Another security issue that's been rising in recent years is the advent of organised criminals shoulder-surfing iPhone passcodes in order to then later steal the phone and take over the iCloud account.
Unfortunate victims are then locked out of their account forever, losing precious iCloud data such as photos of their kids.
There are some steps you can take to protect yourself, such as using a longer/more complex passcode and being very careful where you type it to ensure nobody can see over your shoulder.
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8 Jul 2021 20:53 | apple | iOS
I love Yubikeys, they provide a very strong second factor for accounts and services that you care a lot about. I use them for all kinds of things but one thing I was quite excited to try was the Yubikey 5ci in static password mode.
Static password mode simply acts as a virtual keyboard, playing back a static sequence of characters over the connected interface (usually USB). I wasn't sure at first if this was supported over the lightning port but it turns out it is which is very cool.
Using static password mode to supply the entire password for something is a bad idea - if someone steals the key then they have the entire password and there's no way to protect it on the key. Plug it in, press the sensor and voila you've got the entire secret string. But using it in combination with a known passphrase is very powerful. I was quite excited about the idea of using this on iOS - a relatively simple password combined with a huge amount of extra entropy from the Yubikey as a salt.
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12 Nov 2015 12:28 | apple | iOS
I decided to roll my tethering bypass idea into a script to make it easy to
use.
This script automates the fiddly configuration bits and gives you a quick way
to throw up a proxy that will bypass tethering restrictions on iOS.
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24 Oct 2015 11:26 | apple | iOS
It's often annoying that Apple lets carriers disable tethering at will,
especially when the carrier has already sold you "unlimited" data. Three allow
free data when roaming in "feel at home" countries but they don't allow
tethering at all, even if you're willing to pay for it.
After being irritated by these restrictions on several holidays I decided to
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15 Oct 2015 22:11 | apple | iOS
I've always been fairly cynical about Siri. It seemed more like a gimmick than
something people would use seriously in their day to day lives, but I've
recently discovered how wrong I was.
I don't have a CarPlay stereo in my car, because I didn't want to be tied into
Apple's apps. Maps is nowhere near as good as TomTom (which I also paid good
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31 Aug 2015 22:23 | apple | iOS
Despite Apple's best efforts, there are nearly always a number of users who
experience issues after a major iOS update. Users might experience crashes,
unusually high battery drain, slowness etc etc.
Whenever I upgrade to a major iOS release I usually do a fresh reinstall of
iOS. Although Apple provides no official way to do this without losing all of
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