Ars Technica: “TikTok and 53 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data”

In March, researchers uncovered a troubling privacy grab by more than four dozen iOS apps including TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media and video-sharing phenomenon that has taken the Internet by storm. Despite TikTok vowing to curb the practice, it continues to access some of Apple users’ most sensitive data, which can include passwords, cryptocurrency wallet addresses, account-reset links, and personal messages. Another 53 apps identified in March haven’t stopped either.

The privacy invasion is the result of the apps repeatedly reading any text that happens to reside in clipboards, which computers and other devices use to store data that has been cut or copied from things like password managers and email programs. With no clear reason for doing so, researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk found, the apps deliberately called an iOS programming interface that retrieves text from users’ clipboards.

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TikTok’s continued snooping has gotten extra scrutiny for other reasons. When called out in March, the video-sharing provider told UK publication The Telegraph it would end the practice in the coming weeks. Mysk said that the app never stopped the monitoring. What’s more, a Wednesday Twitter thread revealed that the clipboard reading occurred each time a user entered a punctuation mark or tapped the space bar while composing a comment. That means the clipboard reading can happen every second or so, a much more aggressive pace than documented in the March research, which found monitoring happened when the app was opened or reopened.

Dan Goodin

If you care in the least about you privacy, you should absolutely stay off TikTok! Its skyrocketing popularity despite massive security and privacy issues is a good example how the majority of people care too little about their individual privacy – or simply do not understand the implications of this continuous data collection, in this case likely for the benefit of the Chinese government.

The Verge: “Apple’s new iOS 14 home screen brings Windows Phone Live Tiles back to life”

I’ve always wanted Apple to bring these Live Tiles to the iPhone. Apple’s overhauled iOS 14 home screen finally does that, enabling lively widgets for apps that sit on the home screen. It’s the final addition to the iPhone that I’ve been missing from Windows Phone, 10 years after Microsoft first introduced Live Tiles to the world.

Live Tiles were one of Windows Phone’s most unique features. They enabled apps to show information on the home screen, similar to the widgets found on Android and iOS. You could pin almost anything useful to the home screen, and Live Tiles animated beautifully to flip over and provide tiny nuggets of information that made your phone feel far more personal and alive.

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Apple has taken the best of both Android widgets and Windows Phone’s Live Tiles and combined them into iOS 14. It’s not the first time we’ve seen Windows Phone features appear in iOS or Android, and it underlines how important Microsoft’s mobile efforts were even if they were a glorious failure.

Tom Warren

Even though I love Live Tiles, I have never been a fan of widgets on Android. After switching from iOS two years ago I simply put my most used apps on my – single – home screen and relied on search for the rest. But these discussions about upcoming widgets in iOS sparked my interest, so I started experimenting with widgets a bit. I currently own a Samsung Galaxy S8 with Android 9 and Samsung’s One UI, version 1.0.

The Wall Street Journal: “Olympus to Exit Camera Business after 84 Years”

The Tokyo company, which has been under pressure from U.S. shareholder ValueAct Capital to improve shareholder returns, said Wednesday that it planned to sell its camera unit to private-equity firm Japan Industrial Partners Inc. It didn’t disclose financial details. The companies aim to complete their deal by the end of the year.

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As recently as 2007, the dawn of the smartphone era, digital cameras were a $3-billion-a-year business for Olympus. Within a few years, however, most of the market evaporated because people were using their phones to take pictures. Camera revenue shrank to just over $400 million in the year ended March 31, and the business has lost money for the past three fiscal years.

The company’s main product line is now medical-imaging devices such as endoscopes.

Kosaku Narioka

Unfortunate news, but not unexpected, especially in the context of the massive economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

The New York Times: “Apple rejects Facebook’s Gaming App, for at least the Fifth Time”

Since February, Apple has rejected at least five versions of Facebook Gaming, according to three people with knowledge of the companies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential. Each time, the people said, Apple cited its rules that prohibit apps with the “main purpose” of distributing casual games.

Facebook Gaming may also have been hurt by appearing to compete with Apple’s own sales of games, two of the people said. Games are by far the most lucrative category of mobile apps worldwide. Apple’s App Store, the only officially approved place for iPhone and iPad users to find new games and other programs, generated about $15 billion in revenue last year.

Seth Schiesel

Alternative headline: “Apple rejects Another Rival Gaming Service to Prevent it from Competing on iOS”. As reported in March, new game streaming subscriptions from Microsoft, Google and Nvidia have also been severely limited by Apple’s rules, while its own Apple Arcade is allegedly compliant. Yet another example of companies defining the rules of access to their platforms so that competitors can never challenge their dominance.

Windows Central: “Microsoft’s Head of Industrial Design for Surface now also heading design team for Windows”

Groene is the lead designer of Microsoft's Surface line and has been involved with several design choices that have been well received. His expanded role including the design of Windows could help end some of the frustrations people have expressed regarding the inconsistent design of Windows 10.

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While it’s unclear what role Groene has played in the design of Windows at this point, there does seem to be a shift regarding UI design and Windows at Microsoft. Panay being placed in charge of Windows, along with Groene’s new role, could iron out inconsistencies in the operating system and improve the user interface. Panay teased a new Windows 10 UI earlier this year and Microsoft confirmed last month that some elements of Windows 10X will come to Windows 10. We’ll have to wait and see to find out what Microsoft has in plan for the future of Windows.

Sean Endicott

I do not usually comment on issues of design, but in Windows 10 the situation is becoming ridiculous. There are no less than four different styles for Start Menu tiles alone:

• flat icon with the system-wide accent color as background (all Win32 apps, as well as most Store apps)
• flat icon with a custom background color (in most cases a shade of blue, like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, old Microsoft Edge)
• Fluent Design icon with solid blue background (most modern Windows apps, with some glaring exceptions, like Store, Calculator)
• Fluent Design icon with solid dark grey background (Office apps, To Do, Sticky Notes and most recently Skype)

The Guardian: “Climate crisis: alarm at record-breaking heatwave in Siberia”

Russian towns in the Arctic circle have recorded extraordinary temperatures, with Nizhnyaya Pesha hitting 30°C on 9 June and Khatanga, which usually has daytime temperatures of around 0°C at this time of year, hitting 25°C on 22 May. The previous record was 12°C.

In May, surface temperatures in parts of Siberia were up to 10°C above average, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Martin Stendel, of the Danish Meteorological Institute, said the abnormal May temperatures seen in north-west Siberia would be likely to happen just once in 100,000 years without human-caused global heating.

Freja Vamborg, a senior scientist at C3S, said: It is undoubtedly an alarming sign, but not only May was unusually warm in Siberia. The whole of winter and spring had repeated periods of higher-than-average surface air temperatures.

Damian Carrington

2020 began with record-breaking temperatures in Australia, followed by wildfires, which killed hundreds of millions animals, triggered rare weather phenomena such as fire clouds and ‘ember attacks’, and spewed so much ash and dust in the atmosphere that it colored glaciers in neighboring New Zeeland brown. Australia’s bushfires are also believed to have released as much as two-thirds of the nation’s annual carbon dioxide emissions in just past three months, thus greatly contributing to more global warming.

Techdirt: “How Most of the Anti-Internet Crew Misread the News that the NY Times is Getting Rid of 3rd Party Advertisers”

Yet, again, the NY Times is now doing the same thing that Facebook and Google have done. It’s collecting data on its users, and then using that data to sell access to advertisers. Why is that evil “selling data” when it comes to those other companies by “good” when it’s the NY Times? Look at the segmenting the NY Times already says it’s doing: how exactly is it getting “marital status”? Or income levels? Is that the sort of info you give up to get a NY Times subscription (and if so, who is actually giving that info away?) or is the NY Times collecting that information through other means?

Now, there are some reasonable arguments to be made that in making this move the NY Times will be sending less data back to 3rd party advertisers, but even that is only narrowly true. First of all, the data that flows back to ad networks via publishing partners is already a lot less significant than you might think. It’s just not that much – and unless the NY Times is also going to pull other things like the URL tracking it includes in its “share on Facebook” links, it’s still going to be sending data back to companies like Facebook.

Mike Masnick

An interesting initiative from The New York Times, but I am unsure how this makes business sense. If I understand correctly, they plan to build proprietary first-party data platform from scratch. On one hand it should make them independent from ad tech giants Google and Facebook, but at the same time their – much smaller – competitors (expect The New York Times to be silently pushed out of Google’s top 10 search results and from the Facebook news feed).