Skip to main content

You should probably turn of FaceTime even though Apple just fixed a massive privacy bug

[ad_1]


Last night, a security bug popped up in Apple's FaceTime video chat app. The flaw let users exploit a group conference calling feature that allowed callers to hear the recipients talking, even before they picked up the call. Worse still, if the recipient pressed a button to dismiss the call, it would enable the camera as well. It was essentially a work around that let people eavesdrop on unassuming users. Apple eventually disabled the group talk function on the server side, but it's still probably not a horrible idea to disable FaceTime for the moment until a software update comes down the line.



Here's how to turn it off for now.



iOS: Go into your settings, locate FaceTime, and flip the switch at the top to turn it off completely.



MacOS: Open the FaceTime app, go to preferences, and uncheck “Enable for this account.”



As The Verge points out, this feature has been in place since October of 2018, but the company doesn't know exactly when the bug started happening.



I’m not going to share the instructions on how to do it here, but you’re already here on the internet, so you can find them if you’re curious (or a real jerk). Several sources, however, have confirmed that it is fixed for the vast majority of users.



Bugs like this are worrisome because it takes a while to find out the extent of their effects and how long they have been in place. But, as companies are increasingly eager to put cameras, microphones, and screens in your house, it seems inevitable that we’ll see more problems like this down the road.



As I’m writing this, Hulu is airing a commercial for Facebook’s in-home video conferencing device, the Portal. Awkward.




[ad_2]

Written By Stan Horaczek

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Charted: Here's how much your food waste hurts the environment

[ad_1] Our species is pretty good at wasting food. Some we discard at the farm for being undersized or oddly shaped. Others we allow to decay in their shipping containers, thrown away before they even reach shelves. We leave even more foodstuffs wasting away in grocery stores, often by letting it sit there until it reaches its sell-by date. As consumers, we don’t have much control over most of the process that brings our food to the grocery store, but we do have control over how much food we personally waste. Let's face it: We’ve all found liquified lettuce in our veggie drawers. Don't fret. It's arguably impossible to consume 100 percent of the food we buy. But a healthy reminder of the effect food waste has on the environment might help us all to be more conscious of the amount of food we eat—and don't eat. Consumer food waste varies extensively depending on the area. In South and Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that only around ...
Post a Comment
Read more