Free Apple Woven Nylon Band With Purchase Of Apple Watch Series 3 GPS & Cell

It’s a very rainy day here in Vermont, which is a little fitting for the way I feel today. Animals have a special way of taking hold in our hearts, and many of us find great comfort from having them in our lives. I think for anyone who has had pets in their life knows that unique bonds are formed with each one, and for some the bond runs deep. I’ve been around and owned horses for my entire life. I have bonded with several horses, but one horse holds a very special place in my heart, Skye. I am blessed to have been able to share 30 something years with this wonderful animal. I was able to grow as a rider thanks to him and in later years he helped my girls learn basic horsemanship. Yesterday I had to say goodbye to my lifelong friend and the grief over his loss is enormous. But, I have to keep moving forward. I have two other horses who need me and at the end of a long day, I can count on my pups, Piper and Tyson, to keep me company at night.

Don’s been out this week at CES. I’ve seen a few Facebook posts from the show and it seems robots are the big theme this year! I’ve had a hard time accepting the idea of drones, I can only imagine how long it will take me to adjust to robots taking care of people or as a partner in a round of scrabble! Thankfully, I’m confident in saying it will still be sometime before I have to be concerned over the idea of robots in my life. Who knows, maybe by the time that happens I will have become a fan of drones! Robots are happening right now, so I guess I need to get used to the idea! I’m looking forward to Don’s report on new products that will expand our home automation offerings, as well as other new product offerings to add to our Small Dog line up.

For this week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive I feel the need to crank it up! Music and movies really are a way to relax, focus or just take some time to distract your mind. I am a huge fan of my Sonos speakers for my music and movies. This week, I’m bundling a white Sonos Playbase with a pair of white Sonos Play 1’s. This trio of speakers normally costs $999.99. I’m making this bundle available to Kibbles & Bytes readers for $875.99!

If you pay any attention to technology news, you’ve probably already heard of the recently discovered Meltdown and Spectre exploits that are reported to effect a majority of computer systems currently in operation, regardless of their operating system. Since the vulnerability is at it’s core, hardware-based, users of Macs, PC’s and some mobile devices are all at risk equally. The hardware in question are processors by Intel, AMD and ARM and the issue could be exploited in 3 ways known as Variants 1 and 2 (identified as Spectre) and Variant 3 (identified as Meltdown).

The way the Spectre exploit works is by taking advantage of the way your computer processor’s architecture is wired to execute code. In a very basic way, the processor’s job is to make a series of decisions very quickly and pass along the results of those decisions. To speed things up, most modern processors use a technique known as “branch prediction” to guess what the next decision it’s going to have to make is. This “speculative execution” greatly improves the speed of a processor as it can always stay a few steps ahead of the game. It’s not always correct in it’s predictions, but that doesn’t matter because the speed at which it does these predictions allows it to perform many, many of these per second.

In very simple terms, it’s all of these incorrect predictions that allow your sensitive data to be potentially revealed. When these bits of data are trashed, for just a moment, the state of your processor can be analyzed by some malicious agents and backtrack it’s way to what bits of data were used to arrive at it’s incorrect prediction. It can then exploit this method by making your processor arrive at incorrect predictions on purpose by injecting data far outside the bounds of what it expects and, in turn, grabbing more of your sensitive data with each execution.

Patches to guard against this involve an extra step every time your computer executes these kind of instructions, double checking to see if the data it’s executing lies within the bounds of what’s expected as well as separating the code and predictions into separate areas of memory. Different processor models have slightly different architectures and the exploits work in slightly different ways across them, however this is generally how things work.

Meltdown is much more clear-cut exploit. To run efficiently, data being run through different parts of your computer processor is stored in a cache as it’s passed between sections of your processor. Meltdown reads this cache and can take the information contained in it and send it off in another direction to be utilized for nefarious purposes. The fix for this involves splitting the address space for this shared memory so that the data is never complete and would appear as gibberish if it were captured, the downside to this fix is that it involves making your computer do twice the work for the same amount of processing. Fortunately, this type of shared memory space only occurs in an impactful way during specific I/O events such as disk-reads or network communication and has little effect on computationally-heavy computing such as video-editing or gaming.

New chipsets and operating-systems should be affected very minimally by any patches to eliminate these exploits, however older systems and certain cloud and virtualization computing systems could take a pretty big performance hit as they rely heavily on I/O to operate.

It’s not often that we see such a vulnerability so widespread and so tricky to fix. It’s something that has been baked into the core architecture of so many of our computer systems in slightly different ways and yet it exists almost universally between manufacturers. It’s like suddenly discovering that bare lightbulbs can steal your credit card number. Sure you can just say “use a lampshade” but lightbulbs come in different sizes and styles even though they all work pretty much the same way and even if you design a lampshade for every bare lightbulb out there, there will be slightly less light when fitted with a lampshade.

Most of us use the internet on daily basis. We might be browsing a favorite news source, googling the answer to a trivia question or perhaps reserving movie tickets to the latest blockbuster. We do all kinds of different things throughout the day, and in the course of this you might find some annoyances like pop up ads, videos suddenly playing or sudden notifications while using a site. Luckily, these annoyances can be reduced by using a handful of settings within Safari. You can customize much of your browsing experience and adjust many preferences to suit your individual needs.

To make the most out of Safari’s site-specific settings you will want to customize your frequently visited sites. First, load a site whose settings you’d like to customize. Then, choose Safari > Preferences and click Websites in the toolbar. You will see a list of general settings in the sidebar at the left, followed by any plug-ins you’ve installed. For each setting or plug-in, you can set what happens when you visit the site you just loaded—or, if you have a bunch of sites open in different tabs, you can customize the behavior for any open site. Here are some of your options.

Content Blockers

One way of seeing fewer Web ads is to install a Safari content blocker. Choose Safari > Safari Extensions to open Safari’s Extension Gallery, and then scroll down slightly to find the page’s Search field, where you can search for a blocker. There are lots—look for one like Adguard AdBlocker that supports Safari’s content blocking API. Once you’ve installed one, select Content Blockers in the Websites preferences. By default, Safari blocks ads on all sites, so choose Off from the pop-up menus for sites whose ad content you want to see.

Auto-Play

Little is more annoying than sites that play a video when a page loads, distracting you from the text you want to read. Even worse are those sites—Macworld, we’re looking at you—that auto-play videos that aren’t even related to the page. Safari squelches auto-playing videos by default, but for sites like YouTube, you might want to allow videos to play. You can also choose to stop only videos that have sound.

Camera & Microphone

Apart from Web conferencing services, you’re unlikely to run across many sites that want to access your Mac’s camera and microphone. That’s why the Camera and Microphone settings default to asking you whenever a site wants permission to record you. If you find it irritating to be asked constantly by a site you use often, choose Allow from the pop-up menu for that site. If a site asks repeatedly but you never want to allow it, choose Deny to stop those prompts.

Location

Most Web sites that ask for your location want to determine how close you are to particular stores. If that’s information you’re interested in sharing, let them see where you are, by all means. And if you’re using a mapping service that wants your location, it’s entirely reasonable to set its pop-up menu to Allow. But if a site keeps asking and it feels creepy, set it to Deny.

Notifications

Are there sites whose new posts you’d like to know about right away? If they support Web notifications and you give them permission, they can post push notifications that appear on-screen and in Notification Center, just your other notifications.

The Notifications preferences look different from the others because they show only sites that have asked for permission in the past. Safari remembers your choice, and if the site gets annoying later, you can always take back permission by changing the Allow pop-up menu to Deny. And if you never want to be prompted for push notifications—they can be distracting—uncheck the “Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications” checkbox at the bottom of the pane.

So there you have it, a few Safari tips to hopefully make things a little less annoying and in some cases, creepy, while you are on the internet. There are more options to explore, I have only mentioned a few. Take a peak at some of the other options within your Safari preferences and customize things even more!