[VIDEO] Earlier today, I posted Jeff Benjamin’s first look at macOS Catalina. Consider that the appetizer. Here’s Rene Ritchie (video embedded in the main Loop post) with the main course, a detailed take on Catalina with all kinds of perspective and backstory.
It’s long, but worth your time.
For anyone who wants to create a Mac Pro graphic, here’s a detailed walkthrough of how to get the holes just right. Some nerdy reverse engineering.
[VIDEO] This is an excellent, easy to absorb first look at macOS Catalina by Jeff Benjamin. The video is embedded in the main Loop post.
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:
According to a new report from the San Francisco Chronicle, Apple has hired a “handful” of hardware and software engineers from self-driving car startup Drive.ai – which is planning to close its doors later this week.
Interesting read, including a confirmation from Apple (via Axios).
So very curious. What’s Apple up to here? Wondering if there’s a specific product in the pipeline, or perhaps still a broader R&D effort sussing out the space, exploring various business models.
I think about news sites and great election tools, like interactive maps that show voting trends, real time meters that show likelihood of candidates (sometimes famously incorrectly), and the like. Interesting to see Apple News getting into this business.
Here’s a link to the candidate guide. This is some good work. I found it easy to navigate, with lots of detail on each candidate.
This little rabbit hole is an incredible labor of love from Sam Henri Gold. When I asked Sam how he pulled this all together:
I began the archive after the Every Apple Video Youtube channel went down in March(?) 2017, been updating it since. I’ve been sourcing from YouTube (both Apple’s own and other small personal channels ppl uploaded Apple vids to) as well as FTP servers and clips internet friends donated. I’m always looking for more donations!
Have anything to donate to the cause? You can reach Sam on Twitter.
Sit back, grab a hot beverage, and dig in. This is long, so consider skipping section-to-section to find specific topics of interest, to avoid getting overwhelmed.
Great work by AppleInsider’s Daniel Eran Dilger.
[VIDEO] Loop reader Niles Mitchell continues his quest to connect external devices to his iOS 13 iPhone. The video is embedded in the main Loop post. Last time, he successfully connect a Kindle. Can he use the same approach to access files on an Iomega Zip drive?
Fun series!
Scott Stein, CNET, walks through the big picture of the iPadOS public beta. Well balanced, pointing out the features that work well as well as the ones that fall short, all wrapped in a “it’s a beta, so have patience, this will likely change” sensibility.
Easy read, informative.
Good set of instructions from Chance Miller, 9to5Mac. At this point, my advice would be to limit yourself to a spare device, one that does not depend on a specific app running perfectly. Or at least make sure the apps you need are said to run well on the beta.
And, obviously, make a backup before you dive in.
John Voorhees, MacStories:
The message from WWDC was clear: SwiftUI is the future, a unified approach to UI development designed to simplify the process of targeting multiple hardware platforms. It’s a bold, sprawling goal that will take years to refine, even if it’s eagerly adopted by developers.
And:
However, SwiftUI also raises an interesting question: what does it mean for Catalyst? If SwiftUI is the future and spans every hardware platform, why bother bringing iPad apps to the Mac with Catalyst in the first place? It’s a fair question, but the answer is readily apparent from the very different goals of the two technologies.
For non-developers, think of Catalyst (previously called Marzipan) as a development kit to make it easier for developers to port their iOS apps to macOS. But think of SwiftUI as more of a starting point to lay out apps that will run on all your Apple platforms.
John does an excellent job digging into the value of both Catalyst and SwiftUI, explaining each one’s place in the Apple universe. Both are important.
If I had to boil this all down to a single talking point, I’d say that Catalyst is the hero we need now, letting developers bring their iOS apps to the Mac, refreshing and enriching the Mac experience while we wait for SwiftUI to evolve and mature and for SwiftUI apps to become the norm on all platforms.
In a way, this model is similar to the early days of Mac OS X, when Carbon made it possible for classic Mac apps to run on OS X while we waited for developers to build and ship modern OS X apps.
A great read.
Lovely sequence of images, starting with the Mac OS System 1 startup screen, the first so-called happy Mac.
Beautifully done.
This was a pretty amazing auction. The centerpiece was Gilmour’s “Black Strat”:
“The Black Strat,” a 1969 Fender Stratocaster which Gilmour used to record Pink Floyd albums “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here” and “The Wall,” sold for $3,975,000.
The winning bidder?
https://twitter.com/jimirsay/status/1141827314268954629
Jim Irsay is the owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts. What do you do with a guitar like that? Do you hang it on a wall? Will it ever be played again?
[VIDEO] I love this series, all filmed on the latest iPhone, in this case, the iPhone XS. Both the released video and the “making of” are embedded in the main Loop post.
The New York Times:
“The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy” is a medical handbook that recommends the right amount of the right drug for treating ailments from bacterial pneumonia to infected wounds. Lives depend on it.
And:
Antimicrobial Therapy, which publishes “The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy,” bought 34 of its handbooks from Amazon and Amazon’s third-party sellers. At least 30 were counterfeits.
And:
Amazon takes a hands-off approach to what goes on in its bookstore, never checking the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells. It does not oversee the sellers who have flocked to its site in any organized way.
That has resulted in a kind of lawlessness. Publishers, writers and groups such as the Authors Guild said counterfeiting of books on Amazon had surged. The company has been reactive rather than proactive in dealing with the issue, they said, often taking action only when a buyer complains.
I’ve written a bunch of books over the years and had a front row seat as counterfeiting grew from a clumsy, back-room business using hacksaws (to cut book spines) and copiers into a sophisticated factory, sucking in books and spitting out copies in mere minutes.
It has become harder and harder to make a living writing books, and nigh impossible to stop counterfeiting. Amazon selling counterfeit books and relying on customer complaints to spot counterfeits, in my opinion, is like a fence selling stolen goods. Just as an art patron might not know that their Picasso is a fake, the book buyer might never know that the forged book they just bought is fake.
The two terrible sides to fakes on Amazon? The original author/maker doesn’t see a penny for their hard work and, as called out above, real harm can be done where faulty information is sent out from a supposedly reliable source.
From Amazon’s response to this story (H/T Christopher Lloyd) on their blog:
A recent New York Times article claims that Amazon doesn’t care about counterfeits and takes a hands-off approach to what is sold in our stores. Nothing could be further from the truth. We invest substantial amounts of time and resources to protect our customers from counterfeit products, including books. We also stand behind every product sold in our stores with our A-to-z Guarantee.
Amazon strictly prohibits the sale of counterfeit products. We invest heavily in prevention and take proactive steps to drive counterfeits in our stores to zero. In 2018 alone, we invested over $400 million in personnel and tools built on machine learning and data science to protect our customers from fraud and abuse in our stores.
And:
One of the examples prominently featured by the Times, was the Sanford Guide. We’ve worked closely with Sanford Publishing and took additional action in November 2018 to address their concerns. Since these measures were put in place, the publisher has not submitted any further notices of infringement.
I’d love to see followup from the New York Times on this, both in continued investigation and in direct response to Amazon’s rebuttal.
MyCrypto and CipherBlade, via Medium:
MyCrypto and CipherBlade have collaborated on this article to help you understand the dangers of a SIM-jacking attack, and how best to defend yourself against and attack, and how to recover from such an event. This article aims to be a “one-stop” article to read, reference, and share with your friends and colleagues. It’s not short, but it’s thorough.
If you’ve been following our stories on SIM-swapping, this should be in your reading queue. Full of detail. I’ve gotten a lot of response to the posts, both warning me how many people are vulnerable to having their lives turned upside down by this hack, and weighing in with their take on best practices.
I’m far from an expert here, but this seems a solid resource, worth bookmarking and passing along. If you have an opinion on the linked post, either pro or con, please do ping me.
[H/T Ricky de Laveaga]
Love this on two counts:
The page is HTML rendered as HTML, all tags visible like one of those visible person models, with all the organs and bones showing through invisible skin.
Quine. From the Wikipedia page:
A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. The standard terms for these programs in the computability theory and computer science literature are “self-replicating programs”, “self-reproducing programs”, and “self-copying programs”.
My nerd light shining through. No apologies.
PC Magazine:
All four major wireless carriers in the US are constantly flinging claims at you—they’re the fastest, the largest, the friendliest, the best. So 10 years ago, we decided to put those claims to the test. Every year since then, with the carriers’ cooperation, we strap phones into a set of cars and send them across the country with our staff members behind the wheels, scooping up data for several weeks to see who has the fastest and most reliable smartphone data network.
And:
Verizon had a good run for the past five years with its nationwide LTE network, but AT&T has rocketed into the top spot this year. What the carrier calls 5G Evolution may not be 5G, but it’s definitely a stride toward it. The big push to improve its 4G LTE network in preparation for 5G pays off big time for AT&T; it’s America’s fastest mobile network in 2019.
I hate the 5Ge tag. It’s misleading and not at all representative of 5G. As far as I’m concerned, it soiled the AT&T brand, a dark mark that takes away from this accomplishment.
Been reading a lot about folks getting SIM swapped lately. We posted this SIM-swap horror story a few days ago, and followed up with this story on the strategy that other countries are using but that the US is not.
Came across the headline linked post from Tony Sheng. An interesting read, wondering if it’s simply alarmist or insightful.
In a nutshell, Tony got SIM-swapped and went into great detail on the process and what he did to minimize harm. His highest priority:
Disassociated my phone number from my email address. If you connect your phone number to your email, then a hacker with your phone number can reset your password and take over your email address.
Once they have your email and your phone number, they can reset passwords on pretty much all your accounts for which you don’t have physical 2FA (like a Yubikey).
Step 1 is far and away the most important. If you haven’t done this yet. Stop reading and do it now.
Not sure how you do that. Do you use a secondary email address for verification? YubiKey is a hardware dongle. Secure, but not convenient.
Opinions on this? Please tweet at me with how you solve this problem.
First, the Wall Street Journal posted this article about fake businesses hijacking legitimate business names on Google Maps:
The ruse lures the unsuspecting to what appear to be Google-suggested local businesses, a costly and dangerous deception. A man arrived at Ms. Carter’s home in an unmarked van and said he was a company contractor. He wasn’t. After working on the garage door, he asked for $728, nearly twice the cost of previous repairs, Ms. Carter said. He demanded cash or a personal check, but she refused. “I’m at my house by myself with this guy,” she said. “He could have knocked me over dead.” The repairman had hijacked the name of a legitimate business on Google Maps and listed his own phone number.
Google responded to the article with this detailed post. From that post:
We get millions of contributions each day (like new business profiles, reviews, star ratings, and more) and the vast majority of these contributions are helpful and accurate. But occasionally, business scammers take advantage of local listings to make a profit. They do things like charge business owners for services that are actually free, defraud customers by posing as real businesses, and impersonate real businesses to secure leads and then sell them. Even though fake business profiles are a small percentage of the overall business profiles on Google, local business scammers have been a thorn in the internet’s side for over a decade.
And:
We have an entire team dedicated to addressing these issues and taking constant action to remove profiles that violate our policies.
Google goes on to run through numbers, showing how many scams they’ve shut down. Which sort of goes to the point, I think. The problem exists, is massive, and Google is doing all they can, short of making businesses certify themselves in some verifiable way.
A formal verification process would be costly. As is, Google depends on the unpaid public to report fraudulent businesses. Caveat emptor.
[VIDEO] This one (embedded in main Loop post) has been flying around Twitter. This can’t be real, I thought. But apparently it is.
Can you imagine Apple shipping this product? Yikes.
This is a great how-to, with detailed screenshots. Save this one, for when you move your iPad to iOS 13.
Washington Post:
New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments. The weight transfer that causes the buildup can be compared to the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure or abrasion.
The result is a hook or hornlike feature jutting out from the skull, just above the neck.
If you don’t have access to the article (and I find the Washington Post a no-brainer value, worth my subscription dollar), here’s a link to the original study, which shows X-rays of said horns. Crazy.
UPDATE: Reading the comments on the study itself, it seems like there’s some question as to the validity of the conclusion, that phone use is to blame. That said, there are a number of studies that do blame phone use for repetitive stress injuries to the neck. At the very least, we need more time and rigorous science to know what’s what.
UPDATE 2: This takedown by Ars Technica pulls no punches. It’s called Debunked: The absurd story about smartphones causing kids to sprout horns.
Neil Cybart, laying out Apple’s pre-2018 “pull” strategy:
One way of conceptualizing this product strategy is to think of every major Apple product category being attached to a rope. The order in which these products were attached to the rope was determined by the degree to which technology was made more personal via new workflows and processes for getting work done. Accordingly, Apple Watch and iPhone were located on the end of the rope held by Apple management. Meanwhile, Mac desktops were located at the other end of the rope while iPads and Mac portables were somewhere in the middle.
As Apple management pulled on the rope, the Apple Watch and iPhone received much of the attention while the Mac increasingly resembled dead weight.
And:
The quicker Apple pulled on the rope, the more chaotic the end of the rope moved.
But that seems to be changing:
Over the past two years, we received clues that a major change was beginning to take hold in Apple’s product strategy. This change was on display during this year’s WWDC.
And:
Apple no longer appears to be relying so much on a pull system when it comes to advancing its product line. Instead, a push system is being utilized, and every major product category is being pushed forward simultaneously. The change was designed to reduce the amount of chaos found at the end of the “rope” that Apple was pulling. Accordingly, the primary benefactors arising from this new strategy are the iPad and Mac. This explains why this year’s WWDC announcements felt more overwhelming than those of previous years. Apple was able to move its entire product category forward at the same time.
Not sure I agree with the “push vs pull” label, but I do agree with the basic point. There does appear to be an overall change in Apple’s strategy, much more of a focus on the health of the overall ecosystem, rather than a focus on the new hotness, with older products gathering dust.
To me (as I’ve found myself saying again and again lately), Apple is firing on all cylinders. Great detailed read.
Andy Greenberg, Wired:
…an escalating pattern of fraud based on so-called SIM swap attacks, where hackers trick or bribe a phone company employee into switching the SIM card associated with a victim’s phone number. The attackers then use that hijacked number to take over banking or other online accounts. According to Tenreiro, the bank had seen more than 17 SIM swap frauds every month. The problem was only getting worse.
And:
SIM swap hackers rely on intercepting a one-time password sent by text after stealing a victim’s banking credentials, or by using the phone number as a password reset fallback. So the phone company, Tenreiro says, offered a straightforward fix: The carrier would set up a system to let the bank query phone records for any recent SIM swaps associated with a bank account before they carried out a money transfer. If a SIM swap had occurred in, say, the last two or three days, the transfer would be blocked. Because SIM swap victims can typically see within minutes that their phone has been disabled, that window of time let them report the crime before fraudsters could take advantage.
I recognize that this is a game of whack-a-mole, where one security hole is plugged and another one is discovered. But this seems a pretty solid solution.
By August of 2018, Mozambique’s largest bank was performing SIM swap checks with all the major carriers. “It reduced their SIM swap fraud to nearly zero overnight.”
Why is the US not following in Mozambique’s SIM-securing footsteps?
CTIA vice president for technology and cybersecurity John Marinho argued that while US carriers may not offer real-time SIM swap checks, that’s in part because the US has other protections, like geolocation checks based on banks’ mobile applications installed on smartphones, and two-factor authentication. (The latter, of course, is exactly the security measure SIM swaps attempt to circumvent.)
Fascinating read.
[H/T @Varunorcv]
Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider:
In its Global Games Market Report, Newzoo outlined the top 35 public companies connected with gaming, with Apple firmly seated in the top five firms, beaten only by Tencent, Sony, and Microsoft and just ahead of Activision Blizzard.
That puts Apple ahead of Nintendo. And Apple Arcade is coming, with entry level iPod touch devices priced to fuel game growth.
A common conversational gambit is to suggest that Apple will become a major force in gaming. If that day is not already here, it certainly seems to be coming.
Apple:
Apple today announced the completion of a major expansion of its Apple authorized service network. With nearly 1,000 Best Buy stores across the US now providing expert service and repairs for Apple products, customers have even easier and more convenient access to safe and reliable repairs.
And:
By expanding to every Best Buy store across the US, customers in cities including Yuma, Arizona; Sioux City, Iowa; Twin Falls, Idaho; Casper, Wyoming and Bismarck, North Dakota will have more convenient access to Apple repairs. Plus, Best Buy’s Geek Squad has nearly 7,600 newly Apple-certified technicians ready to make same-day iPhone repairs or to service other Apple products.
It just got a lot easier to find a place to get your gear serviced, in warranty, in an Apple blessed way.
Interesting that Apple specifically called out those cities. If you look up Yuma, Arizona on your map, for example, you’ll see how incredibly far you have to go to get to an Apple Store (All the way to San Diego to the west, or to Mesa to the northeast). This is a terrific move, extending Apple’s reach, a win for many of Apple’s remoter customers.
Sarah Perez, Tech Crunch:
Good news for Apple Watch owners who don’t want to clutter up their Watch with unused apps. With the release of the new watchOS 6 operating system later this year, Apple will allow Apple Watch device owners to remove many more of the built-in, first-party apps from their smartwatch — including previously unremovable apps like Alarm, Timer, Stopwatch, Remote, Camera Remote, Radio and others, as well as health apps like ECG, Breathe, Noise and Cycle Tracking.
Excellent news. As is the news that you can update your Apple Watch running the watchOS 6 beta over the air, without the need to work through your iPhone. Props to Maks Motyka for this discovery:
https://twitter.com/MaksMotyka/status/1140681934529601537
You’ll still have to accept the EULA, apply the first beta via your iPhone but, once that’s done, it’s untethered updates. Huzzah.
That was no easy headline to construct. Better just to watch the video embedded in this tweet:
https://twitter.com/claybavor/status/1141142140329680896
You’ve got an AR component, showing your face with different makeup applied, underneath a second pane, guiding you through the process.
This might not apply (sorry!) to you, but the basic concept, with an AR pane adjacent to a guiding video, seems groundbreaking to me.
If you’re interested in learning more, click the headline link to read Google’s official blog post.
Matthew Miller, writing a story that no one wants to write:
At 11:30 pm on Monday, 10 June, my oldest daughter shook my shoulder to wake me up from a deep sleep. She said that it appeared my Twitter account had been hacked. It turns out that things were much worse than that.
After rolling out of bed, I picked up my Apple iPhone XS and saw a text message that read, “T-Mobile alert: The SIM card for xxx-xxx-xxxx has been changed. If this change is not authorized, call 611.”
This reads like a nightmare, told with ever increasing dread. Yes, it does get worse.
Read to the end for a section called “Recommendations for your security” but, since all this is still not resolved, I’m hoping for a “Lessons learned” update. And, for Matthew’s sake, hope the resolution happens quickly.