Macworld UKApril 2017的目錄

A new file-encrypting ransomware program for macOS is being distributed through BitTorrent websites, and users who fall victim to it won’t be able to recover their files, even if they pay. Crypto ransomware programs for macOS are rare. This is the second such threat found in the wild so far, and it’s a poorly designed one. The program was named OSX/Filecoder.E by the malware researchers from antivirus vendor ESET who found it. OSX/Filecoder.E masquerades as a cracking tool for commercial software like Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Microsoft Office for Mac and is being distributed as a BitTorrent download. It is written in Apple’s Swift programming language by what appears to be an inexperienced developer, judging from the many mistakes made in its implementation. The application installer is not signed…

Ever since the release of the new MacBook Pro, which introduced two features never before seen on the Mac – namely the Touch ID sensor and the Touch Bar – it’s been an open question. When will those features go from being available only on the 13- and 15in MacBook Pro, and move across the entire Mac product line? It’s probably only a matter of time before the Touch Bar and Touch ID sensor crop up on the MacBook, if for no other reason than it’s a laptop and Apple has already showed how to integrate those features into a laptop. (But given how svelte the MacBook is, it might take a while.) The real question is on the desktop. Yes, it’s true that roughly two-thirds of the Macs Apple…

I need Apple advice,” my sister texted me recently. “I got a message that my computer is blocked due to an unexpected error. It gives me a number to call to fix it. Does that sound legit?” No. It did not sound legit. What’s worse, the error message gave her an 0800 number to call, which she did, and the person on the other end of the line offered to share her screen and tried to sell her £200 in security software. That was the point at which her instincts kicked in and she got off the call and asked me for help. The culprit in all this was a pop-up message in Safari, which read in part: “Your Apple Computer has been blocked. Mac iOS alert! System might be…

Need something fresh to play on your Mac? Luckily, the past month brought a pretty compelling stack of fresh game releases, and we’ve picked 10 that should absolutely be on your radar. Torment: Tides of Numenera is arguably the month’s most anticipated release, as the long-awaited spiritual successor to isometric role-playing classic Planescape Torment is finally here. Other noteworthy releases include indie gem Night in the Woods, naval battler and pirate simulator Blackwake, and the free The Long War 2 mod for XCOM 2, but we have plenty more options. 1. Torment: Tides of Numenera Price: £34.99 from Steam ( tinyurl.com/jsdhtxb ) Among PC role-playing fans, 1999’s Planescape: Torment is regarded as one of the most daring and beloved games of all time, and it became playable on…

With another quarter of falling iPad sales, there’s a lot of talk these days about what’s up with the device. While Apple still sells more than twice as many iPads per quarter as it does Macs, the Mac business generates more revenue and is more stable than the iPad, which has shown year-over-year sales declines for 14 of Apple’s latest 15 financial quarters. Despite a larger installed base than the Mac, customer-satisfaction scores that are “through the roof” (to use Tim Cook’s phrase), dominance in the high-end tablet market, and increasing sales to first-time iPad buyers, its lack of sales momentum leads to a lot of scepticism about its future. We do, however, feel that the iPad, or something very much like it, will be a huge part of the…

I recently spent some time with a couple of friends who both have Windows laptops and I found myself experiencing a hitherto unfamiliar feeling while watching them use their computers: envy. Let’s be clear: I’m not talking envy for Windows. Throughout my life, I’ve spent a not inconsiderable amount of time untangling problems created by Microsoft’s operating system, and I have no desire to switch from macOS. No, what drew my eye was one specific hardware feature that their laptops – a Microsoft Surface Book and a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga – shared: a touchscreen. Look, I know. I know that touchscreen notebooks are supposed to be toaster-fridges, hybrids that aren’t as good as either a full-blown touch-based device like the iPad or a traditional laptop. But as I watched…

In 2011, Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed the Cupertino City Council plans for his company’s new campus. Six years later, Apple Park is set to open. Employees will begin the process of moving to the new campus in April, and in six months more than 12,000 people will work in Apple Park. Jobs conceived of the 2.8 million square ft building, which evokes a flying saucer with panels of curved glass, and Apple will honor its late founder’s memory with a 1,000-seat auditorium named Steve Jobs Theater. Apple Park sits on 175 acres of land designed to be part nature refuge, part centre for collaboration and creativity. The campus replaces Hewlett-Packard’s concrete jungle with 9,000 trees, two miles of trails for employees to walk and run on, plus an orchard,…

Microsoft has released Touch Bar support to all Office for Mac users. This gives the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps new contextual capabilities on the new MacBook Pro. Microsoft first announced Touch Bar support in October, and a preview was released to members of the Office Insider program earlier this month. MacBook Pro users can access these features by going to Help > Check for updates in any of their Office for Mac apps. The public version includes new capabilities for Office users. In Word, you can use the Touch Bar to insert photos, hyperlinks, or comments in your document. In PowerPoint, the Touch Bar gets ‘view-specific controls’ to present a slideshow. Microsoft also added a new slider to the Touch Bar so you can rotate an object – like…

Spring is just around the corner, which means we’re likely getting close to another Apple event – and the rumour mill is starting to churn. As first spotted by MacRumors, Japanese site Mac Otakara recently claimed that Apple will host an event in March with its new iPad Pro line-up in the starring role. From now until then, rumours about that line-up will swirl. What’s the latest? The rumour: Previously, we’ve heard that Apple will expand the iPad Pro to four sizes, including a 7.9in version (the same size as the iPad mini), the current 9.7- and 12.9in options, and a new 10.5in size. Plausible? Since 10.5in iPad Pro is rumoured to have pretty major design changes, a later ship date could be a necessary evil. As MacRumors points out,…

What happens when someone turns off your heat in the middle of winter, then demands £1,000 to turn it back on? Or even holds a small city’s power for ransom? Those kinds of attacks to personal, corporate, and infrastructure technology were among the top concerns for security experts from the SANS Institute, who spoke during the recent RSA conference in San Francisco. Some of these threats target consumers directly, but even the ones that target corporations could eventually ‘filter down’ to consumers, though the effects might not be felt for some time. The seven deadly attacks Here are the seven most dangerous attack vectors, according to SANS, and what, if anything, you can do about them: 1. Ransomware Ransomware surfaced more than 20 years ago, but it has since evolved…

Lithium-ion batteries removed from laptops can still be dangerous In one of the Slack teams we’re in, a colleague posted a photo of a battery he removed from a MacBook Air. He replaced the battery just fine, but one of the cells looked like it had been inflated like a balloon. We warned him to take care, and in the resulting discussion, realized it’s not common knowledge that it’s not just a defectively designed Samsung Note7 battery that can cause fires and damage. If you believe the battery in your phone, tablet, or laptop has started to expand, unplug the device immediately if it’s plugged in, and turn it off if at all possible. Don’t charge or use it at all, because lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that are bulging have already…

It’s never too early to start speculating about the next iPhone, even if it’s not due out for more than six months. We’ve got the usual ‘edge-to-edge display’ and ‘virtual Home button’ rumours that seem to circulate about every iPhone, but we’ve also noticed reports congregating in another area lately: biometric security. The iPhone has, of course, offered biometric security in the form of Touch ID since the iPhone 5s was released in 2013. That technology expanded to the iPad and, more recently, to the MacBook Pro. But in recent weeks we’ve seen a few suggestions that new technologies might supplement – or replace – Touch ID in the upcoming iPhone. Is that likely, or wishful thinking? Iris scanning It’s a staple of science fiction: you put your eye up…

Why use one processor when two will do? Bloomberg recently reported that Apple has developed an ARM-based chip that it will integrate into future Macs to handle some of the low-power responsibilities, thus taking pressure off the main, more power-hungry Intel processor. Here’s the thing: this multipronged approach is nothing new to Apple. And while I do believe that Apple is investigating building computers based solely on the same type of ARM architecture it uses in its iOS devices, this latest report doesn’t necessarily draw a straight line to that future. After all, the Touch Bar and Touch ID sensor in the new MacBook Pro already rely on an ARM chipped dubbed the T1. Mainly, it’s another example of Apple mixing and matching technologies where appropriate so that it always…

In a departure from the norm, Apple just announced the dates and location of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. This year, the event will be at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center instead of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, though Apple is keeping its usual June time slot. The company typically holds off on revealing WWDC details until much closer to the event, but Apple executives wanted to give developers plenty of time to make travel arrangements, according to The Loop. The convention centre in San Jose is comparable in size to Moscone and will still be able to fit about 5,000 developers and 1,000 engineers, who flock to WWDC every year to learn about Apple’s latest updates to iOS, macOS, and now watchOS and tvOS, along with efforts like HealthKit, CareKit,…

Apple has overtaken Samsung in smartphone sales for the first time in two years, but don’t count on it staying ahead for long. The Korean firm sold 76.8 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, giving it a market share of 17.8 percent, but it was just beaten by Apple, which sold 77 million iPhones for a 17.9 percent share, according to figures from Gartner. The fourth quarter is usually a strong one for Apple, boosted by holiday sales of the new generation of iPhones it releases each September, said Anshul Gupta, a research director at Gartner. For Samsung, though, 2016 ended particularly badly, dominated by the fiasco around the recall of its incendiary Galaxy Note7. Handsets such as the Note7 could have accounted for 10- to 15 percent of Samsung’s…

Read professional reviews of Apple’s new MacBook Pro line-up, and you’ll come away thinking the new laptops have great battery life. Dive into a customer forum, though, and the upshot will be exactly the opposite: the new MacBook Pros have ‘terrible’ battery life. That characterization came from user yillbs on MacRumors.com. “I don’t think anyone can convince me that this thing isn’t just flat out the worst battery life ever on a MacBook,” yillbs wrote, clearly frustrated. “I’ve been defending it like mad, but at this point... how can you? 4.42 hours is just bad.” User Happypuppy was anything but. “Not happy with the battery either. I was editing my MacBook review video last night and at 6:28pm it was at 100 percent,” Happypuppy wrote. “At 8:52pm it was down…

You can be tracked and have your data intercepted from many angles, by legitimate and illegitimate actors alike: governments, criminals, personal enemies, corporate spies, children without moral compasses, you name it. Many techniques let you encrypt and shield your data at rest, on your devices and on remote servers, and in transit. But there’s one problem with all the shields you can put up: when you need to use to use a website, you’re giving yourself away, whether it’s from your current location or via a virtual private network (VPN) service that encrypts your request out to a data server location from whence it issues. Tracking which sites you visit or observing VPN end points can reveal a lot, even if the contents of sessions can’t be determined. And websites…

Software and video games were once on borrowed time, surviving only as long as the hardware on which they ran. But then systems became powerful enough to mimic those that came before. So began the age of emulation. Today, even a years-old Mac can emulate a huge range of older hardware, giving you the chance to relive old favourites, or to experience apps and games you might have missed. Emulation is also vital from an archiving standpoint, keeping safe countless pieces of software that would otherwise disappear forever as the media they’re stored on degrades. In this feature, we explore the current state of emulation on macOS. We begin with how to emulate old Apple hardware such as the Apple II and Macintosh Plus. We then delve into emulating ancient…

There are a few pretty good MFi-approved game controllers for iOS, but most of them seem more ideally designed for iPad than iPhone. It makes sense to prop up your iPad and use a gamepad from a few feet away, but would you do the same with an iPhone and squint at the smaller screen? Some controllers offer iPhoneholding clips, which is a fair solution, although it can be awkward depending on the size of the phone and/or controller. Thankfully, the Gamevice is a better solution for bringing physical controls to your iPhone. The newly-released second-gen version supports the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus (as well as 6/6s and 6/6s Plus), and as the name suggests, it clamps around the top and bottom of your phone to surround the screen…

Brian Meehan and his wife were happy users of Time Machine backups, including to a networked Time Capsule. However, after upgrading to macOS Sierra, they were not only unable to get Time Machine to ever move from Preparing Backup on their identical MacBook Pro laptops, but after talking to Apple technical support, couldn’t get a working solution. They reverted to El Capitan. From what we can tell, he and his spouse have done everything right. They may need to find an alternative to Time Machine instead. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of solutions that we can easily recommend to every kind of user. The free availability of Time Machine coupled with Apple’s all-in-one router and backup drive, Time Capsule, definitely makes it difficult for any company to have a viable…