Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Newton Mail for iOS and Mac is Back for $50/Year

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Back in September, iOS and macOS email app Newton were shut down, much to the disappointment of Newton Mail enthusiasts. At the time, Newton parent company CloudMagic said that though the company tried various business models, it wasn't able to figure out how to maintain profitability and growth over the long term.

A couple of months later, Essential, a smartphone company owned by Android co-creator Andy Rubin, purchased CloudMagic and the Newton app. At the time, it wasn't known what Essential planned to do with the Newton app.

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The company's plan became clear this week when a new version of the Newton email app showed up in the App Store and the Mac App Store, bringing it back to life. The Newton apps were never actually pulled, but they hadn't been updated for months and were becoming unusable due to bugs and crashes.

Since December, CloudMagic and Essential have been working to bring Newton Mail back to life, and there are interface improvements and new features like deleting a single email in a thread, resizing the Mac compose window, adding emails to OmniFocus, and other enhancements to the compose window on Mac.

Newton Mail has also had its pricing restructured. At the time it was shut down, CloudMagic was charging $100 per year upfront for Newton, which may be a major reason why it ultimately was an unsustainable business model. It's difficult to get people to pay $100 for an email app.

Newton Mail is now priced at $49.99 per year, which is still expensive, but more reasonable than $100. There's also a 14 day free trial so you can give it a go before downloading.

The app has a simple, clean interface and features like read receipts, send later, inbox filtering for newsletters and other junk mail, snooze, app integration, undo send, recap for notifying you about emails waiting for a reply, one-click unsubscribe, and push notifications, all features that many users like.

Of course, with any third-party email app, it's always worth investigating privacy policies to see what companies are doing with your data. Newton says it may share aggregated or de-identified information with third parties and works with third-party social platforms like Facebook to serve targeted ads unless you opt out, which is something to be aware of.

MacRumors videographer Dan is a big fan of Newton Mail and it's his go-to email app, so make sure to watch the video above to see Newton Mail in action. And if you're looking for other email app alternatives, we recently rounded up some of the best iOS email apps in the App Store.


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Deal Alert: Acer Chromebook Spin 13 Back To $699


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Apple Once Again the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

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Apple has once again reclaimed the title of most valuable publicly traded company marking the first time the Cupertino company has held that title since December.

As noted by CNBC, Apple surpassed Microsoft and Amazon this afternoon with a closing price of $174.24, for a market capitalization of $821.59 billion.


That beats out Microsoft's market value of $813.48 billion and Amazon's market value of $805.70 billion. Earlier this week, Apple also briefly surpassed the other two companies, and the top title has been shifting back and forth for months now.

Apple saw a significant drop in market value in January after lowering its revenue guidance for the first fiscal quarter of 2019 to $84 billion, down from $89 to $93 billion.

Apple's stock has recovered somewhat since its earnings release on January 29 where it reported revenue of $84.31 billion and net quarterly profit of $19.965 billion, or $4.18 per diluted share.

It was Apple's second best quarter ever in terms of revenue and profit, despite the fact that it ultimately ended up being lower than expected due to flagging iPhone sales.


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Apple Store at Natick Collection in Greater Boston Reopens February 16

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Apple today announced that its retail store at the Natick Collection shopping mall in Natick, Massachusetts, near Boston, will reopen on Saturday, February 16 at 10:00 a.m. local time. The store had been closed for renovations since May 2018.


The reopening date was shared in the Apple Store app—it hasn't been reflected on Apple.com yet—and highlighted by the Twitter account Storeteller.

Earlier this week, Apple announced that Angela Ahrendts will be stepping down as Apple's retail chief in April after five years in the role. She will be succeeded by Deirdre O'Brien, who has been promoted to Senior Vice President of People + Retail, expanding upon her HR responsibilities.

Apple operates 506 retail stores around the world.

Related Roundup: Apple Stores

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Apple Removes Useless 'Do Not Track' Feature From Latest Beta Versions of Safari

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In the release notes for Safari 12.1, the new version of Apple's browser installed in iOS 12.2, Apple says that it is removing support for the "Do Not Track" feature, which is now outdated.

From the release notes: "Removed support for the expired Do Not Track standard to prevent potential use as a fingerprinting variable."

Do Not Track is no longer an option in iOS 12.2, as seen in iOS 12.2 screenshot on left. iOS 12.1.3 screenshot on right.

The same feature was also removed from Safari Technology Preview today, Apple's experimental macOS browser, and it is not present in the macOS 10.14.4 betas. According to Apple, Do Not Track is "expired" and support is being eliminated to prevent its use as, ironically, a fingerprinting variable for tracking purposes.

"Do Not Track" is an outdated feature that was added to Safari quite a long time ago, first showing up in OS X Lion in 2011. Proposed by the FTC, "Do Not Track" is a preference that is sent by a user's browser to various websites requesting that advertising companies not use tracking methods.

It is entirely up to the advertising companies to comply with the "Do Not Track" messaging, and it has no actual function beyond broadcasting a user preference. All it does is say something to the effect of "hey, I prefer not to be tracked for targeted advertisements," which websites, advertisers, and analytics companies are free to ignore.

In the settings for Safari in iOS 12.2, Apple is no longer listing "Do Not Track" as a setting that can be toggled off or on, and in the Safari Preview browser, "Ask websites not to track me" is no longer listed as an option.


To replace Do Not Track, Apple has been implementing much more stringent Intelligent Tracking Prevention options, which do actually have a tangible effect and prevent the tracking methods that many advertisers and analytics sites use to detect your cross-site internet browsing.

Related Roundups: macOS Mojave, iOS 12
Tag: Safari

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macOS Keychain Security Flaw Discovered by Researcher, but Details Not Shared With Apple Over Bug Bounty Protest

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German security researcher Linus Henze this week discovered a new zero-day macOS vulnerability dubbed "KeySteal," which, as demoed in the video below, can be used to get to all of the sensitive data stored in the Keychain app.

Henze appears to use a malicious app to extract data from the Mac's Keychain app without the need for administrator access or an administrator password. It can get passwords and other information from Keychain, as well as passwords and details for other macOS users.


Henze has not shared the details of this exploit with Apple and says that he won't release it because Apple has no bug bounty program available for macOS. "So blame them," Henze writes in the video's description. In a statement to Forbes, Henze clarified his position, and said that discovering vulnerabilities takes time.
"Finding vulnerabilities like this one takes time, and I just think that paying researchers is the right thing to do because we're helping Apple to make their product more secure."
Apple has a reward program for iOS that provides money to those who discover bugs, but there is no similar payment system for macOS bugs.

According to German site Heise Online, which spoke to Henze, the exploit allows access to Mac Keychain items but not information stored in iCloud. Keychain is also required to be unlocked, something that happens by default when a user logs in to their account on a Mac.


Keychain can be locked by opening up the Keychain app, but an admin password then needs to be entered whenever an application needs to access Keychain, which can be inconvenient.

Apple's security team has reached out to Henze, according to ZDNet, but he has continued to refuse to provide additional detail unless they provide a bug bounty program for macOS. "Even if it looks like I'm doing this just for money, this is not my motivation at all in this case," said Henze. "My motivation is to get Apple to create a bug bounty program. I think that this is the best for both Apple and Researchers."

This isn't the first Keychain-related vulnerability discovered in macOS. Security researcher Patrick Wardle demoed a similar vulnerability in 2017, which has been patched.


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Chromebooks built on Sarien / Arcada boards could pack integrated LTE


via About Chromebooks http://bit.ly/2SvMKX7