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The Brand-Recognition Edition Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Apple Card Savings Account Available Starting Today With 4.15% Interest Rate, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

Apple today announced that the long-awaited Apple Card Savings feature is available starting today with an initial APY of 4.15%. The savings account has no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements.

Apple Wants To Be 'Top Of Wallet' With New Savings Account, Expert Says. Here's How Its 4.15% Offer Compares To Top Rates, by Lorie Konish, CNBC

Apple's 4.15% savings account now lands in 11th place on Bankrate's rankings, he said.

Still, Apple may have an advantage when it comes to the top offerings for rates due to its brand recognition, Rossman said.

Apple In India

Apple In Mumbai: Tim Cook Inaugurates First Store In India, by BBC

Videos showed Mr Cook waving to customers and opening the store's doors as employees clapped and cheered.

He also greeted customers who visited the store and posed for selfies with some of them.

Mr Cook will also attend the opening of a second store in the capital Delhi on Thursday.

Apple Opens Its First Retail Store In India But Customer Challenges Persist, by Manish Singh, TechCrunch

Despite local iPhone assembly and the company’s contract partners reaping the rewards of New Delhi’s generous incentives, Apple products, including the iPhone, remain prohibitively expensive in India in a move that has stunned analysts who thought Apple will pass on the incentives to customers.

[...]

Moreover, even after paying a hefty price, Apple customers in India do not get access to scores of services. Several popular Apple services, such as News+, Fitness+, and Apple Pay, remain unavailable to Indian consumers. The Apple Card and its accompanying savings account feature in the U.S. are also absent from the Indian market. Apple Maps and Siri offer fewer features to Indian customers.

On Security

Newly Discovered LockBit Mac Ransomware Doesn't Work—Yet, by Lily Hay Newman, Wired

For now, Wardle notes that LockBit's macOS encryptors seem to be in a very early phase and still have fundamental development issues like crashing on launch. And to create truly effective attack tools, LockBit will need to figure out how to circumvent macOS protections, including validity checks that Apple has added in recent years for running new software on Macs.

“In some sense, Apple is ahead of the threat, as recent versions of macOS ship with a myriad of built-in security mechanisms aimed to directly thwart, or at least reduce the impact of, ransomware attacks,” Wardle says. “However, well-funded ransomware groups will continue to evolve their malicious creations.”

NSO Hacked iPhones Without User Clicks In 3 New Ways, Researchers Say, by Joseph Menn, Washington Post

Israeli spyware maker NSO Group deployed at least three new “zero-click” hacks against iPhones last year, finding ways to penetrate some of Apple’s latest software, researchers at Citizen Lab have discovered.

The attacks struck phones with iOS 15 and early versions of iOS 16 operating software, Citizen Lab said in a report Tuesday. The lab, based at the University of Toronto, shared its results with Apple, which has now fixed the flaws that NSO had been exploiting.

Stuff

Apple Launches All-new ‘Apple Trade In’ Website In Time For Earth Day, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

The new website comes just in time for Earth Day, and Apple explains on the environmental benefits of trading in old devices.

Adobe Lightroom Gains AI-powered Denoise, Curves In Masking, New Adaptive Presets, More, by Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac

Adobe is out with a major spring update for Lightroom today that includes new Sensei AI-powered improvements to make photo and video editing more intuitive and seamless. New capabilities are available with the latest adaptive presets, there are now Curves in masking, a new AI Denoise tool, and more.

Google Pushes Emergency Chrome For Mac Update To Fix Actively Exploited Flaw, by Michael Simon, Macworld

Google has labeled the vulnerability as high risk and urges all users to update to version v112.0.5615.121. The update, which arrived on April 14, includes two security fixes, one of which is divulged as a type confusion bug in V8 discovered by Google’s Threat Analysis Group on April 11. Google says it is aware that the vulnerability has been exploited in the wild but declined to provide specific details.

Outlook For Mac’s New Profiles Separate Work And Personal Emails With Colorful Themes, by Tom Warren, The Verge

Microsoft has started rolling out a new profiles feature in Outlook for Mac that lets you easily separate out work and personal email accounts with different colored themes.

Develop

33 Years Of TidBITS: Handcrafted Content From Humans, by Adam Engst, TidBITS

I can’t compete with all the tech reporters at the likes of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, nor do I have the loose-lipped industry sources that whisper secrets to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. But unlike me, they won’t delve into the murky details of the File Provider extension for cloud storage services or explain how to resolve nagging problems with a Level 2 clean install.

Notes

Porn On Amazon's Kindle App Prompts Warnings From Apple, Alphabet, by Greg Bensinger, Reuters

Reuters learned of the issue when two families told Reuters their pre-teen sons downloaded the explicit material via Amazon's Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service and viewed the full-color photographs on the Kindle iPhone app. Pornography also is available through Amazon's Kindle online store and viewable on versions of the Kindle app.

[...]

Referring to Amazon, Apple said, “We’ve shared these concerns with the developer and are working with them to ensure their app is compliant with our guidelines.”

Bottom of the Page

It's a thundery night here where I am, and the rumblings have been going on for quite a while already. And I have to say, I still cannot get used to listening to the thunders on my AirPods Pro with the noise canceling turned on. They sounded surreal.

(I was walking from the subway station back to my flat… with an audiobook playing in my ears… with accompanying thunders.)

~

Thanks for reading.