Safe from Shellshock: How to protect your home computer from the Bash shell bug

On the surface, the critical “Shellshock” bug revealed this week sounds devastating. By exploiting a bug in the Bash shell command line tool found in Unix-based systems, attackers can run code on your system—essentially giving them access to your system.

How to free up space on a packed hard drive

There are tried and true means for going about this. These techniques should help.

What exactly is "Other" hard drive storage?

If you choose About This Mac, click on the More Info button, and then click the Storage tab you will indeed see a very general graphical layout of the file allocation for each volume connected to your Mac. This representation lists Audio, Movies, Photos, Apps, Backups, and the Other entry you mention.

Automate your Mac: 10 ways to make managing email easier

If there's one daily chore that cries out for automation, it's managing your email inbox. Fortunately, there are all kinds of tools—some built into Mail.app itself, others from third-party vendors—that can help you do just that.

When search fails in Outlook

Outlook, like the Mac OS and some other apps, uses OS X’s Spotlight feature to catalog its messages. When you search for a sender, recipient, or word within a message, Outlook turns to Spotlight’s index to find it.

Apple attacked over 'worsening' factory conditions in China

Apple is under fire again for the way workers are treated at a supplier factory in China, prompting the iPhone maker to rush a team to the factory to investigate.

How to spill-proof your laptop (and how to fix it if that fails)

Perhaps one of the worst threats your Mac faces is the chance of being doused with water or other liquid: In a second, a cup of coffee could leave you about £1000 in the hole for a new Mac (plus £3 for another latte).

The trick to finding the right printer driver for your Mac

I recently purchased a new Epson AIO inkjet printer, the 2014 WF-4630. Overall, I couldn’t be more pleased with it. It’s fast, versatile and produces superb output.

Apple updates privacy policy, sets up site to guide users

Apple outlined its new privacy policy and set up a site to explain what information it collects from users and how it handles it, as the company enters new areas like health tracking and mobile payments that have potential privacy implications.

Apple updates privacy policy: 'We sell great products,' not your data, says Tim Cook

Need another reason to upgrade to iOS 8? Apple can't see any of your personal information if you have a passcode enabled on devices running the new OS. And if Apple can't see it, the government can't, either.

This is Tim: Cook talks to Charlie Rose about Apple Watch, Samsung, and the future

Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn't speak publicly often outside of events and the company's quarterly earnings calls, so it was a special treat to watch his interview with Charlie Rose this weekend. We've put together edited highlights from his first hour chatting with the ABC talk show host about Apple's new products, the Apple TV, Steve Jobs, and the future of the company.

Apple timeline in pictures - from the launch of the Mac to the Apple Watch

24 January 1984: Introducing Macintosh The revolutionary 128K, 8MHz Macintosh sets the agenda for Apple’s next two decades.

Adobe slates critical Reader security update for Tuesday

Adobe yesterday said it would issue security updates next week for its PDF viewer Reader as well as for Acrobat, its PDF creator, to fix critical flaws in the software on Windows and Apple's OS X.

Apple will keep pushing for a sales ban on Samsung products

Apple will appeal a judge's order this week that denied its request for a sales ban on Samsung products that were found to infringe its patents.

iCloud flaw may have allowed nude celebrity photos to leak

A funny thing happened on the Internet Sunday as a cache of nude photos of Kate Upton, Jennifer Lawrence, and other big-name stars made their way onto 4chan. Reports indicate that this leak may have been the result of a hacker (or hackers) taking advantage of a flaw in Apple's iCloud service.

According to The NextWeb, a hacker may have used a Python script posted to GitHub to hack their way into celebrities' iCloud accounts. The script, TheNextWeb reports, uses a flaw in Find My iPhone to make it easier to crack a password using "brute force" means where hackers use a piece of software to repeatedly guess a password.

This exploit reportedly disabled any "lockout" mechanism to keep hackers from brute-forcing a password. It also went around iCloud's security notification feature, TheNextWeb notes, so users apparently had no idea that their accounts were compromised.

The motivation for the attack seems to be financial in nature: BuzzFeed reports that the hacker posted the photos to 4chan "in an attempt to earn bitcoins."

TheNextWeb says that it appears that Apple has corrected the flaw, but as of this writing, Apple has yet to comment on the matter. 

As tablet growth slows, Apple may face a year-long iPad sales contraction

Apple's iPad will be hit hard this year as global tablet shipments and sales growth slow dramatically, especially in the markets where the Cupertino, Calif. company has historically been strongest: North American and Europe, analysts said last week.