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Andrew Orr

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.

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Watch Second Trailer for ‘Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry”

Apple has uploaded a second trailer for its upcoming documentary called “Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry.” It tells the true coming-of-age story of the singer-songwriter and her rise to global superstardom. From award-winning filmmaker R.J. Cutler, the documentary offers a deeply intimate look at this extraordinary teenager’s journey, at just seventeen years old, navigating life on the road, on stage, and at home with her family, while writing, recording and releasing her debut album “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?”

‘SimpleLogin’ is an Open Source Alternative to Sign in With Apple

Sign In with Apple lets you create accounts with your Apple ID for apps that support it. Its “Hide My Email” feature protects your email by forwarding emails to your actual email. SimpleLogin does the same; it lets you create random email aliases that forward emails to your true email address. This open source alternative to Sign In with Apple helps you keep your email safe from newsletters, websites, and more. It’s free to download and use and there is an optional subscription for advanced features like custom domains, unlimited aliases, or a catch-all alias.

Washington State Suffers Data Breach due to Contractor ‘Accellion’

Washington’s state government reported a data breach on Monday that could affect over 1.6 million people. The breach is connected to Accellion, a contractor involved with the state auditor’s office.

During the week of January 25, 2021, Accellion confirmed that an unauthorized person gained access to SAO files by exploiting a vulnerability in Accellion’s file transfer service. Some of the SAO data files contained personal information of Washington state residents who filed unemployment insurance claims in 2020 […] may also include the personal information of other Washington residents who have not yet been identified but whose information was in state agency or local government files under review by the SAO.

New Facebook Message Warns You of iOS 14 Ad Opt-In

In response to an iOS 14 feature that makes developers ask user consent to use their data, Facebook wants to remind people just how beleaguered it really is.

In the post, Facebook says that if users accept the prompts for Facebook and Instagram, the ads you see on those apps won’t change. “If you decline, you will still see ads, but they will be less relevant to you.” The tech giant notes that Apple has said that providing education about its new privacy changes is allowed.

To me, the most offensive part about this isn’t Facebook pretending to care about “businesses other than itself that rely on ads to reach products customers.” It’s how it says “This won’t give us access to new types of information.”

Data Privacy Day 2021: Tresorit Responds to Encryption Backdoors

For Data Privacy Day 2021, companies with private products like Tresorit, ProtonMail, Threema, and Tutanota, have issued a joint statement about proposed laws about backdoored encryption.

[…] encryption is an absolute, data is either encrypted or it isn’t, users have privacy or they don’t. The desire to give law enforcement more tools to fight crime is obviously understandable. But the proposals are the digital equivalent of giving law enforcement a key to every citizens’ home and might begin a slippery slope towards greater violations of personal privacy.

Apple Shares ‘MySwimPro’ in Developer Spotlight

Apple has highlighted Fares Ksebati and his app MySwimPro in its Developer Spotlight. It provides aquatic workout videos for athletes.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you started? That it’s really important to be consistent, that it takes time to develop, and that if you can just be a little bit better every single day, the compounding impact is absolutely insane. We’ve been at this for five years, which is more than 1,800 days, and we’re trying to be at least 1 percent better each day.

Pixelmator Pro ML Super Resolution Now Removes WebP Compression Artifacts

Pixelmator Pro has a new update ready, version 2.0.4. It brings an improvement to its ML Super Resolution image upscaler. It can now remove compression artifacts from WebP files. Another improvement adds support for portrait masks in Apple ProRAW images.

Pixelmator Pro already supports the WebP file format and, as it gains more users around the web, it’s becoming clear that the WebP compression algorithm produces unique compression artifacts. ML Super Resolution has already been trained to remove JPEG artifacts when resampling images but, with today’s update, it can now remove WebP artifacts too.

How Apple Improved iMessage Security in iOS 14

Project Zero, Google’s security team, reverse-engineered iMessage to see how Apple improved it in its latest OS 14 releases. Specially, how it has gained new protections against zero-day attacks using BlastDoor, resliding of the shared cache, and exponential throttling.

One of the major changes in iOS 14 is the introduction of a new, tightly sandboxed “BlastDoor” service which is now responsible for almost all parsing of untrusted data in iMessages (for example, NSKeyedArchiver payloads). Furthermore, this service is written in Swift, a (mostly) memory safe language which makes it significantly harder to introduce classic memory corruption vulnerabilities into the code base.

This Person Hacked His iPod to Stream Spotify Using Raspberry Pi

Guy Dupont recently hacked an old iPod to stream Spotify. He used a Raspberry PI Zero W and a custom UI built using Python. Additionally, he fitted a 1000 mAh batter into it, a motor for haptic feedback, and a 2-inch LCD Adafruit display. “My mother-in-law recently gifted me a bag of the family’s retired iPods. I had forgotten how good it feels to hold and use one of these things. Naturally, I decided to modify one. I wanted to supply some modern features (streaming, search, Bluetooth audio, etc), while paying homage to the amazing UX that Apple originally released almost 20 years ago.”