For most of the past six weeks, the biggest story out of Silicon Valley was Apple’s battle with the FBI over a federal order to unlock the iPhone of a mass shooter. The company’s refusal touched off a searing debate over privacy and security in the digital age. But this morning, at a small office in Mountain View, California, three guys made the scope of that enormous debate look kinda small.
Mountain View is home to WhatsApp, an online messaging service now owned by tech giant Facebook, that has grown into one of the world’s most important applications. More than a billion people trade messages, make phone calls, send photos, and swap videos using the service. This means that only Facebook itself runs a larger self-contained communications network. And today, the enigmatic founders of WhatsApp, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, together with a high-minded coder and cryptographer who goes by the pseudonym Moxie Marlinspike, revealed that the company has added end-to-end encryption to every form of communication on its service.
If there’s a positive spin to put on such a vulnerability, it’s that fixes can be implemented server side without the need for an iOS update. Apple today has fixed the passcode bypass method by forcing Siri to request your Lock screen passcode whenever a user tries to search Twitter via Siri while at a secured Lock screen
Continuing the celebrations of its 40th birthday, Apple has posted a special Apple Music playlist featuring songs from Apple ads over the last four decades. The playlist contains 38 songs in total, with music from The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Coldplay, Gorillaz and more.
There’s the rub for Smile and TextExpander: I don’t see anything that I really need in TextExpander version 6. I’m not using it with a “team” and my family members probably have no interest in sharing a group of text snippets with me. Yes, I realize that Smile made their own syncing service, but I have used iCloud, Dropbox, and BitTorrent Sync, and they work fine for TextExpander. Creating their own syncing service was solving a problem that I didn’t have.
The real issue here is not so much that of whether a subscription is good or bad, but of its cost, and its value to users. [...] The move to a subscription model just doesn’t make sense for this type of app, and the increased cost simply isn’t justified.
Now I’m being asked to pay more, and continuously, to subscribe to a utility that does less than another utility I already own.
Apple's team of US-based editors will curate the feed, which will consist of top stories and some of the most popular pieces on Apple News.
With over 800 filters, overlays, and effects that you can apply to your photos, Filters is a little overwhelming at first. But with well done favorites, undo features, and filter categories, Filters makes it easy to navigate its vast array of effects to find just the look you want.
Vivaldi 1.0 is stuffed with options to get the browser working just as you like, even as it tries to preserve a tidy interface. Vivaldi programmers will respond fast to new feature requests, said Jon von Tetzchner, Vivaldi's chief executive and a co-founder of Opera Software, one of the earliest browser makers.
Apple's Swift has far-reaching effects on all platforms, not just iOS, OS X, watchOS, and tvOS. We dive into why Swift matters, how to use it, and how it differs from Objective-C.
The DGCCRF has specifically asked Apple to remove 10 contract clauses, according to France's BFM. These for instance force carriers to buy a minimum number of iPhones over three years, pay into an Apple-run advertising fund, and allow Apple to use their patents. The company can also void a contract without warning, and prevent carriers from setting their own plans and payments for iPhones.
“No, Apple is not destroying the fabric of America,” Sanders said in an interview with the New York tabloid. “But I do wish they’d be manufacturing some of their devices here in the United States rather than in China. And I do wish that they would not be trying to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.”
The amateur in me is thrilled by the prospect of living in the Cloud, editing on the go. The purist in me wonders if, in the future, desktop photo editing will be like the film-photography revival of today—a luxury to feed our nostalgia, a wistful effort to exercise human control over a task machines have taken over from us. I wonder what Sontag would make of that.
I took stock. The only two software services that I subscribe are: 1) Evernote, 2) Todoist. (The company I work for paid for Office 365.)
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If you are doing a demo, and you found out that everybody in the room watching you are either using MacBooks or iPads, you might want to consider not spend so much time talking about the integration of your product with Windows Explorer.
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Thanks for reading.