Hello, welcome to the Tuesday, February 2, 2021 edition of the Sandcent Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, and today I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

And as predicted, less than a week after we got updates for iOS, watchOS, and the other Apple operating systems, today we got

the next version of macOS, and with that, of course, also a whole list of security patches.

Now, the iOS updates really just focused on three specific vulnerabilities that had already been exploited.

This update for macOS has a much more extensive list of updates. I don't really see anything

that sort of screaming patch now, but you probably do want to update to the latest version of macOS. There are also a

couple of functional fixes. The one problem that I've seen people report about this particular

update is that if you're using one of the M1 Max, there may be some issues with loading third-party kernel drivers, in particular users of soft rate.

If you're using an external disk drive that relies on the soft rate software, then you may want to be a little bit careful

with this particular update.

And according to soft rate,

the company behind this software,

Apple is working on a fix,

and you may see another macOS update shortly.

And also of interest for Mac users, Patrick Wardle,

probably the leading security experts when it comes to anything.

Apple has now released all of his objective Z-tools for free and open source. Now, some of them have already been available open source for a while, but there were a few that he charged a limited

amount of money for. Well, they're now also available as source code on GitHub.

And then we have a third Apple news here, and that's a blog post.

It actually came up last week.

Didn't get around to really cover it.

And that's a change that Apple made in iOS 14 to better protect the iMessage service.

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