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The Violates-A-Number-Of-Guidelines Edition Sunday, May 27, 2018

In Apple Mail, There’s No Protecting PGP-Encrypted Messages, by Micah Lee, The Intercept

But even if you follow this advice and disable remote content, Apple Mail and GPGTools are still vulnerable to EFAIL. I developed a proof-of-concept exploit that works against Apple Mail and GPGTools even when remote content loading is disabled (German security researcher Hanno Böck also deserves much of the credit for this exploit, more on that below). I have reported the vulnerability to the GPGTools developers, and they are actively working on an update that they plan on releasing soon.

[...]

If you’re an Apple Mail user who relies on PGP-encrypted email, and completely disabling PGP for the time-being, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation recommends, isn’t an option for you, then your best course of action is to temporarily stop using Apple Mail and switch to Thunderbird, at least until GPGTools releases an update that fixes this issue.

Why Apple, Facebook And Google Are Worried About Your ‘Digital Well-being’, by JP Mangalindan, Yahoo

It’s a particularly fraught time for big tech companies, which have come under scrutiny for issues such as data privacy and “tech addiction” — an over-dependence on gadgets and the internet. Several studies have linked long-term use of Facebook with depression and chronic loneliness among some types of people. Meanwhile, our psychological dependence on smartphones has become so complex that just having them nearby can hinder our ability to focus, according to some research.

As a result, companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google are proactively rolling out measures to look after your digital well-being, likely in part to help shore up their public image.

Phil Schiller Explains Steam Link App Rejection, by John Voorhees, MacStories

"Unfortunately, the review team found that Valve’s Steam iOS app, as currently submitted, violates a number of guidelines around user generated content, in-app purchases, content codes, etc. We’ve discussed these issues with Valve and will continue to work with them to help bring the Steam experience to iOS and AppleTV in a way that complies with the store’s guidelines."

Stuff

Apple’s App Installation Process Explained, by Bradley Chambers, 9to5Mac

Apple has built an excellent system for iPad app installations. It’s as easy to install one app on five iPads as it is fifty apps on five thousand iPads. It’s all over the air, and IT managers don’t have to touch individual devices.

Collections Is A Better Way To Organize Those Photos You Snap As Mental Notes, by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch

If your mental notes are more visual in nature, then you may want give the new app Collections a go instead of relying only on your Camera Roll.

Review: Lifx Beam Is A Fun Way To Add HomeKit Accent Lighting To Your Walls, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

All in all, the Lifx Beam is a fun way to add some accent lighting to your HomeKit-enabled smart home. The half-baked HomeKit integration is disappointing, but that’s something that could be improved as time progresses.

Develop

Mainframe On The Macbook, by Marianne Bellotti, Medium

Philosophical arguments aside, transpiling means that for a new COBOL developer the hardest parts of the process are eliminated for you. You do not have to wrestle with mainframe emulators and you do not have to figure out which flavor of COBOL compiler works with that emulator.

From Win32 To Cocoa: A Windows User’s Would-be Conversion To Mac OS X, by Peter Bright, Ars Technica

Microsoft has never done anything so bold as Apple's OS X transition. It developed a new, modern OS, but did so in the early 1990s: Windows NT. And although Windows NT ticked the right boxes at the time—protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multiprocessor, written in platform-independent C—in places it was never even close to modern. Its APIs were based on the Win16 API from 16-bit Windows. This was a deliberate decision, as it made it easier to migrate 16-bit apps to the new 32-bit platform, and at the time it probably made sense. But it means that nowadays the 64-bit API (Win64) still reflects decisions made 20 years ago. As mentioned in my Vista article, the graphics stack in NT is today pretty archaic (to be fair, it was never cutting-edge, but what was a sensible compromise 20 years ago is now just plain obsolete).

What makes this all worse is that Win16 was never well-designed in the first place, and Win32 has replicated poor decisions in abundance. Win32 is a big API; it's really huge, many thousands of API calls, and it's totally inconsistent. It's inconsistent in every way imaginable.

Bottom of the Page

I've walked 10,000 steps before noon.

I've changed my iPad's wallpaper to a Aqua-era Mac OS X wallpaper.

I've written down tomorrow's to-dos for work.

Small wins.

~

Thanks for reading.