Category: Apple

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Bulk Emailers and Spoofing email

Recent industry changes by Apple, Google and Yahoo have meant many queries at work as we have ramped up our SPF, DMARC and DKIM settings to prevent spammers spoofing our domains.

In short, 3rd party suppliers that provide web services for us are no longer able to just spoof our domains and need to register their email servers on our DNS SPDF record as an authorised sender. Many question why they need to do this, when its worked for years and trying to point out that was was ok in 2014 is not okay now in 2024 if we want to stop the spoofers and spammers trying to snare our users that rely on our services.

NCSC provide a service to report phishing emails to them as report@phishing.gov.uk and tools to check how secure a domain is when you want to see how likely it is to be spoofed, ie sent pretending to be someone else, available here.

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Apple and FreeBSD update

The update to PERL also managed to break SSL, with no clear culprit of what had failed. rebuilding all the of PERL dependencies did little to fix it. and oddly Apache still tried to serve up the webpages but in plain text on the internal network.

Going thru the Freebsd-update fetch and install route and rebuilding OpenSSL once the patch update had been applied allow Apache to once again happily serve up the site pages.

iOS 17 is not far away from being launched but I have been running the Beta’s on phone, iPad, Watch and AppleTV quite happily for a month now. After upgrading the AppleTV the big screen FaceTime is a bonus but watching the Apple Launch event now sure I need the finger double tap for the watch or the USB-C connections for iPhone so will wait to see how the prices pan out or if a battery replacement on each will buy another year of service and see what next September brings.

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Apple Beta Updates

Back from holiday so have now installed the new iPhone, Watch and AppleTV beta updates, and may have found a killer feature in the WatchOS update which allows the Watch to connect to my bike Bluetooth Cadence sensor, so effectively making the cycle computer redundant as the Apple Health cycle mode will replicate all the functions the cycle computer will do. Interesting to see how this might impact battery life though on the watch given it will be much more active during rides.

Seems to be lots of little changes to iPhone in terms of widgets and messaging integration, but probably more updates for the Instagram generation rather than myself. Early days yet so will probably find more useful features as I delve and others update so the SharePlay functions come into their own.

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New Offerings from Apple – Beta launches

Been looking at the new beta previews from Apple of the forthcoming iOS/TvOS/WatchOS coming out later this year.

WatchOS does not appear to have a major new killer functions, least not for me. although current Watch is 3 years old, so will probably update anyway, but the new body temperature sensor is less of a pull for me, but if it can take accurate body temperature rather than just variations in temperature I might be sold.

Of a bigger pull is the addition of FaceTime to AppleTV 4K. Using an iPhone/iPad as the local camera feed putting friends and family on the big screen is a welcome addition. Yet to see the revised controls, but have been getting annoyed with the current controls and the control panel covering the subtitles or screen text I purposely paused it to read is hopefully corrected. watch this space.

Yet to look at the iPhone iOS update changes, but will take a deeper look at when I can.

EDIT – pants – FaceTime is not available on 1st 4K Gen AppleTV boxes and not sure there is an enough change in the tech to warrant splashing out on a new box. just for FaceTime. Also requires Phone to be on iOS17 so really not worth the change today.

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Apple Watch 6 fails to install data plan

Was lucky enough to order and take delivery of the new Apple Watch 6 on launch day, but joy slightly tempered by ongoing issues to transfer my 4G data plan from the old Series 3 to the new device.

Various calls to EE, my network provider so far have been unable to resolve, despite various resetting of the watch and phone settings to get it working.

Only really a pain when out running, as I don’t take my phone so missed SMS and other alerts. Apparentlty a known issue, but not helping me much….

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AppleTV – new toys

Sorting out the house over the summer I came across an old AppleTV Gen 2 box. Its long since gave up getting updates and logging into the damn things proved a trial as its too old to recognize 2FA logins.
Some googling threw up the fact you can still do this, but have to append the generate 2FA code to your password in the password field.

This unlocked my iCloud so I could bring up my Camera Roll and finally accessed all the photos I have taken over the years from my phone. Too many don’t make it into proper albums or printed, but watching them back brings back happy memories of holidays and days out.


A bonus byproduct of this trial of viewing old photos, which I had hooked into the AV AMP under the telly, was the music quality that was being pumped out alongside the pictures. Being a Gen2 AppleTv, though the pictures although good did not match the audio quality, being a max of 720 lines.. not even full HD.

A quick trawl of Amazon turned up the AppleTV 4K 64Gb model on a next day delivery with payments spread over 5 months.. Not quite an impulse purchase, but now I have access to all of the Apple content and HQ music and easy access to all the family photos for not much more that a good quality digital photo frames of not so long ago.

the TvOS has come along way since the original device, so will probably penlty of playing with the new apps and settings to get things just right.