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News: plain-text passwords and FileVault, MobileMe and iCloud storage, MobileMe websites, and more!
Mon, 7th May 2012
FYI, this story is more than a year old

A flaw has been revealed in Apple's FileVault technology that stores the user's password in clear text, after an Apple developer enabled a debug mode. The good news is that this only affects users who used FileVault encryption prior to Lion and then upgraded to Lion and kept using the legacy version of FileVault. Luckily, the fix is simple: start using the whole-disk encryption offered by FileVault2 and remove all previous backups in order to fully eradicate any remaining copies of your plain-text password. Apple has silently extended the period of expanded iCloud storage for previous MobileMe subscribers. MobileMe subscribers who migrated to iCloud last year were given an extra 20GB of iCloud storage for a total of 25GB, and now Apple has extended that offer to September 30 this year, at which point they will be given the choice to keep the storage and pay, or downgrade to the free 5GB storage tier.

The demise of MobileMe will happen in just a few short months, and if you're currently using MobileMe to publish websites then you may want to re-consider where your website is currently hosted. To that end, Macworld has a guide on re-hosting your MobileMe website with a service you might already have, and their guide on publishing your MobileMe iWeb site on Dropbox is good.

Adobe has now released Creative Suite 6 after its announcement last month. Adobe's Creative Cloud, their subscription-based online offering won't be landing until May 11.