If you had problems launching apps on your Mac—or if it was just behaving weirdly—around 4 PM Eastern Standard Time on 12 November 2020, here’s why.

In a move that has received little attention so far, Apple will let other makers’ products send privacy-protected “I’m lost” signals to Macs, iPhones, and iPads, as soon as year’s end.

macOS 10.14 Mojave brings important security and privacy improvements to the Mac, but both Apple and developers need to work harder to avoid overwhelming users with a cacophony of alerts.

In ExtraBITS this week, Apple has been hit by a double dose of bad: a new form of DNS hijacking malware that targets the Mac and another crashing link bug for Messages in both macOS and iOS.

Apple says future versions of macOS won’t include a number of open-source scripting languages. The impact of this change will vary depending on the audience, but it will affect more people than you might think.

As of 1 October 2018, Apple will stop paying affiliate fees on apps purchased through recommendation links. It’s a small-minded, unpleasant move that can’t benefit Apple in any significant way but will hurt many small publishers, although TidBITS won’t be affected.

At WWDC, Apple threw back the curtains on macOS 10.15 Catalina, bringing the Mac ever closer to iOS without losing sight of what makes the Mac unique. We’re particularly impressed with the work the company did on accessibility features.

Apple provides some fantastic images for use as Desktop backgrounds and screensavers, but if you like seeing pretty pictures regularly, you’ll get bored with Apple’s tiny collection. Happily, Mac developers have tapped massive Internet photo sites to give you an inexhaustible set of beautiful photos to dress up your Desktop, screensaver, and browser windows.

In ExtraBITS this week, Walmart Pay becomes available at thousands of Walmart stores throughout the United States, we learn why some apps are intentionally slow, the EasyDoc malware targets unsuspecting Mac users, and iOS 10 will help you register for organ donation.

There’s a poorly worded checkbox buried in the App Store pane of System Preferences that, if you misinterpret the interface, can result in your Mac failing to download critical anti-malware data. Adam Engst unwittingly had it set wrong, and if you do too, read on to learn how to get it right.

In this week’s gathering of the ExtraBITS, the Apple/FBI case continues to simmer, with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights speaking out in Apple’s favor in its battle with the FBI, the San Bernardino District Attorney saying something unbelievably stupid, and Amazon removing encryption from Fire OS but quickly reversing course in the face of customer outrage. In other news, Kirk McElhearn explains how to slim down iTunes, Serenity Caldwell draws a review of the Apple Pencil, Apple blocks the first case of Mac ransomware, Apple support takes to Twitter, and Backblaze updates us on hard drive reliability.

A vulnerability associated with the Sparkle software updater opens many popular apps open to attack. Josh Centers explains who’s at risk and what to do about it.

A new piece of Mac malware is making the rounds. OSX/MaMi hijacks macOS’s DNS settings to intercept traffic by routing it through malicious servers. Additional capabilities, which didn’t seem to be active in the version that researcher Patrick Wardle analyzed, including taking screenshots, generating simulated mouse events, persisting as a launch item, downloading and uploading files, and executing commands. The motive, author, and how OSX/MaMi is spread are currently unknown, and when the Hacker News article was published, antivirus apps weren’t able to detect it. To see if you’re infected, check your DNS settings in System Preferences > Network, and look for the DNS servers 82.163.143.135 and 82.163.142.137. But unless you did something to bypass macOS’s Gatekeeper security, you likely have nothing to worry about since the malware’s executable isn’t signed by Apple.

XcodeGhost is a new piece of malware that uses modified versions of Xcode to insert malicious code into popular iOS apps. This appears to affect only Chinese apps, because bandwidth limitations in China are what prompted developers to download modified copies of Xcode from unofficial sources, rather than going straight to Apple.

It’s not new, and Apple doesn’t show it much love, but the ubiquitous Services menu can be a productivity powerhouse. Josh Centers explains how to use it and even how to make your own services.