Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman is a veteran technology, business, and science reporter based in Seattle, who has written for TidBITS for over 20 years.  He contributes regularly to Macworld (senior contributor), the Economist, Fast Company, and Increment magazine.  In 2017, he was the Designer in Residence at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, where he printed a book of his work by letterpress. 

The domain name system is largely insecure, leaking information and subject to compromise.  New services from Cloudflare and Quad9 could provide greater security and integrity than Google Public DNS, currently the best known public DNS service. 

The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced WPA3, a replacement for its current local network encryption options.  WPA3 both fixes an exploit and increases security for those using open networks, all while reducing the burden on users.  But don’t expect it to take over from WPA2 soon. 

A security researcher found a fundamental flaw in the WPA2 security specification that underlies all Wi-Fi implementations.  It lets an attacker decipher encrypted data between a device and a base station.  However, the opportunity to exploit this flaw is limited and closing fast for hardware that can be updated. 

Users who have Find My Mac enabled but are relying on weak iCloud passwords that have been stolen in mass breaches have had their Macs locked by extortionists.  We need to change iCloud passwords immediately and, longer term, give up outdated password ideas. 

To save storage space and bandwidth, and to provide additional capabilities, Apple is moving forward with image and video formats that boast higher compression ratios.  Glenn Fleishman dives into the details of HEVC and HEIF to explain why they’ll be so useful when they debut in iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra. 

Slack has added its most-requested feature, threaded messages, to its group messaging service, but since it’s awkwardly integrated into the system’s existing interface, the result isn’t entirely successful. 

Reviewers have a responsibility to understand how their testing differs from consumer use when problems arise because introducing confusion into the world reduces trust in technology journalism as a whole. 

The latest update to the long-standing synchronization and backup app ChronoSync lets you perform scheduled backups to Amazon S3 and Google Cloud and via SFTP.  This is particularly interesting from the perspective of off-site backups. 

The new MacBook Pro laptops are the first Macs with Thunderbolt 3, a standard that uses the USB-C plug style and retains USB compatibility.  But what’s most interesting about Thunderbolt 3 is how it supports numerous other protocols, including USB, Thunderbolt 2, FireWire, DisplayPort, and Ethernet, with the addition of appropriate adapters.