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Teen AirDrop Wars Get Serious

Charlotte Henry ·

AirDrop wars between teenagers are apparently a thing. Teens use the file sharing tool to send each other memes and other content, and adults are getting caught in the crossfire. YouTuber and Adobe Spark product manager Veronica Belmont was amongst those who told their story to The Atlantic.

Anyone who has accidentally left their AirDrop settings open to everyone around a group of teens is likely familiar with the deluge of memes, selfies, and notes that arrives so quickly it can often freeze your phone. “Another day another group of French teens trying to AirDrop me memes on the subway,” one woman tweeted. “in a crowd of teens and they keep trying to AirDrop me memes!!!” said another. One young Twitter user joked that she was going to a music festival last weekend “just to AirDrop”… The photos swapped are usually memes or odd pictures teens find on Google Images.

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YouTube Star Jailed for 15 Months After Tricking Homeless Man

Charlotte Henry ·

YouTube star ReSet tricked a homeless man into eating biscuits filled with toothpaste and posted the video online. He has been sentenced to 15 months in prison, ordered to pay his victim €20,000, and banned from social media for five years, the Guardian reported.

ReSet, who was born in China but grew up in Spain, was among the 200 most popular YouTubers in Spain and Latin America, with 1.1 million followers. In 2017 he accepted a dare to scrape the cream out of Oreo cookies and replace it with toothpaste. He found a Romanian man who was living on the streets of Barcelona, handed him the doctored biscuits and a €20 note, and filmed the encounter. The man later vomited. “Maybe I went a little too far, but look on the bright side: this helped him clean his teeth,” ReSet, 21, said. “I don’t think he’s brushed them since he became poor.”

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Square Sends Sensitive Receipts to the Wrong Person

Charlotte Henry ·

It is always awkward if you purchase something embarrassing or sensitive, and someone finds the receipt, right? Or your partner finds the receipt for a present you bought them? Well, the Wall Street Journal found that Square has been sending millions of receipts to the wrong person. It has created some very difficult situations.

Square has forwarded receipts documenting transactions as mundane as a cup of coffee and as sensitive as an obstetrician’s visit to people who were uninvolved in the purchases, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In some cases, neither the purchaser nor the recipient could say why Square sent receipts to the people it did. At issue are the methods that tech companies employ to make money off of the financial data of their users, as well as the degree to which those companies disclose or get consent from their users about those efforts. Data on individuals’ credit-card transactions can be particularly delicate and more revealing than their social-media posts or web-browsing activity.

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WDDC 2019: Apple is a Privacy-as-a-Service Company

Charlotte Henry ·

Away from the excitement of new Mac Pros and operating systems for Mac and iPad, another thing stood out at WWDC 2019. Apple is making privacy-as-a-service a core part of its offering, as Darrell Etherington noted at TechCrunch.

Apple has been playing up its privacy game for at least a few years now, and in the Tim Cook era it’s especially come to the fore. But today’s announcements really crystallize how Apple’s approach to privacy will mesh with its transformation into becoming even more of a services company. It’s becoming a services company with a key differentiator – privacy – and it’s also extending that paradigm to third-parties, acting as an ecosystem layer that mediates between users, and anyone who would seek to monetize their info in aggregate.

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Apple Customer Satisfaction Scores 81 on ACSI Survey

Andrew Orr ·

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) recently did an Apple customer satisfaction survey in which the company scored 81 out of 100. Other companies were included as well.

Following a 1% jump, Samsung moves into a first-place tie with Apple at 81 despite smartphone sales dropping for both companies…Apple’s iPhone X, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone SE all score 83…Customer experience shows little improvement over the last year. Cell phones are generally easy to use, with text messaging earning the top score at 85. Despite being the only area to improve year over year, battery life (78) finishes last among customer experience benchmarks.

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It’s Not Just Apple: Antitrust Probe Aimed at Facebook, Google, More

Andrew Orr ·

It’s not just Apple anymore. A new antitrust probe launched by the House of Representatives examines Facebook, Google, and other tech giants.

“Big Tech plays a huge role in our economy and our world,” said Ranking Member Collins (R-GA). “As tech has expanded its market share, more and more questions have arisen about whether the market remains competitive. Our bipartisan look at competition in the digital markets gives us the chance to answer these questions and, if necessary, to take action. I appreciate the partnership of Chairman Nadler, Subcommittee Chairman Cicilline and Subcommittee Ranking Member Sensenbrenner on these important issues.”

Good to see that it’s a bipartisan probe.

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Apple Thwarts Sensor Fingerprinting With iOS 12.2

Andrew Orr ·

A study called “SensorID: Sensor Calibration Fingerprinting for Smartphones” examined sensor fingerprinting techniques against smartphones. It found that Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are inaccurate in small ways that make them unique. But Apple thwarted this technique in iOS 12.2 and used the researchers’ suggestion to add random noise to the analog-to-digital converter output and removing default access to motion sensors in Safari.

We demonstrate that our approach is very likely to produce globally unique fingerprints for iOS devices, with an estimated 67 bits of entropy in the fingerprint for iPhone 6S devices. In addition, we find that the accelerometer of Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 3 devices can also be fingerprinted by our approach.

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YouTube Bans Minors From Streaming Unless an Adult is Present

Andrew Orr ·

In a blog post today, YouTube announced new policies when it comes to minors. YouTube bans minors from live streaming without an adult present, and comments on videos featuring minors have been disabled.

The vast majority of videos featuring minors on YouTube, including those referenced in recent news reports, do not violate our policies and are innocently posted — a family creator providing educational tips, or a parent sharing a proud moment. But when it comes to kids, we take an extra cautious approach towards our enforcement and we’re always making improvements to our protections.

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WWDC19: Project Catalyst Could Help Revive Mac Gaming

Andrew Orr ·

Project Catalyst is Apple’s official name for what we now as Marzipan. It lets developers port iOS apps to the Mac. I think it can help revive Mac gaming, because presumably games will also be able to get ported. Apple Arcade will be available on macOS as well.

But the big news is clearly Catalyst. Details are still thin, and Apple will most likely share more information this afternoon during its State of the Union WWDC keynote.

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EU to Speak to Apple About Spotify Complaint

Charlotte Henry ·

The EU said it wanted to hear from Apple about Spotify’s complaint against it. The complaint is being handled by European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, reported Reuters.

“We are looking into that and we have been asking questions around in that market but of course also Apple themselves, for them to answer the allegations. And when they come back, we will know more,” Vestager told reporters on the sidelines of an OECD conference. Vestager, who three years ago ordered Apple to repay about 13 billion euros ($14.6 billion) in unfair tax incentives to Ireland, can levy hefty fines on companies for breaching EU antitrust rules and also order them to amend business practices.

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Tune in Monday to The Mac Observer’s Live WWDC 2019 Blog

Andrew Orr ·

Apple’s WWDC 2019 event is on Monday, June 3. The Mac Observer will host a live blog where you’ll get a live play-by-play of the event, with our commentary and reactions, so bookmark it in your favorite browser 🙂

Dave: We’ll see you here Monday morning for our live play-by-play and helpful-but-sometimes-snarky commentary. Join us then!

You can also follow @MacObserverLive on Twitter.

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Huawei Ban Could Lead to Drop in Global Phone Sales

Charlotte Henry ·

Analyst’s Canalys reduced down their estimates for global smartphone shipments in a new report. AppleInsider reported that they now expect sales in 2019 to total 1.35 billion units. That is down 3.1% from the 1.39 billion units sold in 2018. The Huawei ban is a key factor in the drop in sales.

If found to be correct, the 2019 forecast would be a continuation of the industry’s decline, following a year-on-year contraction of 4.5 percent in 2018 from 2017. Canalys does not break down the figures to relate to specific companies, but in its post it spends a lot of time discussing Huawei, the main subject of the US measures. The firm’s base assumption will be that restrictions on Huawei will be “imposed stringently” once the 90-day reprieve expires, which will dramatically affect its ability to roll out new devices in the short term.

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Pl@ntNet is a Social Network for Plant Lovers

Andrew Orr ·

First created in 2009, Pl@ntNet is a social network for plant lovers, as well as a plant identification app.

Once a user makes an identification (or marks the plant as unknown), they submit their photos to the Pl@ntNet community. Thousands of professional botanists and flora-philes scan the stream of new observations to verify a species, or suggest a new one. If a person confirms your observation, a little green “crowd” icon appears. Your score rises as more people validate your labels, although a few users are certified to train the algorithm without community validation.

I haven’t used this yet but I’ll definitely check it out. I also love iNaturalist. It’s not really a social network, but it can identify both plants and animals.

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Bypassing macOS Security With Synthetic Clicks

Andrew Orr ·

Security researcher Patrick Wardle found he can bypass macOS security by using synthetic clicks built with AppleScript.

Typically apps are signed with a digital certificate to prove that the app is genuine and hasn’t been tampered with. If the app has been modified to include malware, the certificate usually flags an error and the operating system won’t run the app. But a bug in Apple’s code meant that that macOS was only checking if a certificate exists and wasn’t properly verifying the authenticity of the whitelisted app.

Mr. Wardle refers to this as a “second stage” attack, because the hacker or malware needs access to your Mac to exploit this bug.

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News+: The App Store Enables Spying, Tracking, and Analytics

Andrew Orr ·

In the latest issue of Fast Company magazine, Mark Wilson writes about the business of spying, advertising, and analytics that the App Store enables.

[Apple] designed a dead-simple interface that, to this day, allows users to sign away contacts, location data, and camera and microphone access with a single tap as they install an app. Apple also created efficient APIs—the software connecting its hardware to outside apps—to provide third-party developers access to sensitive user information. Meanwhile, iPhone apps are not required to encrypt their transmissions. “Apple was well known for usability before it was known for privacy,” says Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

This is part of Andrew’s News+ series, where he shares a magazine every Friday to help people discover good content in Apple News+.

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Eye Tracking is the Holy Grail of Advertising

Andrew Orr ·

Avi Bar-Zeev, who works on AR/VR/MR, says that eye tracking is the holy grail of advertising (And he’s all for it). While I don’t disagree with that point, I do wonder how prevalent it will become. For example, when Face ID first came out, there was a fear that it could be exploited for eye tracking ads. But that isn’t possible because Apple locks down its technology. I expect the same for Apple Glasses.

Bundled into VR headsets or AR glasses, eye-tracking will, in the near-future, enable companies to collect your intimate and unconscious responses to real-world cues and those they design. Those insights can be used entirely for your benefit. But they will also be seen as priceless inputs for ad-driven businesses, which will learn, model, predict and manipulate your behavior far beyond anything we’ve seen to date.

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iTunes May Be Retired at WWDC 2019

Charlotte Henry ·

Could it finally be the end of the road for iTunes? That is one of the rumors circulating in the run-up to WWDC 2019. Bloomberg News reported that iTunes retirement could be announced next week.

The changes will showcase Apple’s new generation of devices and software: Apple Watches that are more independent from iPhones, iPads with software that reduces the need for a laptop, apps that run on any Apple device, and growth areas such as augmented reality and personal health-care management, according to people familiar with the plans. While the developer conference is software-focused, the company often sprinkles new hardware announcements in at the event. This year, Apple won’t show off a new Apple Watch or iPhone hardware until the fall, but has considered previewing the new Mac Pro at the conference.

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To Change Facebook, Change Mark Zuckerberg

Charlotte Henry ·

Facebook is under-fire at the moment. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked about his position as the shareholder meeting yesterday. At Fast Company, Mark Sullivan argues that the only way to change the company is to change the man at the top.

Natasha Lamb, the managing partner of Arjuna Capital—is one of a growing number of investors calling for serious changes at the top, either by separating the roles of board chair and chief executive (Zuck has both) or losing him as CEO completely. They’re right to do it. If you want to change Facebook, you have to change Mark Zuckerberg. The reason is simple: Zuckerberg is Facebook and Facebook is Zuckerberg. The company, in word and in action, is the product of his vision, talent, ambition, moral compass, and worldview.

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David Cameron: Former UK Prime Minister Joins U.S. AI Firm

Charlotte Henry ·

Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron has a new job. Mr. Cameron is to chair the advisory board of Afiniti, a Washington-based AI firm, the Guardian reported. He follows his former deputy into the tech sector. Sir Nick Clegg, who served as Deputy Prime Minister between 2010 and 2015, joined Facebook in October 2018.

The position represents one of Cameron’s most prominent appointments since he stood down as prime minister in 2016. He has previously taken a number of roles at not-for-profit organisations and has a memoir, For the Record, due out later this year. Cameron said he was “delighted” to take the job working on “transforming the future of customer service and interpersonal communications”. The advisory board features an array of high-profile figures including John Browne, former chief executive of BP and François Fillon, the former prime minister of France. Afiniti was set up by the US-Pakistani entrepreneur Zia Chishti and specializes in the use of AI in call centers.

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AirPort Base Stations Get 7.9.1 Firmware Update

Andrew Orr ·

Although Apple discontinued its line of AirPort base stations (routers), it recently released a firmware update, version 7.9.1. It fixes several security issues, one of which seems especially bad.

Impact: A base station factory reset may not delete all user information

Description: The issue was addressed with improved data deletion.

CVE-2019-8575: joshua stein

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North Face is Really Sorry for Spamming Wikipedia

Andrew Orr ·

North Face as issued an apology over its manipulating campaign to spam Wikipedia pages and game Google search results.

We believe deeply in @Wikipedia’s mission and apologize for engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles. Effective immediately, we have ended the campaign and moving forward, we’ll commit to ensuring that our teams and vendors are better trained on the site policies.

If the idiots didn’t openly brag about it, they probably could’ve gotten away with it, at least for a while longer.

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An Inside Look at the Qualcomm Monopoly Ruling

Andrew Orr ·

Timothy Lee did a nice deep dive into the 233-page Qualcomm monopoly ruling from Judge Lucy Koh. I’ve heard hot takes of the settlement between Apple and Qualcomm that suggested maybe Apple knew it was going to lose and gave up. But Judge Koh ordered Qualcomm to renegotiate with its customers.

The legal document outlines a nearly 20-year history of overcharging smartphone makers for cellular chips. Qualcomm structured its contracts with smartphone makers in ways that made it almost impossible for other chipmakers to challenge Qualcomm’s dominance. Customers who didn’t go along with Qualcomm’s one-sided terms were threatened with an abrupt and crippling loss of access to modem chips.

In her ruling, Koh ordered Qualcomm to stop threatening customers with chip cutoffs. Qualcomm must now re-negotiate all of its agreements with customers and license its patents to competitors on reasonable terms.