Year: 2019

Apple Fixes FaceTime Bug – Will issue update sometime next week

Reuters News February 1, 2019 0

(Reuters) - Apple Inc said on Friday it has fixed a privacy flaw in its group video chat software and that it plans to improve how it handles reports of software bugs after a teenager and his mother tried for days to warn the iPhone maker of the bug.

Apple said on Monday it would fix a flaw in its FaceTime chat software that allowed users to hear the audio of a person they were calling before that person answered the call.

The bug was discovered by 14-year-old Grant Thompson, who, along with his mother, Michele, tried to report the bug to Apple but said they struggled to get the company’s attention until the problem gained traction on social media.

Apple turned off the FaceTime group chat feature on Monday as its engineers worked to fix the issue. The company said it has fixed the bug on its servers and will turn on the feature for users again next week.

Meantime, Apple thanked the Thompson family for reporting the problem. Grant Thompson told Reuters TV reut.tv/2WCzJu3 he was trying to chat with his friend while playing a video game when he discovered the bug.

But it took Grant Thompson and his mother, who is an attorney, nine days of phone calls, emails, online postings and even a letter on Michele Thompson’s law firm letterhead before getting a response from Apple, the family said.

“We want to assure our customers that as soon as our engineering team became aware of the details necessary to reproduce the bug, they quickly disabled Group FaceTime and began work on the fix,” Apple said in a statement.

“We are committed to improving the process by which we receive and escalate these reports, in order to get them to the right people as fast as possible.”

The state of New York is probing Apple’s failure to warn consumers about the bug, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday.

Reporting by Sonam Rai in Bengaluru and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Sai Sachin Ravikumar and Frances Kerry

How to get Swift 5 and Xcode 10.2 Beta

Dan Uff February 1, 2019 1

For those of you who are new to Swift and Xcode and want to try the beta, here's how to obtain what you need.

All developers must be a member of the Apple Developer program in order to do the below. For more information about the program, click here.

Once you've become a member, login to https://developer.apple.com with the username and password that you used to sign up.

When you've logged in, select the Downloads option on the left. From there, select the BETA version of Xcode. To download it, follow the screens.

Once downloaded, locate it and double click on the XIB file. Depending on the speed of your Mac, installation may take anywhere from 5-10 minutes and will be located in the Applications folder and/or in Launchpad.

iOS 12.1.4 being tested according to several web site analytics

Dan Uff January 31, 2019 0

It seems that Apple has been working on the FaceTime bug over the last few days - other Apple news-related web sites are reporting that they are seeing a new iOS version appear in their analytics.

The version should fix the FaceTime bug that we've reported on earlier in the week.

Report: Apple moving from Lightening Port to USB-C in New and Future iPhones

CompuScoop Staff January 31, 2019 0

“Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman… reports that Apple is currently testing iPhones with USB-C charging ports instead of Lightning ports,” Ben Sin writes for Forbes. “This isn’t too surprising for anyone who follows industry trends. USB-C is a charging and data transferring tech that’s been hailed by tech insiders as the “next big thing” years ago, and outside of the iPhone world, that has come true. Almost all new Android handsets charge via USB-C, as do premium laptops released in the last year or so.”

“There’s almost no good argument against using USB-C on mobile devices: it can deliver more power, more data, more efficiently than older USB or Lightning ports,” Sin reports. “In fact, even Apple made the switch to USB-C on its laptops and iPads in recent years.”