Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge To all of you who got a new Apple device for Christmas, congrats! But you might have had some difficulty setting up and signing in to iCloud along with other Apple users. First reported by Apple Insider, as of Saturday morning, Apple’s system status page was showing “some users affected” by an issue that began at around 4:45AM ET on December 25th.
Nearly 36 hours later, the issue appears to be over. A status update at 4:35PM ET Saturday shows the issue as “resolved.”
The issue appeared to be affecting multiple devices. The system status page didn’t show issues with any other parts of iCloud or other Apple services.
Apple Support tweeted Friday afternoon that it was aware of the issue, and said it was “experiencing a high capacity at…
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla’s new holiday update will finally give people the ability to use a new Boombox mode, which can broadcast custom audio on the outside of the car (hence the name). As is common with new Tesla features, Boombox combines real utility with lowbrow humor: owners can use fart and goat sounds in lieu of normal, boring honking sounds car horns usually make.
The mode rolled out with a number of other updates as part of Tesla’s firmware 2020.48.26 update, and is something Tesla fans have eagerly anticipated. In the new mode, which can be seen at the timestamped section in the video below, several sounds are available for Tesla owners through the Toybox section they can use in place of a regular horn: goat baaing, applause, a little “tada”…
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What’s the cruelest prank you can make on employees who are struggling during a global pandemic when millions of people have lost their jobs or lives? GoDaddy — a web domain registrar once best known for its sexist advertisements — tried to find out when it sent employees a fake email informing them they’d receive a $650 holiday bonus. As The Copper Courier originally reported, GoDaddy sent an email phishing “test” to its employees promising much-needed money; “2020 has been a record year for GoDaddy, thanks to you!”, it said. “Though we cannot celebrate together during our annual Holiday Party, we want to show our appreciation and share a $650 one—time Holiday bonus!”
The employees who clicked the link then reportedly received an email…
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The upcoming Galaxy Buds Pro collection. | Evan Blass More details of Samsung’s unannounced Galaxy Buds Pro wireless earbuds with active noise cancelation have leaked, including the price.
According to slides shared on Twitter by WalkingCat, the Galaxy Buds Pro will cost $199 at launch making them $80 cheaper than the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds, our noise-canceling champions. Samsung’s pro buds will feature strong IPX7 durability against dust and water, and up to 8 hours of listening time which can be extended to 28 hours with the charging case. WalkingCat provides this handy chart to compare specs across all of Samsung’s wireless buds.
Image: WalkingCat Samsung Buds comparison chart. WalkingCat also shared a slide showing an exploded view of the new active noise…
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The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. | Photo: WinFuture An FCC listing confirms that Samsung’s S Pen stylus can be used with the company’s upcoming flagship Galaxy S21 Ultra phone. The confirmation, first discovered by Android Authority, comes in a test report for model number SMG998B. The discovery lends clarity to recent statements from Samsung mobile president TM Roh, who said that some of the “most well-loved features” of the Galaxy Note will be coming to other Samsung devices in 2021.
The FCC test report explicitly describes an EUT (Equipment Under Test) device that can be used with an S Pen in both hover and click modes. “The EUT can also used with a stylus device (S Pen). The EUT operates with the S Pen in two different inductive coupling modes of S Pen motion detection (Hover and…
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Image by Alex Castro / The Verge A group of high profile tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and VMWare have filed an amicus brief in support of Facebook’s legal action against NSO Group, Microsoft has announced. Facebook-owned WhatsApp sued the spyware vendor last year, alleging that its software was used to hack 1,400 devices via a vulnerability in the messaging service. Other companies listed on the filing include the Internet Association, and Microsoft subsidiaries GitHub and LinkedIn.
In response to Facebook’s lawsuit last year, NSO Group has argued it should benefit from “sovereign immunity,” Reuters reports, because it sells its tools to foreign governments. However, in July a judge denied its request to dismiss the lawsuit. Now NSO Group is…
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge 36 personal phones belonging to Al Jazeera journalists, producers, anchors, and executives were hacked in a spyware campaign between July and August 2020, a new report from Citizen Lab alleges. The attacks reportedly used Pegasus technology provided by the Israeli firm NSO Group, and are thought to be the work of four operators. Citizen Lab says it has “medium confidence” that one is working on behalf of the UAE government and another for the Saudi government.
The attacks are worrying not just because they appear to show politically-motivated targeting of journalists, but also because they’re part of a trend of using increasingly advanced methods that are harder to detect. According to Citizen Lab, the attacks seem to have used a…
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Is your internet service provider charging you every month for the cable modem or router that you purchased with your own money? Or, perhaps, have you never bothered to buy those items because you couldn’t escape the fee? That fee will be illegal starting Sunday, December 20th, and you should tell your ISP that you’ll no longer tolerate it, threaten to sue, and/or take advantage of any binding arbitration clause it may have with you.
Last year, Congress passed a law that should have fixed this ridiculous loophole as of June 20th, 2020 — and though the FCC managed to extend the deadline six months by spinning up some bullshit about how cable companies didn’t have the resources to stop charging you money, the law should take full effect…
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Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge DJI says people in the US will still be able to buy and use its drones and other products despite being named to the Commerce Department’s Entity List. The Chinese drone giant was named to the blacklist on Friday for “enabl[ing] wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance” — most likely a reference to how DJI provided drones and other technology to the Chinese government to be used in its Muslim detention camps in the Xinjiang province.
“DJI is disappointed in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s decision. Customers in America can continue to buy and use DJI products normally,” the company said in a statement to The Verge. “DJI remains committed to developing…
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft president Brad Smith warned that the wide-ranging hack of the SolarWinds’ Orion IT software is “ongoing,” and that investigations reveal “an attack that is remarkable for its scope, sophistication and impact.” The breach targeted several US government agencies and is believed to have been carried out by Russian nation-state hackers.
Smith characterized the hack as “a moment of reckoning” and laid out in no uncertain terms just how large and how dangerous Microsoft believes the hack to be. It “represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world,” Smith argues.
He believes that it “is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of…
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