Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss MoviePass buying EFO films, Amazon admits an Alexa device recorded a conversation and sent it to someone one the device's contact list, Apple's vein scan iPhone unlocking plans, multiroom sterero for HomePod, a Facebook blackout to pinpoint fake accounts, the billion dollar GDPR lawsuits, and more.

Joe in Gladewater, Texas listens on KTBB and asked: "I made a mistake a while back and opted into being a Beta tester for iOS. The sad part is, I only have one phone and doing it on one phone can create some problems and it's crashed my phone several times. Is there any way to roll back to a stable version and then opt-out of any new updates on Beta? I'm about ready to throw this phone out the window."

 

Joe, we feel your pain, iOS is nice and stable when it’s released but the betas can be full of bugs.

There was one a few years ago that allowed people to use the camera, but it wouldn’t save the pictures they took. Lots of crashes and incompatibilities are not uncommon.

That’s the nature of any product on beta, obviously, but for something as essential as our phones are to our daily lives it’s a bigger problem. We’ve become very dependent on our smartphones and having them suddenly become unreliable is a big problem.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution. When you enrolled in the iOS public beta program you installed a beta tester profile onto your phone.

That profile is what allows you to install non-release versions of iOS. The solution to your problem is to get rid of it.

Just go to Settings, then General, and then Profile, once there you’ll see “iOS Beta Software Profile.”

Tap on the button below to delete it, enter your passcode to verify it’s you, and you’re done.

Your phone will no longer download beta version of the OS, the next time it updates it will be to a release version.

There’s one problem though, it won’t revert you to a stable release. If you want to do that you’ll have to manually restore to the stable version with all that restoring entails.

If you can hold off until the next release you may be happier and in the meantime, you may prefer to stick to the future betas so you at least get some bug fixes between now and the full release.

Nicholas in Malden, Massachusetts asked: "I have a ZTE phone and it's been in the news a lot lately. Supposedly, China can spy on Americans using it. So, are they spying on me using this phone?"

 

We don’t know Nicholas, we’re not China.

But seriously, they probably don’t care about you, they may have the capacity to spy on you, but spying on millions of devices at once is not very practical.

Now, if you happened to get a job at Lockheed working on secret projects, or if you were involved in Apple’s proprietary chip designs, or anything like that that may benefit either the Chinese government or Chinese manufacturers, they probably could.

There’s very little to gain in spying on some guy’s Netflix habits and texts messages about how he’s out of milk and his roommate should pick some up. There’s a lot to gain in spying on secret information.

If you don’t have confidential information on your phone, they may be able to spy on you, they just probably don’t care enough to do it.

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