Since 2015 Andrew has been writing about Apple, privacy, security, and at one point even Android. You can find him most places online under the username @andrewornot.
Apple is bringing Jared Harris (Chernobyl) and Lee Pace (Halt and Catch Fire) to star in its Foundation series.
Based on Isaac Asimov’s novel series of the same name, Foundationchronicles the epic saga of The Foundation, a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it. Harris will star as Hari Seldon, a mathematical genius who predicts the demise of the empire. Pace is set as Brother Day, the current Emperor of the Galaxy.
totallee makes thin iPhone cases so your smartphone doesn’t become bulky. It recently released a line of green cases for the midnight green iPhone 11 Pro.
This case covers every corner of your phone and features a camera lens “lip” for added protection. Like a brushed finish? Go matte. Looking for invisible protection? Transparent all the way. Want a sophisticated backing? Leather is for you. This case maintains the original look of your iPhone 11 Pro. No branding. No bulk. No nonsense.
You can pick up one of these cases for US$29.
Ceres is a nonprofit that promotes sustainable energy. Monday night it celebrated its 30th anniversary where it gave Apple an award.
ProtonVPN found an issue with iOS that affects VPNs: When you connect to a VPN some data is left outside of the network.
Verizon is giving new and existing customers a free year of Disney+ which will launch on November 12 for $6.99/month.
Despite arguments from governments that encryption would hinder their ability to fight criminals, this clearly isn’t the case. In a recent example one of the biggest child porn sites on the dark web was recently taken down.
No backdoors were needed to track down the owner of the server or hundreds of the site’s visitors. For that matter, the FBI didn’t even need a warrant. The FBI did not deploy its infamous NIT (Network Investigative Technique) to track down site users. The flaw was the payment system linked to the site. Users may have thought their Bitcoin transactions couldn’t be traced back to them, but they were wrong.
The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: Terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, organized crime.
Facebook announced new features today that it claims can stop 2020 election interference. However, its advertising policy lets politicians lie and gladly pockets the money it gets from allowing it.
One new feature is called Facebook Protect. By hijacking accounts of political candidates or their campaign staff, bad actors can steal sensitive information, expose secrets, and spread disinformation. So to safeguard these vulnerable users, Facebook is launching a new program with extra security they can opt into.
Mark Zuckerberg on letting politicians lie in Facebook ads: “I don’t think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true. And I think that those tensions are something we have to live with.”
Several Trend Micro apps were removed from the Mac App Store after they were found collecting user browser history.
Dr Cleaner, Dr Antivirus, and App Uninstall – utilities owned by the Japan-headquartered security house and distributed on the Mac App Store – are no longer available for download…Mac security guru Patrick Wardle noted last week that in addition to the advertised functions of removing adware and malware from Macs, the software also collected people’s personal data including their browsing history, then transmitted that data as a password-protected archive to a server on the internet.
As of this writing Dr. Antivirus is still in the MAS.
Tim Cook has been named chairman of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management taking over from Jim Breyer.
Apple is leasing 100,000 square feet of office space in London’s tallest building, 22 Bishopgate for tis Apple Pay division.
David Murphy asks if people are morally obligated to inform their guests that their home contains smart devices like HomePod, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home. Given the fact that these devices can listen to you, should you post a sign in your house that says, “Warning: This Area Under Surveillance?”
If you’re simply sporting a smart speaker, I think announcing its presence is less of a deal—overkill, really. But if a camera is recording me at any point, and that’s something you can view later, I think it’s the friendly thing to do to let me know before I start gossiping…or worse.
What do you mean by worse??
NordVPN admits it was hacked, saying that in March 2018 one of its data centers was accessed by a third party.
Redditor u/stephenvsawyer found that HEIC photos were given unlimited backups to Google Photos because they are smaller than JPGs. If Google tried to compress them the files would actually get bigger, which would be a waste of storage space. But Google calls it a bug and says it will fix it.
However, what that means remains unclear. Would Google start charging for HEIC images stored in Photos, even if they’re small and don’t take up much space? Would it forcibly re-convert those pics to compressed JPEG, or compress them further under the HEIC format? And will the fix apply to all HEIC images or just iPhones?
I’m not sure how Google will fix it unless they just check if the file extension is .HEIC and arbitrarily limit these files (arbitrary since converting them would increase their size).
Reports say that Apple has moved its timeline for a custom 5G Apple modem to 2022.
It won’t be easy. In fact, bringing a new modem to the finish line in two years is really pushing it, my source said. After all the design work is done, and the fabrication of the chips themselves is underway, an arduous testing and certification process still awaits.
Right now I think 5G is overhyped and even the previous rumor of a 5G iPhone in 2020 didn’t make sense.
The latest Apple betas like iOS 13.2 have a feature that lets you delete your Siri audio history in settings.
In addition to offering an explicit opt-in, Apple has promised that only employees, and not contractors, will be involved in reviewing the audio clips. However, this doesn’t stop the automated text transcriptions of your Siri requests from being transmitted to Apple, irrespective of whether you opt-in or -out, although they will pseudonymized and dissociated from your Apple ID. What’s more, these transcripts could be reviewed by employees and contractors.
I’m glad that Apple is adding this feature, and given its privacy stance I’m surprised it’s a feature we don’t already have.
Twitter is once again available for macOS users via the Mac App Store, and it was built using Catalyst. The company explained the shift.
Not only was Apple the first company to reach a market value of one trillion dollars, the company recently passed that milestone.
The New York Times has a nice feature out today about how a mother found photos of her kids in a machine learning database.
None of them could have foreseen that 14 years later, those images would reside in an unprecedentedly huge facial-recognition database called MegaFace. Containing the likenesses of nearly 700,000 individuals, it has been downloaded by dozens of companies to train a new generation of face-identification algorithms, used to track protesters, surveil terrorists, spot problem gamblers and spy on the public at large. The average age of the people in the database, its creators have said, is 16.
I can’t imagine the gross feeling you get when you see your kids in a database like this.
Five games were just added to Apple Arcade, tempting people to keep their subscription as the service’s one month free trial nears its end.
A conversation on Hacker News from an alleged Apple employee says that things are broken at Apple and no one communicates.
Broken management structure. I have had many managers (a red flag in itself) but even worse none of the managers take suggestions from engineers. Everything is purely top down. If an engineer realizes there is a problem on a macro scale they cannot fix it. It is literally impossible to unite more than 1.5 teams to get anything done.
Obviously there is no way to tell if they are real or not (At least, my surface research for these linked teasers can’t tell). Another commenter mentions “overt sexism that I’ve been witness to in iCloud management…”
Amazon Music now joins Spotify as third-party features available on Apple TV. Download the Amazon Music app to get started.
For now, the tvOS Amazon Music app is available for Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD users in thirteen countries: the U.S., UK, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Mexico, Japan, and India.
Amazon Music is a free download from the App Store.
Alfonso Cuarón has set a multi-year deal with Apple for its Apple TV+ while still managing his deal with Anonymous Content.
Redditor u/BickNlinko bought a certified refurbished MacBook Pro from Apple and it had diagnostic software called ‘PhoenixCE’ left on it.
The hashtag #BoycottApple is trending on Twitter after Apple removed the HKMap and Quartz apps from the App Store at the behest of China.
Just after Apple removed the apps, #BoycottApple has been trending on all the social media platforms with users voicing their discontent with Apple’s move. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Apple has been under fire for pulling something like this. Back in 2017, the company pulled The New York Times app from the App Store stating that the Chinese government had requested the app’s removal because it was “in violation of local regulations.”
Phil Schiller: “Courage.”
