Category Archives: News

News

AirPlay mirroring could have issues on Macs with OS X 10.9.2

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Almost every OS X release has its problems, and OS X 10.9 Mavericks is no exception. From the security problem they discovered a couple weeks back, to the continued Power Nap woes of the new Mac Pro, Mavericks has seen its fair share of problems. A new problem has sprung up. There have been several reports that the latest Mavericks update, 10.9.2, completely breaks AirPlay mirroring.

Here’s one complaint from Apple’s support communities:

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Apple Forum Discussion

AirPlay Mirroring is something that many professionals rely on for presentations, and it is also something a lot of people use to stream entertainment to their big screen televisions.

There doesn’t seem to be an apparent cause of this particular Mavericks bug. It seems to work on machines that were updated to Mavericks from an old install, and ones that were wiped clean and had Mavericks installed fresh. Some are speculating that it is in the code of Mavericks itself.

Mavericks has had, it seems, an inordinate number of bugs when it comes to built in Mac features. 10.9.2 itself was meant to fix both the aforementioned security problem, and a huge problem they’ve been having with Mail.app and Gmail.

Slow Updates

It seems that this update cycle has taken longer than usual. By this time of the year we’re usually on the third update to a new version of OS X, while we’ve only seen two so far with Mavericks despite its problems. 10.9.2 does seem to have finally fixed the Finder problems on older machines, so there’s that.

OS X 10.10 or OS XI will probably get shown of at WWDC in June. Almost always in the past, most of the big problems with the previous year’s release have been taken care of by WWDC. The question is whether or not Apple will keep that tradition. They seem to be stretched pretty thin, what with the number of bugs that iOS 7 has, and Mavericks, they have to be trying hard, but things seem to be happening slower than usual.

With the AirPlay Mirroring bug, Apple hasn’t yet acknowledged the problem, but will probably take care of it in the next update, especially if users keep talking about it in the forums.

Have you had this problem? Have you found a workaround?

News

Emergency update for Flash released by Adobe

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Can we please live in a world where Flash becomes obsolete? Wasn’t that the whole point of iOS? Are there really websites out there that still use this broken and buggy web software? Apparently there is, or so it seems. Adobe has found and patched several zero-day exploits over the last couple months, and they just announced that they’ve found and patched another one. Every time they do this they have to release an “Emergency” update for Flash which has to be installed. It’s getting a little tedious.

More Problems for Flash on the Mac

According to fireeye.com:

This threat actor clearly seeks out and compromises websites of organizations related to international security policy, defense topics, and other non-profit sociocultural issues. The actor either maintains persistence on these sites for extended periods of time or is able to re-compromise them periodically.

This actor also has early access to a number of zero-day exploits, including Flash and Java, and deploys a variety of malware families on compromised systems. Based on these and other observations, we conclude that this actor has the tradecraft abilities and resources to remain a credible threat in at least the mid-term.

The exploit affects all of the latest versions of the Flash plugin, including those in use on the Mac. It allowed hackers to execute malicious code by taking control of the virtual function table pointer object. Whatever that means.

Apple Was Smart

The good news here is that Macs don’t come with Flash installed automatically anymore. In order to get Flash users have to go out and get it themselves. This will save a lot of computers. The problem with all of these “Emergency” patches is that non-technologically inclined people will either ignore the warning, or will get tired of the warnings that seem to come every few days. That could lead to a state of ambivalence, which would be bad for everyone.

If you’re running Flash, but don’t really use it all that much, the best thing you can do is get rid of it altogether. If you need Flash, then make sure you have auto-update turned on, so that you’re always up to date.

If you’re the tech support person for someone like your parents, you should help them avoid flash at all costs, and if you can’t, make sure they are always up to date.

Conclusion

Hackers are never going to stop trying to ruin our computers and steal our money. The issue isn’t that Flash is terrible, or that it takes up every machine resource known to man, but that it is a hacker-magnet. It has so many holes in it you might as well call it a sponge.

Flash can’t die soon enough. Not only is HTML 5 more reliable, and more stable, it will also solve a lot of these zero day exploits, which seem to pop up over and over again.

You can find more info on this exploit on Adobe’s security page.

News

Apple’s North Carolina data center sees another expansion

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Apple isn’t known for its Internet services. It started a social network this one time and it wasn’t very successful. Mobile Me was pretty terrible at launch, and iCloud hasn’t been all that well received. One of the things Apple is trying to do to make its Internet services department better is building huge data centers in the US to store and facilitate those services.

Back in 2010 Apple began construction on a North Carolina data center. Since then they have expanded it a couple times. On Thursday they announced they are yet again expanding it.

The facility is already very big, at 100 acres of solar farm, plus a 500,000 square foot data center. This announcement plans to double the data center space. The Hickory Record adds:

Like the previous tactical data center, plans for the new one shows banks of computers in the main portion of it and 11 air units to cool it. Two more air units will supply the office and other occupied area of the data center. Its security measures appear to be similar to that of the previous data center, including what’s called a man-trap door — one door closes before the second one opens.

Siri Is the Future

Siri hasn’t been what you’d call a revolutionary success. When it first came out it was buggy, unstable, and lacking in features. Over the last couple years Apple has added features and fixed the bugs. It is still quite unstable, despite the added power of the North Carolina data center.

That’s why it isn’t surprising that Apple is focusing so much money and time on building additional data centers to improve the quality of one of their key features.

Google Has Them Beat

Apple is a hardware company that tries to compete with services. Google is a services company that tries to do hardware. Google Now has seen rave reviews over the last couple years because it doesn’t have the same problems Siri has. It’s stable and has a ton of pretty awesome features. It’s even on iOS, so you can try it out if you haven’t already.

The point is that Google seems to have the service bit down, whereas Apple continues to struggle, despite putting tons of money and effort into improving the infrastructure. A possible solution would be to hire as many Google employees as possible, and use their expertise to improve the existing and future services.

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Aerial photos via wired.com
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Aerial photos via wired.com
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Aerial photos via wired.com
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Aerial photos via wired.com

Apple is spending a lot of money to expand its North Carolina data center, it also has two more planned or built in Prineville Oregon, and Reno, Nevada. It wouldn’t be surprising to see them expand their data center efforts outside of the US in the coming years since a large portion of their user base is outside of the United States.

Apple is going to have to use some of its huge cash pile to change the perception that it’s bad at services. It could take years, but here’s hoping they show everyone they know how.

News

Apple bringing iTunes Festival to SXSW

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Since 2007, Apple has put on a live concert series each year, under the moniker “iTunes Festival”. The concerts are free to go to, and are also streamed for free on all Apple devices, including the Mac and Apple TV. The concerts have always been held in London, where it has seen enormous success with over 400,000 visitors since 2007.

2014 will be the first year where the concert series is held outside of London. This year it will happen March 11-15 at SXSW (South by Southwest) in Austin, Texas. The event will be held at the Moody Theatre in downtown Austin.

From the press release:

“The iTunes Festival in London has become an incredible way for Apple to share its love of music with our customers,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “We’re excited about the incredible lineup of artists performing and SXSW is the perfect place to debut the first iTunes Festival in the US.”

Musical Guests

Over the years, the iTunes Festival has had several of the biggest names in music perform on stage, including Justin Timberlake, Brittany Spears, and Lady Gaga. This year the Festival will include Coldplay, Pittbull, Imagine Dragons, Keith Urban, and Zedd, with additional acts to be announced later.

SXSW

In the tech-sphere we mostly know SXSW as a technology party where startups can show off their stuff to potential investors and the public. A ton of brands have launched and/or gotten popular at SXSW over the years including Twitter and Foursquare.

That SXSW is just part of the actual event, a separate event is put on for music related quests, and another for film. This will be, perhaps, the first year the music event overshadows the tech event, at least in the tech press.

SXSW starts March 7 and goes to March 16.

Can’t Make it to Austin?

Getting to Austin can be a huge pain, and once you do get there you’ll have to put up with hundreds of thousands of people wandering the streets, and attending the events. If you can’t get there or don’t want to deal with the crowds, Apple will be streaming the event live and on demand for people who use their platforms.

It can be done through iTunes on the Mac, or through the dedicated iTunes Festival app on the iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV. Apple streams all the events for free. They started the event in order to bring more traffic and sales to their iTunes music store, and (according to Apple) to give back to the fans of music and Apple.

News

Record songs from iTunes Radio with this new Mac App

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It’s hard to tell whether or not Apple’s iTunes Radio has been a success. They haven’t announced numbers beyond the first weekend, so who knows how it’s really doing. For those of you who do use the service, which can be accessed through iTunes on the Mac, doubleTwist has released a new Mac app, called AirPlay Recorder, which allows you to record songs played on iTunes Radio for later listening.

What the App Does

Basically the way it works is by tricking iTunes into thinking the app is an AirPlay device. Which then causes the music to go to the app, which then records it. It’s very simple, and probably very illegal (more on that later). Each track is saved in your music folder in a specialized “Recorder” folder that can then be transferred directly into iTunes.

This marks the second time that doubleTwist has released an app to rip songs from iTunes Radio. They released an Android app in January, which basically does the same thing; only it does the recording on an Android device instead of directly on the Mac.

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DoubleTwist AirPlay Recorder
Legally Speaking

What the app does is cool, no doubt, and it is most definitely useful to start a huge collection of music, the question is whether it’s legal or not. While we’re no lawyers here, it seems unlikely that it follows the letter of the law.

The developers claim it is legal because in the US radio and TV are available under the Fair Use clause of copyright law. “We are based in the US where recording radio and TV for personal use has been protected under fair use for decades,” writes the developer on their Google Play app page.

Of course, this takes a pretty liberal view of what radio really is. iTunes Radio isn’t exactly radio as we knew it 20 years ago before the Internet became popular.

Will the App Survive?

That’s the question isn’t it? Technologically speaking can Apple block an App like this without blocking legitimate AirPlay receivers? It would seem the only way is if they somehow have a way to block certain receivers, which is of course possible, knowing Apple.

It’ll be interesting to see how Apple responds to this, or if they will respond at all. If they have a way of blocking it, they will for sure. If they don’t have a way, chances are nothing will be said about it from Cupertino.

The AirPlay Recorder app costs $9.99, and is available on the doubleTwist website. It does have a free trial version, but will only record the first 10 seconds of each track until you make the purchase. It’s quite expensive, but since you’ll save money on buying CDs from iTunes, you’ll make it up in no time.