jrg_uk

AppleInsider said:

Ashley said in her video that the AirTag supplied her with a partial phone number, which is questionable.

"And their phone number -- uh, I mean, the last 4 digits"

…

Given that AirTag owners select what information to display when an AirTag is scanned, it seems improbable that a stalker would tell Apple's iCloud that displaying this information would be acceptable, nor would it be useful in the case of an actual lost AirTag.

This seems the most genuine bit of the whole story. In testing with mine, if I didn’t mark it as lost, scanning it with an Android phone took me to an Apple website that did show the last four digits of my phone number.

I’ve got one attached to my bicycle and I’ve had the bleeping “trill” when moving it before, I assume, my phone has connected up to it.

I also had the tag completely reset: at first I thought I had dropped it out in the middle of town, as it was showing a “last seen” location where I had been. Then, when I checked and it was still attached I wondered if the Find My network was glitching, before I finally discovered that the tag had gone back into its “register” mode.

I’d be happy with either of these problems being fixed, but it doesn’t seem to have updated yet.

I just want to know what was it about FairPlay, introduced when the iTunes music store began in 2003 or so, that took them until 2015 to decide to sue for patent violation?

Or is it another of the bogus patents that espouses an idea wrapped up in impressive sounding patent lingo, rather than any genuine technique for implementing it?

willett said:

The “solution” to this is definitely NOT to put an upper limit on tap to pay transactions, as the UK apparently has done.

That isn’t what’s going on in the UK anyway. There’s a cap on pure contactless, ie transactions which just require a card to be tapped and no other authorisation. With just a card, beyond that limit requires chip & pin use. It’s an anti-fraud measure, which I think originated EU wide (in the UK it started at £30.)

Apple Pay, and Google Pay, are not subject to that legal limit as they already have a secondary authorisation: fingerprint, face, etc to approve it (though some stores’ equipment have never been updated to support the distinction between contactless with card and Apple/Google pay.)

To be honest, I’m not sure who is asking for the higher contactless limit. No-one using their phone/watch, for sure, and the Banks don’t seem to be asking for it either.

The iMac Pro does come with ECC RAM, which makes it deserving of a “pro” label. Anyone serious about their data would benefit from that.

(it’s a continuing shame that MacBook Pro do not have an ECC option. Apple shouldn’t be beholden to Intel chipsets, and ought to have been able to offer it even on the Core Processor Family of CPUs and at a good price.)