Who doesn’t like dial-up internet? Even if those who survived the dial-up years are happy to be on broadband, and those who are still on dial-up wish that they weren’t, there’s definitely a nostalgic factor to the experience. Yet recreating the experience can be a hassle, with signing up for a dial-up ISP or jumping through many (POTS) hoops to get a dial-up server up and running. An easier way is demonstrated by [Minh Danh] with a Viking DLE-200B telephone line simulator in a recent blog post.

This little device does all the work of making two telephones (or modems) think that they’re communicating via a regular old POTS network. After picking up one of these puppies for a mere $5 at a flea market, [Minh Danh] tested it first with two landline phones to confirm that yes, you can call one phone from the other and hold a conversation. The next step was thus to connect two PCs via their modems, with the other side of the line receiving the ‘call’. In this case a Windows XP system was configured to be the dial-up server, passing through its internet connection via the modem.

With this done, a 33.6 kbps dial-up connection was successfully established on the client Windows XP system, with a blistering 3.8 kB/s download speed. The reason for 33.6 kbps is because the DLE-200B does not support 56K, and according to the manual doesn’t even support higher than 28.8 kbps, so even reaching these speeds was lucky.

There’s an eXodus taking place, and millions are finding a new home on Bluesky. In recent days, the decentralized social media platform has been gaining 10,000 new users every 10–15 minutes, or about 1 million new users per day. Open Culture is already there, sharing the cultural posts you once enjoyed on Twitter. We hope you will join us. Find us at @openculture.bsky.social, or just click here.

PS. If you’re are on Threads, you can also find us there too.

If you're planning to steal 60 presidential campaign yard signs, don't just check out the potential penalty, look for an AirTag too.


AirTags have found stolen cars, stolen mail, and unfortunately also been used to track car thief victims. But now one has been used in Springfield, MO, it track down someone stealing yard signs.

No formal charges have been filed yet, and police investigation is still continuing, so it's not fully clear what happened. But it is known that Laura McCaskill and her partner John included an AirTag with their Harris/Walz yard sign, and that was tracked to a car that had around 60 such signs in the trunk.


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It’s essential to know when an authentication request is genuine. Without that knowledge, it’s all too easy to give your password away to malware, or to a badly-behaved app that’s trying to work around macOS security rules. By far the best way to authenticate now is using Touch ID, but many Macs don’t support it, either because they can’t, or because their keyboard doesn’t, and macOS doesn’t always offer it anyway. This article looks at how you can recognise genuine requests.

All Macs

The traditional non-biometric dialog is still in widespread use, and can appear on any Mac, even when Touch ID is available, and in Sequoia. I’ve been trying to work out a simple rule to predict when you should expect to see a classic request, and it appears to be associated with more traditional apps like Keychain Access, and when asking to access a file-based keychain such as the login keychain. But there don’t appear to be any simple and robust rules.

When an app needs to access a secret that requires authentication, the security system, not the app, displays a dialog asking you for the password to that keychain to authenticate before it will provide the password or other secret to the app.

That authentication dialog is very important: although malware might try to forge it, it contains distinctive features you should always look for:

• The icon consists of a locked padlock, on which is superimposed a miniature icon representing the app or component that has asked to access the keychain.
• The bold text names the app or component that has called for keychain access, and states which item it’s asking to access: here, a named secure note.
• The smaller lettering specifies that it’s asking for the keychain password, that is the password used to unlock the named keychain, not that for your Apple Account or any other password.
• If you’re in any doubt about its authenticity, click on the Deny button and the request will be denied.
• If you’re in any doubt about its authenticity, open Keychain Access, lock the keychain there, and repeat the action while watching the keychain to ensure that it’s unlocked and handled correctly.

Note that this doesn’t provide or ask for your user name, only the password for that keychain.

Macs without Touch ID

If Touch ID isn’t currently available to your Mac, either because it doesn’t support it, or because it doesn’t have a keyboard connected that includes Touch ID support, you should see the non-biometric versions of other dialogs requesting authentication. These are for purposes other than keychain access that require elevated privileges, such as for a process to run a privileged helper, or to make changes in System Settings.

This new vertical format should contain the following:

• The icon consists of a locked padlock, on which is superimposed a miniature icon representing the app or component that is asking for your password.
• Bold text names the app making the request.
• Below that is a general indication of the purpose of the request.
• Below that is the instruction to Enter your password to allow this.
• There are two text boxes, to contain your user name (already completed) and password.
• There are only two buttons, one of which may be OK or something more specific, and the other is Cancel.
• If you’re in any doubt as to its authenticity, click on the Cancel button to deny the request, and consult the app’s documentation.

Macs with Touch ID

If your Mac supports Touch ID (all Intel Macs with T2 chips, and all Apple silicon Macs), and currently has a keyboard connected to it with support for Touch ID, macOS should offer you the biometric version of that authentication dialog.

This should contain the following:

• The icon consists of a Touch ID fingerprint, on which is superimposed a miniature icon representing the app or component that is asking for your password.
• Bold text names the app making the request.
• Below that is a general indication of the purpose of the request.
• Below that is the instruction to Touch ID or enter your password to allow this.
• There are only two buttons, the upper being Use Password…, and the lower is Cancel.
• If you’re in any doubt as to its authenticity, click on the Cancel button to deny the request, and consult the app’s documentation.

This dialog has distinctive behaviour that’s difficult to forge. When you place your fingertip on the Touch ID button on the keyboard, it will either authenticate successfully, so dismissing the dialog, or the dialog shakes to indicate you should try placing your fingertip on the button again.

If Touch ID authentication fails, or you click on the button to Use Password…, the dialog expands to resemble the non-biometric version above, with the following two important differences:

• The icon still consists of a Touch ID fingerprint, with a superimposed miniature icon representing the app or component.
• The instruction remains to Touch ID or enter your password to allow this.

Although you will continue to encounter classic non-biometric authentication dialogs on a Mac with full Touch ID support, you may also come across some that you might have expected still to use the old dialog, but which now use a biometric dialog, such as that below.

Perhaps as Touch ID support extends this will become more consistent.

A security expert has recounted how close he came to being fooled by a new AI-based scam call that aimed to get his Gmail account details.


There were already scam ChatGPT apps on the App Store, but now artificial intelligence has been deployed by scammers in what expert Sam Mitrovic describes as "super realistic."

"People are busy and this scam sounded and looked legitimate enough that I would give them an A for their effort," wrote Mitrovic in a blog post. "Many people are likely to fall for it."


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When the first Macs with internal hard disks started shipping in 1987, they were revolutionary. Although they still used 800 KB floppy disks, here at last was up to 80 MB of reliable high-speed storage. It’s worth reminding yourself of just how tiny those capacities are, and the fact that the largest of those hard disks contained one hundred times as much as each floppy disk. By the 1990s, with models like the Mac IIfx, internal hard disks had doubled in capacity, and reached as much as 12 GB at the end of the century.

Over that period we discovered that hard disks also needed routine maintenance if they were to perform optimally, and all the best users started to defrag their hard disks.

Consider a large library containing tens or even hundreds of thousands of books. Major reference works are often published in a series of volumes. When you need to consult several consecutive volumes of such a work, how they’re stored is critical to the task. If someone has tucked each volume away in a different location within the stack, assembling those you need is going to take a long while. If all its volumes are kept in sequence on a single shelf, that’s far quicker. That’s why fragmentation of data has been so important in computer storage.

The story of defragging on the Mac is perhaps best illustrated in the rise and fall of Coriolis Systems and iDefrag. Coriolis was started in 2004, initially to develop iPartition, a tool for non-destructive re-partitioning of HFS+ disks, but its founder Alastair Houghton was soon offering iDefrag, which became a popular defragging tool. This proved profitable until SSDs became more widespread and Apple released APFS in High Sierra, forcing Coriolis to shut down in 2019, when defragging Macs effectively ceased.

All storage media, including memory, SSDs and rotating hard disks, can develop fragmentation, but most serious attention has been paid to the problem on hard disks. This is because of their electro-mechanical mechanism for seeking to locations on the spinning platter they use for storage. To read a fragmented file sequentially, the read-write head has to keep physically moving to new positions, which takes time and contributes to ageing of the mechanism and eventual failure. Although solid-state media can have slight overhead accessing disparate storage blocks sequentially, this isn’t thought significant and attempts to address that invariably have greater disadvantages.

Fragmentation on hard disks comes in three quite distinct forms: file data across most of the storage, file system metadata, and free space. Different strategies and products have been used to tackle each of those, with varying degrees of success. While few doubt the performance benefits achieved immediately after defragging each of those, little attention has been paid to demonstrating more lasting benefits, which remain more dubious.

Manually defragging HFS+ hard disks was always a questionable activity, as Apple added background defragmentation to Mac OS X 10.2, released two years before Coriolis was even founded. By El Capitan and Sierra that built-in defragging was highly effective, and the need for manual defragging had almost certainly become a popular myth. Neither did many consider the adverse effects on hard disk longevity of those intense periods of disk activity.

The second version of TechTool Pro in 1999 offered a simplified volume map for what it termed optimisation, offering the options to defragment only files, or the whole disk contents including free space.

By the following year, TechTool Pro was paying greater attention to defragging file system metadata, here shown in white. This view was animated during the process of defragmentation, showing its progress in gathering together all the files and free space into contiguous areas. TechTool Pro is still developed and sold by MicroMat, and now in version 20.

A similar approach was adopted by its competitor Speed Disk, here with even more categories of contents.

By 2010, my preferred defragger was Drive Genius 3, shown here working on a 500 GB SATA hard disk, one of four in my desktop Mac; version 6 is still sold by Prosoft. One popular technique for defragmentation with systems like that was to keep one of its four internal disks empty, then periodically clone one of the other disks to that, and clone it back again.

Alsoft’s DiskWarrior is another popular maintenance tool, shown here in 2000. This doesn’t perform conventional defragmentation, but restructures the trees used for file system metadata, and remains an essential tool for anyone maintaining HFS+ disks.

Since switching to APFS on SSDs several years ago, I have missed defragging like a hole in the head.