Apple's initiatives to minimize tracking by marketers is continuing to make life harder for the advertising industry, forcing advertisers to use inefficient data sources to pinpoint users. AppleInsider reports: Over the years, Apple has enhanced how it protects the privacy of its users online, typically by limiting what data can be seen by advertisers tracking different data points. Initiatives such as Intelligent Tracking Protection in Safari has helped secure more privacy by making it harder to track individual users, which advertising executives in December admitted has been "stunningly effective." While ITP and other improvements have helped to minimize the tracking of users, marketers are also being affected by another element of iOS 13, one where users are regularly notified of apps that are capturing their location in the background. The warning gives options for users to allow an app to continue to track all the time or to do so when it is open, with users often selecting the latter.

According to data from verification firm Location Sciences seen by DigiDay, approximately seven in ten iPhone users tracked by the company downloaded iOS 13 in its first six weeks of availability. Of those tracked users who installed the update, around 80% of them stopped all background tracking by apps. Ad tracking company Teemo suggests the opt-in rates to share data with apps when not in use are often below 50%, whereas three years ago, the same rates were close to 100%. The higher rates were due to it being a time when users were largely unaware there were options to disable tracking in the first place.

At CES 2020, Samsung debuted "The Sero" (translates to vertical in Korean) -- a 4K TV that automatically rotates on its stand so you can more easily watch vertical content that's been recorded on phones or uploaded to apps like TikTok or Instagram. Pocket-lint reports: The new TV is a relatively modest 43-inches in size, but it's not aimed at those who might have the space and money to go and grab a 65-incher (yes, you've guessed it, it's aimed at the "mobile generation" according to Samsung). As well as being 4K, while there are 60W speakers for bouncy audio. The Sero is going to launch this year although it's already available in South Korea.

Content casts from your Samsung Galaxy device but it'll work with other phones and tablets, too and will have Apple's AirPlay so you can use it with iOS. The TV flips on demand depending on the orientation of your phone. Samsung also says it'll be available on wheels so you can move it from room-to-room. Variety reports that Sero will launch in several global markets. Samsung didn't announce pricing, but in Korea, the Sero TV has sold for around $1,600.

Some app developers are concerned that frequent iOS 13 notifications will scare users away. From a report: "'Facebook' has used your location 107 times in the background over the past 3 days. Do you want to continue to allow background location use?" Such pop-up notifications are frequent for many iPhone users who have downloaded Apple's iOS 13. They arrive every few days for each app that tracks location while not in use and includes maps. Apple touted the new notifications as a way to make users more mindful of how much tracking goes on even when they aren't using their phones. Each notification gives users the option to let the app use their location data only when it is in use or if they agree for the app to track their locations at all times. Since iOS 13 was released in September, tens of millions of people have moved to block apps' ability to track their locations when not in use, according to an estimate from Location Sciences, a company that verifies mobile location data.

Some app developers, particularly the ones whose business models rely on being able to access users' locations at all times, are concerned that the iOS 13 notifications will hurt their apps' adoption. Seven of them signed an email to Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook addressing these concerns in August. The signatories included Life360, an app that lets family members track one another's location and can summon an ambulance immediately in the event of an auto accident, and Tile, a maker of tracking devices for items like wallets and keys. Both Life360 and Tile rely on constantly tracking all their users and compete with Find My, a preinstalled Apple app that helps users locate a lost iPhone -- and isn't subject to the same notifications. [...] Apple's iOS 13 location-tracking changes have hit the supply of mobile location data available for advertising and analytics, said Jason Smith, chief business officer of Location Sciences. He said the amount of location data gathered by apps while not in use had dropped by 70% since iOS 13 was released.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has expanded a lawsuit against an iOS virtualization company, claiming that its actions facilitate jailbreaking and violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibition on circumvention of copyright-protection systems. Apple sued Corellium, a company that sells access to virtual machines that run copies of the operating system used in iPhones and iPads, in August 2019. Apple said that Corellium sells "perfect replicas" of iOS without a license from Apple and markets its software as "a research tool for those trying to discover security vulnerabilities and other flaws in Apple's software." But instead of aiding good-faith security research, Corellium "encourages its users to sell any discovered information on the open market to the highest bidder," Apple alleged.

The first version of Apple's lawsuit accused Corellium of copyright infringement. A new version filed on December 27 alleges both copyright infringement and "unlawful trafficking of a product used to circumvent security measures in violation of 17 U.S.C. 1201," a statute that's part of the DMCA. Apple argued that Corellium gives users the ability to jailbreak iOS for either benign or malicious purposes. In response to the new allegations, Corellium CEO Amanda Gorton said "Apple's latest filing against Corellium should give all security researchers, app developers, and jailbreakers reason to be concerned."

Corellium is "deeply disappointed by Apple's persistent demonization of jailbreaking," with Gorton writing that "developers and researchers rely on jailbreaks to test the security of both their own apps and third-party apps." Apple's filing, according to Corellium, essentially "assert[s] that anyone who provides a tool that allows other people to jailbreak, and anyone who assists in creating such a tool, is violating the DMCA." Apple, Gorton wrote, "is using this case as a trial balloon in a new angle to crack down on jailbreaking" and "is seeking to set a precedent to eliminate public jailbreaks."

Mac developer Michael Tsai reports that Apple News no longer supports RSS. The news comes from user David A. Desrosiers, who writes: Apple News on iOS and macOS no longer supports adding RSS or ATOM feeds from anywhere. Full-stop, period. It will immediately fetch, then reject those feeds and fail to display them, silently without any message or error. I can see in my own server's log that they make the request using the correct app on iOS and macOS, but then ignore the feed completely; a validated, clean feed. They ONLY support their own, hand-picked, curated feeds now. You can visit a feed in Safari, and it will prompt you to open the feed in Apple News, then silently ignore that request, after fetching the full feed content from the remote site. Simon Willison, creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django, points out that Apple News still hijacks links to Atom/RSS feeds -- "so if you click on one of those links in Mobile Safari you'll be bounced to the News app, which will then display an error."

An anonymous reader writes: Last month, news broke that Microsoft was killing off Cortana for Android and iOS and was removing Cortana from its Launcher app for Android. On January 31, 2020, Microsoft will end support for the Cortana app in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K. Microsoft refocusing Cortana for the enterprise, and specifically for Windows and Office, is not new. Nonetheless, killing off the Cortana app was a bold move. VentureBeat sat down with Andrew Shuman, who has been leading the Cortana team since Javier Soltero's departure last year, to find out why Cortana for Android and iOS is being killed off, what to expect with Cortana for Windows, his thoughts on natural language and typing, what's going on with the Alexa integration, and more.

Over the past decade, Netflix and its rivals have come to rely heavily on the power of algorithms, those top-secret computer programs designed to connect audiences with the programming they're most likely to enjoy based on what they've previously watched. But as Peak TV gives way to the era of Too Much TV and an even more ridiculous amount of content spreads across a rapidly multiplying number of services, platforms are supplementing that sophisticated software with a more low-tech method of helping subscribers find their next favorite show: human beings. From a report: While computer-generated suggestions aren't going away, companies are increasingly looking for other means to help viewers discover shows and movies they might otherwise have missed in a world where something significant premieres almost every day. The industry calls this "human curation," which is basically a fancy phrase for describing nonautomated ways of hyping specific content. AT&T-owned WarnerMedia's upcoming HBO Max service, for example, plans to expand its sister cable network's "Recommended by Humans" promotional campaign by having the stars and producers of its shows, as well as other celebrities, make short videos to highlight particular projects. Those videos will be embedded directly on the service in the hopes that, say, a testimonial from Zac Efron might prompt a young millennial to watch The Exorcist for the first time.

Meanwhile, Netflix, the platform known for its "Because You Watched ..." algorithmic suggestions, is currently beta testing something called "Collections," which are thematic playlists made by company staffers instead of its computers. Netflix isn't saying yet whether it plans to expand the test beyond a select pool of Apple iOS users or make it a permanent feature. Platforms are turning to human curation because of what they see as the limits of reactive recommendation algorithms: They can predict what you might like based on what you've watched in the past, but they can't forecast how your tastes might change or how you're feeling physically and mentally.

At its developer conference in June this year, Apple introduced Project Catalyst that aims to help developers swiftly bring their iOS apps to Macs. Developers have had more than half a year to play with Catalyst. Here's where things stand currently: The crux of the issue in my mind is that iOS and Mac OS are so fundamentally different that the whole notion of getting a cohesive experience through porting apps with minimal effort becomes absurd. The problem goes beyond touch vs pointer UX into how apps exist and interact within their wider OSes. While both Mac OS and iOS are easy to use, their ease stem from very different conventions. The more complicated Mac builds ease almost entirely through cohesion. Wherever possible, Mac applications are expected to share the same shortcuts, controls, windowing behavior, etc... so users can immediately find their bearings regardless of the application. This also means that several applications existing in the same space largely share the same visual and UX language. Having Finder, Safari, BBEdit and Transmit open on the same desktop looks and feels natural.

By comparison, the bulk of iOS's simplicity stems from a single app paradigm. Tap an icon on the home screen to enter an app that takes over the entire user experience until exited. Cohesion exists and is still important, but its surface area is much smaller because most iOS users only ever see and use a single app at a time. For better and worse, the single app paradigm allows for more diverse conventions within apps. Having different conventions for doing the same thing across multiple full screen apps is not an issue because users only have to ever deal with one of those conventions at a given time. That innocuous diversity becomes incongruous once those same apps have to live side-by-side. Columnist John Gruber of DaringFireball adds: I think part of the problem is Catalyst itself -- it just doesn't feel like nearly a full-fledged framework for creating proper Mac apps yet. But I think another problem is the culture of doing a lot of nonstandard custom UI on iOS. As Wellborn points out, that flies on iOS -- we UI curmudgeons may not like it, but it flies -- because you're only ever using one app at a time on iOS. It cracks a bit with split-screen multitasking on iPadOS, but I've found that a lot of the iPad apps with the least-standard UIs don't even support split-screen multitasking on iPadOS, so the incongruities -- or incoherences, to borrow Wellborn's well-chosen word -- don't matter as much. But try moving these apps to the Mac and the nonstandard UIs stick out like a sore thumb, and whatever work the Catalyst frameworks do to support Mac conventions automatically doesn't kick in if the apps aren't even using the standard UIKit controls to start with. E.g. scrolling a view with Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End. Further reading: Apple's Merged iPad, Mac Apps Leave Developers Uneasy, Users Paying Twice (October 2019).

Apple has formally opened its bug bounty program today to all security researchers, after announcing the move earlier this year in August at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. From a report: Until today, Apple ran an invitation-based bug bounty program for selected security researchers only and was accepting only iOS security bugs. Starting today, the company will accept vulnerability reports for a much wider spectrum of products that also includes as iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and iCloud. In addition, the company has also increased its maximum bug bounty reward from $200,000 to $1,500,000, depending on the exploit chain's complexity and severity.

Starting today, you can now stream more than 100 local PBS stations on YouTube TV by way of dedicated live channels for both PBS and PBS Kids, as well though on-demand programming. More stations are expected to be added in 2020, PBS notes. TechCrunch reports: PBS service is available to 75% of U.S. households via YouTube TV, significantly broadening PBS' reach among cord-cutters. Before today, PBS programming has been available through the PBS.org and PBSKids.org websites, as well as the PBS Video app and PBS Kids app for iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung TV and Chromecast. Some of its programming has also been available on-demand via channels offered by Amazon and Apple, as well as through popular on-demand streaming services like Netflix. And of course, U.S. households can also pick up their local PBS station's signal for free via their digital antenna, or subscribe to cable or satellite TV to access PBS channels. But YouTube TV is the first live TV service to offer PBS stations directly in its app.

History may not look kindly upon it, but the 2010s really was the decade of Facebook. From a report: A new report from analytics firm App Annie revealed the top 10 most downloaded mobile apps of the decade, and Facebook has an unsurprising grip on the whole operation. Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram were the four most downloaded apps across Android and iOS in the 2010s, and all four come from the same company. It is, if nothing else, a clear view of just how much Facebook dominated our daily lives from 2010 to 2019. Its flagship app and Messenger spin-off both have user counts in the billions, while Instagram and WhatsApp are household names.

Rewound, the basic music player app released last week that you could skin to make your iPhone look remarkably like an iPod Classic, has been pulled from the App Store, according to Rewound blog post published on Medium. The Verge reports: The blog says that Apple pulled the app because it copied the iPod's design, charged for Apple Music features, and people could mistake the app for an Apple product. The blog makes the case that the app had a pretty basic interface that looked nothing like an Apple app, and the iPod classic skins didn't come preinstalled. (You had to download them after you had already installed the app.) We've asked Apple for comment, and we'll update this story when we hear back.

The Rewound blog says the iOS app can't be updated without "breaking the app for all 170,000+ users," but the developer, Louis Anslow, says he will attempt to bring the app back in some way. On a GoFundMe page for continued development of Rewound, Anslow says he will "try some tweaks to get Rewound resubmitted" on the App Store and that the GoFundMe will help support development of a web app and an Android app. On the GoFundMe page, Anslow says it "isn't clear if Apple will ever allow Rewound back on the [App Store]," and states that "we are not promising fully finished versions" of any of the apps.

Apple says it goes out of its way to protect the safety and security of its young users. The App Store of 2019 tells a different story. Laura June, writing for InputMag: One of the most insidious forms of abuse on modern content platforms is the way unknown creators can co-opt well-known characters. Off-brand Spider-Man and fake Elsa and Anna pop up all over YouTube. I discovered this the hard way two years ago, when I found my daughter watching fake Peppa Pig videos on YouTube, many of them horrific and violent, and preying on the very young (Peppa Pig is a very popular television show for preschoolers). But YouTube, unlike Apple's App Store, is a platform where pretty much anyone can upload anything. And Google, which owns YouTube, doesn't peacock on stage like Tim Cook does, looking down his nose at Facebook and other companies for their lax attitudes on user safety. Given Apple's reputation, it was with some surprise that I found myself in a very similar position several weeks ago, while browsing Apple's App Store for games for my nearly 6-year-old daughter.

[...] Keep in mind, I was not looking for fakes. I fully expected to find only official apps for these company's characters. I didn't expect to find Paw Puppy Smashy Patrol in the store above the official Nickelodeon app PAW Patrol Pup Rescue Pack. Some apps boldly use the official Disney characters in their titles, literally advertising themselves with the copyrighted, intellectual property of a currently airing Disney show. But even the ones that aren't using Disney names in their titles depict characters that look nearly identical to Vampirina, Elsa and Anna, Sofia the First, and so on. The quality of the design varies, but some of them really do feature characters who look exactly like the ones you've come to know and trust (even if they've not-so-cleverly disguised themselves with names like Paw Puppy Smashy Patrol and Ice Queen Adventure). The apps are designed to fool you; fooling you is the goal. They're designed to make you think, "Oh right, Disney! We love Disney, we trust Disney. Let me download that for you, kid!"

We've known Windows 10 Mobile has been a dead platform for years now. Even Microsoft themselves have been telling people they need to switch to Android or iOS. But yesterday, we saw the final blow to Microsoft's mobile OS -- it officially reached its end of life and is no longer supported. From a report: There is some good news for the two of you still running Windows 10 Mobile though. The platform's office apps will receive updates and security patches until January 12, 2021. This includes Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. That means you still have a little more time before you absolutely need to migrate to another mobile platform if you just can')t break your Windows 10 Mobile addiction. Though we still recommend you take the leap as soon as possible.

An anonymous reader writes: Cisco on Wednesday outlined new details behind its strategy to build next-generation internet technology. As a set up for what it dubs its 'Internet for the Future' strategy, the networking giant announced a multi-year plan for building and investing in 5G internet technology, including silicon, optics and software. On the silicon side, Cisco announced Silicon One, a new switching and routing applications specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for the 5G internet era. The programmable networking chip is designed to provide significant improvements to performance, bandwidth, power efficiency, scalability and flexibility, according to Cisco. Cisco said the first first generation of the chip, Q100, surpassed the 10 Tbps routing milestone for network bandwidth.

In addition to the silicon, Cisco also outlined its focus on the optics space. As port rates increase from 100G to 400G, optics become a larger portion of the cost to build and operate internet infrastructure. To account for that, Cisco said its qualification program tests its optics and non-Cisco optics to comply with industry standards, and invests organically to make sure that its router and switch ports rates continue to increase. Cisco also announced plans to offer flexible consumption models for Silicon One that were first established with its optics portfolio, followed by the disaggregation of the Cisco IOS XR7 software. The Silicon One architecture will integrate into its new 8000 series carrier class routers, which is powered by Cisco's new IOS XR7 operating system. The OS will provide faster download speeds and security improvements, Cisco said.

According to the report, Cisco is currently working with Comcast and NTT Communications on ongoing deployments and trials of the 8000 series.

Kyle Wiggers, writing for VentureBeat: In January during the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Google debuted interpreter mode, a real-time translation feature for Google Home speakers and third-party smart displays like those from JBL, Sony, LG, and Lenovo. The tech giant said at the time that interpreter mode would eventually come to mobile devices, but it didn't set a date. The date is today, as it turns out. As of this morning, Google Assistant on both Android and iOS smartphones supports interpreter mode, enabling you to ask for directions, order food, or simply chat in a foreign language. The number of recognized languages has increased from 27 to 44, and interpreter mode now lets you optionally type using a keyboard or manually select the language in which you'd like to speak. Saying a command like "Hey Google, be my German translator" or "Hey Google, help me speak Thai" kicks off interpreter mode. You'll see and hear the translated conversation on your phone, and after each translation, Google Assistant might present suggestions (like "Nien" or "Ju tut et") that let you quickly respond.

Security researchers are accusing Apple of abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to take down a viral tweet and several Reddit posts that discuss techniques and tools to hack iPhones. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Vice: On Sunday, a security researcher who focuses on iOS and goes by the name Siguza posted a tweet containing what appears to be an encryption key that could be used to reverse engineer the Secure Enclave Processor, the part of the iPhone that handles data encryption and stores other sensitive data. Two days later, a law firm that has worked for Apple in the past sent a DMCA Takedown Notice to Twitter, asking for the tweet to be removed. The company complied, and the tweet became unavailable until today, when it reappeared. In a tweet, Siguza said that the DMCA claim was "retracted." Apple confirmed that it sent the original DMCA takedown request, and later asked Twitter to put the Tweet back online.

At the same time, Reddit received several DMCA takedown requests for posts on r/jailbreak, a popular subreddit where iPhone security researchers and hackers discuss techniques to jailbreak Apple devices, according to the subreddit's moderators. "Admins have not reached out to us in regards to these removals. We have no idea who is submitting these copyright claims," one moderator wrote.

Google today released Chrome 79 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS users. This release comes with security and bug fixes, but also with new features such as built-in support for the Password Checkup tool, real-time blacklisting of malicious sites via the Safe Browsing API, general availability of Predictive Phishing protections, a ban on loading HTTPS "mixed content," support for tab freezing, a new UI for the Chrome Sync profile section, and support for a back-forward caching mechanism. ZDNet has outlined each new feature in-depth.

WireGuard has now been committed to the mainline Linux kernel. "While there are still tests to be made and hoops to be jumped through, it should be released in the next major Linux kernel release, 5.6, in the first or second quarter of 2020," reports ZDNet. From the report: WireGuard has been in development for some time. It is a layer 3 secure VPN. Unlike its older rivals, which it's meant to replace, its code is much cleaner and simple. The result is a fast, easy-to-deploy VPN. While it started as a Linux project, WireGuard code is now cross-platform, and its code is now available on Windows, macOS, BSD, iOS, and Android. It took longer to arrive than many wished because WireGuard's principal designer, Jason Donenfeld, disliked Linux's built-in cryptographic subsystem on the grounds its application programming interface (API) was too complex and difficult. He suggested it be supplemented with a new cryptographic subsystem: His own Zinc library. Many developers didn't like this. They saw this as wasting time reinventing the cryptographic well.

But Donenfeld had an important ally. Torvalds wrote, "I'm 1000% with Jason on this. The crypto/ model is hard to use, inefficient, and completely pointless when you know what your cipher or hash algorithm is, and your CPU just does it well directly." In the end, Donenfeld compromised. "WireGuard will get ported to the existing crypto API. So it's probably better that we just fully embrace it, and afterward work evolutionarily to get Zinc into Linux piecemeal." That's exactly what happened. Some Zine elements have been imported into the legacy crypto code in the forthcoming Linux 5.5 kernel. This laid the foundation for WireGuard to finally ship in Linux early next year.

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers found a new vulnerability allowing potential attackers to hijack VPN connections on affected *NIX devices and inject arbitrary data payloads into IPv4 and IPv6 TCP streams. They disclosed the security flaw tracked as CVE-2019-14899 to distros and the Linux kernel security team, as well as to others impacted such as Systemd, Google, Apple, OpenVPN, and WireGuard. The vulnerability is known to impact most Linux distributions and Unix-like operating systems including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, iOS, and Android. A currently incomplete list of vulnerable operating systems and the init systems they came with is available below, with more to be added once they are tested and found to be affected: Ubuntu 19.10 (systemd), Fedora (systemd), Debian 10.2 (systemd), Arch 2019.05 (systemd), Manjaro 18.1.1 (systemd), Devuan (sysV init), MX Linux 19 (Mepis+antiX), Void Linux (runit), Slackware 14.2 (rc.d), Deepin (rc.d), FreeBSD (rc.d), and OpenBSD (rc.d).

This security flaw "allows a network adjacent attacker to determine if another user is connected to a VPN, the virtual IP address they have been assigned by the VPN server, and whether or not there is an active connection to a given website," according to William J. Tolley, Beau Kujath, and Jedidiah R. Crandall, Breakpointing Bad researchers at University of New Mexico. "Additionally, we are able to determine the exact seq and ack numbers by counting encrypted packets and/or examining their size. This allows us to inject data into the TCP stream and hijack connections," the researchers said.