A bug report submitted on Open Radar this week reveals a major security vulnerability in the current version of macOS High Sierra that allows the App Store menu in System Preferences to be unlocked with any password.
Practically, this isn’t much of a problem: again, the panel in question isn’t locked down by default, and unlocking this panel does not give you access to any other locked panel.
The problem is we don’t know why this is happening, and whether the bug that allows it may exist elsewhere. As with the earlier bug, it’s amazing no one caught this problem in testing, and it really makes you wonder how much you can trust macOS to keep your data locked down.
There’s been a change to the official Twitter app in the last few months that affects anyone who tries to share a URL from inside the app. Using the standard activity view controller, recognised as the system share sheet, the Twitter app surreptitiously appends some query string parameters to the original URL.
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The important thing to note here is that the mechanism is innocuous and uses valid APIs provided by Apple. Twitter is not exploiting private APIs to achieve this. A cursory look at the app review guidelines suggests to me there are no grounds for Apple to scold Twitter (or any other app) for doing it.
However, after talking to a number of users, we found that Apple has included iCloud accounts that were opened in the U.S., are paid for using U.S. dollars and/or are connected to U.S.-based App Store accounts in the data that will be handled by local partner Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD) from February 28.
“I am almost 65, have been with Apple for four years and in 2 1/2 years the [Apple Music] service has gotten to well over 30 million subscribers and Beats has continued its successful run. But there’s still a lot more we’d like to do. I am committed to doing whatever Eddy [Cue], Tim [Cook] and Apple need me to do, to help wherever and however I can, to take this all the way. I am in the band.”
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As an example of what “more interesting might be,” Iovine drew from subscription television. “Netflix has a unique catalog, because they don’t buy HBO and they have their own catalog. Then on top of that they have a little thing called $6 billion in original content. HBO has $3 billion, Amazon probably has $4 billion. Well, guess how much original content streaming has: zero! Fundamentally. All the catalogs are exactly the same,” he told the crowd.
It really seems to strike the right balance between performance and usability for those of us who use Macs to record and edit audio on a regular basis.
Apple is now selling Linksys' Velop Mesh Wi-Fi System in stores and online, signaling a break from a policy of only selling its own AirPort routers.
The WayAround app, developed by co-founders Darwin Belt and Armand Fisher, uses tags that can attach to anything; files, clothes, food, and more. Those tags have information coded into them that allows the visually-impaired user to hear information about the item the tag is attached to.
“The app allows blind or low-vision [individuals] to get information not just in a recording, but in a structured data format,” Belt said. “You don’t have to listen to all the information, you can choose.”
I was hauling my wheelie toward the boarding gate for a New York-bound flight when an alert popped up on my iPhone. Its message was terse: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”
I was rattled, weirdly clammy, but finally resigned.
I had, after all, signed on for this sobering reminder, parting with 99 cents for WeCroak, a jaunty little app devised to notify users like me, five times a day at seemingly random intervals, that try as we may to ignore it, there will be no dodging The End.
MyAppleMenu will be taking a break tomorrow, and will return on Saturday, 13 Jan, 2018.
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Thanks for reading.