Eclectic Light Company Founder Dr. Howard Oakley - TMO Background Mode Interview

Dr. Howard Oakley is currently a developer of Mac software and is the founder of The Eclectic Light Company. Howard started life keenly interested in medicine, attended Oxford, and spent most of his career with the British Royal Navy as a doctor, ascending to the rank of Surgeon Commander. Along the way, he became heavily involved with computers and programming. His first encounter with a Mac SE and MPW hooked him for life.

We chatted about his life and times as a navy physician, his parallel evolution as a Mac developer, his amazing blog, The Eclectic Light Company, his writing for Mac Format, and some of his amazing free software: Aquiline Check, Consolation and SilentKnight, tools he wanted for himself. Howard delves into security issues, like XProtect, in a way that few other developers do.

Boost Productivity with this App's Task Timelines, Project Visualization, Daily Planning, and Cross-Links: $25

We have a deal on Pagico 9, software designed to make your life easier by managing all your tasks, files, projects, and clients in one elegant package. Pagico 9 turns to-do lists into meaningful timelines, visualizes project status, centralize tasks, cross-link everything, neatly tag projects, and more in just a few clicks. It’s $25 through our deal.

New 'Shot on iPhone' Clip - 'Powder'

Apple’s latest ‘Shot on iPhone’ video takes us to the slopes. Winter X Games snowboarders Red Gerard, Danny Davis, Kimmy Fasani, and Ben Ferguson feature in the clip. They enjoy fresh powder at the iconic Baldface Lodge in British Colombia. Joe Carlino directed the video. It was shot on an iPhone 11 Pro.

Leaked Documents Reveal Antivirus Surveillance Industry

Leaked documents reveal that an Avast antivirus subsidiary called Jumpshot packages what you do on your computer and sells it to companies like Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and more.

The data obtained by Motherboard and PCMag includes Google searches, lookups of locations and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, people visiting companies’ LinkedIn pages, particular YouTube videos, and people visiting porn websites. It is possible to determine from the collected data what date and time the anonymized user visited YouPorn and PornHub, and in some cases what search term they entered into the porn site and which specific video they watched.

I write a lot about privacy and security, and I try hard to be optimistic that eventually things will change and some day we will have a federal privacy law.