With my previous post in mind, to illustrate just how tricky just how tricky software development can be. [macrumors.com]
According to multiple people on the MacRumors forums and Reddit, the 13.2 update “bricked” their HomePods, rendering them unusable. Users who are seeing problems are experiencing a “white swirl” on both of their HomePods, or an endless reset loop.
Even for giant corporations like Apple, modern software is so complex even critical bugs like this can slip through.
It’s sometimes good to remember that software is developed by people. Those people have lives, partners, children, problems of their own. They’re fallible, and the development cycle is in itself unpredictable, full of pitfalls even for the most experienced. So when your favourite new thing isn’t released on time, try to be a little understanding.
[Brent Simmons]
The only reason anything ever ships is because people just keep working until it’s ready.
A great tip for opening a link in a new Safari tab on iOS. [finertech.com]
In Safari on iPad and iPhone, you can quickly open a link in a new tab by tapping it with two fingers.
This doesn’t seem sustainable. [grist.org]
A fluctuating bitcoin price, along with increases in computer efficiency, has slowed the cryptocurrency’s energy footprint growth rate to “just” 20 percent per month so far in this year. If that keeps up, bitcoin would consume all the world’s electricity by January 2021.
A critical vulnerability has been discovered in PGP and S/MIME email encryption plugins like, Thunderbird with Enigmail, Apple Mail with GPGTools, and Outlook with Gpg4win. The EFF’s advice is to uninstall or disable these until further notice. [The EFF.]
Our advice, which mirrors that of the researchers, is to immediately disable and/or uninstall tools that automatically decrypt PGP-encrypted email. Until the flaws described in the paper are more widely understood and fixed, users should arrange for the use of alternative end-to-end secure channels, such asSignal, and temporarily stop sending and especially reading PGP-encrypted email.
Update: To be clear this is not a flaw in PGP itself, rather in it’s implementation in the above plugins.
On Twitter, Nutella is using world password day to advise people to use, “Nutella” as their password. It’s terrible advise, please don’t do this.
Passwords should ideally be random, incorporating both upper and lower case letters as well as numbers (alphanumeric). And don’t reuse the same password across multiple sites or services.
Today it's World Password Day: choose a word that's already in your heart. Like "Nutella", for example! #WorldPasswordDay #Nutella pic.twitter.com/Q9EERc6244
— Nutella (@NutellaGlobal) May 3, 2018
From [imore.com]. If Siri is pronouncing someone’s name incorrectly, this could help put it right.
John Gruber on not force quitting iOS apps.
The single biggest misconception about iOS is that it’s good digital hygiene to force quit apps that you aren’t using. The idea is that apps in the background are locking up unnecessary RAM and consuming unnecessary CPU cycles, thus hurting performance and wasting battery life.
This has been a bugbear of mine for many years, I see people doing it all the time and have overheard people being advised to do it in Apple Stores by employees. You really shouldn’t, it’s completely unnecessary unless an app is misbehaving. What’s worse is that it actually decreases battery life, the complete opposite of what people are trying to achieve.
Of note here is that, this hack only works because of Googles own accelerated mobile pages technology, which although not its primary purpose, obscures the originating URL.
If you get an email asking you to change a password, especially an unexpected one do not click on it. Instead go directly to the site in question by manually typing the URL in the address bar of your browser.
The randsomeware attacks, including the one on the NHS, that occurred last week are a direct result of nation states hoarding vulnerabilities to use against adversaries, instead of working together to make us all safer.