Don't Be Soup! Mac OS
Mac OS X is an incredible operating system, far superior to Windows. Apple is designed to be secure and well-optimized for the hardware, but also elegant, simple and user-friendly. They thought about everything that they put in it and the results are spectacular. If you have a newer Mac, there is no physical option to install Mac OS versions older than your current Mac model. For instance, if your MacBook was released in 2014, dont expect it to run any OS released prior of that time, because older Apple OS versions simply do not include hardware drivers for your Mac.
Don't Be Soup Mac Os 11
Don't Be Soup Mac Os Download
Don't Be Soup Mac Os Update
Don't Be Soup Mac Os 11
I'm about to tell you something that will shock you, and probably make you very angry. I hope you won't hate me for it. Here goes.
If you are an iPhone user, everything you have copied to your clipboard on your iPhone can be secretly accessed by various apps. These apps often record the contents of your clipboard several times a minute, and send them to their company servers to store for eternity.
Think about all the things you copy to your clipboard. Links. Passwords. Private messages to your friends and family. Don't Be Soup Mac Os 11
All of these things are being stolen from you and sent to the data centers of multinational corporations, who will use it to figure out what ads to show you so they can make more money.
And that is just the best case scenario. There's no way to know for sure what they are using your clipboard data for.
Apple has known about this for a long time. And they are just now taking steps to restrict apps' access to your clipboard, and to notify you when an app accesses the contents of your clipboard.
This was never an issue for Apple until privacy advocates started raising awareness of this earlier this week.
Here's an insane supercut of several well-known apps stealing the contents of your clipboard (which now triggers a notification in the newest version of iOS.)
Some apps, like TikTok, use this clipboard exploit even while running in the background to steal every single character you type into any app.
Here's an example of this discovered when Apple started showing clipboard notifications in the iOS 14 beta:
Apps can even use this clipboard exploit to get your location data without you ever granting them permission. Here's how: And it gets worse. Don't Be Soup Mac Os Download
Now I'm going to tell you something else that will really make your blood boil: If you use a Mac, your iPhone has access to your Mac's clipboard by default.
And this means, by extension, the apps installed on your iPhone also have access to things you copy to your Mac's clipboard.
Think about that. How many sensitive things do you do on your laptop every day? How many passwords to you copy/paste from your password manager? How many emails do you type up? How many websites do you copy/paste to share through private messages?
All of that is going to your clipboard, which is getting shared with your iPhone, which can then be accessed by various companies through their iPhone apps, and stored in their servers around the world.
This 'feature' is called Universal Clipboard or 'Handoff.' And it is enabled by default on every Mac.
For your privacy, I recommend you turn this feature off immediately. It only takes a few seconds. Here's how to do this. Step 1: Open Spotlight Search.
By default, you can open MacOS Spotlight Search by pressing the command key and spacebar at the same time.
Then type the word 'Handoff' and double click the 'General' option that appears under 'System Preferences' in the list below. Step 2: Uncheck Handoff.
A menu will pop up when you click 'General' under the 'System Preferences' option. If you look all the way at the bottom of this menu, you will see an option that says 'Allow handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices.' Uncheck the box next to this.
My advice would be to uninstall all the apps that have been stealing information from your clipboard without your consent.
These apps have violated your trust by abusing this 'vulnerability' in iOS. (I put the word vulnerability in quotes because, again, Apple has known about this for a long time and initially refused to do anything about it.)
Here's a list of apps who have been caught red-handed stealing your clipboard data:
And last but not least, change your passwords! Assume that these passwords have been intercepted by these clipboard-thieving apps are now in private data centers all over the world.
Sure these companies are unlikely to use your passwords. But they may eventually get hacked. And hackers might try to exploit your passwords or sell them to even worse actors.
It breaks my heart to learn of this. It's been going on for maybe years. Don't Be Soup Mac Os Update
And in case you're curious, Android is just as permissive with letting 3rd party apps access your clipboard data.
Switching to Android won't save you, but switching to a feature phone might, if that's a sacrifice you're willing to make. Me? I just uninstalled basically all 3rd party iPhone apps and use the Brave browser or the Firefox Focus browser for everything.
It really is a jungle out there. Stay vigilant friends. Don't let the bad guys win. You can follow me on Twitter for more no-nonsense security tips.
In October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.
This move is a blow to professional userssuch as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcementwho depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.
What about Apples built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that its not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, its not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.
TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because hes a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual:
Support for user-added custom words: Every profession has its own terminology and jargon, which is part of why there are legal, medical, and law enforcement versions of Dragon for Windows. Scheresky isnt asking Apple to provide such custom vocabularies, but he needs to be able to add custom words to the vocabulary to carry out his work.
Support for speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition: Currently, macOSs speech recognition is speaker-independent, which means that it works pretty well for everyone. But Scheresky believes it needs to become speaker-dependent, so it can learn from your corrections to improve recognition accuracy. Also, Apples speech recognition isnt continuousit works for only a few minutes before stopping and needing to be reinvoked.
Support for cursor positioning and mouse button events: Although Scheresky acknowledges that macOSs Dictation Commands are pretty good and provide decent support for text cursor positioning, macOS has nothing like Nuances MouseGrid, which divides the screen into a 3-by-3 grid and enables the user to zoom in to a grid coordinate, then displaying another 3-by-3 grid to continue zooming. Nor does Apple have anything like Nuances mouse commands for moving and clicking the mouse pointer.
When Scheresky complained to Apples accessibility team about macOSs limitations, they suggested the Switch Control feature, which enables users to move the pointer (along with other actions) by clicking a switch. He talks about this in a video.
Unfortunately, although Switch Control would let Scheresky control a Mac using a sip-and-puff switch or a head switch, such solutions would be both far slower than voice and a literal pain in the neck. There are some better alternatives for mouse pointer positioning: Don't Be Soup Mac Os 11
Dedicated software, in the form of a $35 app called iTracker.
An off-the-shelf hack using Keyboard Maestro and Automator.
An expensive head-mounted pointing device, although the SmartNav is $600 and the HeadMouse Nano and TrackerPro are both about $1000. Its also not clear how well they interface with current versions of macOS.
Regardless, if Apple enhanced macOSs voice recognition in the ways Scheresky suggests, it would become significantly more useful and would give users with physical limitations significantly more control over their Macs and their lives. If youd like to help, Scheresky suggests submitting feature request feedback to Apple with text along the following lines (feel free to copy and paste it):
Because Nuance has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, it is becoming difficult for disabled users to use the Mac. Please enhance macOS speech recognition to support user-added custom words, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition that learns from user corrections to improve accuracy, and cursor positioning and mouse button events.
Thank you for your consideration!
Thanks for encouraging Apple to bring macOSs accessibility features up to the level necessary to provide an alternative to Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. Such improvements will help both those who face physical challenges to using the Mac and those for whom dictation is a professional necessity.
Don't Be Soup Mac Os 11
Don't Be Soup Mac Os Download
Don't Be Soup Mac Os Update
Don't Be Soup Mac Os 11
I'm about to tell you something that will shock you, and probably make you very angry. I hope you won't hate me for it. Here goes.
If you are an iPhone user, everything you have copied to your clipboard on your iPhone can be secretly accessed by various apps. These apps often record the contents of your clipboard several times a minute, and send them to their company servers to store for eternity.
Think about all the things you copy to your clipboard. Links. Passwords. Private messages to your friends and family. Don't Be Soup Mac Os 11
All of these things are being stolen from you and sent to the data centers of multinational corporations, who will use it to figure out what ads to show you so they can make more money.
And that is just the best case scenario. There's no way to know for sure what they are using your clipboard data for.
Apple has known about this for a long time. And they are just now taking steps to restrict apps' access to your clipboard, and to notify you when an app accesses the contents of your clipboard.
This was never an issue for Apple until privacy advocates started raising awareness of this earlier this week.
Here's an insane supercut of several well-known apps stealing the contents of your clipboard (which now triggers a notification in the newest version of iOS.)
Some apps, like TikTok, use this clipboard exploit even while running in the background to steal every single character you type into any app.
Here's an example of this discovered when Apple started showing clipboard notifications in the iOS 14 beta:
Apps can even use this clipboard exploit to get your location data without you ever granting them permission. Here's how: And it gets worse. Don't Be Soup Mac Os Download
Now I'm going to tell you something else that will really make your blood boil: If you use a Mac, your iPhone has access to your Mac's clipboard by default.
And this means, by extension, the apps installed on your iPhone also have access to things you copy to your Mac's clipboard.
Think about that. How many sensitive things do you do on your laptop every day? How many passwords to you copy/paste from your password manager? How many emails do you type up? How many websites do you copy/paste to share through private messages?
All of that is going to your clipboard, which is getting shared with your iPhone, which can then be accessed by various companies through their iPhone apps, and stored in their servers around the world.
This 'feature' is called Universal Clipboard or 'Handoff.' And it is enabled by default on every Mac.
For your privacy, I recommend you turn this feature off immediately. It only takes a few seconds. Here's how to do this. Step 1: Open Spotlight Search.
By default, you can open MacOS Spotlight Search by pressing the command key and spacebar at the same time.
Then type the word 'Handoff' and double click the 'General' option that appears under 'System Preferences' in the list below. Step 2: Uncheck Handoff.
A menu will pop up when you click 'General' under the 'System Preferences' option. If you look all the way at the bottom of this menu, you will see an option that says 'Allow handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices.' Uncheck the box next to this.
My advice would be to uninstall all the apps that have been stealing information from your clipboard without your consent.
These apps have violated your trust by abusing this 'vulnerability' in iOS. (I put the word vulnerability in quotes because, again, Apple has known about this for a long time and initially refused to do anything about it.)
Here's a list of apps who have been caught red-handed stealing your clipboard data:
And last but not least, change your passwords! Assume that these passwords have been intercepted by these clipboard-thieving apps are now in private data centers all over the world.
Sure these companies are unlikely to use your passwords. But they may eventually get hacked. And hackers might try to exploit your passwords or sell them to even worse actors.
It breaks my heart to learn of this. It's been going on for maybe years. Don't Be Soup Mac Os Update
And in case you're curious, Android is just as permissive with letting 3rd party apps access your clipboard data.
Switching to Android won't save you, but switching to a feature phone might, if that's a sacrifice you're willing to make. Me? I just uninstalled basically all 3rd party iPhone apps and use the Brave browser or the Firefox Focus browser for everything.
It really is a jungle out there. Stay vigilant friends. Don't let the bad guys win. You can follow me on Twitter for more no-nonsense security tips.
In October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.
This move is a blow to professional userssuch as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcementwho depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.
What about Apples built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that its not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, its not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.
TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because hes a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual:
Support for user-added custom words: Every profession has its own terminology and jargon, which is part of why there are legal, medical, and law enforcement versions of Dragon for Windows. Scheresky isnt asking Apple to provide such custom vocabularies, but he needs to be able to add custom words to the vocabulary to carry out his work.
Support for speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition: Currently, macOSs speech recognition is speaker-independent, which means that it works pretty well for everyone. But Scheresky believes it needs to become speaker-dependent, so it can learn from your corrections to improve recognition accuracy. Also, Apples speech recognition isnt continuousit works for only a few minutes before stopping and needing to be reinvoked.
Support for cursor positioning and mouse button events: Although Scheresky acknowledges that macOSs Dictation Commands are pretty good and provide decent support for text cursor positioning, macOS has nothing like Nuances MouseGrid, which divides the screen into a 3-by-3 grid and enables the user to zoom in to a grid coordinate, then displaying another 3-by-3 grid to continue zooming. Nor does Apple have anything like Nuances mouse commands for moving and clicking the mouse pointer.
When Scheresky complained to Apples accessibility team about macOSs limitations, they suggested the Switch Control feature, which enables users to move the pointer (along with other actions) by clicking a switch. He talks about this in a video.
Unfortunately, although Switch Control would let Scheresky control a Mac using a sip-and-puff switch or a head switch, such solutions would be both far slower than voice and a literal pain in the neck. There are some better alternatives for mouse pointer positioning: Don't Be Soup Mac Os 11
Dedicated software, in the form of a $35 app called iTracker.
An off-the-shelf hack using Keyboard Maestro and Automator.
An expensive head-mounted pointing device, although the SmartNav is $600 and the HeadMouse Nano and TrackerPro are both about $1000. Its also not clear how well they interface with current versions of macOS.
Regardless, if Apple enhanced macOSs voice recognition in the ways Scheresky suggests, it would become significantly more useful and would give users with physical limitations significantly more control over their Macs and their lives. If youd like to help, Scheresky suggests submitting feature request feedback to Apple with text along the following lines (feel free to copy and paste it):
Because Nuance has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, it is becoming difficult for disabled users to use the Mac. Please enhance macOS speech recognition to support user-added custom words, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition that learns from user corrections to improve accuracy, and cursor positioning and mouse button events.
Thank you for your consideration!
Thanks for encouraging Apple to bring macOSs accessibility features up to the level necessary to provide an alternative to Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. Such improvements will help both those who face physical challenges to using the Mac and those for whom dictation is a professional necessity.
