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Charging Cables Are Still Apple's Worst Product

Charlotte Henry ·

ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley Hughes does not like Apple’s charging cables. At all.

I’m not sure what it is about Apple cables, but the brilliant white rubber coating the company uses just doesn’t seem to be all that robust. After about six months of use — you know, the regular stuff like plugging and unplugging it — the outer starts to get soggy and discolored, and then over time becomes more and more fragile, until one day it starts peeling off, and then it is game over for the cable (unless you want to go through the pantomime of patching it, which buys you a little time). While I’ve long given up on using Apple cables for my iPhone and iPad — and even for my Apple Watch — I had hoped that the USB-C-to-USB-C charging cable for my MacBook Pro would be OK. I mean, how badly can you mess up a USB-C-to-USB-C cable? Pretty bad, if you’re Apple it seems.

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Netflix Says No to macOS Catalina, Won't Port its App Over

Andrew Orr ·

With the release of macOS Catalina and Catalyst, many developers are now porting their iOS apps to the Mac. But not Netflix.

Last year, Apple Inc. software chief Craig Federighi said developers would be able to easily bring their iPad apps to Mac computers, essentially letting coders write an app once and deploy it across millions more devices. So far, the reality has fallen short for some developers and is even leaving consumers paying twice for apps. Major app developers and service providers like Netflix Inc. are also demurring on taking part, at least at this early stage.

I’ll be interested to see if Hulu ports their app over.

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Oops! Twitter Accidentally Used Your Phone Number for Ads

Andrew Orr ·

Twitter admitted yesterday that it “unintentionally” used some email addresses and phone numbers for advertising purposes. These phone numbers were specifically used to keep your account safe with two-factor authentication.

We recently discovered that when you provided an email address or phone number for safety or security purposes (for example, two-factor authentication) this data may have inadvertently been used for advertising purposes, specifically in our Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences advertising system.

This is exactly why SMS-based two-factor authentication needs to go away. SMS is inherently insecure, as the FBI recently noted. Funnily enough, I recently removed my phone number from Twitter, although it’s probably too late.

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Lightning Cable That Allows Hackers to Remotely Take Over Your Computer Being Mass Produced.

Charlotte Henry ·

The O.MG. Cable, a Lightning cable that allowed hackers to remotely take over a victims computer, was demonstrated last summer at Def Con. Now, Fast Company reported, it is being mass-produced.

The O.MG Cable was first reported by Motherboard’s Joseph Cox when the security researcher who created it, a person known as “MG,” first demoed his handmade prototype at the Def Con hacking conference last summer. The O.MG Cable looks like an ordinary Apple-made Lightning cable and works exactly the same—it will charge a device and transfer data to and from the device just like an authentic Lightning cable. However, the O.MG Cable also contains a built-in wireless hotspot. This allows attackers to remotely run commands on the Mac or Windows PC the cable is plugged into, which allows them to do, well, pretty much whatever they want—including reading or even deleting your data… The good news at the time was that the O.MG cable needed to be handmade and was relatively expensive—$200 a pop. But now MG says that he’s found a way to mass-produce the cable in a factory, which will allow thousands of them to roll off an assembly line.