Over the last weekend a report of a serious privacy bug was found in Apple's Group FaceTime service. The bug would allow someone to enable the microphone and camera on someone's device.

The Issue

You can read the 9to5mac article for the steps on how this bug was activated. The short version is that if the person you are calling declined the call with the sleep/wake button, and you added your own phone onto the call again, you would be able to hear the original caller's microphone and see their camera.

Apple is currently working on a fix. In the interim Apple has disabled Group FaceTime on the server-side, until a fix is released, which should be this week.

Security Implications

Imagine this scenario. A group of 3 people decides to have a FaceTime call. Person 1 calls Person 2. While the phone is ringing, Person 1 attempts to call Person 3, but accidentally clicks on their own contact information while scrolling.. Person 2 declines the FaceTime call accidentally, and the audio from Person 2's is audible by Person 1.

I cannot emphasize enough how bad this bug is. Not just because of the fact that it should not have gotten through Quality Assurance (QA) and testing, but also because of Apple's focus on privacy. In regards to getting through QA, using the sleep/wake button to dismiss a call is an extremely common action and adding another person to a Group FaceTime call is the entire point of Group FaceTime. To add on to this, despite announcing Group FaceTime was announced at the 2018 World Wide Developers Conference (World Wide Developer Conference, Apple delayed Group FaceTime due to bugs and issues. This one was obviously not noticed during testing.

You might think that this is a minor bug because you "have nothing to hide". While that is all well and good for you, there are others that need privacy or are in sensitive situations where this can be abused. One example of this could be a domestic violence situation where an abuser can use this bug to be able to spy on someone. This would not be a good situation at all.

Another example could be a lawyer, who needs confidentiality of their clients. One last example is world leaders. If any of the world leaders, or their assistants, use and iPhone, they may have been able to use this bug to listen in. In other words, this is a really bad bug.

The fact that this bug got through is bad, but it is compounded because one of Apple's core tenets is security and privacy. Any privacy bug is a problem for Apple because they make it a differentiator to other products on the market.

It is good to see that Apple has taken this seriously and has temporarily disabled Group FaceTime services. Even though this is bad, it is possible that Apple will make some internal changes to improve testing of their features for privacy bugs. 

Source: 9to5mac.com

I did not write about this last week when it happened, because it appears as though there is a barrage of negative stories about Apple and with everything going on the world, who needs additional stories to get riled up about. Last week Dave Lee posted a video that showed that the Core i9 model of the 2018 MacBook Pro was throttling down its CPU under heavy loads. If you were to buy one of these computers, you would expect it to work really well, regardless of how much load the computer was under.

When the video was released many were skeptical that this was actually the case, and if it was indeed the case, that it was a design flaw with the MacBook Pro. It appears as though it is not a design flaw, but in fact it is a bug with the new 2018 MacBook Pros. Here is Apple's statement:

Following extensive performance testing under numerous workloads, we’ve identified that there is a missing digital key in the firmware that impacts the thermal management system and could drive clock speeds down under heavy thermal loads on the new MacBook Pro. A bug fix is included in today’s macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Supplemental Update and is recommended. We apologize to any customer who has experienced less than optimal performance on their new systems. Customers can expect the new 15-inch MacBook Pro to be up to 70% faster, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar to be up to 2X faster, as shown in the performance results on our website.

This means that it is not the hardware itself that was the issue, but in fact it is software related. It is good to see that Apple took this seriously and found the cause of the issue. This bug affects the 13-inch models as well as the Core i7 and Core i9 15-inch models. It is highly recommended that you get the supplemental update to fix the issue. You can download it via the Updates tab in the Mac App Store, or by downloading it directly from Apple's support page.

Via Six Colors.

At 2:00AM this morning, as it does every November, the time changed back to Standard time within many parts of the United States. The "Fall Back" occurrence is one that delights many. One of the benefits of the time change is that it becomes lighter earlier, which means that I can exercise earlier on my days off. Since I got my Apple Watch back in May, I have tried to fill all of the rings for the activity trackers.

There are three rings to be filled. The rings are "Move Goal","Exercise", and "Stand Goal". Out of these three rings, only one is adjustable, the Move Goal. The exercise goal is set, by Apple, at 30 minutes. while the Stand Goal is set to 12 hours.

One of the issues that I found is that with the time change, the stand goal hours are a bit off. It is not that they are not being detected, it is that the hours are off.

There are a couple of different bugs. The first one below is what it looked like this morning. I I woke up around 5:40 this morning, and got in my standing goal for the 5 O'clock hour, but it registered as 6. If you look carefully, you will notice that even though the hours of 12,6,12, and 6 are correct, that the standing goal does not make sense.

If it did start at 6, and the screenshot was taken at 8:48, then it would be impossible to get four hours of standing goals accomplished. As the screenshot below, taken at 10:02 shows, I accomplished five hours of standing goals, and the hours are the standard hours.

Now, I thought that maybe the watch just needed a restart, and if you own an Apple Watch, this is not a quick process, but I thought I would try it anyway. After I restarted, this is what I saw when I looked again:

Now the hours are off by one. Yes, it is starting at the proper hour, for my standing goal, but it is not correct overall. The issue is that the first hour should be 11, not 12, but since it is hardcoded, that cannot change and with that, there are six hours increments, but the first number is five, so it does not make any sense. What is correct is is the last hour, if going based upon starting at 11PM.

What I find most peculiar is that the information within the Activity App on the iPhone also shows the incorrect hours, as exhibited in the two images below. The one on the top is from yesterday and the one on the bottom is from this morning.

This bug itself does not bother me, but what does is that it appears as though this was not tested for. In the grand scheme of things, it is a minor bug.

What I hope Apple fixes this issue in Watch OS, hopefully sooner rather than later.