iCloud - page 10

If you’ve been having problems with Apple Music and iCloud Music Library incorrectly matching songs in your library, you’re far from the only one. It turns out the reason is that Apple Music doesn’t use the same method for matching songs you own as iTunes Match does. This results in significantly more errors and frustrated users.

Though iTunes Match used acoustic fingerprinting to identify songs you own and match them for all of your devices, Apple Music uses the metadata of those songs. That means if you change something as simple as the title and artist, it could match to an entirely different song despite the unchanged audio.

European leaders have finally agreed to a bailout plan with Greece this morning. The country’s financial crisis at one point capped how much cash citizens could withdraw daily, so Apple has decided to help its customers out by providing one free month of iCloud to current subscribers.

As you may have heard, Apple released the public beta for OS X El Capitan yesterday. Since I tend to ignore the risks of beta software in favor of all the new features, I downloaded it on my mid-2011 MacBook Air. Do yourself a favor: don’t be like me. Understand and acknowledge the risks of beta software. It’ll save you time and data.

Apple Music is at heart a streaming solution, designed so that you can listen to any of the tens of millions of songs in its library at any time, assuming you have a data connection.

These days, though, unlimited data plans are the exception rather than the rule, so you might want to be a little less profligate with your use of such a data-heavy solution.

Apple Music allows you to save your songs, albums and playlists to your iPhone or Mac for offline listening, which could be a boon if you’re watching your data cap.

Here’s how to make that happen.

According to Apple’s own Apple Services, Stores, and iCloud status page, several important services are experiencing slow downs and possible outages.

iCloud Backup, Documents in the Cloud, iMessage, and Photos are all showing yellow, as are Mail Drop, iCloud Drive, and iWork for iCloud beta.

If you’re experiencing issues in these areas, it’s not you; it’s Apple.

I took the plunge and downloaded a password manager today, and when I was researching how to use it on my iPhone, one help page said I needed to put some bookmarklets onto my Mac and then move them over to the iPhone.

Problem was, I wasn’t sure how to make that happen; I figured it was just automatic.

It might be magically enabled for you, but if you’re like me and don’t know how to get your Safari bookmarks from one device to the other, here’s how to get it to work.

If you’re having problems with Apple’s iCloud services, don’t worry — you’re not alone!

On its status page, Apple is currently showing yellow alerts for Back to My Mac, Find My iPhone, iCloud Account & Sign-In, iCloud Backup, Drive, Keychain, Mail, iMovie Theater, iWork, and Photos — meaning that services are either running slowly or are down. While not all users are experiences these problems, Apple acknowledges that many are.

Matt Stopera had his iPhone stolen last February from his favorite bar in New York City. Like most of us, he was upset, but not overly so. Matt got a new phone and went about his life.

A year later, odd pictures of a Chinese man standing in front of an orange tree started appearing on his new iPhone, via iCloud.

Unlike most of us, Matt is a blogger on Buzzfeed. He wrote up a quick post on the site about the photos appearing on his iOS device, and got some attention for it. What happened next is nothing short of amazing.

Transferring your WhatsApp data to a new device can be a pain — particularly if you’re switching from Android to another platform, or vice-versa. But WhatsApp looks set to make it a whole lot easier by giving users the ability to backup their messages to Google Drive.

If you’ve been interested in trying out Apple’s iWork suite of productivity apps for yourself, but don’t have an Apple device to try them on, you’re in luck: Anyone can now create an Apple ID and sign into the iCloud Beta website to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote for free.

Meet the world’s worst iPad thieves: Dillian Thompson (20) and Dorian Walker-Gaines (22). From “the money team.”

Houston police arrested these two geniuses after they uploaded a celebratory selfie video from Burger King to flaunt the cash they stole, along with an iPad, laptop and a couple other items left in someone’s unlocked car. The duo took a number of selfies and even uploaded a video to Facebook showing the $5,000 in C-notes they’d just stolen.

“This, my good people, is what we get from a good night’s hustle,” Dillian says in the video, completely oblivious to the wonders of iCloud and the felony theft charges that are about to follow.

Check out their video below:

Imagine a lifetime job with Apple, that doesn’t require you going into the office every day, from which you can never be fired, but which still gives you a sizeable guaranteed paycheck at the end of each month.

If that sounds like a dream come true, apparently you share the same utopian vision as a little company called Hall Data Sync Technologies: a non-practicing patent troll company which just filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple.

Apple Maps has been out for over two years, but it’s just finally completing its original mission to completely replace Google Maps in all of Apple’s products.

Starting today, iCloud.com users will see an online version of Apple Maps when using Find My iPhone instead of Google Maps.

iCloud was hailed by Tim Cook back in 2012 as “not just a product. It’s a strategy for the next decade.” Yet these days, iCloud is something of a mess: Not only has it not gained significant features since launch, but a slate of very public hacks have made it a rare black mark on Apple’s security record.

What the heck happened? According to a new report, iCloud isn’t living up to its potential because, organizationally, it’s an orphan within Apple.

Whether you’re a Mac novice or a seasoned veteran, there are a ton of tips and ticks out there for mastering OS X Yosemite. In Part 2 of our Yosemite tip series, we gather more of the very best.

Apple Pay is here at last. With U.S. customers giving the new payment method a try, results — and opinions — vary widely.

In this week’s news roundup, we talk about Cult of Mac’s first day with Apple Pay, the new Marvel movie leak, Christian Bale landing the role of Steve Jobs in an upcoming biopic and much more. Get your weekly fix of news in just minutes.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

Recent reports of iCloud phishing attempts in China illustrate just how important it is always verify that you’re logging into legitimate websites before you enter your precious passwords.

To help, Apple today outlined how users can protect themselves from phishing attacks, in which bad guys pose as legitimate entities in an attempt to gain sensitive data on the web. Apple’s simple PSA page shows how web surfers can verify the authenticity of any website.

Apple just released iOS 8.1, bringing Apple Pay, iCloud Photo Library and other new features to the mobile operating system.

Available now via Software Update, iOS 8.1 will let you quickly set up Apple Pay on compatible devices. Upgraders running OS X Yosemite will also notice additional Continuity features that let iOS 8 work with the latest version of the Mac operating system.

The Chinese authorities are staging a “man-in-the-middle” attack on Apple’s iCloud service in an attempt to steal username and password information, according to anti-censorship watchdog group GreatFire.org.

As per Wikipedia, a man-in-the-middle attack “is a form of active eavesdropping in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking directly to each other over a private connection, when in fact the entire conversation is controlled by the attacker.”

GreatFire.org first noticed the apparent attack when it became aware of the fact that certain connections made to Apple’s iCloud site in China no longer responded with a trusted digital certificate, thereby risking decryption.

iCloud passwords and security passwords can be guessed using social networking and various phishing techniques, and complex passwords and two-step verification are not as intuitive as they should be.

In a delightfully complete article over at TidBITS, author Rich Mogul lays out the facts behind the current spate of Apple security problems – most of which boil down to this: People are the weakest link in the chain.

As anyone who’s worked with technology in the past decade can tell you, the thorniest technical challenges aren’t typically those that deal directly with hardware and software. No, in most cases, the toughest things to troubleshoot and fix lie along the human spectrum. System administrators have long known this, coming up with acronyms like PEBCAK and ID-10T errors.

The same goes for security, which in Apple’s case affects an ever-increasing number of people who not be savvy to the ways of information security.

Here’s an important heads-up: If you keep documents in your iCloud Drive, don’t use iOS 8’s “Reset All Settings” option. It could delete files stored in the cloud.

Update: After nearly two hours of downtime, iCloud services have been restored.

If you’ve been having trouble accessing some of iCloud’s services this afternoon, you are not alone.

Apple’s System Status page is showing that some iCloud users are unable to access all of the service’s features and have been unable to do so for about an hour.

We’ve received reports from users across the U.S. that iCloud is unavailable to them, and many other Apple users in other countries are reporting the same issue. An official statement on what’s caused the outage has not been released by Apple, though some reports have theorized that the company’s iCloud facility in North Carolina is facing issues.

We’ve reach out to Apple for comment, but for now there is no ETA on when iCloud will be up and running again for all users.

Apple was aware of the iCloud vulnerability which resulted in dozens of nude celebrity images being leaked earlier this month.

According to emails between Apple and noted security expert Ibrahim Balic, Cupertino was given information of a similar security flaw as early as March of this year. In an email from that month, Balic informed an Apple official that he had successfully bypassed the feature designed to stop a so-called “brute-force” attack taking place.

If you haven’t been scared off cloud services by the Fappening or past horrors like MobileMe, you might want to try iCloud Drive, Apple’s answer to Dropbox and Google Drive. It’s a pretty great concept, an extension of the Apple philosophy from way back – documents are identified by the apps they were created by. Before, though, you needed to export a file from a drawing app to use it with a painting app. With iCloud Drive, you’ll be able to move from one app to another much more easily.

Before you begin, make sure you’ve read and understand the warning about using iCloud Drive if you haven’t yet installed OS X Yosemite on your Mac. If you haven’t installed the Yosemite public beta, apps on your iOS 8 devices will be unable to share data with companion apps on your Mac. Consider yourself warned.

If you choose to enable iCloud Drive on your iOS 8 device, and you have an OS X Yosemite beta installed on your Mac, here’s how to use it the right way.

You can use iCloud or iTunes to transfer your entire mobile system from your old iPhone to your new one. It’s a clumsy, one-way process, though, and can be time consuming.

The folks over at DigiDNA iMazing (formerly DiskAid) have a secure solution that works a bit differently, giving you complete control over how you backup and restore your data, letting you create a complete snapshot of your iPhone before you head to upgrade to iOS 8 or a new iPhone 6.

Here’s how.