MyAppleMenu - Tue, Nov 3, 2015

Tue, Nov 3, 2015The Other-People's-Fingerprints Edition

Apple Pay Warning: Storing Your Partner's Fingerprints Is Like 'Giving Away Your Pin', by Richad Dyson, The Telegraph

Banks have warned customers that if they store other people's fingerprints on their iPhones they will be treated as if they have failed to keep their personal details safe.

This means the bank can decline to refund disputed transactions or refuse to help where customers claim they have been victims of fraud.

Somebody Just Claimed A $1 Million Bounty For Hacking The iPhone, by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Motherboard

Over the weekend, somebody claimed the $1 million bounty set by the new startup Zerodium, according to its founder Chaouki Bekrar, a notorious merchant of unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities.

Bekrar declined to identify the team that won the prize, as well as details about the exploits they found. He also declined to say how much he is planning to sell this exploit for.

The Definition Of 'Use'

Court Dismisses Distracted Driving Charge Because Eight-Year-old N.S. Law Doesn’t Cover Asking Siri For Help, by Joe O'Connor, National Post

Justice Campbell noted in his ruling that Ikede wasn’t actually looking at his device. He was talking to it, and not for some polite and distracting chit-chat, but to engage a “navigational system related directly to the safe operation of the vehicle, through a hand-held electronic device.”

What he wasn’t doing, the judge wrote, was “using” a handheld cellular telephone, as handheld cellular telephones were understood to be in 2007.

Stuff

Official Plex App For Apple TV Now Available, Offers Local Streaming, Playlists, Channels, More, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

Plex is a media server for video, TV shows, music and photos. The app is fully featured, with quick access to search, playlists and more from the top bar. It also tracks your currently playing items so you can quickly pick up with a show or film from where you left off.

Although the app is free, be warned that the app will work only if you have a Plex Media Server setup either locally or on a remote network. You need to buy a Plex Pass subscription to access some premium features.

Procreate Version 3 Adds iPad Pro And Apple Pencil Support, New Brushes, More, by Benjamin Mayo, 9tot5Mac

Perhaps the most significant change is the addition of iPad Pro and Apple Pencil integration. Procreate now create images with up to 16,000 x 4000 resolution on Apple’s latest hardware, due to be released later in the month. Existing Apple hardware can also benefit, with the iPad Air 2 now capable of creating 8000×4000 resolution images.

Instapaper 7 Review: Excellent Read Later App Only Gets Better On iOS 9, by J.R. Bookwalter, Macworld

On the surface, Instapaper 7.1 may seem to offer only a few subtle improvements, but these changes collectively add up to an impressive update that takes full advantage of everything iOS 9 has to offer.

How To Certify And Encrypt Your E-Mail In OS X, by Topher Kessler, MacIssues

Even though we have modern messaging technologies like Apple’s Messages that default to encrypted communications, we still primarily use e-mail, even for sensitive business transactions. If you have several partners that you would like to communicate privately with, then while you can resort to an encrypted collaboration platform, you can also do so via classic e-mail, with only a few steps taken for each person.

Microsoft Downgrades Free OneDrive Storage To 5GB, Ends Unlimited Storage For Office 365 Customers, by Harish Jonnalgadda, iMore

Microsoft has announced radical changes to its OneDrive cloud storage service, ending unlimited storage for Office 365 users. Free storage is also being decreased from 15GB to 5GB for all users. The reason for the scaling back of storage comes after Microsoft found that a few customers were using up to 75TB of cloud storage from a single account.

Develop

Candy, Crushed., by Peter Kafka, Re/code

The thing about creating a megahit game in the iPhone/Android era is that there’s no flywheel effect: A megahit gives you resources to market other games, which is nice. But no one has been able to prove that making one megahit lets you make other megahits. Ask Rovio, the people behind Angry Birds.

Notes

If The Future Of TV Is Apps, Who’s Going To Be The TV Guide Of The Future? Ask Siri., by Peter Kafka, Re/code

Here’s an alternate scenario: Apple TV becomes popular, which means Apple starts building up a big database of stuff I’ve asked Siri to find for me. Then Siri gets really smart (not a foregone conclusion) and can start suggesting stuff for me based on what I’ve asked for in the past.

Apple Pulls ‘Throw Your Phone’ App Designed To Break Your Phone, by James McCann, Rip It Up

A smartphone app based around users chucking their devices into the air as high as they can has been banned by Apple. [...] The game detects how high users throw their phone before it falls back to earth. According to the game’s creator, his intention was to smash as many phones as possible.

Amazon Opens Its First Real Bookstore — At U-Village, by Jay Greene, Seattle Times

How Ziff Davis Survived The Death Of Print, by Erin Griffith, Fortune

Nobody Knows What Mountain Dew Is, And That’s The Key To Its Success, by Venessa Wong, BuzzFeed

Its color is boldly unnatural. It tastes, approximately, like melted Life Savers, but unlike any recognizable fruit or flavor. There are no noteworthy Mountain Dew copycats or competitors. Mountain Dew exists, largely, in its own realm, separate from other sodas — and other beverages entirely.

And that turns out to be a feature, not a bug.

Little. Yellow.

Just want to end today's edition by saying, I do enjoy a cup of Mountain Dew now and again, and I've never wondered what the heck is in it.

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Thanks for reading.