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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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Articles by Andrew Orr

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Cloudflare Ends 8Chan Service in Wake of Recent U.S. Shootings

Andrew Orr ·

The U.S. got a fresh wave of mass shootings over the weekend. A couple killers had posted their manifestos on 8Chan, and Cloudflare is ending its service for the website.

8chan is among the more than 19 million Internet properties that use Cloudflare’s service. We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time. The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.

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News+: Should Apple Leak the iPhone 11 Design?

Andrew Orr ·

In the latest issue of Macworld, Michael Simon says that Apple should leak the iPhone 11 design like Google did for the Pixel 4.

We already know it’s coming in September. And we kind of know what it will look like too. There have already been bountiful leaks that have revealed a giant square camera bump—which incidentally looks a whole lot like the Pixel 4—and it’s expected that all three models will be pretty much identical from the front. So what’s the harm in confirming what we already know?

If we accept two conditions: 1) Many Android phones tend to mimic iPhones; and 2) iPhone 11 mockups are close to or exactly the real design; Then I think the Pixel 4 was also the iPhone 11 leak.

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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Apple Music Alternative Playlist Renamed 'ALT CTRL'

Andrew Orr ·

Apple is slowly rebranding Apple Music, and its latest efforts include renaming the Apple Music alternative playlist to ALT CTRL.

The playlist, which features 50 songs, will change every week. Each song is hand selected by a group of curators. The songs featured have less to do with genre, and more to do with overall feel and themes.

“ALT CTRL, formerly known as The A-List: Alternative, is where you’ll find the best of those new left-of-center tunes.” reads the Editors’ notes on the new ALT CTRL page, “Alternative is more an attitude than a sound—music that colors just a bit outside the lines.”

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Meet America's Phone Farmers That Commit Ad Fraud

Andrew Orr ·

People are setting up multiple phones to create a “phone farm” to fake engagement with ads to earn money from certain apps. Vice spoke to several farmers and built their own setup.

With a marketing strategy called “incentivized traffic,” app developers take advertisements or other content that companies want to get in front of an attentive audience, and pay that audience to watch or interact with them.

Rather than actually watch ads, these phone farmers use as many as a hundred phones and sometimes automate the process to make it seem like someone is watching the ads in order to generate income.

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StubHub Apple Pay Rolls Out to iOS Browsers

Andrew Orr ·

Starting today, StubHub Apple Pay will be available on the web for iOS devices so that fans can buy tickets easily and safely.

Fans will begin to see Apple Pay as an available payment option for MLB mobile web transactions on the iPhone this week. For more on how to use Apple Pay and connect it with your StubHub account, visit StubHub’s customer help center.

Good to see Apple Pay being offered in more places.

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Last Month Google Play Had 205 Malicious Apps With Over 32M Installs

Andrew Orr ·

In July alone, Google Play had 205 malicious apps with over 32 million installations, most of them containing hidden ads.

The bulk of the suspicious software – 188 to be exact – contained hidden ads, accounting for 19.2 million installs. The rest of the offenders fell under the categories of subscription scam, ad fraud, stalkerware, fake apps, fake antivirus tools, adware droppers, and software with built-in backdoors, according to data compiled by ESET malware researcher Lukas Stefanko.

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Neato Robot Vacuums Can Use Siri Shortcuts

Andrew Orr ·

Neato robotic vacuums can use Siri Shortcuts and HomeKit, like starting, pausing, and stopping cleaning later this year.

Zone cleaning lets you deploy the vacuum to specific, targeted areas of your house so they get cleaned more readily, and it sounds like you’ll be able to set up Siri shortcuts for specific zones. That should let user use voice commands to send the vacuum to different parts of the house, a pretty handy feature. And if you’re not so much into the voice commands, Siri Shortcuts will enable the Neato app to learn and suggest times to send out your vacuum with lock screen suggestions.

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Future Apple Headphones Could Tell Which Ear They’re In

Andrew Orr ·

New patents reveal that future Apple headphones could tell which ear they’re in using machine learning.

Apple notes that “During operation, capacitive sensor electrodes may be used by the control circuitry in capturing capacitive sensor ear images that are processed by a machine learning classifier. The machine learning classifier may be used to determine whether the headphones are being worn in a reversed or unreversed orientation.

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Play the Original Diablo in a Web Browser on Your iPad

Andrew Orr ·

The developers at Rivsoft made it possible to play the original Diablo game using a web browser. Someone on Reddit also got it working on their iPad.

Like the newer Diablo games, the original is an isometric top-down dungeon crawler with multiple character classes, tons of loot, and hoards demons to fight. The version of Diablo on Rivsoft’s site is the Shareware build — in modern times, we’d call this a demo. You can play the first two dungeons of the game with one of the game’s three character classes.

For the past several weeks I’ve been playing Diable III on my Nintendo Switch. I should give the original a play, too.

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That Recent Data Breach Might Not Be Limited to Capital One

Andrew Orr ·

The Capital One data breach might not have bene limited to the bank. Other companies could’ve been affected too, according to Slack messages from the hacker Paige Thompson.

Reports from Forbes and security reporter Brian Krebs indicating that Capital One may not have been the only company affected, pointing to “one of the world’s biggest telecom providers, an Ohio government body, and a major U.S. university,” according to Slack messages sent by the alleged hacker.

Krebs posted a screenshot of a list of files purportedly stolen by the alleged hacker. The stolen data contained filenames including car maker “Ford” and Italian financial services company “Unicredit.”

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Vietnam Might Be the Next iPhone Manufacturing Center

Andrew Orr ·

Due to the trade war between the United States and China, companies are looking to put their eggs into more baskets. Vietnam could be one of them.

Apple has homed in on Vietnam and India as it intensifies its search for ways to diversify its supply chain. Nintendo has accelerated a shift in the production of its Switch console to Vietnam from China, according to Panjiva, a supply chain research firm. The Taiwanese electronics behemoth Foxconn, a major assembler of iPhones, said in January that it had acquired land-use rights in Vietnam and had pumped $200 million into an Indian subsidiary. Other Taiwanese and Chinese partners to Apple have indicated that they are considering ramping up operations in Vietnam as well.