OS X

Adobe has worked with Apple to sandbox Flash Player under Safari in Mac OS X, restricting the ability of attackers to exploit any vulnerabilities they might find in the browser plug-in.

"With this week's release of Safari in OS X Mavericks, Flash Player will now be protected by an OS X App Sandbox," Peleus Uhley, platform security strategist at Adobe, said Wednesday in a blog post. A sandbox is a mechanism that enforces certain restrictions on how an application interacts with the underlying operating system.

After a dozen years and nine major releases, OS X has had a full life: the exuberance of youth, gradually maturing into adulthood, and now, perhaps, entering its dotage. When I am an old operating system I shall wear… leather?

The 2011 release of OS X 10.7 Lion seemed to mark the natural endpoint of the "big cat" naming scheme. But Apple couldn't resist the lure of the "cat, modifier cat" naming pattern, releasing OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion a year later. Perhaps it just wanted to give its cat nine lives.

As an anticipated launch date nears, Apple on Monday pushed out OS X 10.9 Mavericks Developer Preview 8 to developers with no major changes.

Continuing with its release cycle, Apple's latest dev preview comes two weeks after the previous version was seeded at the beginning of September.

LIke the most recent developer previews, it appears that today's comes with only minor changes to the forthcoming operating system, people familiar with the release said. Of note, work on iCloud Keychain stability issues continues, though areas of focus remain unchanged from Preview 7.

While deleting files in OS X simply involves moving them to the trash and emptying it, this routine does not remove the data of these items, but instead only clears the directory entry for them. The content of the items is kept on disk with the system having no way to access it; as a result, there is potential for the content to be scanned and recovered by data recovery tools.

Apple on Monday unveiled Mavericks, the start of the next 10 years of its Mac OS X operating system, with a naming switch from breeds of cat to California locales. It will launch this fall on the Mac App Store

Craig Federighi, head of OS X development for Apple, unveiled OS X 10.9 Mountain Lion at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2013 keynote. He highlighted three key features found in the forthcoming operating system update: new tabs in Finder, the ability to tag individual files, and enhanced support for multiple displays.

Apple on Tuesday released OS X 10.8.4, its latest security and maintenance update for the Mountain Lion operating system for Mac, improving Wi-Fi connectivity and Microsoft Exchange compatibility, and also fixing an issue that prevented making FaceTime calls to non-U.S. numbers.

The OS X 10.8.4 update is now available for Mountain Lion users through the Mac App Store. A system restart is required once the update has been installed, and it is recommended by Apple for all users.

Google is looking to bring a version of its Chrome OS app launcher to the Mac, possibly as an add-on to the Chrome browser, allowing users to access a slew of Web apps normally available only from within the

Chrome developer François Beaufort revealed on his Google+ page that the Internet search giant is working to bring the app launcher to Mac.

Exactly one week after the last OS X 10.8.4 beta was released to developers, Apple on Wednesday seeded build 12E52 of the upcoming maintenance update with no known issues.

Build 12E52 is the seventh release for OS X 10.8.4, and comes four versions a line of code was discovered pointing to Apple's ongoing efforts to introduce the 802.11ac Wi-Fi protocol in an upcoming Mac refresh.

OS X 10.9, which is internally codenamed “Cabernet,” will focus on various “power-user” enhancements and take core features from iOS, according to our sources. Unlike operating system updates such as OS X Leopard and OS X Lion, OS X 10.9 will likely not be an overhauled approach to how the operating system feels and functions.

Apple on Tuesday patched Java for the aged OS X Snow Leopard and tweaked Safari to give users more control over what websites they let run the vulnerability plagued Oracle software.

Oracle on Tuesday shipped an update for Java 6 and Java 7 to patch up to 42 bugs -- the number depends on the version and platform -- for Windows and OS X. Because Apple maintains Java 6 for OS X -- unlike Java 7, which Oracle handles -- it followed with its own update.