A few months ago, news broke about the latest massive data breach, this time from National Public Data. This company collects vast amounts of personal data about individuals from public data sources, including addresses, employment history, criminal records, and Social Security numbers. NPD then sells access to that data to employers conducting background checks, landlords…
Are you planning to upgrade to a new iPhone 16? It’s exciting, we know, but it’s best to purposely proceed when setting up your new iPhone to avoid causing yourself headaches. Follow these instructions when you’re ready to transfer your data—and, for many people, much of your digital life—to the new iPhone. Apple also has…
We’ve written about how Apple-only companies can protect themselves from ransomware (strong security, isolated backups, monitoring software). Still, realistically, it’s primarily a threat to Windows and Linux computers. If you, or anyone you know, is targeted by ransomware, look to the No More Ransom website, developed by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre and the Dutch police,…
When you connect to a public Wi-Fi network at places like airports, hotels, coffee shops, or schools, you might encounter a captive portal login page that you need to interact with to gain access to the network. This page might ask for login credentials, your name, or require you to agree to the terms of…
In the Apple world, the account that controls access to all your Apple-related online services is the Apple ID. Buying apps from the App Store, putting photos in iCloud Photos, and sharing data between iCloud-enabled apps—all these actions rely on your Apple ID. If you’re a regular Apple user, you have an Apple ID associated…
Apple’s iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer flexible options for managing app notifications. You can choose whether an app should show no notifications, temporary banners, or persistent alerts. To adjust these settings, navigate to Settings > Notifications on iOS and iPadOS, or System Settings > Notifications on macOS. Temporary banners appear briefly and then disappear, making…
Apple’s prices for Thunderbolt, USB-C, and Lightning cables often seem unnecessarily high. $69 for a Thunderbolt 4 cable or $19 for a simple USB-C to Lightning cable? Unfortunately, when it comes to cables, you often get what you pay for. Happily, other reputable hardware manufacturers like Anker, Belkin, and OWC sell quality cables for less…
A side effect of the pandemic is that online videoconferencing improved drastically. Video calls happened before 2020, but videoconferencing wasn’t an everyday activity for most people. Now, with many people working remotely or in a hybrid model, it’s a fact of business life. To support videoconferencing tools, Apple has extended macOS’s basic webcam and microphone…
QR codes, those square, blocky codes you scan with your iPhone’s camera to load a Web page, have become ubiquitous. So much so that we seldom pause before scanning any QR code we see. But if you think about it, that’s the same as clicking random links in emails or texts, which is a terrible…
In the early days of the Internet, saving bandwidth was crucial due to slow modems. Watching images load on web pages and waiting for large email attachments was common. Today, with average Internet download speeds in the US nearing 250 megabits per second, these issues are largely behind us. Most web pages load instantly, emails…