Apple's bundled Mail app in the latest versions of iOS 7 fails to encrypt email attachments, leaving them vulnerable to attackers, a security researcher has warned. Security researcher Andreas Kurtz wrote in a blog post that he discovered a few weeks ago that attachments in the Mobile.Mail app in iOS 7.0.4, 7.1, and 7.1.1 were not adequately secured by Apple's data protection mechanisms.
Before today, you needed a developer account to help test Apple’s upcoming software releases before they hit the general user population. You didn’t need to actually develop anything, but it would still cost you $99 per year to partake, and technically it was still sort of against the rules. Today, Apple introduced its OS X Beta Seed Program to make pre-release Mac operating system software available to all who want to help try it out.
On Friday Apple announced a fix to a security bug in its iOS 7 system. Saturday Web security experts have parsed the patch to figure out what exactly the problem was… And apparently it’s a doozy. The culprit of what may be one of Apple’s biggest security snafus is an extra “goto” in one part of the authentication code, Wired reported. That spurious line of code bypasses the rest of the authentication protocols.
There can be little doubt that, just like Microsoft thinks touch is the future of computing, Google seems to believe voice will be the user interface of the future. Indeed, when Frederic Lardinois was in Mountain View earlier this month, a Google spokesperson challenged him to just use voice whenever possible on my phone. For Google, all things voice now start with “Ok Google” or “Ok Glass.” With Android KitKat on flagship phones like the Moto X and Nexus 5, voice recognition isn’t just something you have to start with a click. It’s always listening to you and is waiting for you to talk to it.
Windows 8.1 is now the fifth most popular desktop OS, at least as seen by Web tracker Net Applications. For November, Microsoft's latest flavor of Windows snagged 2.64 percent of all desktop OS traffic recorded by Net Applications. That number was a healthy gain from the 1.72 percent seen in October and the 0.87 percent in September. The rise also pushed Windows 8.1 just ahead of Mac OS X 10.9 with a 2.42 percent and just behind Windows Vista with a 3.57 percent share.
Apple has just released iOS 7 to registered developers. While still incremental, it's got a few noticeable feature updates yet for the young OS. The update, currently in beta, includes some bug fixes and user interface tweaks. For example, users can now toggle back and forth between a light and dark colored keyboard, better for use in dark settings. The update also lets iPhone 5S users upload "burst mode" photos - taken in rapid fire by holding down the shutter button - into the photo stream.
Alongside new iPads and Macs, Apple on Tuesday quietly released an iOS update that brings new features and fixes others. iOS 7.0.3, which went out as a free update today, brings back iCloud Keychain -- a feature that was originally slated to launch with iOS 7, but did not make it into the final release.
The consensus is that Apple currently plans on announcing the details of OS X Mavericks availability and pricing during this week’s event in San Francisco. We’re hearing that, in order to kill some last-minute bugs, a quiet update has been made to the Gold Master version of Mavericks previously shipped out to developers.
Mozilla released Firefox OS 1.1 on Wednesday, filling in a large number of missing features and improving the performance of the browser-based operating system for mobile phones. Firefox 1.0 debuted with the first generation of mobile phones earlier this year, generally low-end models targeted at feature-phone owners who wanted to take the smartphone plunge but not have to spend as much money as required for higher-end Android or iOS devices. Like many first-version operating systems, though there were a lot of missing pieces.
Get your motor running, head out on the highway – and download some software. Apple’s big iOS 7 update is now available to all, or at least to anyone with an iPhone 4 or higher, iPad 2 or above, iPad mini or 5th generation iPod touch. The big question will be whether people are as quick to update to iOS 7 as they have generally been with less extreme mobile OS changes from Apple.