Apple

Ankur Thakur, iDownloadBlog:

This tutorial shows you how to delete your Apple ID or iCloud account. But first, it’s essential to know about the consequences of such action, what will stop working, and what you must do before deleting your Apple ID to prevent your devices from becoming unusable!

Why delete your Apple ID?

• You have a second Apple ID and wish to stop using the first one.
• You migrated to non-Apple platforms like Android or Windows PC and no longer use or plan to use Apple devices.
• You have privacy concerns with Apple.

This is serious business. The consequences are severe. Measure twice, cut once, caveat emptor, etc.

But if you have a good reason, read through Ankur’s tutorial, proceed with caution.

Josh Centers:

That gave me an idea: what if I put my recommendations on a website and sent people to that? That idea was the genesis of my new Apple Buying Advice site, which isn’t affiliated with TidBITS in any way.

And:

We offer expert recommendations to ensure you buy the right product at the right time. Whether it’s an iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or AirPods, we can help you make the right choice. These are the very same recommendations we would give to friends and family.

And:

The site is monetized through affiliate links, largely to Amazon, and I get a small commission when you make a purchase through them. But the affiliate commissions don’t influence my recommendations.

Check out the site (early days still), consider subscribing to the newsletter (email field and subscribe button on main page.)

Reuters:

Dutch police ended a hostage taking in an Apple flagship store in Amsterdam after a man armed with two guns held at least one person hostage for hours, police said on Wednesday.

This situation played out late last night.

This tweet shows the hostage and the hostage taker:

https://twitter.com/parool/status/1496229024682721280

The caption, translated from Dutch:

A photo in the hands of Het Parool shows the hostage taker, dressed in a camouflage suit, together with the hostage. They sit opposite each other, the hostage appearing handcuffed with his hands behind his back.

Another tweet shows the hostage taker wearing what looked like a bomb vest.

Here’s how it ended:

“We managed to end the situation by hitting the hostage taker with a car when he ran outside,” police said on Twitter, adding that the man was being treated for serious injuries.

And:

The situation ended when the hostage, reportedly a 44-year old British man, fled from the building when a police robot delivered water at the door of the store at the request of the hostage taker.

The hostage taker ran after the man and was quickly hit by the car.

The video of this ending is the first part of this I saw last night, before all the details emerged. Still putting all the pieces together.

Reuters:

A single activist helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world’s most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world.

It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone.

And:

A mysterious fake image file within her phone, mistakenly left behind by the spyware, tipped off security researchers.

Interesting read. Were it not for that mysterious fake image, we still might not know about this.

Bowdoin College:

Bowdoin College’s groundbreaking Digital Excellence Commitment (DExC) will provide every current student and all future students with a suite of the latest Apple technology and access to a full range of course-specific software designed to advance learning, inspire innovative teaching, and create digital equity across the student body in the use of tools essential for success in the twenty-first century.

That’s an M1 MacBook Pro.

The effort started a few years ago:

In summer 2020, the College issued each student an iPad Pro Wi-Fi + Cellular (activated and funded by the College for those students who had internet connectivity needs), an Apple Pencil, and an Apple Magic Keyboard.

From the FAQ:

students will have the option to pay $1 to keep their equipment when they graduate.

Nice.

Nice origin story. Amazingly, Daring Fireball has been a going concern for 20 years now.

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

Safari remains the second most-used desktop web browser in the world as of January 2022, but two of its competitors are close to taking over second place this time around.

While Safari is used by 9.84% of desktop users, Microsoft Edge is right behind with 9.54% market share. Firefox, which had only 8.1% share in January 2021, has gained new users during the past few months and now has 9.18% of the desktop market share. Unsurprisingly, Google Chrome is still in first place with 65.38% of the share.

And:

While StatCounter or even Apple doesn’t provide details on the reason why Safari is losing users, we can easily make a few assumptions about it. Safari is the default web browser for Apple devices such as the iPhone and the Mac, which certainly contributes to it being the second most used web browser worldwide.

Last year, Apple introduced a completely redesigned version of Safari that unified the address bar with the tab bar. However, the update left some users unhappy, which made Apple revert Safari back to its old design and make the new interface optional for users. This, of course, wasn’t enough to stop many users from switching to other web browsers.

Not sure how big a deal this is. If you look at the StatCounter chart embedded in the 9to5Mac post, the lines are pretty flat. Chrome absolutely dominates, and the rest of the players, including Safari, sit way down in the mix. If I did not read the article and just looked at the chart, I’d say any movement is negligible, in the noise.

Personally, I trust Safari more than other web browsers, both with privacy and with behaving properly in the macOS ecosystem (just search for “chrome Mac battery drain” for one example). Safari is not perfect, obviously, but it works really well for me.

Fabian Braunlein, Positive Security (via AppleInsider):

Recently, reports about AirTags being used to track other people and their belongings were becoming much more frequent.

In one exemplary stalking case, a fashion and fitness model discovered an AirTag in her coat pocket after having received a tracking warning notification from her iPhone. Other times, AirTags were placed in expensive cars or motorbikes to track them from parking spots to their owner’s home, where they were then stolen.

Lots of press on this issue, and this response from Apple, titled An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking, wherein Apple lays out their work with safety groups and law enforcement agencies to “update AirTag safety warnings and help guard against further unwanted tracking.”

Back to Fabian’s headline linked blog post:

I might be slightly more familiar with AirTags than the average hacker (having designed and implemented a communication protocol on top of Find My for arbitrary data transmission), but even so I was quite surprised, that when reading Apple’s statement I was able to immediately devise quite obvious bypass ideas for every current and upcoming protection measure mentioned in that relatively long list.

The following section will discuss each anti-stalking feature and how it can be bypassed in theory. Thereafter I will describe how I implemented those ideas to build a stealth AirTag and successfully tracked an iPhone user (with their consent of course) for over 5 days without triggering a tracking notification.

There’s a market for stalking devices. Apple did not invent the concept. But consider:

Apple needs to incorporate non-genuine AirTags into their threat model, thus implementing security and anti-stalking features into the Find My protocol and ecosystem instead of in the AirTag itself, which can run modified firmware or not be an AirTag at all (Apple devices currently have no way to distinguish genuine AirTags from clones via Bluetooth).

Hoping the AirTag team digs into this post.

Wesley Hilliard, AppleInsider:

Your iPhone, iPad, and Mac all have a free password manager made by Apple called iCloud Keychain. Here’s how to use it, set up two-factor authentication, and never have to remember a password again.

Nice little exploration of Apple’s updated password management process. If you use Keychain Access, you definitely need to read this.

Antoinette Siu, The Wrap:

TikTok can circumvent security protections on Apple and Google app stores and uses device tracking that gives TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance full access to user data, according to the summaries of two major studies obtained by TheWrap that appear to confirm longstanding concerns raised by privacy experts about the popular video-sharing app.

The studies, conducted by “white hat” cybersecurity experts that hack for the public good, were completed in November 2020 and January 2021. TheWrap verified the studies and confirmed their conclusions with five independent experts.

When asked by TheWrap, reps for TikTok — whose parent company ByteDance has had ties to the Chinese government — declined to confirm or deny the validity of the research.

Most alarming of all:

The summaries of the studies, shared exclusively with TheWrap, suggest that TikTok is able to avoid code audits on the Apple and Google app stores. More alarmingly, the research found that TikTok is capable of changing the app’s behavior as it pleases without users’ knowledge and utilizes device tracking that essentially gives the company and third parties an all-access pass to user data. This is highly unusual and exceeds the abilities of U.S.-based apps such as Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

And:

Examining the backend, researchers also found that the app essentially acts like a web browser. It uses a JavaScript bridge, the programming language for the web, to directly pull the app from TikTok’s servers when it’s launched. This makes the security of the app hard to assess, because that can keep changing, according to Lockerman at Conquest Cyber. Theoretically, it also means TikTok can change its app behavior dynamically or test certain things on the fly without pushing an update to users.

If true, how is this possible? How does the TikTok app get through the App Store review process?

A spokesperson for TikTok declined to address the studies directly, but told TheWrap that the company adheres to app store policies, adding that its product meets information security standards in the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, India and Singapore and recently received certification by the ioXt Alliance for meeting standards and commitments to cybersecurity and transparency. In fact, TikTok said it works with the ethical hacker community and researchers through a program called HackerOne to test its product.

So is this much ado about nothing? Or is TikTok getting away with privacy-evading practices? And, if the latter, how is this getting past App Store reviewers?

Daniel Deakin, NotebookCheck:

Xiaomi built its well-regarded reputation by selling affordable Android smartphones under its Mi, Redmi, and POCO brands, which consisted of devices that frequently “borrowed” popular features and design language from other tech products, with Apple typically being a target for “inspiration”.

Jarring dissonance there, with “well-regarded reputation” fighting against “frequently borrowed features and design language”.

The release of the iPhone 13 series allowed Apple to roar ahead again, and by Q4 2021 the fruit company had soared to 22% of worldwide smartphone shipments while Samsung lost a bit of ground on 17% and Xiaomi dipped drastically to 12%.

And, therefore, Xiaomi now sees its salvation in the high end market dominated by Apple.

Peter Kafka, Recode:

Facebook built one of the most amazing money machines the world has ever seen. Then Apple came and threw a wrench in the gears.

That’s one of the narratives that sprang from last week’s news, when Facebook’s parent company Meta delivered an alarming earnings report to Wall Street, which promptly cut an astonishing $250 billion out of the company’s value in a single day — a 26 percent drop.

Obviously, the goal was better privacy, not a move against Facebook specifically. But Facebook did get hammered. But they are still healthy enough:

Facebook is still making an enormous amount of money from advertising — analyst Michael Nathanson estimates the company will generate $129 billion in ad revenue in 2022. But that would mean its ad business will only grow about 12 percent this year, compared to a 36 percent increase the previous year.

A specific sign of the drop:

Alex Austin, the CEO of Branch, a company that helps advertisers figure out how their campaigns are working: After Apple introduced its anti-tracking changes in the spring of 2021, advertisers who used Branch’s services to measure paid ads on iOS dropped by 20 percent.

And this, on the push to grow Facebook’s Marketplace Platform, with digital storefronts on Insta and Facebook:

Facebook can’t tell a shoe store if someone saw their ad on the app, then clicked through to the store’s site or app and bought something — but it can tell them if a Facebook user saw the ad on Facebook and then bought the shoes on Facebook.

Obviously, that depends on building traffic to Facebook and Instagram, having people view those platforms as a trusted shopping option.

Follow the headline link, watch the video.

The implication is that Siri thinks it’s speaking on a HomePod with a display. Is this fake? An accidental beta leak? A Siri misspeak?

Either way, interesting. According to the post, this is iOS 14.5 B1, audioOS 15.3.

Statista:

When Apple introduced AirPods alongside the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus in September 2016, the reactions were mixed at best. While many were impressed with the technology behind Apple’s first true wireless headphones, their design drew a lot of criticism and the internet was having a field day cracking jokes about the headphones’ looks, price and overall appeal.

That was then. This is now. Follow the headline link and check out the numbers.

• Apple has 34.4% of the market
• Beats is next with 15.3% of the market

Taken together, that’s 49.7% of the market. Astonishing.

Reed Albergotti, Washington Post:

Inside Apple, your job classification can mean a lot. The difference between a “level 4″ engineer and a “level 5,” for instance, could mean a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. And those titles help determine how much Apple employees can make when they leave the company for another job.

And:

In widely used databases that companies refer to for verification of job information, Apple changes the job title for every employee, whether they’re a PhD in computer science or a product manager, to “associate,” the company confirms.

And:

The practice recently came to light when Cher Scarlett, a former Apple software engineer who raised concerns about alleged discrimination and misconduct at the company, filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that when Apple changed her job title to “associate,” it delayed the hiring process at a prospective employer by nearly a week, during which time the company rescinded the offer.

This is a long-standing practice for Apple, but it seems obvious that this can be an issue for folks who leave Apple and list a specific job title on their resume. What’s the harm to Apple if they change someone’s title to, say, “Former Level 4 Engineer” or some such? And what’s the benefit to Apple in changing someone’s title to “Associate”?