Let’s say you want to search all of the text messages that you have received on your Mac via Messages (formerly iChat), sent using Apple’s iMessage system, because you know someone sent you some information via chat messages, but you can’t remember who, or you can remember who but it was so long ago that scrolling back on your iPhone or in your Mac’s Messages chat window would take forever. Here are two methods to search all of your archived Mac messages at once.

Earlier this week, in fact just before the 4th of July (was that planned, knowing fewer people would be paying attention?), Facebook announced that a “blocking bug” (actually an “unblocking bug – some outlets have been referring to it as a virus) had hit more than 800,000 users, causing people that the Facebook users had blocked to become unblocked, with no notice or warning.

On Friday people across the United States started experiencing a massive Comcast outage. Over the weekend, instead of getting better, it spread, and now, going on 4 days later, the Comcast outage is global.

In a fairly stunning win for mobile phone privacy, the Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement agencies must obtain a warrant before they can demand and receive from mobile carriers and mobile providers access to the cell phone location data (known as ‘cell site location information’, or CSLI for short) of a given cellular phone. In the case of Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that tracking a cell phone is barely different than putting an ankle bracelet on an individual and monitoring their movements, and so overturned related case law that has been around for (up to) decades.

With today’s Supreme Court decision in the Wayfair v. South Dakota case, the Supremes have cleared the way for states to collect sales tax from Internet-based merchants who do not have a physical presence within the state; however the ruling is quite narrow in its scope and so does not open the floodgates for states to tax anybody and everybody who arguably does business online within a given state. Read on for a plain English explanation of this Internet sales tax decision, as well as a link to the full South Dakota v. Wayfair decision and the dissenting opinions.

Depending on your security and privacy settings on your Apple Mac, you may get a message that software or an app you were installing “was blocked from opening because it is not from an identified developer.” And when you try to override it, the ‘Allow’ or ‘Open Anyway’ button doesn’t work. The explanation below may be why!

In an unusual move, the Court that issued the decision in the AT&T Time Warner antitrust lawsuit yesterday warned the losing party (that would be the U.S. Department of Justice ), essentially, not to bother trying to appeal his ruling. In his 172 page ruling in the case of the United States of America versus ATT Inc, et al, Judge Richard Leon says, among other things, and we quote, “I do not believe that the Government has a likelihood of success on the merits of an appeal.”

By now, in 2018, most people know that rental scams on Craigslist abound. But how to tell a Craigslist rental scam is not as well known. Below is an example of a Craigslist rental scam. The scammer calls himself Bob Osell, claims to be renting the house located at 2237 Kay St. in Longmont, Colorado, and to be reachable at (760)2378225.

Did you just get one Operation Amber Alert too many on your smartphone? Fed up with how the vast majority of Operation Amber Alerts are not about stranger abductions that endanger the child (or about stranger abductions at all)? You’re not alone. Here’s how to turn off and disable Operation Amber Alerts on your iPhone and Android phone.

A massive Comcast telephone outage is affecting businesses and homes alike across the United States for the second day in a row. States coast to coast are affected, including California, Washington state, New York, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, along with inland states like Colorado and Illinois. Major cities that are effected include Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Houston, Atlanta, Manhattan, and Philadelphia, along with many outlying cities in those areas.

Lots of people put off updating or upgrading their operating system (OS) because every update or upgrade to an OS seems to come with a raft of problems and issues. Whether you use a Mac or a Windows machine, an update or upgrade can cause problems with retrieving email in general, and Gmail in particular. In the Mac world these come from updates to OS X (now on version 10.13, known as High Sierra). If you are using Windows, the current version is Windows 10.

Perhaps in keeping with their desire to be at the fore of the online dating frontier, it seems that Facebook is allowing profiles that are overtly sex ads. Or perhaps they just are eight years late to the rush to fill the void for online erotic services that was left when Craigslist shut down their ‘Adult services’ section.

If you are anything like me, you quickly got tired of having to delete the “On such-and-such a date, so-and-so wrote:” attribution quote line every ..single ..time ..you replied to an email in Mac’s native mail program, Mail.app. Oddly, given how friendly the Mac generally is, there is no way to alter, customize, edit, or remove that infernal line through preferences. Or, really, through any other obvious way. Here’s how to change it. Here is how to fix it for all versions, including the change for 10.8 Mountain Lion!

Some legal experts are saying that it’s time for Amazon to be broken up into separate entities under antitrust laws, pointing to Amazon’s ripping off of vendors in the Amazon Marketplace as an example of Amazon’s reach having gone too far.

Lots of people want to change the color of individual mailbox folders on their Mac in the Mail app, in order to quickly and visually distinguish one mail folder from another. Despite dozens, if not hundreds, of threads looking for this option on the Mac forums, it has never been added as a feature. But there is a way that you can do something just as good – in fact we think better! – to visually distinguish mailbox folders in your Mac mail app program! You can use emoji as icons in your mailbox names!