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Apple yesterday issued an emergency security update for the Mac, patching the same trio of vulnerabilities the company fixed last week on the iPhone. According to one of the groups that first revealed the flaws, the vulnerabilities could have been "weaponized" for use against OS X, the Mac's operating system. The out-of-band update was aimed at OS X El Capitan (aka 10.11) and Yosemite (10.10), the 2015 and 2014 editions, respectively. Older versions, including 2014's OS X Mavericks, went unmatched: Apple is nearing the release of its annual Mac operating system upgrade and thus the end of support for...

Hot on the heels of news that OS X topped the vulnerabilities charts in April comes Dr. Web's virus activity review for May which shows increasing quantities of adware and unwanted applications targeting the Apple operating system. The company reports several programs aimed at OS X that either install adware, install other applications or inject JavaScript code into webpages. Adware.Mac.InstallCore.1 cannot only install unwanted programs on the user's computer but also change the browser home page and the search engine used by default. The program incorporates debugging functions too -- once launched, it scans the system for the presence of...

Microsoft is planning to open source the full server-side .NET core stack and to take that open-sourced .NET core to Linux and Mac OS X, alongside Windows.Microsoft officials announced the company's latest .NET programming-model plans on the opening day of the Connect(); developer-focused event on November 12.In April 2014, Microsoft announced plans to open source a number of its developer technologies, including ASP.NET, the Roslyn .NET compiler platform, the .NET Micro Framework, .NET Rx and the VB and C# programming languages. Microsoft officials said they planned to make these technologies available via a newly created .Net Foundation.Today, the company is adding...

Apple said Thursday that its mobile, desktop and Web services weren’t affected by a major flaw in a set of security software used by hundreds of thousands of websites. The flaw, codenamed “Heartbleed” and first reported by Web security firm Codenomicon, was discovered in a technology called “OpenSSL” — a set of encryption software used by Web companies to safeguard user information. Sites that use OpenSSL will display a small “lock” icon in the top left-hand corner of your Web browser’s address bar (though not all sites showing this lock use OpenSSL); the technology is used on more than two-thirds...

TAMPA — Every year on every NFL team, the Turk nervously ambles next to players in the locker room, dorm room or cafeteria, his role a designated dream killer whose only job is to signal the death knell to somebody's career. He delivers two messages: The coach wants to see you, and bring your playbook. Well, never again in Tampa Bay. Instead, he'll ask them to bring their iPad. That's because rather than producing thick periodicals the size of the Yellow Pages, the Bucs have downloaded their playbooks on iPad 2s and distributed them to each of their 90 players....

A company that makes password recovery tools has released one that can snatch passwords from a locked or sleeping Macintosh running Mac OS X Lion by plugging another computer into the Mac's FireWire port. The attack technique is several years old and the only way to defend against it is to turn the Mac off.

RUSH: I'm using it and I love it. I'm using a beta of the new Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, the new operating system. It's fabulous, Snerdley. The things they've done in the mail app are just fabulous. I tell you what they've done. They've brought so much of the mobile operating system from the iPhone and the iPad over to the computer, it's... (interruption) Oh, no, I have a developer release. I'm an official registered developer out there. I'm one of the testers here. Everything aboveboard. The latest is it's gonna release via the Mac App Store, not DVD....

Microsoft's past operating system woes might have some people living in the past While many computer lovers eagerly await the arrival of Windows 8 and Mac OS X Lion, a massive segment of users takes a decidedly slower approach when it comes to embracing new operating systems. According to an uber-detailed infographic by blog Manolution, 40.7% of users still run Windows XP on their computers. XP, which was released way back in October 2001, has since been succeeded by both the not-so-well-received Windows Vista, as well as Windows 7. In that same time frame, a half-dozen new versions of Apple's...

A recent phishing scam has targeted Mac users by redirecting them from legitimate websites to fake websites which tell them that their computer is infected with a virus. The user is then offered Mac Defender "anti-virus" software to solve the issue. This “anti-virus” software is malware (i.e. malicious software). Its ultimate goal is to get the user's credit card information which may be used for fraudulent purposes. The most common names for this malware are MacDefender, MacProtector and MacSecurity.

The vulnerability is a variant of an issue raised last summer. Proof of concept exploit code was posted today by a security researcher at SecurityReason to demonstrate a vulnerability in versions 10.5 and 10.6 of Apple's Mac OS X operating system. The vulnerability is a potential buffer overflow error arising from the use of the strtod function Mac OS X's underlying Unix code. It was first reported by researcher Maksymilian Arciemowicz last June. SecurityReason's advisory describes a flaw in the libc/gdtoa code in OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and MacOS X, as well as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and other Mozilla software,...

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements , but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have...

Parallels to make switching to the Mac easier, safe and painless August 24, 2009 by Dean Takahashi In the Windows vs. Mac war, we are at a crossroads. Apple is launching its Snow Leopard version of the Mac operating system on Friday at the low price of $29. Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system will launch in October with the primary aim of fixing the problems created by Windows Vista. There has never been a better time to switch to the Mac. Parallels, which makes software so you can run Windows or Mac software on the same machine and use them...

Intego Spots Malware Blocker in Snow Leopard August 25th, 2009 at 5:40 PM by Bryan Chaffin Snow Leopard contains a malware blocker, according to Mac antivirus software developer Intego. The company posted a screenshot of a warning dialog box on its blog that it said was from Snow Leopard, the Mac OS X 10.6 upgrade Apple is shipping on Friday. "We're not sure yet exactly how this works," the firm wrote, "but the above screen shot shows this feature working with a download made via Safari, detecting a version of the RSPlug Trojan horse in a downloaded disk image." If...

GROKLAW’S EXCELLENT TAKE ON THE RECENT PSYSTAR SHENANIGANS Monday, 24 August 2009 A great article on Groklaw about the Apple/Psystar case taking a “darker turn”. Even if you just read up to Psystar’s two reproduced letters, it’s a somehwat long post, but it’s excellent. The following quote struck me the most: I am starting to wonder, are weirdo lawsuits involving companies with nothing much to lose and claims and defenses that seem doomed from the start going to happen to *all* of Microsoft’s competitors?… Every tech site on the planet is writing about Apple and Psystar, but in my view...

MacRumors has received a set of images claimed to be the retail packaging and disc for Apple's forthcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard. If the images, which appear to depict the Portuguese version of Snow Leopard, are in fact authentic, it would mean that Snow Leopard discs are already in mass production. "The world's most advanced operating system. Perfectly optimized." Multiple sources claimed earlier this week that Build 10A432 had been designated "Golden Master", meaning that it was considered the final version to be sent to manufacturing for public release. Several sources have also claimed that Apple may be releasing...

Psystar can argue Apple abused copyright laws, judge rulesA federal judge last week ruled that Psystar Corp. can continue its countersuit against Apple Inc., giving the Mac clone maker a rare win in its seven-month-old battle with Apple. He also hinted that if Psystar proves its allegations, others may then be free to sell computers with Mac OS X already installed. In an order signed on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup gave Psystar the go-ahead to amend its lawsuit against Apple. According to Alsup, Psystar may change that countersuit, which originally accused Apple of breaking antitrust laws, to...

Excerpt - With the 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) beginning next week, MacRumors provides this Rumor Roundup as a summary of major rumors circulating around the Mac Web before the big event (previous roundups: 2007, 2006). The 3G iPhone The 3G iPhone will be announced at WWDC 2008. There really can be no doubt. It's certainly been no secret that the iPhone will eventually adopt 3G technology. When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone in January 2007, he specifically said (video clip) that Apple plans on making "3G phones and all sorts of amazing things in the future". Fast forward...

Breaking: Exclusive leaked pics of the iPhone 2! Thinner design? Check! Different colors? Check! Video chatting? Check and check! Written by Matt HickeyJune 6th, 2008Read 6187 times171 Comments It wasn’t long ago that my inbox was full of screen caps from an image editing program of a new iPod, it was a fat yet small iPod that we now know as the 3rd gen Nano. We posted the photos and were later told by Apple’s legal team to take them down.A similar tipster tonight has very generously given us these pics of the iPhone 2, or iPhone 3G as...

Windows Vista, One Bad Year Later A year since the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft is cringing at the poor sales of the new operating system. It was initially touted as a landmark new development to reinvigorate the IT industry, prompting expectations of wide-ranging “Vista effects.” Instead, Apple’s new operating system, which now also works on PCs, is stealing the thunder. Microsoft has hurriedly responded by developing a new version of the old XP. ◆ Windows Vista flops According to market researcher Net Applications, Apple is enjoying the largest-ever share in the global operating system market with Leopard, the...

The 10.5.1 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac. For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306907. For detailed information on security updates, please visit this website: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798.