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I guess you could say I started cheating on Windows back in October of 2010. That’s when Apple debuted the revamped MacBook Air. For the first time, I could resume working almost as soon as I flipped the lid on a laptop, thanks to the way the notebook leveraged its flash memory. (Intel and Ultrabook makers wouldn’t offer a similar instant-on experience until a year later.) The Air was a work of art, but it didn’t feel complete until OS X Lion arrived last year. With key time-saving features like Auto Save and Mission Control for faster multitasking, I started...

Update – July 25, 2012 10:30AM PDT This threat may run on Leopard 10.5, but it has a tendency to crash. It does not run on the new Mountain Lion 10.8. _______ Intego has discovered a new Trojan called OSX/Crisis. This threat is a dropper which creates a backdoor when it’s run. It installs silently, without requiring a password, and works only in OSX versions 10.6 and 10.7 – Snow Leopard and Lion. The Trojan preserves itself against reboots, so it will continue to run until it’s removed. Depending on whether or not the dropper runs on a user...

The half-a-trillion dollar company finally admits that its software isn't bulletproof.

Here Come The OS Class Wars: Orbitz Finds Mac Users Spend More On Hotels Than Their PC Counterparts Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/25/2012 20:45 -0400 In a finding that many have subliminally known about for years, but never been actually proven, yet is still quite shocking, the WSJ is reporting that tourism portal Orbitz "has found that people who use Apple Inc.'s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see." Which is not really surprising:...

Well, I'm clearly approaching desperation, or I wouldn't be posting something like this. OTOH, if help doesn't appear on FR, it might not be had anywhere. So here's the situation: I installed a brandy-new Cisco router (E1200) for a client who uses an ancient Macbook. Many pages load fine but Google -- the one that matters for her because she uses Gmail -- times out or takes many minutes to load. It's not unheard of -- I've found it brought up on different help forums but there seems to be no consensus on the fix and, disappointingly, no accountability whatsoever...

How do you become a business titan that treats employees like garbage, creates products intended to be monopolies, charges excessive prices that result in outrageous profits, practices significant tax avoidance, and yet not get pilloried (on the contrary, become deified) by the anti-business media? It’s simple; you are Steve Jobs and you are just too cool to criticize. There’s no doubt that Steve Jobs was a major player in the development of the personal computer, transformed the animation business, and developed products in the last decade of his life that changed our culture and society. His finest quality was the...

Contrary to recent reports, the worldwide botnet of Macs infected with the Flashback malware has remained relatively steady in size, the Russian security vendor Dr. Web said over the weekend. Dr. Web discovered the botnet -- which it calls BackDoor.Flashback.39 -- on April 4. It claims that more than 817,000 bots have connected to the botnet thus far, and that an average of 550,000 infected machines are interacting with a command-and-control server each day.

In a challenge to the prevailing belief that Apple computers are immune to the sort of cyberattacks that plague WIndows-based machines, research firm Sophos has released a study claiming that one in five Macs have malware. The report, released on Tuesday, is based on a “100,000-strong snapshot” of the millions of Macs that downloaded Sophos’s free Mac antivirus software. The study found that 20% of Macs were carrying one or more instances of Windows malware. Such malware doesn’t cause symptoms unless the Mac owners run Windows on their machines, but it can be spread to others. However, this doesn’t appear...

Here we go again. Kaspersky Lab security researcher Costin Raiu has discovered another Mac OS X Trojan. Dubbed Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a (or just SabPub, for short), the malware uses Java exploits to infect a Mac, connect to a remote Web site, and wait for instructions that include taking screenshots of the user's Mac and executing commands. "The Java exploits appear to be pretty standard, however, (and) they have been obfuscated using ZelixKlassMaster, a flexible and quite powerful Java obfuscator," Raiu wrote on the Securelist blog. "This was obviously done in order to avoid detection from anti-malware products." Related stories Raiu's discovery comes...

An investigation by Dr Web suggests that about 600,000 Macs have the malware - potentially allowing them to be hijacked and used as a "botnet". It says that more than half that number are in the US. Flashback was first detected last September when anti-virus researchers flagged software masquerading itself as a Flash Player update. Once downloaded it deactivated some of the computer's security software. Remote control "By introducing the code criminals are potentially able to control the machine," the firm's chief executive Boris Sharov told the BBC. "We stress the word potential as we have never seen any malicious...

More than 600,000 Macs have been infected with a new version of the Flashback Trojan horse that's being installed on people's computers with the help of Java exploits, security researchers from Russian antivirus vendor Doctor Web said on Wednesday. Flashback is a family of Mac OS malware that appeared in September 2011. Older Flashback versions relied on social engineering tricks to infect computers, but the latest variants are distributed via Java exploits that don't require user interaction. On Tuesday, Apple released a Java update in order to address a critical vulnerability that's being exploited to infect Mac computers with the...

We are new to apple/macs, and our Lightroom software has gone a bit glitchy. Apparently I have the dreaded beach ball spiral of death or something like that. When we try to edit photos we get this beach ball spiral symbol in our software window. It almost acts like it needs reinstalling but some blogs I've read said that does not work. Any suggestions? Thanks.

SNIPPET: "CHANTING fundamentalist bile, extremist Abu Jibreel was on the front line battling police officers during a mock "funeral" for Osama Bin Laden. With his beard and flowing robes, the follower of hate preacher Anjem Choudary was happy to tell anyone who would listen that he wants to bring down democracy..." SNIPPET: "The Sun can reveal that the 39-year-old Muslim convert was born Paul Steven Mellor in Cheshire." SNIPPET: "He is campaigning for Sharia law and self-governing Muslim "states" to be established in Britain." SNIPPET: "Choudary gloated: "We have a former British Army soldier in our organisation. Next we want...

Quote: homeland.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-hearing-jihadist-use-social-media-how-prevent-terrorism-and-preserve-innovation Subcommittee Hearing: Jihadist Use of Social Media - How to Prevent Terrorism and Preserve Innovation Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence | 311 Cannon House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 | Dec 6, 2011 2:00pm On Tuesday, December 6, 2011 the Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence will hold a hearing entitled "Jihadist Use of Social Media - How to Prevent Terrorism and Preserve Innovation." The Committee will meet at 2:00 p.m. in 311 Cannon House Office Building. Witnesses Mr. Evan F. Kohlmann Flashpoint Global Partners Mr. William McCants Analyst Analyst for the Center for Naval...

LONDON (Reuters) - Police said they had made more than 20 arrests at a demonstration outside the U.S. embassy in London on Friday. Twenty people had been held on suspicion of being members of a banned group while another two were detained for obstruction and violent disorder.

An extremist Muslim group who burned poppies have been formally banned by the state amid fears they were planning a 'Hell for Heroes' outrage today. Members of Muslims Against Crusades had pledged to interrupt today's Armistice Day two-minute silence with a 'surprise'. In response, Home Secretary Theresa May announced yesterday that MAC would be made a proscribed terrorist group. This means that membership of the group, holding meetings or wearing clothing or 'articles' to show support for the organisation are now criminal offences punishable by up to ten years in jail. Last night police were poised to arrest any activists...

'The home secretary is banning Muslims Against Crusades (MAC), a group that planned an anti-Armistice Day protest. It had wanted to repeat a demonstration held last year, when it burned poppies near London's Albert Hall. Theresa May's order will make membership or support of MAC a criminal offence. It is closely linked to seven other previously-banned groups. The organisation, now dissolved, said "the call for Islam will never be silenced by any ban or proscription". Mrs May said she was satisfied that Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) was "simply another name for an organisation already proscribed under a number of names"....

SNIPPET: "British Jihadi Anjem Choudary Tweets On March 19, 2011, British jihadi Anjem Choudary, spokesman for the banned Islam4UK organization, co-founder of Al-Muhajiroun, and spiritual advisor to the UK Islamist group Muslims Against Crusades (MAC),[18] launched a Twitter account and began tweeting. MAC made headlines last week for threatening a British MP who subsequently called on their activities to be closely monitored by law enforcement.[19] According to his Twitter account, Choudary is "a Muslim who believes that Islam is something we must believe in (Tawheed), live by (Shari'ah) and struggle and sacrifice for (by way of Daw'ah and Jihad)."[20] In...

The last Macintosh trojan that we reported on was named Flashback.C, and would execute after you opened a .dmg file posing to be Adobe Flash player. It would install and disable your Apple Anti-Malware system. If you had LittleSnitch installed, the trojan would not execute, instead automatically delete itself. Now, another Macintosh trojan is on the loose. This trojan was originally made for Linux systems, but was ported to Mac OS by a couple of hackers. It's called OSX/Tsnunami.A and it uses your computer and internet connection to attack Web Sites. The Linux build of the trojan was known as...

San Francisco - Steve Jobs told his biographer that he had cracked the problem of creating an effective interactive television, fueling rumours that Apple will release such a device next year. Jobs made the comments to author Walter Isaacson, whose portrait of the technology visionary was released Monday. Titled simply Steve Jobs, the book is the only biography authorized by the Apple co-founder, who granted Isaacson some 40 interviews to outline the parameters of his life from his early years as an adopted child to his last months, as he raced to finish the development of products when he knew...