The IT Nerd

The answer is quite a bit. Here’s the rundown:

• OS X 10.11 is going to be named El Capitan which will ship this “fall” as a free upgrade. El Capitan is a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park for those who wonder where the name comes from. Click here for more info on that. The point of the name is that this is an enhancement to Yosemite. Key enhancements include:
  • Safari allows sites to be pinned to the tab bar. If a window is closed and reopened, the pinned sites reload instantly.
  • Cursor gets bigger to help find it when waking a Mac.
  • Tabs show if music or video is playing in the background, allows users to mute background tabs easily.
  • Spotlight includes better contextually aware results.
  • New snapping apps feature, No doubt “borrowed” Microsoft Windows.
  • Can split apps left and right on the screen, slide the windows to make them bigger or smaller.
  • New Power User features making it easier to deal with lots of windows.
  • Increased speed and performance.
  • Better battery life for notebooks.
  • Better graphic performance.

• iOS 9 was announced and will show up as a free update in the fall. It will support any device that supports iOS 8. The feature set for that is as follows:
  • Siri gets a new user interface and becomes more proactive. For example, if you run in the morning, your phone can learn that you like to listen to music. It can offer music when you plug in headphones. Plus it is context sensitive to time and place.
  • New search window, offers commonly used apps or contacts, one-tap links to nearby locations like food and drink, or breaking news. Search is also improved.
  • Privacy has also been improved in iOS 9. Things you do such as searches are not associated with your Apple ID but a randomized identifier instead. Plus they’re not linked to other Apple services nor are they shared with third parties.
  • Enhancements to the Notes app are coming which include formatting options, checklist options, photos and drawing/sketching tools.
  • The much maligned Maps app has been improved. Transit will be a major focus. It will support a number of cities at launch in Canada (in the form of Toronto only), US, and China.
  • A new app called News will replace Newsstand. It will bring iOS users news from the world’s greatest sources, personalized for them. To emphasize the privacy spin on iOS 9, Apple points out that what you read is not linked to other apple services.
  • Two-factor authentication support is now present to protect data in iCloud.
  • Reductions in the amount of free space you need to get to iOS 9 from 4.6GB in iOS 8 to 1.3GB.
  • Lots of additional health metrics to be tracked including reproductive health.
  • HomeKit: Adding support for Window Shades, CO sensors, motion sensors, security systems. You can access your home remotely and securely through iCloud.
  • CarPlay is going to do a whole lot more in cars that support it. Plus you will not have to take your iPhone out of your bag or pocket to do anything.

• Apple Pay was discussed as well. Here’s the key points.
  • They announced that they were working with Square to enable small businesses to accept Apple Pay. Square is launching reader to accept Apple Pay this fall.
  • Pinterest will launch buyable pins using Apple Pay.
  • Apple Pay will be coming to the UK. Users will be able to commute and pay for fares on London’s Underground with Apple Pay along with having support from a number of UK banks at launch.
  • Support for store credit and debit cards is coming. Store cards offer unique membership benefits. Kohl’s, JCPenney, BJ’s. Loyalty and rewards cards are coming too.
  • Dunkin’ Donuts will support Apple Pay this fall.
  • Passbook is being renamed “Wallet.”
  • One thing that I do note is that there is no mention of Apple Pay coming to Canada. I wonder what the deal is with that?

• The iPad was mentioned today in the context of new functionality with iOS 9. They include:
  • Better multi-tasking on iPad.
  • New QuickType keyboard. Plus shortcuts are coming to the bar. Cut, paste, formatting now included. Finally you can put two fingers on the iPad keyboard and it becomes a trackpad to move the cursor and make selections.
  • New task switcher and full screen previews of apps on the iPad. A finger-swipe from the slide brings in an app,
  • Picture-in-picture with currently playing videos while in another app.
  • Better performance and better battery life.

• Swift 2 which is Apple’s programming language was also announced today. It’s going to go open source. That should increase adoption in a huge way.

• watchOS 2 is coming this fall to an Apple Watch near you. Enhancements include:
  • Timepiece functions. You can now use a picture as your watch face for example.
  • Health and fitness: Your favorite health and fitness apps can run natively on the watch.
  • Apple Pay
  • Maps
  • Siri
  • Native HomeKit support
  • Digital Touch improvements including color in drawings.
  • FaceTime Audio
  • Better WiFi support when not connected to an iPhone.
  • Mail. You can now reply to an e-mail on the watch.
  • Nightstand mode: Display the time, set an alarm that will wake you up in the morning and you can snooze or turn off the alarm with the buttons on the side.

• Tim Cook used the “One More Thing” tagline that the late Steve Jobs was so fond of using in this keynote to announce Apple Music which presumably is the rebrand of the Beats Music service that they got when they bought Beats. It’s described as ” the first ever worldwide live radio station, broadcast from three cities that plays music not based on research or genre or drumbeats. Only music that it great and feels great.” It’s Launching in 100 countries later this month with iOS 8.4, and a new version of iTunes for Mac and Windows, Interestingly, there’s Android coming this fall.

I’ll be adding relevant links later today including a link to the WWDC keynote for you to watch. Check back later to see them.

UPDATE: A link to the keynote can be found here when they post it later today. I’ve updated this story with links on Apple’s website relating to what was announced.

It must be nice to be Apple these days. They came out with their quarterly results and here are the highlights:

• Apple reported a profit of $13.6 billion with revenue up 27% to $58 billion.
• Apple sold 61.1 million iPhones in the first three months of 2015.
• Apple sold 12.6 million iPads, down 23% from a year earlier.
• Apple is increasing its share-buying program which will return $200 billion to investors, up from $130 billion.
• Apple has an outrageous $195 trillion in cash on its books. There are countries that don’t have that amount of cash.

Clearly, it’s good to be Apple.

Oh look here. There’s a nasty bug in iOS that can cause your device to reboot and crash among other things if it is in the range of a malicious WiFi network. Here’s the details:

Skycure bods Adi Sharabani and Yair Amit say the attack, dubbed “No iOS Zone”, will render vulnerable iOS things within range unstable – or even entirely unusable by triggering constant reboots.

“Anyone can take any router and create a Wi-Fi hotspot that forces you to connect to their network, and then manipulate the traffic to cause apps and the operating system to crash,” Sharabani told the RSA security conference in San Francisco today.

“There is nothing you can do about it other than physically running away from the attackers. This is not a denial-of-service where you can’t use your Wi-Fi – this is a denial-of-service so you can’t use your device even in offline mode.”

Charming. The good news is Apple is working on a fix. However, there’s basically no way to protect yourself as there’s no way to tell if you’re in range of one of these networks. So until this is fixed, if your iDevice constantly reboots, you’ll have to get out of range of whatever network is causing it.

This week has not been a good week for Apple on the security front. After serious bugs in iOS and OS X were disclosed yesterday, a researcher by the name of Patrick Wardle, director of research at Synack says that all of the protections in OS X are simple to bypass and pwning a Mac as an attacker isn’t hard. Here’s the high level overview starting with Gatekeeper which is a key security framework of OS X:

“Gatekeeper doesn’t verify an extra content in the apps. So if I can find an Apple-approved app and get it to load external content, when the user runs it, it will bypass Gatekeeper,” Wardle said in a talk at the RSA Conference here Thursday. “It only verifies the app bundle.” 

Lovely. But Gatekeeper is backed up by XProtect which protects a Mac from malware. That has to come to the rescue, right? Wrong:

Getting past XProtect turns out to be just as simple as bypassing Gatekeeper. Wardle found that by simply recompiling a known piece of OS X malware, which changes the hash, he could get the malware past XProtect and execute it on the machine. Even simpler, he could just change the name of the malware, which also lets it sneak in under the fence.

“It’s trivial to bypass XProtect,” he said.

Great. But OS X sandboxes apps. Surely that provides protection. Well….. :

“While the core sandbox technology is strong, there are plenty of bugs that can bypass it,” he said. 

This is depressing. But apps have to be code signed so that they can run on OS X. That’s not much good apparently:

“The code signing just checks for a signature and if it’s not there, it doesn’t do anything and lets the app run,” he said. “I can unsign a signed app and the loader has no way to stop it from running.” 

Why is that? Here’s why:

The check for this runs in user mode, which is a huge security fail because the attacker would be in user mode.” he said. “He could just modify a kernel extension or load unsigned ones.” 

Bottom line. OS X security isn’t secure. This report isn’t going to go over well at 1 Infinite Loop. Plus you can bet that evil doers are right now using this info to stage attacks on Macs. Which means Apple needs to step up their game when it comes to security. And they need to do it now.