August 2019 • Macworld 113HELP DESKThe solution? Either log out and back into
the account or perform a standard restart. That
appears to clear the hardware lockout.
Fix a greyed-out Safari
home page preference
While malware hasn’t found a fertile home on the
Mac for decades, scammers keep trying. As many of
you have experienced, adware and other software
that delivers unwanted content or an unwanted
experience abounds – like redirecting you to a
specific website for searching or turning all Amazon
links into affiliate links that earn the scammers a
commission until they’re shut down.
Even with vigilance against nasty threats, you or
(more likely) someone you know may have installed
otherwise reasonable seeming software that
hijacks Safari in some particular way. That includes
a rather nasty way in which you can be prevented
from changing your home page in Safari in Safari >
Preferences > General, then the Home page field.
This technique involves using profiles, a tool
for system administrators and others to distribute
specific settings files to Mac users. It’s used more
widely in iOS, where VPN software and other apps
rely on profiles to let users opt into behaviour
that Apple otherwise prevents iOS apps from
engaging in. In System Preferences, look for the
Profiles preference, which is a spiky badge with a
checkmark in the middle. If you don’t see Profiles,
you have no profiles installed, and any Home page
field problems are unrelated.