Apple today released Security Update 2017-001 for macOS High Sierra version 10.13.1 and later to fix a serious bug that enables access to the root superuser on a Mac with a blank password. Everyone running High Sierra should be applying this patch immediately.
The Amazon Silk browser, which already comes on Fire tablets, is now available for Amazon Fire TV set-top boxes, sticks, and Fire TV Edition HDTVs. Curious to see how cumbersome it feels, as any and all web browsers designed for TV sdet boxes have historically been terrible.
Pixelmator Pro for macOS has been officially released, for $85 CDN on the App Store. You can also try it for free for thirty days by downloading it directly from the Pixelmator website.
The bug, discovered by developer Lemi Ergin, lets anyone log into an admin account using the username "root" with no password. This works when attempting to access an administrator's account on an unlocked Mac, and it also provides access at the login screen of a locked Mac. Until the issue is fixed, you can enable a root account with a password to prevent the bug from working.
In a feature announced today, Microsoft is going to bring two-level grouping and management to every window and every application. Tabs won't just be for browsers; they'll be for Notepad, or Word, or Visual Studio, or Explorer, or Minecraft. The feature is currently called "Sets," and it'll be coming soon to the Windows Insider Program.
“David Karp will depart Oath by the end of the year,” the statement reads. “David founded Tumblr 10 years ago as a space for the world’s creators, and we thank him for his commitment and passion driving the growth of the platform to almost 380 million blogs and over 155 billion posts.”
One of the worst video games of all time, Desert Bus, has a sequel. In very good news for anybody who hears "notorious game's sequel" and flinches, this new take, dubbed Desert Bus VR, is now completely free to own for PC gamers, whether they own a virtual reality headset or not.
"The good thing is: Food stores get restocked every now and then. You won't starve. The bad thing is that the staff tries to kill you as soon as the lights go out. Barricade yourself with furniture, battle the staff and survive as many days as you can."
A screenshot-taking tool which works just like macOS's screenshot tool - one keyboard shortcut and drag - and it uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to recognize text in your screenshots.
Michael Geist writes for the Globe And Mail, reminding us that Canadian consumers may be shielded from net-neutrality abuses, but the effects of the U.S. decision may still be felt north of the border.
On the first day of its Connect developer conference, Microsoft announced that it is joining the MariaDB Foundation, the group that oversees the development of the MariaDB database. MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL database that's developed and maintained by many of the original MySQL contributors.
Amazon launched its Alexa virtual assistant and smart device platform in Canada today. In tandem with Alexa, Amazon is now shipping three devices there: the Echo Dot, the Echo, and the Echo Plus.
Today, the company is launching its first new funding product since launch, Drip. Instead of supporting a specific project, subscribers can now make a recurring payment to a creator. A Drip can offer rewards to subscribers based on when they pledged, or how much they give.
EA has made some contraversal changes to progression in the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront 2, and fans have been very vocal about it. As of this writing, this EA PR comment is currently at over negative six-hundred and sixty points.
Version 57 of the Firefox browser is out today. It has a sleek new interface and, under the hood, major performance enhancements, with Mozilla claiming that it's as much as twice as fast as it was a year ago. Not only should it be faster to load and render pages, but its user interface should remain quick and responsive even under heavy load with hundreds of tabs.
From Anil Dash and Fog Creek Software, an update Fogbugz. Project management, bug tracking, issue tracking and support. Integrations with key tools like Slack, GitHub & Trello are free and easily customizable, and search and management features are simple and powerful.
The Canada Revenue Agency has obtained a federal court order requiring PayPal to hand over years of transactional information from all business accounts in Canada. The scope of the order is incredibly broad, covering any business account holder who sent or received a payment over a nearly four year period from January 1, 2014 to November 10, 2017. The information to be disclosed includes:
Logitech has been taking heat in recent days for announcing plans to permanently disable its Harmony Link device this coming March. The company had previously offered a free Hub to Link owners who were still under warranty, and tried to assuage frustrations from everyone else with a 35 percent discount.
Willem de Groot, an independent security researcher who reported the findings Tuesday, told Ars that he believes all of the 2,496 sites he tracked are running out-of-date software with known security vulnerabilities that have been exploited to give attackers control. Attackers, he said, then used their access to add code that surreptitiously harnesses the CPUs and electricity of visitors to generate the digital currency known as Monero. About 80 percent of those sites, he added, also contain other types of malware that can steal visitors' payment card details.
Over the next couple months, the browser will start blocking various types of annoying, unwanted redirects, where a website or ad suddenly loads a new page, either because it’s been hijacked by a bad ad or because it intentionally wants to force visitors to see one.
At least one new iPad model with a screen size similar to the 10.5-inch iPad Pro is planned to include Face ID for unlocking the device, making payments, and sending animated emojis. The feature would replace the iPad home button that has come with a fingerprint scanner since 2014, one of the people said. The updated tablet is expected to be released later next year, a little more than a year after the last major iPad Pro upgrade, the people said.
Today, Shirt Pocket Software announced an update to its backup utility SuperDuper! that is compatible with APFS. In fact, the app can create a bootable clone for any Mac running Mac OS X 10.9 and later.
Seán Doran used images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to create a 100-megapixel image of the Moon. The image is also available at Gigapan for easier exploration.
Quebec Bill 997 adopts the “just do it” approach to digital sales tax. The bill covers the waterfront of digital tax issues: sales tax collection for those with a significant online presence, penalties for failure to file income tax returns, as well as penalties for payment providers who do not report purchases in the province when asked and for sites that conceal data about a significant provincial online presence. The key phrase in the bill is “significant online presence”, which triggers most of the obligations.
A US federal judge has stopped a ruling from the Canadian Supreme Court from going into effect in the US. The Canadian order would have ordered Google to de-index all pages belonging to a company called Datalink, which was allegedly selling products that violated the IP of Vancouver-based Equustek. When the order came down earlier this year, Google filed a lawsuit in US federal court seeking to render the Canadian order unenforceable stateside.
A crippling flaw affecting millions—and possibly hundreds of millions—of encryption keys used in some of the highest-stakes security settings is considerably easier to exploit than originally reported, cryptographers declared over the weekend. The assessment came as Estonia abruptly suspended 760,000 national ID cards used for voting, filing taxes, and encrypting sensitive documents