Macworld “Passkey” is the name for a simplified login process to websites that arrived in its full glory later this year with macOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16, and iPadOS 16. A passkey relies on broadly supported industry standards to let you carry out an encrypted login with almost no effort on your part after the initial setup. You can try a passkey without installing the public betas of these upcoming operating systems, as Apple built passkey support in a preview form into Safari across all its operating systems in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and Safari 15 with macOS 12 Monterey. With the full release of passkeys in a few weeks or months, and Google and Microsoft’s announced support for compatible technology, you’re…

Starting with iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma, Apple is making Communication Safety available worldwide. The previously opt-in feature will now be turned on by default for children under the age of 13 who are signed in to their Apple ID and part of a Family Sharing group. Parents can turn it off in the Settings app under Screen Time. Communication Safety first launched in the U.S. with iOS 15.2 in December 2021, and has since expanded to Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K. With the software updates coming later this year, Apple is making the feature available globally. Communication Safety is designed to warn children…

Apple will start automatically assigning passkeys to Apple ID owners with the release of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma. Passkeys are a new type of login credential that are more secure and easier to use than traditional passwords. They are stored in iCloud Keychain and can be used to sign in to apps and websites on all of your Apple devices. Apple in May 2022 announced plans to expand support for a common password-less sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium. The new capability allows websites and apps to offer consistent, secure, and easy password-less sign-ins to consumers across devices and platforms. In iOS 16, Apple introduced passkeys that use iPhone’s Touch…

Macworld You might think that connecting anonymously to a public Wi-Fi network doesn’t reveal much about you. You might be using a VPN (virtual private network) to protect everything you do. But even if you aren’t, the vast majority of websites and email servers (and pretty much all those run by companies) use client-to-server encryption. But what if you could be tracked anyway? Apple has a solution for this as it does for many tracking systems. The company’s trick lies in how Wi-Fi (and ethernet) adapters identify themselves over a local network when connecting wirelessly or via an ethernet cable. Every network adapter has a factory-assigned unique address baked in at the time of manufacture. It’s called a Media (or…

Illustration by Samar Haddad for The Verge My smart home journey began, like so many others, with a poorly placed light switch. My partner and I had just bought our first house, and the switch that illuminated the kitchen was in the laundry room all the way on the other side, meaning we had to wander through darkness to get to it. I hated that light switch. So what to do? Well, I could spend a bunch of money I didn’t have to hire someone to move it, try to do it myself and accidentally burn my house down with a bad wiring job, or take the plunge on a smart home. I took the path of least resistance (that’s…

Macworld Do Macs get viruses? Do Macs need antivirus software? The answers to these questions aren’t as simple as they might seem. In this article, we look at the dangers faced by Mac users, and the pros and cons of using Mac antivirus software. Historically, the Mac has been considered safe and secure for a number of reasons that we will go into below, but in recent years the consensus has fluctuated. In its 2020 State of Malware report, Malwarebytes said it saw “a significant rise in the overall prevalence of Mac threats in 2019, with an increase of over 400 percent from 2018.” The following year, the company found that overall malware detected on macOS decreased by 38 percent…