Insecure / Unsecure

Until yesterday I’ve been embarrassingly insecure about the security of my MacBookPro’s operating system.

My friends in the field cringe when I confessed that on my 2013 machine I was still running the MacOS it came with, Mavericks. Part of it was that I heard friends mona about things lost on upgrades, and also, a hunch that the newer features were not terribly essential.

But the main reason was my photo management flow using Aperture. Yes, the software the Apple stopped supporting in 2015. A torrent of people went crazy and jumping to other photo management systems.

Lesson here- just because a piece of software is no longer supported does not mean it’s not functional. I’ve not found the editing, organizational, management capability I have honed in Aperture (yes Lightroom likely does the trick and I may be there some day). But three years later I am still able to do everything I need to in Aperture. And I use a flickr exporter that moves all the meta data (title, caption, tags) from Aperture to flickr, so all my photo data is first saved locally.

I thought I had read that Aperture did not work in later operating systems, so I stuck where I was. Terribly exposed I bet?

My strategy was to wait to upgrade until something forced my hand, something that prevented my ability to do web and media work. Among my main tools are BBEdit, HTML and code editing software I started using in the late 1990s and Fetch for s/ftp from even earlier, 1989.

I did find a few weeks ago that the newest version of marvelous SiteSucker would not work on my creaky OS, and the version I did was not “sucking” correctly.

But also, in the last few days, I started seeing adware links pop up in new tabs in Chrome, triggered it seemed from the admin pages of this very blog. I did some Wordfence and other scans, and came up empty. I ran MalwareBytes and cleaned 3 things.

Still saw the adware. Checking my version of Chrome I saw that it could not be updated in my old fart OS (I did find more malware in local HTML files using Combo Cleaner a great utility for also reducing bloat in your hard drive).

I found more than a few articles, posts conforming that Aperture worked in Mac OS High Sierra.

As a measure, I first did a time machine backup, and updated first to Yosemite. Everything seemed to work, so I did another Time Machine snapshot, and did the big plunge to High Sierra.

And boom, Aperture works like a champ, like it always had. The only gotchya so far is that somewhere my contacts got lost, but I was able to finally restore it from Time Machine (or maybe iCloud sync clicked in). Maybe it’s me wish, but everything seems a tad more snappy to in response time.

I’m feeling so secure now.