‘Hamilton’ Gives Disney+ Holiday Weekend Subscriber Boost

It looks like ending free trials didn’t deter users signing up to Disney+. The streaming service got a nice boost over the holiday weekend, thanks to the arrival of Hamilton. The hit musical helped the service get.a 74 percent increase in subscribers from the four previous weekends, according to TechCrunch.

According to new data from app store analytics firm Apptopia, Disney’s streaming service saw a big jump in downloads over the July 4 holiday weekend in the U.S., following the worldwide debut of “Hamilton” on Friday, July 3rd. Between Friday and Sunday, that translated to over half a million new global downloads (752K+) for the Disney+ mobile app, excluding India and Japan. Some 458K+ of those downloads were in the U.S, the firm estimated. These figures represent a 46.6% increase over the average seen during the previous four weekends in June (Friday through Sunday), Apptopia noted.

The Story Behind Apple PowerBook’s Design

Gavin Ivester is currently VP of Design at Bang & Olufsen. He started his career at Apple though, working on the PowerBook. He told TechRader how the product took shape.

The ergonomic goal was to get that front edge to be as thin as possible, for comfort, assuming you would use the laptop on a desk.  The breakthrough came from a system integration engineer named Jonathan Krakower, who proposed we push the keyboard back, and then put the battery in one of the now-empty front corners, and the disc drive in the other corner.  That left a space in the middle for some kind of cursor control, and trackballs were the best solution at that moment… My challenge was then to design options to bring that layout idea to life as a product, prototype them, test them with real users, and design better ones until we either had a final design or proved it would never work.   

An iCloud of Uncertainty — Mac Geek Gab 823

When iCloud works, it’s great. And, for the most part, that’s how it is. But sometimes…it just gets plain wonky. Several of you had several questions about that this week, and Dave and John dig in to get you sorted! That’s not all, though. Cool Stuff Found, routers, and even some future stuff is all up for discussion when your two favorite geeks get together this week. Press play and enjoy learning at least five new things!

Happy U.S. Independence Day, 2020 Edition

In honor of Independence Day—a U.S. holiday—The Mac Observer is taking off Friday, July 3rd. We will return Monday, July 6th, with our usual Apple, Mac, iPad iPhone, and Apple Watch news. TMO’s Daily Observations podcast is taking off the holiday, too. Enjoy the holiday, keep those masks on, and stay safe!

Double-Spending Flaw Found in Major Bitcoin Wallets

Israeli researchers at wallet startup ZenGeo have found a vulnerability affecting at least three major crypto wallets – Ledger Live, Edge, and Breadwallet. The flaw allows hackers to spend Bitcoin more than once,  Coindesk report,Ed.

The bug, which the Tel Aviv-based firm calls BigSpender, allows a hacker to double-spend a user’s funds and possibly prevent them from ever using their wallet again. It works by exploiting how certain wallet’s handle Bitcoin’s replace-by-fee (RBF) function, a failsafe that enables users to swap an unconfirmed transaction with one that has a higher fee. “[BigSpender] can lead to substantial financial losses and in some cases to make the victim’s wallet totally unusable, with no way for the victim to protect themselves,” ZenGo CEO Ouriel Ohayon said in an email. “So this can be seen as a high severity attack.”