Mac OS X

Apple offers several alternative boot environments for OS X that can help you troubleshoot problems you might be experiencing, which can be invoked by holding various key combinations at startup. Of these, Safe Mode is perhaps the most common; it offers a limited boot environment and can be started by holding the Shift key. In addition there is Single User mode (Command-S) for a command-line interface, Apple's hardware diagnostics tests (the "D" key), Target Disk mode (the "T" key), and holding the Option key will bring up the boot loader for choosing a startup disk.… Read more

If you watch commercial DVDs on your Mac, you may encounter a rare bug that causes the video to appear corrupted, with a blocklike pattern covering its output. This can occur regardless of whether you're using Apple's provided DVD Player application or a third-party player such as the popular cross-platform VLC media player.

When this bug occurs, even though you may hear audio and see movement, the garbled output makes the video for all intents and purposes unwatchable. Generally when such corruption occurs it indicates a problem with processing the data stream, which can indicate an issue with … Read more

Passware Inc. is a forensics security company that develops investigation software kits to reveal passwords on seized computers. Last year it released a version of its kit that allows an investigator to reveal the passwords of Apple's FileVault encryption technology, along with those for similar technologies such as TrueCrypt, PGP Disk, and BitLocker. Recently the kit has gained more features and now has the ability to snoop through a system's hibernation file for Google and Facebook account passwords.

The Passware snooping technology works by accessing a system's memory either through a port that has direct memory access (… Read more

Following recent security breaches that led to computers at Apple and other companies being compromised, Apple has issued an update for Java on OS X to close the hole.

The update went live this afternoon through Apple's Software Update service, which can be accessed from the Apple menu, and also available as a standalone update for OS X Snow Leopard or later from the following locations:

According to the update's release notes, it will disable all versions of Java that are supplied by Apple … Read more

A new backdoor Trojan for OS X is making the rounds, attempting to set up a secure connection for a remote hacker to connect through and grab private information.

The malware, dubbed "Pintsized" by Intego, is suspected of using a modified implementation of OpenSSH to set up a reverse shell that creates a secure connection to a remote server.

The use of an encrypted connection makes it more difficult to detect and trace, especially since it uses the common SSH protocol. In addition, the malware attempts to hide itself by disguising its files to look like components of … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions on how to read older AppleWorks documents in newer versions of OS X, how to get files to all open in a specific application, recovering a Mac Mini's files from a system that will not boot, and whether or not cleaning utilities are useful. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Managing old AppleWorks documents MacFixIt reader Don asks:… Read more

A rare but potentially frustrating issue you might run into after upgrading to OS X 10.8 or after applying an update such as the most recent 10.8.2 release is that a number of applications in the system may start crashing when launched. This does not happen to all programs, and those affected may appear to be a bit random; however, it is likely they share common ground in all being 32-bit programs.

If this happens to you, a potentially quick way to manage it is to reboot the system into Safe Mode by holding the Shift key … Read more

Unlike other cloud storage services like Dropbox, Apple's iCloud synchronizes documents in use by a specific application so, for instance, in Apple's Pages program you can save a document to iCloud and have it be immediately available for editing in Pages on your iPad or on another Mac. While convenient, this setup does have a restriction in that the documents for one program will only be made available for that program.

While this is not an issue for programs like Apple's Pages and Numbers that have a specialized document format, and may even be useful at times … Read more

With it being Valentine's Day, you might wish to send your significant other an amorous message or two, and while a card, flowers, or a box of chocolates may be the traditional ways to do so, sending a quick e-mail or chat message is not out of the question, either. Of course, you may wish to enhance said message with a heart or two. Sure, the first way that comes to mind would probably be to search the Web for an image you would like, but there are actually a couple of nice heart images buried in OS X … Read more