Summary: Recorded 7th October 2018 Well that was a week that was (as they say). Indonesia can't catch a break as the earthquake not only caused a deadly tsunami but set off a volcanic eruption. Haiti was struck with an earthquake and South Korea by a typhoon. As if that wasn't enough Bloomberg came out with a scary story about a hardware hack that has turned into a massive mystery. Microsoft pulled their Windows 10 update, Simon discovered a big downside to Apple News on Mac and a data aggregator's stash containing 212 million contact listings as well as nine billion data points related to companies and organisations wasn't secured! DONT FORGET THE JOE KISSELL OFFER... 30% any Take Control purchase before November 30th with this link 30% Off or use the code ESSENTIALAPPLE at checkout. Why not come and join the Slack community? You can now just click on this Slackroom Link to sign up and join in the chatter! We can now also be found on Spotify, Soundcloud and even YouTube. Essential Apple Recommended Services: 33mail.com – Never give out your real email address online again. Sudo – Get up to 9 “avatars” with email addresses, phone numbers and more to mask your online identity. Free for the first year and priced from $0.99US / £2.50UK per month thereafter... ProtonMail – End to end encrypted, open source, based in Switzerland. Prices start from FREE... what more can you ask? ProtonVPN – a VPN to go with it perhaps? Prices also starting from nothing! Fake Name Generator – So much more than names! Create whole identities (for free) with all the information you could ever need. Wire – Free for personal use, open source and end to end encryted messenger and VoIP. Pinecast – a fabulous podcast hosting service with costs that start from nothing. Everyone should have a font manager... I really do believe that. So I highly recommend FontBase — All platforms. Professional features. Beautiful UI. Totally free. FontBase is the font manager of the new generation, built by designers, for designers. Essential Apple is not affiliated with or paid to promote any of these services... We recommend services that we use ourselves and feel are either unique or outstanding in their field, or in some cases are just the best value for money in our opinion. On this week's show: SPLIGOSH @Spligosh on Twitter, and an occasional guest on Bart Buschotts' Let's Talk Apple THE BIG CHINESE HACK STORY The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies – Bloomberg Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, and the Chinese Government – Bloomberg Bloomberg stands by Chinese chip story as Apple, Amazon ratchet up denials – Ars Technica Apple Insiders Say Nobody Internally Knows What’s Going On With Bloomberg’s China Hack Story – BuzzFeed Department of Homeland Security Has 'No Reason to Doubt' Apple's Denial of Supply Chain Compromise – MacRumors UK cyber security agency backs Apple and Amazon denials over Chinese hacking – The Telegraph Simon's personal take: someone is totally off whack here... Personally I think the Bloomberg story smacks of FUD... Not one named source, not one “on the record” comment, not one piece of hard evidence. The whole thing smacks of Manchurian Candidate, reds under the bed, cold war era, conspiracy hysteria aimed at giving us all the heeby jeebies about China to me.. I don't believe such a hardware hack is impossible, but it would be highly difficult to do and would have to be snuck in to the design very very early (you can't just plug such a thing into a board like a piece of Lego). I am pretty sure that there would be much easier ways to exfiltrate data than via this almost James Bondian sort of plot. Security researcher named in China spy chip story voices doubts – Cult of Mac APPLE Well I have discovered a massive downside to Apple News on the Mac… Any links that are from Apple News only open in Apple News… and there seems to be no way to get to the original content - unlike on iOS where you can share out to Safari… past
