Archive for March 25, 2024

Monday, March 25, 2024

Digital Wallets and the “Only Apple Pay Does This” Mythology

Matt Birchler:

The FPAN is the “funding primary account number” and it’s the 15-18 digit number printed on your physical card. The DPAN is your “device primary account number”.

[…]

It’s notable that it’s called a DPAN and not “the Apple Pay number” – it’s a generic term, and that’s because this is a standard feature of digital wallets everywhere, not just Apple Pay. Google Pay and Samsung Pay are the biggest other digital wallets in the U.S. and they both do exactly the same thing. While it’s not technically using a DPAN since the payment runs through different companies, Amazon Pay and Shop Pay buttons also obscure the actual FPAN (full card number) from merchants.

[…]

The DPAN is always the same for subsequent transactions at the same merchant. So yes, while this can hinder data brokers from easily buying transaction data from a bunch of different merchants and figuring out shopping trends across those merchants, it does nothing to stop a single merchant from seeing your transaction history with just the DPAN provided by Apple Pay.

[…]

There’s also an idea I see sometimes […] that Apple Pay obscures your personal information. That’s simply not true.

Previously:

Update (2024-03-28): See also: Hacker News.

iPulse for iOS

Craig Hockenberry (Mastodon):

An app that can monitor your device is a great thing to have when you need it, but can get in the way when you don’t. On iOS we solved this problem by using Picture in Picture technology.

[…]

iPulse for iOS/iPadOS literally creates a movie of what’s going on inside your device and updates it every second. You can resize the display to fit well on your screen, or slide it out of the way completely.

[…]

iPulse also provides an alternate view of your storage: the display you’re used to seeing in Settings > General > Storage does not include cached data used by iCloud and other apps. iPulse shows how much actual space is being used.

Craig Hockenberry:

We show actual bytes used on the media, Apple only shows stuff that can’t be jettisoned. And everyone asks about the discrepancy because they have no idea why it would be different. Neither did I at first!

But knowing the true status can be important because reclaiming space can be a bottleneck for all kinds of things.

Craig Hockenberry:

Here we have devices that are equal in power to their Mac counterparts and they have to make noise in order to run in the background. What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Previously:

macOS 13.6.6

Apple (full installer):

This document describes the security content of macOS Ventura 13.6.6.

There does not seem to be an update for Monterey.

Previously:

Update (2024-04-01): Lloyd Chambers:

macOS Ventura update 13.6.6 update destroyedremoved all (but one) of my Favorites in the [Finder] sidebar.

This has been happening to me for years, but it doesn’t seem to be related to installing an update.

macOS 14.4.1

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer, enterprise, full installer, IPSW):

According to Apple’s release notes, the macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 update fixes an issue that could cause USB hubs connected to external displays not to be recognized. It also addresses an issue that could cause apps with Java to quit unexpectedly, and it fixes an issue that could cause Audio Unit plug-ins for professional music apps not to open.

macOS 14.4 was an unusually bad update that perhaps should have been pulled, but it’s good to see reasonably quick fixes. The release notes do not mention a fix for the iCloud Drive versions data loss bug. It does include the security fixes from last week’s iOS 17.4.1 and iPadOS 17.4.1, which didn’t have a corresponding macOS update.

Hopefully an Xcode update is on the way, too.

See also: Howard Oakley and Mr. Macintsoh.

Previously:

Update (2024-03-26): Mario Guzmán:

So can they just not be bothered with adding release notes anymore?

Also minimalism/clean UI is just awful. They’ve reduced it so much that this view just looks like its still in development and there is so much duplicate info.

Howard Oakley:

This Sonoma update also fixes the bug that stripped saved versions from files in iCloud Drive that had been evicted. I have now tested this on three different Macs (Intel T2 and Apple silicon) and confirmed that handling of saved versions in 14.4.1 has now returned to that expected.

Barry Collins (via Ric Ford):

Although the patch does appear to have fixed those issues for some customers, others are now complaining of fresh problems.

On Reddit, Mac owners are reporting that the update has effectively bricked their Mac. “I installed 14.4.1 on my M1 Mac mini and the opening screen is all I get. No login. I’ve tried restarting and starting in recovery mode, to no avail.” Another Mac owner reports seeing the same problem in the Reddit thread.

[…]

Others are seeing ongoing problems with hubs, which the patch was designed to fix.

For example, one Mac owner claims that a Thunderbolt 4 dock that was working normally in macOS 14.4 stopped working once the 14.4.1 update was applied.

[…]

Others are discovering fresh problems that seem to have resulted from this update. “I just updated while at work and I was connected to an external monitor,” writes a MacBook Pro owner on MacRumors.com. “Now after the update it no longer recognizes the external monitor.”

Update (2024-04-01): Howard Oakley:

Two of the serious bugs fixed in macOS 14.4.1 last week were completely unexpected, and only discovered by chance. Here I’ll explain how one of them came to light, and what had gone wrong.