Archive for March 18, 2016

Friday, March 18, 2016

Stale “Purchased From” in Apple’s Receipt E-mails

Zac Hall (May 2015):

You may notice a new look on those digital receipts you get in your email inbox after you buy something from iTunes, iBooks, or the App Store. Apple has refreshed its invoices with a new design, friendlier subject line, and cover art images that are clearer on Retina displays.

[…]

Perhaps more importantly, the new invoice format includes a description of what device the purchase originated from, which could be handy in tracking down suspicious purchases or knowing who in the family made all of those in-app purchases.

This is a great idea marred by the fact that it doesn’t actually show the correct device. The e-mails show every purchase made on my iPhone as from “mjt 5s,” the name for the phone that I erased and sold last fall. The first time I noticed this, I was momentarily worried because it looked as though someone had used my retired phone to break into my Apple ID account. But it seems to be just a display glitch. My new phone’s name shows up correctly everywhere else: iTunes, iCloud, and on the phone itself.

Game Center Is Still Broken After Six Months

Craig Grannell (via Josh Centers):

When iOS 9 hit beta last summer, I heard concerns from developers about Game Center. Never Apple’s most-loved app, it had seemingly fallen into a state of disrepair. In many cases, people were reporting it outright failed to work.

Six months later, little has changed. If anything, Game Center has gotten worse, with major problems increasingly widespread. These include the Game Center app launching as a white screen, and Game Center freezing the Settings app when you try to access its options.

Nick Heer:

As Grannell points out, this doesn’t just affect leaderboards — Game Centre is the underlying architecture for many turn-based games in the App Store.

Federico Viticci:

I’ve also come across this problem and heard about it from MacStories readers and game developers.

The TouchArcade forum has a thread about this with 575 posts.

See also: lots of snarky comments about driving Game Center over to Craig’s house.

Update (2016-03-18): Rene Ritchie:

Lack of a core built-in iOS app using it has always been extremely concerning.

Craig Hockenberry:

They even had a game that could have used Game Center, but it got pulled instead.

Why would you want to dogfood an app in the most popular category in your App Store?

OneDrive Filename Restrictions

Bob LeVitus:

The OneDrive menu reports 3,803 problems, and has been reporting them for over a month. The problem is that when I select View Details, it crashes and leaves a broad white stripe across my display that can only be eliminated by Force Quitting OneDrive.

I think it’s fair to say OneDrive is useless to me until this bug is squashed.

So, I wrote to Microsoft technical support about the issue on February 9 providing logs, screen shots, and a complete description. It took a month but I finally got an answer. Not a solution, mind you, but at least I got an answer.

In short, OneDrive has restrictions on the characters that can be in your filenames, and the total path length must be fewer than 255 characters. Nobody seems to be able to build a better shared folder than Dropbox.

Update (2016-04-10): Arq Backup:

PSA: OneDrive allows a max of 150,000 items in a folder. (This limit isn’t mentioned in their documentation anywhere that I can find.)

Safari Root Exploit

Christopher Budd (via Joe Rossignol):

JungHoon Lee (lokihardt): Demonstrated a successful code execution attack against Apple Safari to gain root privileges. The attack consisted of four new vulnerabilities: a use-after-free vulnerability in Safari and three additional vulnerabilities, including a heap overflow to escalate to root. This demonstration earned 10 Master of Pwn points and US$60,000.

Note that Safari’s helper processes are sandboxed, but the application itself is not.