Tag: infinite loop

Five-year-old runs up $2,500 in-app purchase tab with Apple

Five-year-olds know as well as adults do: iPads are fun to play with. Parents who regularly hand their iDevices over to their children, take note: you can still be burned by kids making in-app purchases. The  BBC published a story on Friday highlighting a five-year-old’s impressive feat in running up a £1,700 iTunes bill—about $2,500—after his father entered a passcode to allow him to download a “free” game from the App Store. The details of the situation reveal a series of unfortunate events that led to the truly epic tab, though Apple has since refunded the money. There are a few things the Kitchens could have done better when their son, Danny, began using an iPad to play games. The article doesn’t specify whether Danny’s father entered a passcode for the device, for the App Store, or within the app itself, but the last scenario listed seems most likely. Entering a password to download apps in the App Store used to mean the user could begin charging in-app purchases without re-entering that password for 15 minutes as the default iOS behavior. Apple made that more difficult with iOS 4.3 in early 2011 by requiring the App Store password a second time when in-app purchases are made. Assuming the family’s iPad was running a more recent version of iOS, it sounds like Danny’s father entered his password when Danny began to make purchases, not realizing what he was authorizing. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Five-year-old runs up $2,500 in-app purchase tab with Apple

Outages result in gray skies for iCloud users

Apple’s System Status page offers some info, but no expectation of when the services will be back up. If you’re a regular Photo Stream or Documents in the Cloud user, this morning’s iCloud outage is probably already giving you hives. The entire service isn’t down, but key parts of it are. Users can still make use of Find My Friends, iTunes Match, and Contact, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes syncing, but iOS device backups, document syncing, and Photo Stream have been down for (as of this writing) almost seven hours and counting. Apple’s System Status page , which was revamped last December to offer more information to users, shows that the three iCloud services have been down since just after 3am CST. Apple claims “less than 3%” of users are affected by this outage, though such a claim seems disingenuous—at the very least, there’s a hefty portion of iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users who back up their devices to the cloud, and tons of others sync documents over iCloud through various apps. (And, as noted by 9to5Mac earlier, some users on Twitter are reporting other iCloud services being down that Apple has not indicated on the status page.) iCloud outages are, unfortunately, nothing new. Still, they rarely last this long. There’s no indication when these services will be back up; we’ve reached out for comment, but Apple has yet to respond. We’ll update this article if we hear anything back. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Outages result in gray skies for iCloud users

A world of hurt after McAfee mistakenly revokes key for signing Mac apps

Travis Nep Smith A McAfee administrator accidentally revoked the digital key used to certify desktop applications that run on Apple’s OS X platform, creating headaches for customers who want to install or upgrade Mac antivirus products. A certificate revocation list  [CRL] hosted by Apple Worldwide developer servers lists the reason for the cancellation as a “key compromise,” but McAfee officials said they never lost control of the sensitive certificate which is used to prove applications are legitimate releases. The revocation date shows as February 6, meaning that for seven days now, customers have had no means to validate McAfee applications they want to install on Macs. “We were told that as a workaround, we should just allow untrusted certificates until they figure it out,” an IT administrator at a large organization, who asked that he not be identified, told Ars. “They’re telling us to trust untrusted certs, and that definitely puts us at risk.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A world of hurt after McAfee mistakenly revokes key for signing Mac apps

New Mac trojan tricks users into paying pricey cell phone fees

Doctor Web Researchers have discovered new Mac-based malware that’s designed to trick users into paying pricey subscription fees. Dubbed Trojan.SMSSend.3666, the trojan masquerades as “VKMusic 4 for Mac,” a name that closely resembles an app used to listen to music on a popular Russian social networking site, according to a report published on Wednesday by Russia-based antivirus provider Doctor Web. An installer prompts users for a cell phone number, purportedly as part of the registration process. Users who respond to a subsequent text message then receive a bill charged to their mobile account. “Trojans of this family used to plague Windows users, but Trojan.SMSSend.3666 targets owners of Apple computers,” Wednesday’s advisory stated. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Mac trojan tricks users into paying pricey cell phone fees

iTunes (temporarily) serves porn images to Russian users

iTunes users in Russia got an eyeful on Wednesday (hat tip to Wired ) when a newly released version of the app displayed graphic images of porn instead of the foreign films they were expecting. The bug, reported to be present in the iTunes Store shown to users in Russia, is most likely the result of images that were linked to xxx.xxx. Security experts speculate it was an oversight by Apple developers, who put the address in as a placeholder and then forgot to revise it. The site happens to be the official search directory for domains that carry the .xxx top level domain, which was created last year. As a result, the iTunes section briefly featured a smorgasbord of pornographic images. Apple quickly fixed the mishap, but has yet to explain how it happened. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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iTunes (temporarily) serves porn images to Russian users

US federal agency dropping 17,000 BlackBerrys in favor of iPhones

It’s no secret that Research In Motion, the maker of the fabled BlackBerry, is on the decline . If falling subscriber numbers last month weren’t bad enough, last week, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) said that it will end its contract with RIM , replacing over 17,000 employees devices with iPhones in a deal worth $2.1 million. “The RIM technology, however, can no longer meet the mobile technology needs of the agency,” the agency wrote in a 10-page document , adding that “no other company’s products can meet the agency’s needs.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US federal agency dropping 17,000 BlackBerrys in favor of iPhones