While early identification of phishing and other online fraud is your first line of defense, a solid cyber insurance policy could save your bacon from “pig butchering.”

Upcoming changes from Apple will give parents greater control over what children with Child Accounts in a Family Sharing group can access while reducing the potential for disclosure of kids’ birthdates or other private data to developers. The company is trying to balance child safety, parental control, and new government age-verification requirements. 

Remember Back to My Mac, which let you access your network from afar? There’s a new game in town. Tailscale creates a secure virtual LAN for your devices that lets you access your own resources and share that access with groups, working around NAT connections that often make inbound connections fragile, erratic, or impossible.

The United Kingdom has secretly demanded that Apple enable backdoor access to all iCloud data stored by any user worldwide. In apparent response, Apple has disabled its higher-grade iCloud protection for UK users, although it is illegal for the company to admit that.

The upcoming iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2 Sequoia releases, now in public beta, let you securely share a link to a lost AirTag or other Find My item with anyone. You’ll also soon have a special way to share tracking links directly with airlines when your luggage is missing or delayed.

With the introduction of the first Macs that support Thunderbolt 5, you might wonder what has changed from Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4. The answer? Not much—it’s a case of evolution, not revolution. However, Thunderbolt 5 will make a difference for those with video-intensive or high-performance data transfer needs.

Apple has quietly tightened the requirements for how children under 13 in a Family Sharing group can bypass its on-device detection system for nudity in images and videos.

Airbnb’s policy change to ban all indoor cameras at listed properties highlights the scourge of tiny cameras used for snooping. Here’s how to discover if you’re being watched in a rental, hotel, or elsewhere.

Google’s new Find My Device network works nearly identically to Apple’s Find My network with a few exceptions: Google’s design offers more anti-stalking and privacy features than Apple.

You might think that modern cartoonists would create their strips using digital drawing tools, but in fact, many still rely on traditional pens and brushes. Glenn Fleishman explored the surprising way that cartoonists meld the old with the new as part of the research for a new book, How Comics Were Made.

After a network hiccup caused his HomeKit-enabled smart thermostat to lose its network connection, Glenn Fleishman had to do tweaky network reconfiguration to get it to rejoin his Home setup.

The “grandparent scam” goes back almost 20 years, but it and similar frauds are gaining new traction through AI voice impersonation. Protect your family, friends, and colleagues with advance planning.

Apple has released details about Contact Key Verification, an upcoming option in Messages that lets you manually verify an iMessage correspondent’s identity without relying on encryption data managed centrally by Apple. The feature also watches for anomalies, warning you when changes prevent it from guaranteeing a conversation is with the same person.

As with all its services, Apple offers no real troubleshooting when iCloud Drive synchronization stalls in macOS. Glenn Fleishman encountered a problem that took months to diagnose and fix. In the process, he went through the wringer of trying nearly everything suggested online, via Apple support, and from colleagues. In the end, the magic that fixed it was undisclosed engineers.

Glenn Fleishman explores iOS 17’s new Check In feature, which lets you specify someone as a temporary safety partner who can confirm you got where you intended to to go. It’s a welcome addition to Apple’s collection of features aimed at increasing personal safety.