“Like its National Park namesake, Apple’s newest operating system can be imposing, perhaps even a little daunting to newcomers,” Chuck La Tournous reports for Macworld.
“And although you won’t find any bears in the digital version of Yosemite, that doesn’t mean it’s danger free,” La Tournous reports. “After all, online security is rarely a walk in the park—and these three features of Yosemite could potentially impact your security.”
3 key things to know about Apple’s OS X Yosemite and Mac security:
• Spotlight knows where you are
• Continuity: Sharing your data with yourself
• Yes, you can change Safari’s new URL display in Yosemite—but here’s why you might not want to
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Handoff sounds very useful but I wish there was a greater level of control so you could restrict the apps that can use it.
I have no problem with network aware apps as long as they are known to the end user and can be disabled from he UI- not using BASH.
What I found a bit creepy is that I was riding past a mall, I looked at my phone to see what time it was and a little bitty Best Buy icon showed up on screen. I guess I had ignored that apps constantly keep track of where you are and if you are near one of their brick and mortar stores, they’ll put their icon on screen.
The marketing mind
VS
The customer mind
No thank you marketing people. I turned that marketing feature OFF.
Their recommendation of keeping just the domain in the address bar instead of showing the full URL isn’t really valid.
Either way it’s going to show the full domain, starting on the left.
apple.bogus-hackersite.com, will still be shown either way. It doesn’t matter if it’s just showing that or showing:
apple.bogus-hackersite.com/for-realz.html
You can see that it’s not apple.com.
It’s fine to keep just the domain in the address field if that’s what you want, but don’t think it’s giving anyone any security. If anything, long term, it’s obfuscating how URLs work, thus potentially leading to a higher security risk through misunderstanding.
Likewise the HTTPS lock icon shows up either way. Showing the full URL doesn’t make it go away.
On the other hand, not showing the full URL can be a security risk. One example (of many) is if you’re submitting sensitive data and you see that in the URL. That’s poor coding, but still present on many sites.
I’m glad Apple gave us an option of doing it both ways, but people really shouldn’t be scared away from turning on full URLs.
• Spotlight knows where you are
– As the article point out, you can turn this OFF. Instead, your Internet IP address can be used instead to give the software an approximation of your location, no data sent to Apple.
• Continuity: Sharing your data with yourself
– If you have Mavericks and want something slightly similar, Notes are already shared between iOS devices and Mavericks. Start one here, finish one there, as long as you’re using the Internet in both cases. You can do this either in the Notes app itself or in Apple Mail.
• Yes, you can change Safari’s new URL display in Yosemite—but here’s why you might not want to
– Complaints about this change were initially overblown. You just click in the field and the whole URL appears. It’s simply a matter of getting used to something different that does have a useful function and simply workaround.
…SIMPLE workaround.