Charlotte Henry joins host Kelly Guimont to discuss Apple’s support for to the Equal Justice Initiative and other orgs in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and changes to the Music app for #BlackoutTuesday.
How the ‘Untappd’ Beer App Was Used to Track Military, CIA Movements
Researchers were able to use beer rating app Untappd to track the location history of military and CIA personnel.
Examples of users that can be tracked this way include a U.S. drone pilot, along with a list of both domestic and overseas military bases he has visited, a naval officer, who checked in at the beach next to Guantanamo’s bay detention center as well as several times at the Pentagon, and a senior intelligence officer with over seven thousand check-ins, domestic and abroad. Senior officials at the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force are included as well.
Not even the CIA is safe against the data industrial complex.
Smartphone Sales Dropped 20 Percent in Q1 2020, With Samsung and Huawei Worst Hit
Smartphone sales to end users collapsed by 20.2 percent in q1 2020, with Apple weathering the storm better than most of its big rivals.
Apple’s Research App Updated With Survey and Hearing Test
Apple updated its Research app today with a COVID-19 survey for participants in the Heart and Movement Study, and a new test for those in the Hearing Study.
Security Researcher Believes Mac Backdoor ‘Tiny Shell” Still Being Used
Mac security researcher Jaron Bradley says he believes hackers are still using an open source macOS backdoor called “Tiny SHell.”
Tinyshell is an open source tool that operates like a shady version of SSH. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered a new sample, but I fully believe attackers are still out there using it. If you watched the Macdoored talk then you’ve seen what attackers are doing “post mortem” with this tool. However, no technical details have been discussed about the malware itself.
Apple Music and Beats 1 Mark Blackout Tuesday in Support of Black Lives Matter
Apple Music and the Beats 1 radio station are marking the Blackout Tuesday campaign in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Theresa Kang-Lowe Signs Multi-Year Deal With Apple TV+
Former talent agency partner at WME Theresa Kang-Lowe is starting her own management company with an Apple TV+ deal.
Earn $50 in Apple Cash When You Spend $50 at Walgreens
Apple and Walgreens are teaming up to offer a deal for new Apple Card customers: Spend US$50 and get US$50 in Daily Apple Cash.
Apple Pay Rolls Out Support for Hong Kong Octopus Card
Apple is rolling out Apple Pay support for Octopus Card, Hong Kong’s popular card for transit and retail.
Amazon No Longer Including Item Details in Order and Shipment Emails
Users have started to notice that Amazon does not include the items you’ve ordered in its confirmation and shipment emails. One Daring Fireball, John Gruber owners whether it is a bid to stop others scraping the data.
Amazon no longer puts a list of items in order confirmation and shipment notice emails. Almost certainly they’re doing this to thwart email-scraping data harvesters from obtaining information about Amazon sales. All sorts of companies harvest this info, and people volunteer to let them do it (including Edison Mail, the iOS mail client whose recent egregious bug granted full access to email accounts to random other users — at least they’re up front about it in their “how we use data” statement). Edison is far from alone in this — there’s an entire cottage industry of email clients and “tools” whose entire business model is based on scraping their users’ email for e-commerce trends. So, from the Department of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Amazon has responded by removing product information from its emails.