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iPhone Game of The Year, ‘Genshin Impact’ Brings in Nearly $400 Million in Two Months

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple named Genshin Impact its iPhone Game of the Year on Wednesday. The game has brought in a staggering $400 million across iOS and Android in two months – it only arrived on the App Store in September. That’s according to a report by Sensor Tower, seen by Cult of Mac.

That averages more than $6 million a day across both iOS and Android — with Apple’s platform accounting for the majority of that spending. The report notes that Genshin Impact experienced: “[A] quick start to life, accumulating $60 million in just its first week after release. By the end of its first month, it had grossed $245 million. In the month following, the blockbuster title continued to find success, picking up close to $148 million. During its first two months, Genshin Impact was the No. 2 revenue-generating mobile game worldwide, ranking behind Honor of Kings from Tencent at No. 1 and above PUBG Mobile from Tencent at No. 3.”

TMO Deals

The iOS 14 and SwiftUI Bootcamp Bundle: $24.99

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a deal on the iOS 14 and SwiftUI Bootcamp Bundle, a three course training bundle for making apps for iOS. It includes SwiftUI: The Complete Developer Course, iPhone Apps for Absolute Beginners: iOS 14 & Swift 5, and SwiftUI Apps for All Apple Platforms. There are 341 individual lessons in these courses and 43 hours of content for $24.99 through our deal.

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Labor Board Alleges Google Illegally Spied on Workers, Then Fired Them

Charlotte Henry ·

A complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday claims that Google violated U.S. labor laws. It alleges that the company spied on workers who were organizing employee protests before firing two of them, The Verge reported.

The complaint names two employees, Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers, both of whom were fired by the company in late 2019 in connection with employee activism. Berland was organizing against Google’s decision to work with IRI Consultants, a firm widely known for its anti-union efforts, when he was let go for reviewing other employees’ calendars. Now, the NLRB has found Google’s policy against employees looking at certain coworkers’ calendars is unlawful. Several other employees were fired in the wake of the protests, but the NLRB found that only the terminations of Berland and Spiers violated labor laws.

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Twitter Supports Physical Security Keys for Two-Factor Authentication

Andrew Orr ·

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.)

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Windows 10 on ARM Running on an M1 Mac Beats Surface Pro X

Andrew Orr ·

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.

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Telegram Beta Supports Siri Announce Message Feature

Charlotte Henry ·

Users of the latest beta of security-focusssesd messaging app Telegram can now access Siri’s ability to announce messages through AirPods, The 8-Bit reported. It is the first third-party aim to support this feature.

Those on the latest Telegram beta via Testflight will see an option to enable the feature Telegram in Settings – Notifications – Announce Messages With Siri. It’s worth noting that only Apple’s AirPods, AirPods Pro, Powerbeats, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Solo Pro support this feature. Moreover, only iPhones and iPads running on iOS 13.2 and later are supported. The Announce Messages with Siri feature uses Siri to announce incoming messages out loud when a user’s headphones are connected to their iPhone or iPad, they are wearing them, and their device is locked, according to Apple. Upon the arrival of an incoming message, Siri plays a tone, announces a sender’s name, and then reads the message.

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Inside the iPhone Wi-Fi Exploit Apple Patched This Year

Andrew Orr ·

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.

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Salesforce Buying Slack for $27.7 Billion

Charlotte Henry ·

Slack has become a major part of our work lives for many of us in 2020. Now cloud computing giant Salesforce is set to buy a workplace chat app for $27.7 billion, The Verge reported.

Slack has transformed from a fast-rising startup formed as a gaming company in 2009 into a major competitor of Microsoft with more than 12 million daily active users as of October of last year (and likely many more now, though the company has not disclosed concrete numbers) and a market value of close to $25 billion. The company, led by Flickr co-creator Butterfield, started primarily as an email alternative that pitched itself to startups, media companies, and other tech-savvy businesses to better manage interoffice communication. But Butterfield and his team grew Slack into a full productivity suite with video meeting features, file hosting, IT administration, and all manner of other features typically offered by large enterprise corporations.