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.
Government entities have been using Section 215 of the Patriot Act as justification to collect logs of web browsing activity.
In fact, “one of those 61 orders resulted in the production of information that could be characterized as information regarding browsing,” Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in the second letter. Specifically, one order had approved collection of logs revealing which computers “in a specified foreign country” had visited “a single, identified U. S. web page.”
Apple’s Family Sharing feature now supports sharing in-app purchases among members at the discretion of each developer.
Apple has ordered a six-part documentary series from World Surf League (WSL) and Box to Box Films with the top surfers around the world.
A Satechi magnetic wireless charging cable has been released on Friday, says the company. For US$29.99 you can get up to 7.5W of charging.
Calls from scammers pretending to be from Apple and Amazon have been appearing lately. In the case of Apple, some of them mention suspicious iCloud activity.
In both scenarios, the scammers say you can conveniently press 1 to speak with someone (how nice of them!). Or they give you a phone number to call. Don’t do either. It’s a scam. They’re trying to steal your personal information, like your account password or your credit card number.
Apple has given a straight-to-series order for “Gutsy Women” a documentary series starring Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea.
To accompany his roundup of encrypted DNS services, Andrew has a roundup of the best encrypted cloud storage services.
Switching from your ISP’s DNS is good because your browsing history could be sold. Here are five encrypted DNS services to use instead.
Financial tech company Yolt has introduced support for Apple Pay. This means customers can pay with their Apple Watch or iPhone.
Twitter announced on Wednesday that its mobile app now supports physical security keys for iPhone and Android. The company added support for these keys in 2018 but people could only use them in a browser. But switching to the WebAuthn protocol brings the method to mobile devices.
Now anyone with a security key set up on their Twitter account can use that same key to log in from their mobile device, so long as the key is supported. (A ton of security keys exist today that work across different devices, like YubiKeys and Google’s Titan key.)
An engineer for Amazon Web Services was able to run Windows on ARM on an M1 Mac, and it’s faster than Microsoft’s Surface Pro X.
According to Geekbench 5 results, Windows ARM running on the M1 chip is faster than Microsoft’s Surface Pro X, which is a great deal. The version running on the M1 Mac scored a single-core score of 1288 and a multi-core score of 5449, which obliterates the Surface’s single-core score of 765 and multi-core score of 3014.
Apple has released the third version of its developer betas for iPadOS 14.3, iOS 14.3, tvOS 14.3, and watchOS 7.2.
New service Discovery+ will be free for up to 12 months for new and existing Verizon customers, depending on their plan.
Ecobee, maker of products for the smart home, announced on Wednesday that its SmartCamera now supports HomeKit.
Google’s security firm Project Zero published a report on Tuesday detailing an iPhone Wi-Fi exploit that Apple patched earlier this year in iOS 13.5. It’s a long, 30,000 word blog post, but ArsTechnica has a good breakdown.
Beer developed several different exploits. The most advanced one installs an implant that has full access to the user’s personal data, including emails, photos, messages, and passwords and crypto keys stored in the keychain. The attack uses a laptop, a Raspberry Pi, and some off-the-shelf Wi-Fi adapters.
Fight for the Future launched a scorecard on Wednesday to examine brands that typically advertise to kids and if they advertise on YouTube.
Apple has released a tool for owners of its Pro Display XDR screen that lets users calibrate their display for specific color workflows.
Every Pro Display XDR undergoes state-of-the-art factory calibration with laboratory grade instrumentation. Pro Display XDR Calibrator enables in-field recalibration of Pro Display XDR for specific color workflows that may require custom calibration. Recalibration with this utility requires one of the following spectroradiometers: Photo Research SpectraScan PR-740, PR-745 or PR-788; Colorimetry Research CR-300
A UNIX command line tool called “ls” can be used to bypass Mac privacy protections like TCC (Transparency, Consent, and Control) and the sandbox. This provides unauthorized access to file metadata in directories that are supposed to be protected
I continue to believe that macOS “security” is mainly theater that only impedes the law-abiding Mac software industry while posing little problem for Mac malware. It doesn’t take a genius hacker to bypass macOS privacy protections: calling “ls” is a script kiddie level attack.
It affects macOS Big Sur, Catalina, and Mojave.
Microsoft has added CarPlay support to its Teams Calling feature, giving users one more way to quickly connect with people.
Apple announced a series order for “Acapulco” on Tuesday, a Spanish and English language comedy series from Austin Winsberg and Eduardo Cisneros.
Amazon Web Services announced on Monday the launch of Mac EC2 instances so developers can run macOS environments in the cloud.
The Podcasts app lets you save podcast episodes to listen later or to archive them, but they remain within the app. What if you want to download podcasts and save them elsewhere, like the Files app? This shortcut lets you do that. I’ve only used it once so far but it worked like a charm. It’s a nice way to archive episodes that you find particularly interesting.
As Arielle Pardes points out, you’d think some of the tech companies were merging with the amount of features they’re copying from one another. This market is so free you guys.
Does your head hurt? Mine does, as do my thumbs, which now have three times as many platforms to scroll for short-form and ephemeral videos. I am overwhelmed with content and underwhelmed by features—at least until the next big thing comes along, and everyone lunges to copy that.
I have definitely noticed this when it comes to Facebook, if only because I don’t like Facebook. They’ve copied all they could from Snapchat. In my opinion, Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be as ubiquitous as WeChat is in China. All interactions, all commerce must flow through Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg can’t conceive of a different business model. Or, he can conceive but he doesn’t care. Why should he? We reward him by using his services.
A fully functional Apple I computer signed by Stevie Wozniak will enter an auction for US$50,000 on December 10.
