Apple is rolling out a new detailed financial report option to App Store Connect for developers this month. The company made the announcement in a post on its Developer blog this afternoon.

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Apple and Goldman Sachs will let Apple Card customers defer their April payments without incurring any interest.

Jamf has just announced a new Apple Watch app to help parents navigate the challenges that have been suddenly brought on by a switch to distance learning. Jamf Parent, is a tool that it had previously released for iPhone and iPad to help parents with managing school-owned devices at home.

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Apple's native iOS password manager may be getting an overhaul later this year with the presumed release of iOS 14 that will make it more competitive with third-party options like 1Password and LastPass, reports 9to5Mac. From a report: Right now, iCloud Keychain can store your passwords and help autofill them on the iPhone, where copying and pasting long strings of letters and numbers or manually doing so has been a headache since the advent of the mobile touchscreen. But it doesn't have reminders for changing those passwords like competitors do, and it doesn't support two-factor authentication (2FA) options. That means users are still stuck using potentially insecure methods like SMS or email in the event that they do have 2FA set up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dark Sky is an incredibly useful weather app that’s been on my radar since I joined 9to5Mac in 2013. In a surprise announcement on Tuesday, Dark Sky announced that it was joining Apple. Within minutes, the Dark Sky app joined Apple’s list of software in the App Store.

We know Dark Sky is now dead on Android and the weather data provider API for other apps is going away, but what happens next for Dark Sky at Apple?

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To meet surging demand for online information, internet giant taps public water supplies that are already straining from overuse. From a report: In August 2019, the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association built a 16-foot pyramid of jugs in its main entrance in Phoenix. The goal was to show residents of this desert region how much water they each use a day -- 120 gallons -- and to encourage conservation. "We must continue to do our part every day," executive director Warren Tenney wrote in a blog post. "Some of us are still high-end water users who could look for more ways to use water a bit more wisely." A few weeks earlier in nearby Mesa, Google was finalizing plans for a giant data center among the cacti and tumbleweeds. The town is a founding member of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, but water conservation took a back seat in the deal it struck with the largest U.S. internet company. Google is guaranteed 1 million gallons a day to cool the data center, and up to 4 million gallons a day if it hits project milestones. If that was a pyramid of water jugs, it would tower thousands of feet into Arizona's cloudless sky. Alphabet's Google is building more data centers across the U.S. to power online searches, web advertising and cloud services. The company has boasted for years that these huge computer-filled warehouses are energy efficient and environmentally friendly. But there's a cost that the company tries to keep secret. These facilities use billions of gallons of water, sometimes in dry areas that are struggling to conserve this limited public resource. [...] Google considers its water use a proprietary trade secret and bars even public officials from disclosing the company's consumption. But information has leaked out, sometimes through legal battles with local utilities and conservation groups. In 2019 alone, Google requested, or was granted, more than 2.3 billion gallons of water for data centers in three different states, according to public records posted online and legal filings.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deciding when to rewrite a piece of code, what makes Combine such a great way to do reactive programming in Swift, and the final part of our indie app development special series. Also, tips for coding beginners, Indie Support Weeks, and much more.

Sponsored by Setapp: Try Setapp with over 170+ Mac apps completely free for the first week.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/stacktrace/IYWiiPdGMl_StacktraceEp76.mp3

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Apple has acknowledged that some customers may be having issues attempting to connect to a Personal Hotspot , including problems with data performance and connection reliability.

Apple has seeded the first beta of watchOS 6.2.5 to developers.

Apple has shared the trailer for the upcoming short film "Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth" for Apple TV+, which launches April 17.

Apple is releasing the first developer beta of watchOS 6.2.5 today. This comes after Apple began beta testing of iOS 13.4.5 and other updates yesterday, oddly leaving Apple Watch out until now.

Update: watchOS 6.2.5 is now available to developers.

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Zoom's troubled year just got worse. From a report: Now that a large portion of the world is working from home to ride out the coronavirus pandemic, Zoom's popularity has rocketed, but also has led to an increased focus on the company's security practices and privacy promises. Hot on the heels of two security researchers finding a Zoom bug that can be abused to steal Windows passwords, another security researcher found two new bugs that can be used to take over a Zoom user's Mac, including tapping into the webcam and microphone. Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker and now principal security researcher at Jamf, dropped the two previously undisclosed flaws on his blog Wednesday, which he shared with TechCrunch. The two bugs, Wardle said, can be launched by a local attacker -- that's where someone has physical control of a vulnerable computer. Once exploited, the attacker can gain and maintain persistent access to the innards of a victim's computer, allowing them to install malware or spyware.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new report, Apple is planning on adding some 1Password-like upgrades to its iCloud Keychain feature in iOS 14.

China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it's suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials. From a report: The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China's public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China's numbers are fake. The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said. The outbreak began in China's Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is working to improve the iCloud Keychain password manager on iOS, 9to5Mac has learned, with two-factor password integration and more. These new features described are based on an early build of iOS 14 obtained by 9to5Mac.

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Wednesday’s best deals include iPad Pro and iPad Air at some of this year’s best prices, plus a new B&H sale discounting Apple Watch and more. Hit the jump for all of today’s top deals in the latest 9to5Toys Lunch Break.

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Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

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A paper coauthored by over 112 researchers across 160 data and social science teams found that AI and statistical models, when used to predict six life outcomes for children, parents, and households, weren't very accurate even when trained on 13,000 data points from over 4,000 families. From a report: They assert that the work is a cautionary tale on the use of predictive modeling, especially in the criminal justice system and social support programs. "Here's a setting where we have hundreds of participants and a rich data set, and even the best AI results are still not accurate," said study co-lead author Matt Salganik, a professor of sociology at Princeton and interim director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "These results show us that machine learning isn't magic; there are clearly other factors at play when it comes to predicting the life course." The study [PDF], which was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the fruit of the Fragile Families Challenge, a multi-year collaboration that sought to recruit researchers to complete a predictive task by predicting the same outcomes using the same data. Over 457 groups applied, of which 160 were selected to participate, and their predictions were evaluated with an error metric that assessed their ability to predict held-out data (i.e., data held by the organizer and not available to the participants). The Challenge was an outgrowth of the Fragile Families Study (formerly Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study) based at Princeton, Columbia University, and the University of Michigan, which has been studying a cohort of about 5,000 children born in 20 large American cities between 1998 and 2000.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A security researcher has discovered a pair of new bugs in the video conferencing service Zoom that can allow an attacker to gain access to a Mac's webcam, microphone, and more.

An issue in the new iOS 13.4 and macOS Catalina 10.15.4 software updates apparently prevents FaceTime calls with older devices such as the iPad 2 and iPhone 4s.