TidBITS

Facebook has added a Protect item to a screen in its iOS app that lists Facebook services. Tapping Protect takes you to an App Store page for a VPN called Onavo Protect that is owned by Facebook and “collects your mobile data traffic.” Worse, 12.5 million iOS users may already be using Onavo Protect.

 

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We’ve had the HomePod for a weekend, and for the most part, it has been a success when it comes to music, thanks to excellent audio quality and Siri spinning Apple Music tracks with aplomb. Siri on the HomePod has been less useful as a fount of general knowledge, or perhaps we just don’t have the right questions.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Were you thinking about taking advantage of the 50 percent discount CrashPlan for Home users get when switching to Carbonite? Although those discount prices remain the same for the first year, the regular price you’ll pay later for Carbonite service has increased by 12 to 20 percent.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Some iPhone 7 models are showing “No Service” messages even when cellular coverage is available due to a failed logic board component. Apple has announced a repair program to fix the problem for free.

Apple quietly slipped some new remote control capabilities into iOS 11.2.5 and iTunes 12.7.3. Josh Centers explains how to take advantage of them.

Apple’s revenues and profits grew at record rates during the first fiscal quarter of 2018, but signs of softer unit sales indicate that more of the company’s money is coming from higher-priced, higher-margin products. The other big winners were the Services and Other Products categories.

If Preview is displaying some PDFs as black rectangles instead of pages, even though their thumbnails are correct, you can solve the problem in a non-obvious way: by recalibrating your display.

In a move that has surprised few, Apple has announced via a support note that it will be deprecating nearly all the remaining services in macOS Server. In the future, macOS Server will “focus on management of computers, devices, and storage on your network.” Time to start looking for alternatives for everything else macOS Server does for you.

In this inaugural Bad Apple column, Adam Engst explores what happens to iCloud Photo Library when you turn iCloud off and back on. A preview: it took a 90-minute call with Apple to discover that the “expected behavior” requires a temporary upgrade to an unnecessary storage plan and then a 60-minute call to get the charge for that plan reversed.

CARROT Weather’s AI would kill you if it could, but since it can’t, it instead provides accurate and attractive weather forecasts. Josh Centers explains why CARROT Weather has become his favorite weather app.