Apple has thoughtfully created a two-tier system of how Stolen Device Protection works that offers a balance of user friendliness while enhancing sercurity.
For example, with the feature turned on, actions like using passwords or passkeys, applying for an Apple Card, turning off Lost Mode, erasing an iPhone, and using payment methods saved with iPhone will require biometric authentication – no passcode fallback when away from familiar locations.
Stern and Nguyen reported a series of stories this year detailing how thieves — in some cases, organized crime rings — were taking advantage of the god-like powers of your device passcode, the first in February and the follow-up in April. The gist of it is that your device passcode/passphrase controls the keys to your entire digital kingdom. With the phone and your passcode, you can reset your iCloud account password and access the passwords saved in your keychain. Thieves were scamming people to glean their passcodes, then stealing their phones. This granted thieves access not just to the phones’ contents, but to the victims’ banking accounts. And resetting the victims’ iCloud passwords prevented the victims from remotely wiping, locking, or finding the stolen devices.
[...]
But overall, this new feature clearly seems like a win for security — and a triumph of Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen’s investigative reporting.
Messaging should be more open, but it’s too important to only be open via elaborate hacks and bolted-on systems. It’s certainly possible that some good old-fashioned adversarial interoperability could create an industry of better cross-platform messaging tools like Beeper and others, but what we really need is better cross-platform protocols underneath those tools. I want Apple to protect my messages! I just don’t want them stuck on my Apple devices forever.
And to be honest, while I appreciate some apps have more features than iMessage and would allow me to text better with my Android friends than SMS or even RCS, I'm just much more drawn to a solution that makes my phone number my single point of contact, and not a user account through someone like Meta or even Apple.
The headphones feature beige ear cups and a black headband with Stüssy branding.
Following last month’s announcement of the 2023 App Store Award winners, Apple has now shared an in-depth look at the most popular apps for the year. In a press release, Apple recognizes “the most popular apps and games of 2023, with year-end charts localized for users in more than 35 countries and regions.”
Apple today announced three new games coming to Apple Arcade in January, including Tamagotchi Adventure Kingdom, Cornsweeper, and Blackjack by MobilityWare+. All games on Apple Arcade are ad-free and do not offer in-app purchases.
Popular flight tracking app Flighty has been updated today with a collection of new year-in-review features. This includes your “2023 Flighty Passport,” breaking down all of your flight stats for the year. There are new “Delay Report” and “Aircraft Report” year-in-review features as well.
This feature is begging to be added to all direct messaging chat apps, given the deeply frustrating experience of trying to plan anything in a busy group chat in iMessage or, worse, an SMS thread. Between threads polluted with thoughts broken into multiple messages or strewn with unrelated jokes, asides, and GIFs, it’s so easy to miss key information about what’s going on. Pinning messages anywhere would be manna from heaven.
Apple has said it now requires a judge's order to hand over information about its customers' push notification to law enforcement, putting the iPhone maker's policy in line with rival Google and raising the hurdle officials must clear to get app data about users.
Whoever pays to opt out of ads tends for now to be wealthier than those who sit through them. Among those paying for news online, eight out of ten are from medium- or high-income households, according to the Reuters Institute. As well as having more money, the wealthy tend to be more privacy-conscious: the richest users are likeliest to decline to be tracked on their iPhones, says Mr Seufert.
Still, early indications are that, in TV at least, the difference may not be big. In America the highest-earning households make up 9% of ad-supported subscribers and 11% of ad-free ones, finds Antenna. Mr Wieser suggests that, as consumers are squeezed and spend less on nights out, they may in fact be more inclined to pay for ad-free TV.
Paying subscription money, I'm thinking, and still am getting advertisment bombarded at you seems wrong… until I remember newspaper and magazine subscriptions used to be come with advertisements. (I said 'used to', because I haven't read a dead-tree newspaper or magazines in ages.)
But, I also remembered, there were advertisements that I used to enjoy seeing. I cannot remember the last time I enjoyed an advertisement on YouTube. (Nor can I remember the advertisers. But that may be due to failing memory as I age. :-))
~
Thanks for reading.