Intego Mac Security Podcast

Tim Cook on Retirement, the FBI on Encryption, and ChatGPT on Forbidden Names – Intego Mac Podcast Episode 373

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Tim Cook gives a rare interview and discusses his future at Apple. Why is the FBI now encouraging the use of encryption in messaging apps? We didn’t think they were fans. The Telegram messaging app aims to crack down on the kind of criminal activities Telegram has been known to abet. And ChatGPT bumps up against another ethical and security problem with its so-called Stop Lists.


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Transcript of Intego Mac Podcast episode 373

Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac podcast—the voice of Mac security—for Thursday, December 5, 2024. This week’s Intego Mac podcast security headlines include: Tim Cook gives a rare interview and discusses his future at Apple. Why is the FBI now encouraging the use of encryption in messaging apps? We didn’t think they were fans. The Telegram messaging app aims to crack down on the kind of criminal activities Telegram has been known to abet. And ChatGPT bumps up against another ethical and security problem with its so-called Stop Lists. 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 0:52
Good morning. Josh, how are you today?

Josh Long 0:55
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?

Post Black Friday debriefing

Kirk McElhearn 0:56
I’m doing okay. Can you tell me is Black Friday Week, Month, Year finally over.

Josh Long 1:02
Well, technically, I think this is still Cyber Week. So that’s part of the Cyber Monday week of shopping. So it’s, I guess we’re still in the thick of it. Really, honestly, there’s still going to be sales all the way up until Christmas, and then after Christmas, there will be some after Christmas sales. Everyone’s trying to get your money. And so right, they’ll throw sales in your faces if they think they can get a dime out of you.

Kirk McElhearn 1:25
So the big question is, did you buy a Wi Fi router? Because we’ve been talking about this for several weeks.

Josh Long 1:30
I did not, because I didn’t find a sale on the ones that I was looking for. And so I was kind of a little disappointed about that, and I got a few other things that I kind of had on my list. I was mostly focused on shopping for the kids and not quite so much for myself this time around.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is interviewed in WIRED

Kirk McElhearn 1:49
As usual, I bought cat food and not much else. I bought a couple of films on Blu Ray, but that’s about it. I’m just so tired of these things. My inbox was full of sale here, sale there, from companies I bought things from once or twice, or even more often. So let’s move on until Christmas comes. So we’re going to just open with a quick mention about Tim Cook, who did a a fairly long interview with Wired Magazine, interview with Stephen Levy. Tim Cook does not do a lot of interviews. Every once in a while, there’s a new product, and he’ll do something on the Today Show or whatever, you know, talking to some journalist who’s not a tech journalist, right? But this is with Stephen Levy, who I believe. Stephen Levy wrote a biography of Steve Jobs back in the day. The tech journalist has been around for a long time. Two things stood out for me in this interview. One is that Tim Cook sounds like a press secretary. There’s very little in what he says that goes beyond what he’s supposed to say. There’s no kind of feeling that he’s excited about anything like Steve Jobs. And the other is that he’s hearing voices, isn’t he?

Josh Long 2:48
He said, “I love this place, Steven [Levy, the interviewer]. It’s a privilege of a lifetime to be here, and I’ll do it until the voice in my head says it’s time, and then I’ll go and focus on what the next chapter looks like. But it’s hard to imagine life without Apple, because my life has been wrapped up in this company since 1998 it’s the overwhelming majority of my adult life, and so I love it.” He strongly implies that he’s really not looking to leave Apple in the near future, right? It’s just kind of like I’ll know when I know, I’ll just I’ll feel like it’s the right time, and I’ll go with the way that I feel at the time.

Kirk McElhearn 3:23
But you have to realize that one of the most valuable bits of information for investors would be to know when Tim Cook is going to be replaced. So they have to plan this out very skillfully, and maybe because he said all the voice and I’ll know when the voice in my head says it’s time, it means it’s going to be next week or sometime next year, and it might not be too far ahead. Anyone who gets advanced notice of this would either short Apple or long Apple, because you know what’s going to happen, that the stock is going to move one way or another when there’s a new CEO named I almost think that a company like Apple should name a co CEO to have two people in charge for a certain period before one leaves to smooth it over. But whatever happens, it’s not going to change the company that much. I think this company has its direction hard coded into everyone in the company, so anyone who’s up at the top of the company is already thinking more or less the same, both in a good way and a bad way. And I think a new CEO will change some things, but I don’t think it would change a lot.

Josh Long 4:29
Well, I think the biggest thing is, what’s Apple’s next big thing? Right? That’s what people have been asking the whole time that Tim Cook has been there. They introduced the Apple Watch, they introduced vision Pro, but not really a whole lot else. In terms of new product categories, they supposedly canceled the Apple Car project they had been working on internally and never said anything publicly about, you know, and we don’t really know kind of what the next big thing is for Apple, you know. We know they’re working on a bunch of things internally. They’re, they’re presumably. Working on a vision an Apple vision product, as opposed to the vision Pro, which is kind of the big, clunky, heavy headset thing, and you know, a bunch of different companies, including meta. Meta actually recently, on stage, showed a prototype of a product that’s more or less just glasses that can do a lot of the augmented reality kind of things that people want from this kind of a product without the clunkiness. So they’re not quite there yet. Apple’s working on stuff like that internally as well. Maybe that will be the next big thing, like, who really knows at this point? But that’s the thing. It’s like, people want to know, where is Apple going next? Or is Apple going to be putting out really innovative new tech, or are they just going to be kind of doing the same things that they’ve been doing for the past decade plus?

Kirk McElhearn 5:50
So the Home product that’s been rumored, and that’s probably true, because Mark German Apple’s designated leaker has been talking about this. It’s kind of like a HomePod with a screen if you live in a one room apartment. It’s kind of useful. If you have a house with many rooms, you’re going to buy one for every room. I think that’s a non starter. I think you’ve got a phone in your hand. Why do you need a HomePod with a screen right to get your family to gather around for the occasional FaceTime call on Thanksgiving? That doesn’t make any sense. I do want to mention one thing. You said that Apple hasn’t really come up with anything new. There is a product that’s incredibly popular that was born under Tim Cook’s leadership, AirPods, the whole AirPods line, AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max. They are hugely popular. In fact, when people are interviewed on TV news shows, and I often see this on the BBC, I’d say 15 or 20% of them are wearing AirPods for the interviews. So this is an incredibly popular product, but it’s not. It doesn’t make a lot of money. It’s not something that people need to upgrade often until they lose it. I bought my AirPods pro a little bit more than 200 pounds, but with a 40 pound gift card, they’re around 200 $250 for the AirPods Pro. And the there are cheaper models, so it is an incredibly popular product, but it’s not a money maker.

Josh Long 7:05
Well, that’s a fair point. I mean, AirPods are typically used with Apple products, right? Like you don’t buy AirPods to go use them with an Android phone or something.

Kirk McElhearn 7:13
And that’s the same problem with the Apple Watch.

Josh Long 7:16
Right? Exactly, by the way, since we’re talking about these accessory type products, Apple also did launch the AirTags. So it’s, it’s, you know, that’s another relatively recent Apple product, and it’s been pretty popular.

FBI’s concern over Chinese hacking prompts encryption advisory

Kirk McElhearn 7:29
And they recently updated their polishing cloth. So that’s enough. Tim Cook will leave when the voices in his head say it’s time to go. In the meantime, we’re waiting to see if Apple is going to come up with some really killer product segment. We want to turn 180 degrees and talk about some hackers. Apparently, there are Chinese hackers. This group goes under several names. The one that’s been used most in the news is salt typhoon, which is a name that Microsoft gave this group. It’s an advanced persistent threat group. These are the people playing the really big hacks. Different security companies have given it different names, and this is a problem. They should all is a problem. They should all agree on the names for these things they’ve gotten into phone networks, and telephone companies are having difficulty getting them out, which has even led to the FBI suggesting that people use encrypted messaging apps.

Josh Long 8:15
So apparently, there was a press call in November, and there was some reporting on it at the time, but now this is coming up again in the news cycle this week, and in this call, representatives of the FBI said that there have been some types of data that’s been accessible to these hackers, including such things as call records and even in some cases, live phone calls of some specific targets, and so this is kind of a potentially big deal, right? I mean, there’s a lot of intelligence that can be gathered from metadata, like call records. You can find out a lot about people and who they talk to, and make inferences and all kinds of things like that. So the FBI is basically saying, Now, if that matters to you, if you feel like that, there might be some sort of a safety concern, or maybe industrial espionage concern, or something like that, then you might want to use encrypted messaging platforms, which is really kind of funny, because the FBI historically has said, well, we want to break in. We want to break all the encryption and and be able to access all that stuff for ourselves. And now they’re like, Yeah, you probably should be using that if you don’t want the bad guys to get it. So in any case, we know that, of course, some of the encrypted messaging platforms that you can use could include things like iMessage. I don’t know that they necessarily specifically mentioned it on the call but, but Apple’s I message is one of those platforms that is into an encrypted and so you don’t need to worry about hackers intercepting that if they’ve infiltrated the phone networks.

Kirk McElhearn 9:53
Phone calls are problematic because obviously there’s no way to encrypt it unless you’ve got one of these special phones that the government uses you. Yeah, and you have the multiple platform problem of iPhone and Android, which means that not everyone necessarily has the same apps to make encrypted communication. So if you’re talking about presidential campaigns that were targeted, they’re just using the normal phone network because it’s the easiest way to talk to people, because you call someone, you don’t know if they have it, right? You’ve got someone’s phone number because you’ve been sending text messages. And when you’re making a phone call, you don’t take the time to say, Well, do you have I message? Do you have Signal? Do you have something else?

Josh Long 10:33
Right? And remember, on the Android side of things, they’re using RCS text messaging. Google has its own proprietary implementation of RCS that uses its own encryption. That’s not part of the RCS standard. Remember that in iOS 18, it is capable of RCS communications. This, this different text messaging standard that’s better than plain old text messaging. However, Apple’s implementation as of right now does not include this into an encrypted messaging back and forth with Android users, because Google’s got its own proprietary thing, and it’s not part of the RCS standard yet. So Apple’s working on trying to make that happen, but it just hasn’t happened yet.

Kirk McElhearn 11:18
And one platform is WhatsApp, which is capable of encrypted messaging, and WhatsApp, recently announced they’re going to drop support for some old iPhones next year in May 2025 now they’re kind of old. iPhone 5s iPhone six or six plus. These are pretty old. They can only run iOS 15, but there might still be people using these phones. So if you depend on WhatsApp for even non encrypted messaging, you won’t be able to use WhatsApp anymore on your phone. Please. If you have a phone that old, please don’t keep it. I mean, the iPhone six. We’re up to the iPhone 16. The iPhone six is not 10 generations later. It’s only nine, because it was never an iPhone nine. But still, that’s kind of old.

Josh Long 11:57
Matter of fact, not even iOS 15. These devices are stuck on iOS 12. So this is the 5s six and six plus are limited to iOS, whatever. The latest version of iOS 12 was 12.7 Yeah, which hasn’t gotten any security patches since January 2023, and even then, it’s only been a handful of cherry picked publicly exploited vulnerabilities, and it does not have patches for the vast majority of the security problems that have been patched in more recent versions of iOS. So if you’ve got one of these old devices, you really need to upgrade.

Current iPhone SE is officially over 1000 days old

Kirk McElhearn 12:33
Speaking of old phones, the iPhone SE, so that’s the smaller, cheaper phone is now over 1000 days old. Now there are rumors that there’s going to be a new one in the spring. But if you’re using an iPhone SE, or you can actually still buy the iPhone SE, can’t you?

Josh Long 12:47
There’s an SE third generation, yeah, that’s the one that’s over 1000 days old at this point, right?

Kirk McElhearn 12:53
So if you’re using one of these, it’s an old technology. It’s already a cheaper technology, so slower chips and everything, but it’s an old technology that you might want to think of upgrading. If you really like the SE, you might want to think of upgrading when the new one comes out. I know a lot of people do like the SE because it’s smaller. They don’t need the fancy features of the other iPhone models.

Josh Long 13:13
We should also point out here, if you have the original se, this is also one of those phones that is no longer getting security updates. It’s stuck on iOS 15.

Kirk McElhearn 13:22
That’s the one that’s 4000 days old,

Josh Long 13:25
Yeah, the iPhone SE, second generation and third generation are still getting security updates on iOS 18. However, I really don’t recommend buying the iPhone SE third generation right now, because it’s that out of date already, and we know that there’s another one very likely coming within the next like, say, three to four months. I would really recommend just waiting, according to the rumors that this is going to have face Id rather than the touch ID. I know that really matters to some people, but right now, this is the last iPhone that Apple’s still selling that has touch ID, and you’re gonna get not only face ID, but also Apple intelligence on the new fourth generation that we think is coming in the next four months or so.

Kirk McElhearn 14:09
Do we think it’s gonna get Apple intelligence? Would it have a fast enough chip? I guess, if it’s gonna be updated every three years, they have to do that. Okay, let’s take a break. When we come back, we’re gonna talk about some scams and some malware and all sorts of great stuff.

Voice Over 14:23
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Telegram CEO endorses child safety standards

Kirk McElhearn 15:35
Okay, we were talking about encrypted messaging earlier, and there’s one app that kind of likes to say they’re encrypted, but really isn’t, and that’s Telegram. Now we’re not going to go into all the details you can to use encrypted messaging if you know where to find the setting, which is eight menus down in the settings or something. A while ago, we talked about the CEO of Telegram who was arrested in France, and a lot of this was because Telegram is used by criminals and it’s used to exchange Child Sexual Abuse material and Well, I think a little bit of jail time got the CEO to change his tune, because he’s announced that Telegram is going to join a Child Safety Scheme, in other words, an organization that is trying to set up standards so these different apps can detect this sort of material.

Josh Long 16:20
Right? The BBC story that we’ll link to is light on technical details, but the organization is called the Internet Watch Foundation, or IWF. Apparently, they’re used by a lot of major online services to help them detect and remove this child sexual abuse material, CSAM, as it’s abbreviated, and prevent its spread. This is a good thing from a certain perspective. At the same time we again, we don’t know the technical details of this, so we don’t know whether this is potentially kind of compromising something else about the security of the app. But if you really care about encrypted messaging, I don’t recommend using Telegram anyway, because you do have to enable encryption per chat. It’s not on by default for any chat messages, so I don’t really recommend using Telegram anyway.

Scam-of-the-week

Kirk McElhearn 17:07
Okay, a quick scam warning. I got an email supposedly from x.com and I think, who’s x.com I don’t know what this is, and it says we’ve added a temporary label to your account, and it mentioned my specific handle, and it had my email address, and it says we have found that your account may contain spam or be engaging in other types of platform manipulation. And there’s a little button request review, obviously, it was a scam trying to get you to log into X, whatever that x thing is. The thing that immediately convinced me that it wasn’t legitimate was the big X above the text, it’s not the same x that’s used by Twitter, the logo. It’s just a plain character instead of that fancy character with the lines in it. Be careful about this sort of thing. There have been a bunch of scams like this. We talked last week about DocuSign phishing attempts, and I got another one today. This is relatively common, so be careful of this sort of thing, because it’s too easy when you’re busy to not pay attention to it and to click and to think that it’s going to be real. Well, what I found interesting is that the domain that’s used, I won’t mention it, is a domain that doesn’t exist. In other words, it’s a domain that probably existed because it has the name of a town and the name of a car brand in it, but the domain itself is just if you go to the root of the domain, the.com All you see is just a list of two folders. One of the folders is empty, and one has this particular scammy file, so it suggests that it’s a domain that expired, and we’ve warned about this in the past, that someone took over to be able to use for this kind of scam.

Josh Long 18:38
What I find interesting about this is that, first of all, they could have tricked you. They could have at least been a little bit more convincing if they had actually used an official logo. So in part, the reason why this wasn’t as successful as it might have been is that they didn’t quite do as good of a job as they could have done in disguising this phishing email as such, but the fact that they had your actual username for the platform, and they knew your email address is kind of interesting, which means they probably got that from some sort of database somewhere, maybe a leak of some kind. This could arguably be a targeted attack, or it might be one of those things where they got a big database and just sent this out to everybody, and they had a combination of an email address and their username on the platform.

Open source game engine Godot spreads malware

Kirk McElhearn 19:23
And in fact, I reported it to Google a couple of hours ago, and it’s still not blocked. So it has a sign in to x, and you put your email and username, and then it says next, and then there’s a forget password button, which does nothing. There’s don’t have an account sign up, and there’s no link. So basically, I’m just put a username some random characters. I’m going to click Next and I’m going to put a random password, log in and, oh, what do you know? I’m logged in? Oh, no, invalid password. Please log in again. It’s interesting because it didn’t look like a password. I don’t think they would have my combination of username and password. In any case, I have two factor authentication on stuff like that. But be careful if. Some of these things can look real and they can be dangerous. There’s a game engine called Godot, G, O, D, o, t, obviously, a reference to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and hackers are using this game engine to infect 1000s of PCs. What’s interesting is the maintainer of this is an open source game engine. The maintainer says, well, it’s not our problem. It’s got a scripting tool, and anyone can write scripts with any sort of thing. And this does raise the question of open source software, that anyone can take an alter and let’s say they’ve found a game that’s open source, and they’ve replaced the gaming engine with their version, and it’s easy to infect people. Now you won’t get a lot because this sort of thing can’t be distributed, you know, through Apple’s App Store or whatever. But this kind of open source stuff, we always say that open source is good, but it’s also pretty risky, isn’t it?

Josh Long 20:51
Well, it can be. I mean, certainly you can abuse any technology out there, right? I always say that any technology can be used for good or for evil. This is a case where some malicious actors have created some malware out of this scripting language that’s associated with this project. There have been reportedly 17,000 systems that have been infected in the past three months. What’s interesting about this and why it’s somewhat relevant to our audience, is that this can potentially be used to target gamers across all major platforms, including Mac OS and iOS, as well as Windows, Linux and Android. That’s what’s interesting about this, is that the way that this particular scripting language is designed, it can be used against multiple platforms, used against if you’re talking about malware, but used for good, you know, legitimate purposes, if you’re talking about actually using it as part of the game. As Kirk mentioned, one of the developers who maintains this engine has basically said, there’s all kinds of scripting languages, and somebody would have to go to a lot of trouble if they wanted to execute one of these scripts on a target system, because they would have to also bundle the whole language processing system with it, and so it kind of is more trouble than it’s probably worth.

Kirk McElhearn 22:10
But if they’ve infected 17,000 systems, and it’s certainly worth it to someone.

Josh Long 22:15
Right. Basically, the takeaway from this, the thing that we should tell our listeners at least, is be careful about where you get your games. Now, if you’re getting a game from the Apple App Store, it’s not going to be using this engine and the scripting language and all that kind of stuff, because I don’t think Apple would allow that in to the app store. You do need to be careful if you’re just downloading games from random websites. Well, I mean, you shouldn’t be doing that anyway, right? Like, because you don’t know if it’s going to include steel or malware, which it very likely could. That’s a very common thing these days. Just be really careful about wherever you’re getting your games or other apps from.

ChatGPT’s Stop List raises ethical questions

Kirk McElhearn 22:53
Don’t you miss the good old days when you could download stuff from websites or where you could get floppy disks from? Be mug with a bunch of free wear, and you didn’t have to worry. Yes, I mean, we worried, but not the same, because we had disinfectant on Mac, which was a free antivirus program. So interesting story has come to light in the past week, that certain names, if you mention them in chats with ChatGPT, will cause the software, the software, the chat bot, to stop basically saying, I’m unable to produce a response. And Ars Technica did some research, and they found five names, and it turns out that some of these people were involved in lawsuits against the company. So it looks like ChatGPT has a stop list that will automatically stop any conversation. And okay, it’s a sort of a parlor game to put a name and to show people that it can stop ChatGPT. But what’s going to happen in the future, when there’s more people who sue the companies and have to be blocked? And one of the names here is Brian hood, another one, David Faber, another one, David Meyer, these are not uncommon names, so let’s say you want to research someone like this. This seems to be, on the one hand, I guess they’re protecting themselves from ChatGPT saying something about these people, and since there’s a lawsuit, or have been lawsuits, they can use this as evidence. On the other hand, this can be limiting to just the whole ChatGPT system.

Josh Long 24:24
Well, where this can be a little bit weird is, you know, there can be multiple people named, for example, Jonathan Turley, like, what if you’re, you know, trying to find out some information about a different Jonathan Turley than the one that happened to be suing open AI, the company that makes ChatGPT, so that’s where this is kind of a little bit weird, but I get what they’re doing. They’re trying to protect themselves right from any further harm from these individuals, but that is a little bit awkward, and one can imagine that there could be ways that somebody could exploit something like this. For example. Let’s just say that maybe you as Tom Cruise want to make sure that nobody can get information on a particular name, and so you pretend that you have that name, and then you sue the company just to make sure that ChatGPT won’t be able to say anything about that particular name. So there’s some potential shenanigans that people could come up with related to this scheme.

A new Chrome feature checks a website’s “trustworthiness”

Kirk McElhearn 25:26
Okay, speaking of AI, Google has a new feature in Chrome that lets you, according to bleeping computer, quickly check website trustworthiness. You know, I don’t trust any of this stuff, because it’s like, this is a binary yes or no. Is this trustworthy? Because the article mentions things like Trustpilot and scam advisor and things like that. And, you know, we look to them to find out if a company is legit. I don’t want AI to be doing this, because this is the same AI. You mentioned the name Jonathan Turley. This is the same AI system that fabricated false claims about him, including a non existent sexual harassment scandal that cited a Washington Post article that never existed. Can I really trust AI to tell me if a website is trustworthy and if it’s not, do I sue open AI?

Josh Long 26:13
And this is a beta feature that Google is planning for a future public release of Chrome. Maybe this feature will won’t come to light, but typically what happens is that they put these sort of features in the Canary or developer versions of Chrome so that you can try out these features and and sort of they can figure out whether some of these might be problematic or fix some of the big problems with these sort of new features before they get out to the general public, maybe there will be enough feedback, or people will say, Yeah, I don’t think you really want to do this, and maybe they’ll hold off on actually shipping this. This is also related to some other AI enhancements that Google is planning for Chrome in an upcoming version they’re planning on adding to their enhanced protection feature to use AI to provide real time protection against dangerous sites downloads and extensions. So now they’re also planning to, evidently, use this as a way to sort of analyze whether a site that you’re visiting might be a scam based on sites like trust pilot, scam advisor and Google search results and things like that. So I don’t know I agree with you. I’m a little uncomfortable with this idea, because I’ve seen some of these sites mistakenly flag a page as malicious. I’ve also seen cases where a site was clearly malicious and these did not detect it at all. I’m a little hesitant to just say, Oh yeah, dude. You know this is definitely going to help people out. It may or may not be very helpful.

Apple releases iCloud passwords plugin for Firefox

Kirk McElhearn 27:43
Okay, one quick note, and this is something that came out while we’re recording. Apple is released an iCloud passwords add on for Firefox. So if you do use Firefox, then you’re going to want to use this to use your iCloud passwords.

Josh Long 27:55
Well, that’s really cool. I can’t think of a bad thing to say about that, certainly if you’re if you prefer to use Firefox. I know it’s a pretty small minority of people who are using Firefox these days. If you’re a Firefox user, wonderful thing to have. Very happy to see that.

Kirk McElhearn 28:09
One interesting note. In Mac Rumors’ article about this, it says it appears that it was originally created by a third party developer and later taken over and updated by Apple. Huh, that’s something Apple doesn’t do very often. Yeah.

Josh Long 28:20
Well, that’s true. I’ve never seen or heard of that happening with extensions in particular. So it does happen sometimes where another developer will buy out an extension that becomes popular, but not Apple, yeah? Well, yeah. Like, I’ve never heard of Apple doing that. So very fascinating to see that that might be the case here.

Kirk McElhearn 28:39
Okay, that’s enough for this week until next week. Josh, stay secure.

Josh Long 28:42
All right, stay secure.

Voice Over 28:46
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 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 [email protected] 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 →