Month: May 2019

A week after Sonos added long-promised Google Assistant integration to a pair of speakers, Bose is following suit. The company’s bringing the popular smart home AI to a trio of existing models, the Home Speaker 500 and Soundbar 500 and 700. The forthcoming, pint-sized Home Speaker 300 will be hitting the market with the feature built-in.

Like Sonos, you’ll get your standard array of Assistant queries, including music playback, Chromecast TV control and the ability to control connected home features like smart lighting. All of that will be accessible through the built-in speaker array. Like Sonos, the aforementioned speakers are also compatible with Alexa.

It’s clearly in the best interest of these third-party manufacturers not to have to play sides. For Google and Amazon, it means bringing their respective smart home ecosystems to a pair of well-regarded brands. Also like Sonos, setup happens in the company’s music app, which means, unfortunately, that you won’t have the full suite of setup options you get with Google’s own Home speakers.

The upgrade is available starting today. Additional features, including news and podcasts, are coming this summer. Ditto for the Home Speaker 300, which is arriving this summer.

Safari on iOS has a surprising number of hidden tricks, letting you manipulate tabs, conduct page-specific searches, and more, and not all of these features are immediately obvious due to the gestures involved.

We’ve rounded up some useful must-know Safari tips that you might not be aware of or may have forgotten, so make sure to check out our video because we bet there’s something here that’s going to be new to you.

Close All Tabs – Have hundreds of tabs open in Safari on your iPhone? You can close them all at once. Just long press right on the “Done” button in the tab view (which you can get to by pressing the little icon that looks like two squares) and you’ll see an option to close all tabs.

Open Recently Closed Tabs – Accidentally closed a tab you didn’t want to close? In the tab view, long press on the “+” button and it will bring up a list of tabs that you’ve closed recently so you can open it right back up.

Search Your Open Tabs – With tons of tabs, you might need to do some hunting around to find the specific tab you’re looking for, but luckily, a built-in tab search feature makes this easier. Just scroll to the top of your tabs view (or tap the top of the screen to jump to the top) and you’ll see a search bar for searching tabs.

Close Filtered Tabs – If you want to close some of your tabs while leaving the rest open, the search feature doubles as a filter. After doing a search in your tabs, long press on the “Cancel” button next to the search interface and you’ll see an option to close only the tabs that match your search.

Find Text on Page – You know how you can use the Command + F feature on a Mac to find something specific on a page? There’s a find feature in iOS too. With a website open, type in a search phrase in the search bar at the top and then scroll down to “On This Page” to search for that term on the website. Alternatively, you can open up the Share Sheet and locate the “Find on Page” button.

Close Tabs on Other Devices – If you have multiple devices and use iCloudalong with the feature that syncs Safari information, you can close tabs on your Mac or your iPad right from your iPhone. To do it, open up the tab view (again, the little icon with two squares), scroll all the way to the bottom of your open tabs, and then you’ll see an interface that lists open tabs on other devices.

Handoff Websites – If you’re looking at a website on your iPhone and then want to open it up on your Mac, you can use Handoff, which is available on most modern Mac machines and iPhones. On the Mac, you’ll see a little Safari icon on your dock with a small iPhone icon, just click on that and whatever you’re looking at on your iPhone can be opened up right on your Mac. You can also open websites from device to device using the same cloud tab interface used for closing tabs on other devices.

Have other useful Safari tips that we didn’t share here? Let us know in the comments and we may include them in a future tips and tricks video.

In a blog post today, Google disclosed that it recently discovered a bug that caused some portion of G Suite users to have their passwords stored in plain text. The bug has been around since 2005, though Google says that it can’t find any evidence that anybody’s password was improperly accessed. It’s resetting any passwords that might be affected and letting G Suite administrators know about the issue.

G Suite is the corporate version of Gmail and Google’s other apps, and apparently the bug came about in this product because of a feature designed specifically for companies. Early on, it was possible for your company administrator for G Suite apps to set user passwords manually — say, before a new employee came on board — and if they did, the admin console would store those passwords in plain text instead of hashing them. Google has since removed that capability from administrators.

Google’s post goes to great pains to explain how cryptographic hashing works, likely in an effort to make sure the nuances surrounding this bug are clear. Though the passwords were stored in plain text, they were at least stored in plain text inside Google’s servers, so they’d be harder to get to than if they were just out on the open internet. Although Google didn’t say so explicitly, it seems like it wants to also make sure people don’t lump this bug in the same category as other plain text password problems where those passwords have leaked out.

And oh, there have been so many of those, as Wired notes. Twitter advised all 330 million of its users to change passwords back in March due to a breach. Facebook stored“hundreds of millions” of passwords in plain text in a way where up to 20,000 of its employees could have accessed them. Instagram had to fess up that Facebook’s breach had actually affected millions of Instagram users (not the previously disclosed smaller number).

For its part, Google didn’t characterize just how many users might have been affected by this bug beyond saying it affected “a subset of our enterprise G Suite customers” — presumably anybody who was using G Suite in 2005. And though Google couldn’t find evidence that anybody used this access maliciously, it’s not entirely clear who would have had access to these plain text files either.

In any case, it’s fixed now and Google is appropriately sorry in its post about the whole issue:

We take the security of our enterprise customers extremely seriously, and pride ourselves in advancing the industry’s best practices for account security. Here we did not live up to our own standards, nor those of our customers. We apologize to our users and will do better.

For those eager to get the latest and greatest production build of Windows 10; good news. For those who would rather watch from the sidelines until the kinks are worked out; good news. Today Microsoft has officially launched the spring 2019 update for Windows 10, affectionately called the Windows 10 May 2019 Update. There’s a few new features under the hood, but the biggest change to Windows 10 this time is not a new feature you may or may not use, but instead a new approach to updates, and after almost four years of users not being in control, Microsoft has put the control back in the hands of the people using their OS. Finally.

I’m not going to pine on about days gone past, but one of the biggest changes to Windows 10 when it launched was that the update system was going to be better. Improved. More reliable. Except it wasn’t. Some changes, such as the cumulative updates, have been a huge relief for people setting up new machines, since they no longer needed to update their computer for several days. An update comes every month which should have everything you need to get you to current in one batch. This was a win for end users. However, Windows 10 also brought about a new idea called feature updates, where occasionally, a new version of Windows would come down the same pipe as a normal update. Assuming everything was well tested, the update should install with little fanfare, but as we know that’s not been the case. Windows is on far too many machines to make any update easy, and Microsoft’s feedback mechanism for update issues was not being monitored as it needed to, which lead to multiple feature updates with enough major problems that even the last update from October is only now being pushed out to some machines.

So today we get Windows 10 1903, or the May 2019 Update, and home users will finally get an option to pause updates even if they are using Windows 10 Home. It’s a small step, but coupled with a very measured rollout, hopefully this will be the smooth update Microsoft has been craving for the last couple of years. For those looking for further transparency, Microsoft has a Windows release health dashboard, which shows the status of current known issues, letting you know ahead of time if you may have an incompatible piece of software or hardware.

There are of course new features as well, since this is in fact a feature update for Windows 10. There’s a new light theme, providing a refreshing look for Windows 10 which pairs nicely with the dark mode that arrived a couple of versions ago. Cortana is no longer part of the search bar, and now lives on its own app icon on the task bar. More default applications can now be removed.

There’s more complex features as well, such as Windows Sandbox, which allows you to run an application in a virtualized container for testing without it having access to the system files. Think of it like Hyper-V, but without the complexity. It’s not as powerful as Hyper-V, but it’s also much easier to set up and use.

There’s a few other features as well that we’ll go through in a more comprehensive article after we’ve had time to dig through some of the new abilities. That being said, updates are now offering fewer and fewer big changes, which makes sense due to the maturity of Windows 10 now. Plus, with the lack of stability, it makes sense to offer less user-facing features that are more stable, rather than continue to offer a multitude of new things that may or may not get used.

For those looking to get a jump-start on the upgrade process, Windows 10 May 2019 Update is currently rollout out via Windows Update where you can just check for updates, and you’ll receive it if your computer doesn’t have any blocking hardware or software. Microsoft is taking a very measured and cautious approach here, which is the right thing to do. For those that don’t want to wait for Windows Update, you can always check out the Windows 10 Download page to get the update right now.

More models are likely affected, however.

Apple isn’t just trying to fix the MacBook Pro’s keyboard. The company has launched a repair program that offers free fixes for 2016 13-inch MacBook Pros affected by an issue with flex cable stress (aka “Flexgate”) that produces a stage lighting effect on the display’s backlight before it eventually dies altogether. You won’t have to risk a costly out-of-warranty repair just to keep using your machine.

This might not be the end to the story. While 2018 and newer revisions use longer cables that shouldn’t be at risk, iFixit pointed out that 15-inch MacBook Pros from 2016 also appear to be affected. You aren’t necessarily out of luck, however. Apple is promising reimbursements for people who paid for repairs, so there’s a chance you might be covered if (and only if) it extends the program to more of its laptops.