Dan Kessler is the owner of MacMaven Consulting.
Macs are not immune to ransomware. The first functional Mac ransomware was found in the wild last year. A good backup strategy is critical if you’re hit with this type of malware. Mac ransomware will grow more sophisticated over time. With this in mind, here are a few tips: Assume that any connected backup drive…
Review updated below I’ll cut to the chase. DirecTV Now is a train wreck. AT&T had every opportunity to make this a great service, but apparently felt that holiday sales were more important than satisfied customers. In essence, I paid to become a beta tester of the service. Not cool AT&T, not cool. I’ve…
DirecTV Now is currently giving away an Apple TV (32 GB) when prepaying for three months of service. I took advantage of this offer. I’ve enjoyed the Apple TV 3 for a few years. While it’s not incredibly powerful and has relatively few channels, it has a fantastic user interface. It’s responsive and very simple…
Apple’s Profile Manager is an example of a Mobile Device Management (MDM) system. Despite the “mobile” designation, many MDM systems can manage desktop computers. The Profile Manager is no exception. It can be used to centrally configure and lock down Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs. While there are a huge number of MDM vendors for iOS devices,…
It came as a great surprise to me that Apple has reportedly disbanded its Airport engineering team. This is an unfortunate development, as the Airport and Time Capsule devices offered seamless interoperability with Macs and iOS devices. Configuration of Apple’s routers has always been a piece of cake using the Airport Utility. Anyone who has configured…
Apple published two articles about the state of portable home directories in Sierra: a knowledge base article about mobile user accounts and an institutional preparation guide for iOS 10 and Sierra. The takeaway is that portable home directories are no longer supported on Sierra. This means that a network home and its accompanying local home will no…
The Samsung Note 7 has been making headlines due to its exploding batteries. In fact, today Samsung officially stopped production of the model. While Apple hasn’t experienced such a spectacular PR nightmare, its batteries haven’t been immune to failure. Case in point: My iPhone 5S battery recently began to swell. I knew something was wrong when…
I noticed that NIST recently published the Draft Special Publication 800-179: Guide to Securing Apple OS X 10.10 Systems for IT Professionals. I’m looking forward to reading it. The public comment period is June 23 through August 15th, 2016. The authors are careful to note that the recommendations only apply to 10.10, Yosemite. (System Integrity Protection,…
While I’ve kept Flash updated religiously over the years, last month I finally reached the point where the plugin was adversely impacting my Mac Pro’s performance. So I uninstalled Flash. This rectified the stutters and I eliminated one of the Mac’s most vulnerability-plagued pieces of software. Here’s a list of vulnerabilities that have been discovered in Flash…
Intuit recently added online bill pay to Quicken for the Mac. Finally! I bought Quicken for the Mac 2016 without hesitation, as I can now avoid the daily chore of running Quicken for Windows in a virtual machine. There are several detailed reviews of the Mac 2016 product on the web, so I’ll just give you…