Search Results for tizen

Nicole Perlroth, New York Times:

Apple issued emergency software updates for a critical vulnerability in its products on Monday after security researchers uncovered a flaw that allows highly invasive spyware from Israel’s NSO Group to infect anyone’s iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or Mac computer without so much as a click.

Apple’s security team had worked around the clock to develop a fix since Tuesday, after researchers at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog organization at the University of Toronto, discovered that a Saudi activist’s iPhone had been infected with an advanced form of spyware from NSO.

You’ve no doubt seen the update (unless you are running a beta, even an iOS 14.7 beta).

Here’s a link to Apple’s official security updates page. Note the new updates that dropped yesterday, including those for Safari, Catalina, Big Sur, Apple Watch, and iOS and iPad OS.

The Register:

Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.

The antisocial network that makes almost all of its revenue from building a vast, constantly updated database of netizens that it then sells access to, is upset that iOS 14, due out next month, will require apps to ask users for permission before Facebook grabs data from their phones.

I’m a sucker for a well-written headline. Monstrous. Onion-worthy.

Two good reads for the weekend. First, be sure to dig into Jim Dalrymple’s iOS 14 favorite features piece.

Then follow the headline link and read John Gruber’s powerful App Store essay. I’ll quote a few bits, but worth heading over to read the whole thing:

Feel free to file Google’s release this week of an update to their iPad Gmail app with support for split-screen multitasking under “better late than never”, but this is so late it borders on the absurd.

and:

Five years to add support for a foundational element of the iPad user experience. And an email client is near the top of the list of the type of apps where someone would want to use split-screen. Five years.

and:

I worry that it’s not tenable in the long run to expect Apple to continue striving to create well-crafted — let alone insanely great — software when so many of its users not only settle for, but perhaps even prefer, software that is, to put it kindly, garbage.

And:

I’d like to see all the vim, vigor, and vigilance Apple applies to making sure no app on the App Store is making a dime without Apple getting three cents applied instead to making sure there aren’t any scams or ripoffs, and that popular apps support good-citizen-of-the-platform features within a reasonable amount of time after those features are introduced in the OS. I don’t know exactly how long “reasonable” is, but five fucking years for split-screen support ain’t it.

And:

Imagine a world where the biggest fear developers had when submitting an app for review wasn’t whether they were offering Apple a sufficient cut of their revenue, but whether they were offering users a good enough native-to-the-platform experience.

And, finally:

Rather than watch Apple face antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe with a sense of dread, I’d watch with a sense of glee. “This company is abusing its market dominance to take an unfair share of our money” is an age-old complaint to government regulators. “This company is abusing its market dominance to force us to make our apps better for users” would be delightful new territory. Only Apple could do that.

Go read the whole post. There’s a lot more. It’s clearly born of epiphany.

At the core of the issue is a basic problem with being a public traded company. Once you put your company up for sale to the public, take public money to use as you will, you are beholden to those shareholders. You can’t help but treat the bottom line as a fiduciary responsibility. And there’s the rub.

Apple, and shareholders, made a ton of money on the iPhone and its wondrous ecosystem. But it’s a hard treadmill to escape. So as the smartphone market matured, Apple shifted to services. And the App Store is one of the more important pieces of that strategy.

No argument with Gruber’s idealism. And I do think it’s possible Apple’s hand will be forced by Antitrust investigation/regulation. But the financial forces, the pressure from shareholders for year-over-year growth, will not change. Some balancing force needs to come to bear here, pressure to make Apple value a world where, as John says, their most used apps are best-in-class.

Great food for thought from Gruber. Go read the whole thing.

New York Times:

As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces.

And:

People in China sign up through Ant’s popular wallet app, Alipay, and are assigned a color code — green, yellow or red — that indicates their health status.

And:

The Times’s analysis found that as soon as a user grants the software access to personal data, a piece of the program labeled “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice” sends the person’s location, city name and an identifying code number to a server. The software does not make clear to users its connection to the police. But according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency and an official police social media account, law enforcement authorities were a crucial partner in the system’s development.

Collision of worlds here. The battle to contain coronavirus. Government requiring its citizens to use software that is said to share personal data with police.

The words iPhone and Apple do not appear in the article. Wondering if this software exists for iPhone and, if so, the route it took to get approved for distribution.