Posts Tagged
Security
We live in a world where protecting our privacy isn’t just a matter of principle. Letting your personal information get exposed can harm you financially if your credit card information is obtained, and your credit rating can be damaged if someone steals your identity. Your emails and chat messages can contain sensitive information that you want to ensure only go to their intended recipients.
Our computers hold abundant amounts of personal data that most of us would rather not let get into the wrong hands. You might be surprised to see just how many applications are constantly sending data out of your computer, and it is important to be sure that all that stuff is going to places you trust. Fortunately, there are apps that help us monitor what our computers are sending out, and allow us to selectively block transmissions. Here we are going to look at two excellent apps called Little Snitch and Hands Off that aim to do just that.
Our laptops are valuable devices. They connect us. Inform and entertain us. And yes, sometimes distract us. Dealing with a lost or stolen laptop is not typically a thought we ponder in our busy lives. The good news, there are some powerful tools out there to assist us in the recovery of a missing laptop. The better news, today we’ll take a look at Prey – a free, open-source laptop recovery system that you can begin using immediately.
The developers at preyproject.com make the claim that Prey just works. Let’s take a look at how Prey gets the job done.
Whether it’s at Starbucks, the mall or Motel 6, free WiFi hotspots are popping up everywhere. While you’re using those hotspots, you might unknowingly be giving away some seriously personal information to an opportunistic hacker or two, including your social network, email, and even your online banking account login credentials.
With personal information like that at risk, you might be tempted to stop using those free hotspots altogether, but an app called Cloak by Bourgeois Bits hopes to alleviate those risks by providing Mac users with a corporate grade VPN service built into a consumer level app. Read on to see if Cloak really is the perfect companion to public WiFi.
Our featured sponsor this week is SpyCam, the perfect utility for conducting private video surveillance with your Mac.
Security apps can be a pain to setup, but Spy Cam is so simple that anyone can use it. As soon as I opened up Spy Cam for the first time, I immediately knew how everything worked. You simply set the interval for how often you want Spy Cam to automatically record a movie using your Mac’s built-in camera and indicate how long each movie should be. From that point on, you can easily keep track of who is snooping around on your machine.
If you want to check up on your Mac from a remote location, Spy Cam has your back. It can easily be configured to save the video files to your Dropbox folder, making them accessible from anywhere you have an Internet connection.
Spy Cam is hands down one of the easiest ways I’ve seen to use your Mac for a little covert spying. At $9.99, it’s also much cheaper than many competing security apps (no monthly fees, just download the app and use it forever).
Go Get It!
Go grab Spy Cam now and start keeping a closer watch on your Mac or even your home. Anything that you can point your Mac’s camera at, you can record. Spy Cam can was just released on the Mac App Store so be sure to cruise over and check it out.
Today’s discussion is a classic one: are Macs really impervious to the malware threats so rampant on PCs? Due to the rapidly changing nature of technology and the ever-increasing acceptance of Macs, this is a question that needs to be periodically revisited.
We’ve recently seen Apple’s bulletproof security claims become quite tarnished in light of threats such as MAC Defender. Read on to see if you should be concerned.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of a tried-and-tested backup solution. One that ensures all your data will be safe – whether you suffer a simple hard drive failure, or your house burns down. This type of system gives you immense peace of mind, and removes that guilty feeling in your subconscious caused by not backing up.
Today I’m going to walk through a few options for creating what I would consider to be an “ideal” backup solution for the Mac. This is by no means the only way to handle the safety of your data, but one that’s particularly robust and cost-effective.
Last summer, my MacBook was stolen. It had no protection, no password, no data encrypted, and the thief had access to all of my emails through Mail.app. I even found out that the thief, or the subsequent buyer of my beautiful Macbook, had been using my Instapaper account to bookmark his own webpages! (I have changed my password since).
After that horrible experience was over and I had my new Macbook, some of the first things that I did with it were increase its security, and look into theft-recovery apps.
Anti-theft apps, or theft-recovery apps, provide you with useful information, like location and IP address, once your computer gets lost or stolen. Some even give you access to your computer’s webcam, and a few take care of the whole recovery process of your Mac.
Keep on reading to see some of our favorite apps!
Do you use a single password online? Have you have been using a handful of passwords for several years across any number of services? Or worst of all, do you rely on words that are found in the dictionary? Increasingly, these scenarios can not only put your personal information at risk, but they can endanger the information of your friends, employers and trusted network connections.
The solution to these problems is to use a different, hard-to-remember, complicated password for each website, service, or hardware device that you have access to. KeePassX is an advanced password manager for OSX that focuses on security and ease of use. For many I.T. professionals, KeePassX is an ubiquitous tool that allows free and open movement between secure services and devices. Created by Dominik Reichl, the open source KeePassX is the Mac version of similarly named KeePass for Windows.
Read on to find out how KeePassX improves on standard OS X password managing tools and why this free software is important.
Slowly but surely, awareness about backing up computer data is on the rise. Much of this attention toward backup comes from the recent crop of cloud based storage solutions. The problem with these online storage options is the unavailability of options to backup data over your own network or external drive. There’s also the time it takes to download data from remote servers when you need to restore.
Twin bridges that gap. Nowadays—especially if you’re a freelancer—there is a very high probability of having a web server for running your own website/blog, so why pay an additional monthly subscription for storage?
And in the case of small and medium businesses, there’s likely to be a network storage device or a bunch of RAID servers to use for your backup.
After the break, let us take look how Twin can help us back up data efficiently within our existing storage infrastructure.
There’s a good chance that you’ve made a significant investment in the applications on your Mac – if not in their purchase cost, certainly in the time you’ve invested making sure you’ve got the right apps to suit the way you work.
What would happen if you had to reinstall OS X or just switch to a new computer? Could you easily find your software registration serial numbers and reinstall your favorite collection of apps?
AppShelf aims to help you answer those questions with a ‘yes’ by keeping a list of all your software registration information in a central place, with the serial numbers or license files you need to reinstall if the worst happens.
