MacStories Team

3496 posts on MacStories since July 2011

Articles by the MacStories team. Founded by Federico Viticci in April 2009, MacStories attracts millions of readers every month thanks to in-depth, personal, and informed coverage that offers a balanced mix of Apple news, app reviews, and opinion.




Memberful: Help Your Clients Monetize Their Passion [Sponsor]

If you have a client looking to monetize their passion by building a membership website, look no further than Memberful, the best-in-class membership solution used by creators, publishers, and media companies worldwide.

Memberful has everything you need to get a membership site up and running with ease so your clients can concentrate on creating content while earning revenue. Memberful makes it simple to get your site up and running by integrating with the technologies you already use, like WordPress. There are WordPress shortcuts and built-in functions that allow you to insert dynamic links and integrate Memberful data inside your WordPress theme. Plus, Memberful works with popular services like Mailchimp, Discord, Google Analytics, and more, making it easy to reach and monetize your audience wherever they are without starting from scratch.

We’ve used Memberful ever since we launched Club MacStories in 2015. Not only did Memberful make setting up the Club easy, but it has grown with us throughout the following eight years, allowing us to expand from a newsletter to downloadable content, members-only podcasts, and more. Best of all, everything works seamlessly with our existing tech stack.

When you use Memberful, you’re in complete control of your audience and brand. And, with a GraphQL API, webhooks, and OAuth Single Sign-On, integrating with your existing workflow and systems is straightforward. You’ll get comprehensive analytics, too, allowing you to understand what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments as you go.

Help your clients monetize their passion by getting started for free with Memberful. It’s the proven way for creators, publishers, and media companies to monetize their audiences.

Our thanks to Memberful for sponsoring MacStories this week.





Kolide: Struggling to Afford Cybersecurity Insurance? Here’s Why. [Sponsor]

When MGM Resorts suffered a $100 million hack in September, CEO Bill Hornbuckle wasn’t too worried about the lost revenue, because cyber insurance would cover the tab. “I can only imagine what next year’s bill will be,” he joked.

Weeks later, on a call with analysts, Hornbuckle complained about the “staggering” rise of insurance costs in the past few years.

This story neatly illustrates the crisis in cyber liability coverage. For years, companies have invested more in security insurance than in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.

Some large enterprises are responding to the increased costs by creating their own “captive carriers,” insurance providers that exist only to serve them. But that’s clearly not an option for small businesses, which are more likely to go without insurance altogether.

According to Andrew Bucci, VP of Sales at Amplified Insurance Partners, “It’s going to come to a point where some people may have to self-insure, which means that they don’t take a cyber policy out and they just cross their fingers they don’t have some sort of breach.” That’s a huge gamble for SMBs, since they could be driven to bankruptcy by a single security incident.

At Kolide, we’ve seen our cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years, and we got curious about:

  • What’s driving the increases?
  • Who really needs cybersecurity insurance?
  • How can the average company reduce their premiums?

What we found was that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software. 

Read the full blog to learn more about our findings.

Our thanks to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.