Month: October 2019

Enlarge / The Apple Watch Series 5 has an always-on display thanks to new and improved display internals. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Apple's quarterly earnings calls have fallen into a predictable pattern for the past year or two: iPhone revenues are declining year-over-year, and the Mac mostly remains stagnant, but every other one of Apple's businesses—wearables and services most notably—are ballooning.

That was the case again with Apple's Q4 2019 earnings report today; iPhones were down, but the company posted its highest revenue ever in a September quarter thanks to good performance from services like the App Store, AppleCare+, and Apple Pay, as well as strong iPad and Apple Watch sales. Total revenue was $64 billion.

Apple revealed during the proceedings that the iPhone 11 (sans Pro) is now its best-selling phone, and that iPhone revenue was $33 billion—a 9% decline over the same quarter the previous fiscal year, albeit an improvement over the 15% decline the company saw in the previous three quarters this year. (That improvement is very likely accounted for by the launch of the iPhone 11 and its ilk mid-September, just before the quarter ended.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)

Unless you’d like to keep the pirate look going, it’s best to avoid costume contact lenses this Halloween.

Like every October, health authorities and medical organizations want to remind you that the decorative, over-the-counter lenses are not only illegal, they’re also terrible for your eyes. And not telling tales. The lenses can cause infections, sores, scratches, vision-impairing scars, and even blindness. It’s easy to find eye-related horror stories from people who turned to black-market lenses to change the color, shape, or look of their eyes (some lenses even add logos to your eyeballs).

Just on Tuesday, USA Today reported the case of a Cleveland woman who got decorative lenses stuck to her eyeballs. The lenses were supposed to turn her brown eyes blue but instead made them swollen and red. She had to have them removed in an emergency room.

Enlarge / When MSPs get owned by ransomware, their customers can lose more than just access to an application. (credit: Getty Images)

When more than 20 local governments in Texas were hit this summer by ransomware in one day. The attack was apparently tracked back to one thing the organizations had in common: a managed service provider. With limited IT resources of their own, local governments have increasingly turned to MSPs to operate significant portions of their networks and applications, as have other organizations and businesses—often placing critical parts of their business operations in the MSPs' hands. And that has made MSPs a very attractive target to ransomware operators.

Threat researchers at the global cloud security provider Armor have been tracking publicly-reported incidents in which MSP and cloud service providers have been hit with ransomware. Thus far, they have documented 13 such incidents this year—with 6 of them reported in the past few months.

The most recent publicly exposed victim is Billtrust, which as security journalist Brian Krebs reported, was hit by what BleepingComputer reported was BitPaymer ransomware (a report that has not been confirmed). BillTrust is an online invoicing and billing provider based in New Jersey that also provides credit decision services. Billtrust executives sent an email to customers on October 22, informing them of the attack, stating:

Enlarge / A Twitter logo displayed on a smartphone. (credit: Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images/LightRocket | Getty Images)

Twitter might be the president's favored platform and a valued way for candidates to spread their messages far and wide, but starting next month, elected officials and candidates alike are going to have to make sure all that traffic comes organically. That's because they won't be allowed to pay for political advertising.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has apparently taken a look at the controversy currently embroiling Facebook and decided he wants no part of it.

"We've made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally," Dorsey announced in, naturally, a tweet.

Enlarge / No operating system is an island, but macOS Catalina is named after one. (credit: Apple)

Apple's habit of late has been to release most of its operating system updates for each platform all on the same day. But in one recent instance, though, macOS and watchOS came a single day after iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS updates.

The macOS update mainly adds features we already saw yesterday in iOS and iPadOS 13.2. That includes support for AirPods Pro, the ability to opt in or out of sharing Siri recordings with Apple, new emoji, and new HomeKit feature support. There are also a number of macOS-specific bug fixes and the restoration of some lost Photos features.

Here are Apple's update notes for macOS Catalina 10.15.1: