtual memory and personal file sharing. things we take for granted now. It was still just in black and white. Right? No, it was their color Mac back then.

Josh Long 16:44
Maybe the first version of System 7, I think you’re right may have been black and white. Eventually, of course, it did have color. The final versions of System 7, I think it got up to 7.6.1 or something like that, if I remember, right, yeah, it was around for many years. Yeah. And the later versions of System 7 definitely did have color.

Kirk McElhearn 17:02
So what’s interesting is that you can actually run System 7 in a web browser, we have a link in the article in the Intego Mac security blog, where they have multiple old Apple operating systems if you’re nostalgic, or if you just curious to see what it was like if you’re young enough to not have experienced that. It’s kind of funny to go back and open up a window was System 7, in much better resolution than you would get back in the day. Right? It was 640 by 480 on most of those early computers. So my first Mac was the PowerBook 100 in October 1991. And I bought it because I wanted to do some translation. Previously, I had a typewriter, the keystore one page at a time. So what do you do when you get to the end of the page and you want to go back and proofread. You got to stop in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph, go back and proofread and then retype it. And it was like, you know, it was just too much work. And so I bought the PowerBook 100. And that’s what led me on to this career. So you were years ahead of me in terms of being a much earlier Mac adapter. I had an LC 475. I had a whole bunch of other Mac’s over the years. When I went freelance in 1996. I think how to perform a something. I had lots of Mac’s over the years that marked me but that PowerBook 100 was really something special. It had a built in trackball, I don’t know if it was totally unique. At the time, I think there may have been Windows computers that did that. And it had a floppy drive that was external, it made the size and the weight of the PowerBook 100. A little bit lighter. The floppy drive was huge and heavy was like I don’t know the size of a CD player or something like that. But it did make it a little bit wider. I think the battery life was like two hours if you were lucky. So almost all the time I had to use it plugged in. But it was really one of those examples of this is the future, right?

Josh Long 18:46
Yeah, these were really amazing times for Apple, like they had a lot of innovations, you know, pretty much back to back within like a decade of each other as in the early days of the Apple computers and then the Macintosh and then the portable Macintoshes, including the PowerBook like you were talking about there. And then shortly after that, I think it was 1994 they came out with a whole new processor architecture. So they went from Motorola processors. They used the 68,000 series Motorola processors, initially with the Macs and then they switched to IBM PowerPC processors for the Power Macintosh line.

Kirk McElhearn 19:28
Well, actually, the PowerPC was not just an IBM processor. It was an alliance made up of IBM, Apple Motorola. And so it wasn’t Apple saying well, we’re relying on IBM but they all work together to make this RISC processor reduced instruction set computer processor, which I think it means that they needed to do less to do more, right, it was a little bit faster. I just want to point out you were talking about Apple portables. There wasn’t Macintosh portable in 1989 the weight 16 pounds I knew I’m gonna add one, it was just amazingly useless. It was so heavy it was not portable in any way.

Josh Long 20:05
It’s more like a Macintosh luggable than a portable.

Kirk McElhearn 20:08
Yes, definitely. So the biggest change to the Mac was August 1998. The iMac, after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, there was this colorful, all in one translucent plastic device, it wasn’t beige, it had speakers in the front, it had a floppy drive or a CD drive in the front, it was totally different. It had a handle on top so you could carry it, which most people didn’t carry. But I think the design idea was to make it feel more personal, that you could carry it if you wanted to. And that’s probably what changed Apple the most. That’s probably what got the most attention to the company because you started seeing IMAX in movies and on TV shows all the time.

Josh Long 20:51
That handle on top by the way, although not a very well recognized feature of it, it was kind of a fun throwback to the original Macintosh, you know which actually did have a an all in one design, you had the display built in, and you could pick it up from the top with a handle.

Kirk McElhearn 21:08
That’s right. I should have mentioned in the article was the first major consumer device to use USB. USB existed for a few years, but Windows, computer manufacturers had kind of hesitated to edit, you could buy a card to put in a PC to use USB. But there weren’t a lot of peripherals that worked with USB, until Apple came out with the iMac and all of a sudden people saw, well wait a second, these people need USB peripherals, keyboards and mice and scanners and printers and devices like that. and USB started becoming popular because of Apple.

Josh Long 21:39
And there were a lot of PC manufacturers that started cloning the iMac, you know making a PC that looked nearly identical to the iMac in some cases, or at least we’re adopting translucent plastic and USB on a lot of their desktop models as well. So the iMac really was a revolutionary thing for its time and a lot of copycats rose up to try to grasp on to the coattails of the iMac.

Kirk McElhearn 22:07
So the next big milestone was 2001 when Mac OS 10 was released. And in the article, I put two dates March and September, March was the 10.0, which was kind of the public beta and September was 10.1. And that’s when people started adopting mac os 10, that you could still run apps in the classic environment. So Mac OS nine prior to that. But if you think about it, now it’s been more than 22 years that Apple has been using the same operating system. They don’t really call it Mac OS 10 anymore, they just Mac OS Sonoma, or whatever. But it’s still the same operating system based on a UNIX operating system.

Josh Long 22:45
That’s right, which actually, although people didn’t really think much about Unix at the time, at least not in the consumer world at all. It was kind of mostly known in the business world. But Unix really has a solid foundation in terms of its architecture, you can do a lot of things, and a lot more stably and powerfully with a Unix based operating system than you could with the old Mac OS versions, Mac OS nine and earlier. So this was a really good move for Apple. It of course also introduced things like the terminal which allowed you to run command line applications as well, many of which were included with the operating system and have been ever since.

Kirk McElhearn 23:28
The next major milestone that I selected was the Mac mini in January 2005. And this is interesting computer because it was a B Y O km bring your own keyboard and mouse. When you bought one all you got was the computer. And the assumption was that you already had another computer whether it was another Mac or a PC. And Apple was kind of using the Mac mini to tempt switchers to change from Windows to Mac. Now the switcher campaign started in 2002. And I’ve got a couple of links in my article to Apple switch page on the Wayback Machine. And even one iconic user whose ad is just memorable and the ad is somewhere but with even as its own fan site, do you remember who that is, Josh?

Josh Long 24:07
Yeah, I think you’re talking about Ellen Fleiss, who is a person who appeared to be enjoying some some recreational drugs possibly, while she while talking about how much she loved the Mac.

Kirk McElhearn 24:19
She looked like a stoner she did but that set the tone for this whole switcher concept. And the Mac mini was it was $499 It’s really cheap. You think about it today, I think the cheapest Mac Minis 599 18 years later, that’s not bad, you know, to still be able to get a Mac like that January 2006. And we had had the windows versus Mac platform wars and of course Windows PCs ran on Intel processors. And in 2006 Steve Jobs announced that they were going to switch from PowerPC to Intel. Now we already saw from Motorola PowerPC some years earlier. We recently saw from Intel to Apple silicon, but this was cool. Wait a moment when Steve Jobs took a fair amount of time to explain why he said that the PowerPC roadmap didn’t offer the kind of improvements that they needed to innovate going forward. And so they switched to Intel, which was a big deal. Intel CEO Paul Otto, he came on to the stage at the Macworld Expo in 2006. As Steve Jobs presented the first Intel based iMac and MacBook Pro using these processors, as before, there was an emulation framework called Rosetta this time so that you could run apps in PowerPC. Apple has done really well with this every time they switch processors, and they’ve done it several times, they’ve always given many, many years of support to older apps.

Josh Long 25:38
Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, one of the reasons why I think Apple is so good at this, whenever they switch architectures, they’re doing it for a really good reason. They’re able to find ways with the more efficient processor that they’re switching to, to be able to in real time emulate and therefore be able to run these older apps designed for for the previous architecture. That’s something that’s really impressive, I think, more now than ever with the Apple silicon chips. The ability to still run your intel apps on a Mac today is pretty impressive. And without really any noticeable speed degradation.

Kirk McElhearn 26:15
Yeah, I think in the earliest switches from Motorola PowerPC, it was kind of slower. And even from PowerPC to Intel, you did have slowdowns. But when we started running apps written for Intel processors on Apple silicon, we didn’t notice a difference at all. And you can even still do that today. I don’t know how long Apple silicone is going to support Intel apps. But at least for the immediate future, I think you’re comfortable. So the next milestone I have and this is one of my favorite Mac’s ever. It was the MacBook Air released in January 2008. It was thin and light and it had that aerodynamic wing shape when you look at it from the side, and it had two USB ports, which wasn’t bad because the MacBook without any modifier that came out a few years later only had one USB port. That was a mistake. But it was just so cool to have something so thin and light. And today I have two Macs, I have the 24 inch iMac that’s three and a half years old, and I have an M2 MacBook Air. I still think that original MacBook Air was the coolest Mac ever. I just like the shape a lot.

Josh Long 27:14
Yeah, I think the most impressive thing about that was when Steve Jobs introduced it, he actually pulled it out of an envelope, you think he’s gonna pull out a piece of paper or something and show it to the to the audience. But no, he was actually pulling out a laptop from the manila envelope.

Kirk McElhearn 27:29
The original model weighed three pounds, the current 13 inch M2 MacBook air weighs 2.7 pounds, you can’t go much less than that. You have to have the body you have to have the screen you have to have the innards you have to have a battery right all that ways. One other note is the original MacBook Air was the first Mac to offer an SSD is an option had a 60 gigabyte SSD option, which was extremely expensive. But it was the first SSD. So the final milestone and where they are. And we’ve talked about Apple silicone November 2020. We’ve talked about this in the podcast for years. A huge change gain in battery life gain and performance. It’s hard to imagine, when I think back to that PowerBook 100 with two hours battery life, that my M2 MacBook Air can run for maybe three days without me having to charge it.

Josh Long 28:18
That’s pretty impressive, especially looking back at where we’ve been right with the PowerBook 100, and so forth. By the way, you wrap up your article by saying well, it’s unlikely we’ll see a new form factor for computer anytime soon. Apple’s AR VR vision Pro is an attempt to develop a new approach to computing will it replace the Mac? Not in the short term for sure.

Kirk McElhearn 28:40
Well, I don’t consider that a form factor for a computer because it’s not the same as a computer. Apple wants to say you can do everything you can do on a computer with the vision Pro, the same way they say that for the iPad. It’s not we’ll see how that’s gonna work. It ships on February 2 in about 10 days, we’ll start hearing some reviews from people who weren’t invited by Apple to sit in their PR suite and say only good things about it. And I’m curious to see what real people say when they get the vision Pro. If there are any Mac’s that you remember from back in the day and you want to share with us, drop us an email at [email protected] and we’ll mention it on a future episode. Until next week, Josh stay secure.

Josh Long 29:19
Alright, stay secure.

Voice Over 29:22
Thanks for listening to the Intego Mac podcast, the voice of Mac security with your host, Kirk McElhearn, and Josh long. To get every weekly episode, be sure to follow us on Apple podcasts, or subscribe in your favorite podcast app. And, if you can, leave a rating, a like or 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.

About Kirk McElhearn

Kirk McElhearn writes about Apple products and more on his blog Kirkville. He is co-host of the Intego Mac Podcast, as well as several other podcasts, and is a regular contributor to The Mac Security Blog, TidBITS, and several other websites and publications. Kirk has written more than two dozen books, including Take Control books about Apple's media apps, Scrivener, and LaunchBar. Follow him on Twitter at @mcelhearn. View all posts by Kirk McElhearn →