Month: April 2019

Innovation isn’t required for Apple TV + to become a big hit

CompuScoop Staff April 9, 2019 0

When Apple announced its new TV+ service (coming this fall at an unspecified price), it trotted out a parade of celebrities from Steven Spielberg to Jason Momoa, and made me feel ill with a very overwrought trailer about the all-important impact of storytelling,” Jason Cross writes for Macworld.

“What it didn’t do is show us more than a few scant seconds of any of its many, many original TV shows and movies. It was as if Apple was less concerned with letting us see what we’d be paying for and more concerned with presenting Apple TV+ as a service that would change the world,” Cross writes. “Of course, it’s not nearly so transformative. Apple’s new TV app and Channels are nothing that we haven’t already seen from Amazon and Roku. The upcoming TV+ service is just another way to pay a monthly fee to stream exclusive TV shows and movies.”

“But we shouldn’t mistake Apple’s relative lack of innovation here for its ability to make Apple TV+ a huge success. Apple doesn’t need to reinvent streaming TV for its subscryiption service to pull in tens of millions of subscribers. It just needs a handful of very good shows.”

Read more in the full article here.

Pixelmator Photo now available on the iPad

Dan Uff April 9, 2019 0

The new image editing app brings all new photo editing tools that are available on the Mac to the iPad.

For more information, click here.

NASA to hold Media Event to share twin’s health results

NASA Gov April 8, 2019 0

NASA will host a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, April 11, to share the results of a study – embargoed by the journal Science until that time – evaluating identical twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly. A Reddit iAMA will follow the media teleconference at 4 p.m.

The briefing participants are:

Scott Kelly, retired NASA astronaut, study participant
Mark Kelly, retired NASA astronaut, study participant
Steven Platts, Ph.D., NASA Human Research Program deputy chief scientist
Susan M. Bailey, Ph.D., Colorado State University, principal investigator, Telomeres
Andrew Feinberg, MD, Johns Hopkins University, principal investigator, Epigenomics
Stuart M. C. Lee, Ph.D. KBRwyle, principal investigator, Metabolomics
Christopher E. Mason, Ph.D., Weill Cornell Medicine, principal investigator, Gene Expression
Michael Snyder, Ph.D., Stanford University, principal investigator, Integrative Omics

Teleconference audio will stream live at:

https://www.nasa.gov/live

Reporters interested in obtaining a copy of the embargoed Science study should reach out to the Science press package team at scipak@aaas.org. For reporters registered with EurekAlert!, the embargoed study also is available at:

https://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/sci/

The Twins Study is helping scientists better understand the impacts of spaceflight on the human body through the study of identical twins. The Twins Study research encompassed 10 separate investigators who coordinated and shared all data and analysis as one large, integrated research team. Retired astronaut Scott Kelly spent 340 days in low-Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station while retired astronaut Mark Kelly, his identical twin, remained on Earth. The twins’ genetic similarity provided scientists with a reduced number of variables and an ideal control group, both important to scientific investigation.

For dial-in information, media must contact NASA’s Johnson Space Center newsroom in Houston, at 281-483-5111 no later than 1 p.m. April 11. Questions may be submitted on Twitter during the teleconference using the hashtag #askNASA. Questions can be submitted to the Reddit iAMA event when it begins at 4 p.m.

For more information about NASA’s Twin Study, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/twins-study

https://www.nasa.gov/hrp

-end-

Enterprise Certificates still being abused to spy on iPhone users

CompuScoop Staff April 8, 2019 0

Apple's Enterprise Certificate program continues to be abused for unauthorized purposes, with the discovery of a disguised spyware app that has the capability to acquire a considerable amount of data from a user's iPhone, one that may have been created by a government surveillance app developer.

Apple's program enables enterprise customers to create and distribute apps within an organization without being subjected to the App Store's content guidelines. The system allows for apps with far greater access to data within iOS than normal consumer versions, but the rules for the program means it cannot be used outside of an organization.

Despite it being against the rules, this hasn't stopped unscrupulous organizations from taking advantage of the Enterprise Certificate system to distribute apps that don't have to abide by the consumer-protecting App Store guidelines.

Mobile security outfit Lookout advised to TechCrunch a spy app was discovered pretending to be a carrier assistance app for mobile networks in Italy and Turkmenistan. Once installed, the app us capable of quietly acquiring contacts stored on an iPhone, as well as audio recordings, photos and video, real-time location data, and can even be used to listen in to conversations.

It is believed to have been developed by Connexxa, the creators of a similar Android app named Exodus that has been used by Italian authorities for surveillance purposes. The Android version had more reach than the latest iOS discovery, via the use of an exploit to gain root access.

Both the iOS and Android apps used the same backend, indicating the two are linked. The use of certificate pinning and other techniques to disguise its network traffic is thought to be a sign that the app was created by a professional group.

Once Apple was informed of the app's unauthorized activity by the researchers, Apple revoked the app's certificate, preventing it from functioning. It is unknown how many iOS users were affected by the attack.

The misuse of Apple's Enterprise Certificates program has become an issue for the company since the start of 2019. Early stories focused on how Google and Facebook were providing end users with Enterprise Certificate-equipped apps that monitored their usage habits, a situation that led to Apple revoking the certificates and, in Facebook's case, causing internal issues.

In February, it was discovered developers were also abusing the program to offer apps that would normally be banned from the App Store, including porn and gambling apps. Many were found to have acquired the certificates using another firm's details, allowing them to work around limitations to the number of users allowed under a certificate.

It was also found some developers were distributing hacked versions of popular apps, with users capable of streaming music without paying subscription fees, blocking advertisements, and bypassing in-app purchases. It also meant the developers of the legitimate versions of the apps were missing out on revenue, along with Apple failing to receive its usual 15 or 30 percent cut of all App Store Purchases.

Via: Appleinsider.com