You can do much more with Apple Maps on Apple Watch than just get directions. Check out these tips for making the most of Maps on your wrist.

Apple is donating a total of 2,500 iPads and Macs to Boys & Girls Clubs across the US through its Community Education Initiative. The company says that the devices are intended to help with coding classes and more.

Apple cites an example of an Atlantic City STEAM training program – an enhancement of STEM to include the arts: science, technology, engineering, art, and math …

more…

The post Apple donates 2,500 iPads and Macs to Boys & Girls Clubs appeared first on 9to5Mac.

Lil Baby wins top award of global Artist of the Year. Megan Thee Stallion, Taylor Swift and Roddy Ricch were honored, too.

Find out how to create and edit Memojis in Messages on Mac. Whether you want a brand new Memoji or an update to your existing one, it’s easy!

"A quick analysis of Monday night's Arianespace Vega rocket failure has been root caused to 'a series of human errors,'" writes an anonymous Slashdot reader. STAT reports: In a call with reporters, Roland Lagier, chief technical officer of Arianespace, said the first three stages of the Vega rocket performed normally after liftoff from Kourou, French Guiana, at 8:52 p.m. Eastern Nov. 16. The Avum upper stage then separated and ignited its engine. However, "straightaway after ignition" of the upper stage, he said, the vehicle started to tumble out of control. "This loss of control was permanent, inducing significant tumbling behavior, and then the trajectory started to deviate rapidly from the nominal one, leading to the loss of the mission." Analysis of the telemetry from the mission, along with data from the production of the vehicle, led them to conclude that cables to two thrust vector control actuators were inverted. Commands intended to go to one actuator went instead to the other, triggering the loss of control. "This was clearly a production and quality issue, a series of human errors, and not a design one," Lagier said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After launching Edison Mail+ earlier this year, Edison is back with a new feature to add to the service. Today, it’s adding LinkedIn Discovery to the premium subscription.

more…

The post Edison Mail+ adds LinkedIn Discovery to its iOS email app for easy contact connections appeared first on 9to5Mac.

Market intelligence firm TrendForce is out with a new report, in which it predicts that the A15 chip in Apple’s 2021 iPhones will stick with a 5nm process, but will move to an enhanced ‘5nm+’ version.

The A16 chip for the 2022 iPhones are expected to move to a 4nm process, though the company does add a rider to this …

more…

The post 2021 iPhones will use enhanced 5nm chips; 2022 ones move to 4nm(ish) appeared first on 9to5Mac.

iOS' notification system isn't perfect, but a newly released jailbreak tweak called SmartNotifications 2 can definitely make it better.

Apple has today announced the winners of the second annual Apple Music Awards. Hip-hop artist Lil Baby took top billing, named Artist of the Year. Other categories were Songwriter of the Year, Breakthrough Artist of the Year, Song of the Year and Top Album of the Year.

Apple has also promised a week of special performances, fan events, interviews, and more in early December …

more…

The post Apple Music Awards name Artist of the Year and more; will hold a week of special performances appeared first on 9to5Mac.

Twitter introduced a new feature called Fleets to its platform this week, but if you hate them, then this new jailbreak tweak can do away with them.

Last month, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" wasn't aired on TV, marking the first time since 1965 that the Peanuts special wasn't broadcasted. Instead, it was streamed on Apple+. Now, according to The Associated Press, the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Christmas specials will return to the air. From the report: On Wednesday, Apple bowed to the backlash, announcing it had teamed up with PBS for ad-free broadcasts of "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" (on Nov. 22) and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (on Dec. 13). Both specials will also be available for free during three-day windows on Apple TV+ (Nov. 25-27 for "Thanksgiving" and Dec. 11-13 for "Christmas.") For subscribers, the specials will be available beginning Nov. 18 and Dec. 4, respectively.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers with NASA's New Horizons say they've finally been able to determine if space is truly black. The group has posted their work online, and it will soon appear ini the Astrophysical Journal. NPR reports: New Horizons was originally designed to explore Pluto, but after whizzing past the dwarf planet in 2015, the intrepid spacecraft just kept going. It's now more than four billion miles from home -- nearly 50 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth is. That's important because it means the spacecraft is far from major sources of light contamination that make it impossible to detect any tiny light signal from the universe itself. Around Earth and the inner solar system, for example, space is filled with dust particles that get lit up by the Sun, creating a diffuse glow over the entire sky. But that dust isn't a problem out where New Horizons is. Plus, out there, the sunlight is much weaker. To try to detect the faint glow of the universe, researchers went through images taken by the spacecraft's simple telescope and camera and looked for ones that were incredibly boring. Then they processed these images to remove all known sources of visible light. Once they'd subtracted out the light from stars, plus scattered light from the Milky Way and any stray light that might be a result of camera quirks, they were left with light coming in from beyond our own galaxy. They then went a step further still, subtracting out light that they could attribute to all the galaxies thought to be out there. And it turns out, once that was done, there was still plenty of unexplained light. In fact, the amount of light coming from mysterious sources was about equal to all the light coming in from the known galaxies, says Marc Postman, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. So maybe there are unrecognized galaxies out there, he says, "or some other source of light that we don't yet know what it is." [...] So where does the light come from? Perhaps, he says, there are far more small, faint dwarf galaxies and other faint regions on the outskirts of galaxies that instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope can't detect and so scientists just aren't aware of them. Or, maybe there's more dust out there interfering with the measurements than scientists expected. Or perhaps there's a more exotic explanation -- some unknown phenomenon out in the universe that creates visible light. It's even possible it's something associated with dark matter, a mysterious form of matter that exerts a gravitational pull on visible matter but has never been seen directly.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have uncovered a massive hacking campaign that's using sophisticated tools and techniques to compromise the networks of companies around the world. The hackers, most likely from a well-known group that's funded by the Chinese government, are outfitted with both off-the-shelf and custom-made tools. One such tool exploits Zerologon, the name given to a Windows server vulnerability, patched in August, that can give attackers instant administrator privileges on vulnerable systems. Symantec uses the code name Cicada for the group, which is widely believed to be funded by the Chinese government and also carries the monikers of APT10, Stone Panda, and Cloud Hopper from other research organizations. The group has been active in espionage-style hacking since at least 2009 and almost exclusively targets companies linked to Japan. While the companies targeted in the recent campaign are located in the United States and other countries, all of them have links to Japan or Japanese companies. The attacks make extensive use of DLL side-loading, a technique that occurs when attackers replace a legitimate Windows dynamic-link library file with a malicious one. Attackers use DLL side-loading to inject malware into legitimate processes so they can keep the hack from being detected by security software. The campaign also makes use of a tool that's capable of exploiting Zerologon. Exploits work by sending a string of zeros in a series of messages that use the Netlogon protocol, which Windows servers use to let users log into networks. People with no authentication can use Zerologon to access an organization's crown jewels -- the Active Directory domain controllers that act as an all-powerful gatekeeper for all machines connected to a network. Microsoft patched the critical privilege-escalation vulnerability in August, but since then attackers have been using it to compromise organizations that have yet to install the update. Both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have urged that systems be patched immediately. Among the machines compromised during attacks discovered by Symantec were domain controllers and file servers. Company researchers also uncovered evidence of files being exfiltrated from some of the compromised machines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Both the Sileo and Zebra package managers received updates Monday evening with improved iOS & iPadOS 14 support.

After being announced during Apple’s October event, HomePod mini is now available to customers in some countries around the world. While specialized repair companies like iFixit don’t get their hands on Apple’s new smart speaker, an independent user has decided to share his own HomePod mini teardown.

more…

The post HomePod mini teardown reveals nearly impossible repairs and non-removable power cord appeared first on 9to5Mac.

Researchers from the University of Michigan used their own automated censorship tracking system to collect more than 21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries. They discovered that citizens in what are considered the world's freest countries aren't safe from internet censorship. From a press release: [Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the development of the tool, and her team] found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the world's freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy and human rights. They were among nine countries where Censored Planet found significant, previously undetected censorship events between August 2018 and April 2020. They also found previously undetected events in Cameroon, Ecuador and Sudan. While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship. However, Ensafi points out that the groundwork for that has been put in place here. "When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic," she said. "The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope." It's already happening abroad, the researchers found. "What we see from our study is that no country is completely free," said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. "We're seeing that many countries start with legislation that compels ISPs to block something that's obviously bad like child pornography or pirated content. But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and it's a very opaque process. That's why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time." The study is titled "Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Chrome product manager Mark Chang, Google's version of Chrome that support ARM Macs is now available to download. The Verge reports: In theory, a native version of the notoriously resource-hungry browser might run more efficiently on Apple's Arm-based computers. In our reviews of the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini equipped with the new M1 chip, though, we found that the version of Chrome built for Intel chips already runs well on Apple's new Macs, so hopefully this native version runs even better. You'll be able to pick which version of Chrome to download from the browser's website. Google began rolling out a new version of Chrome on Tuesday, touting the "the largest gain in Chrome performance in years" thanks to some under-the-hood changes. The company's blog about the new release didn't mention anything about a version optimized for Apple's Arm-based Macs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We already know that the new Macs with M1 chip can run both Intel and ARM apps made for macOS and iOS, but Mac users who rely on Windows for some specific software have lost Boot Camp support. However, CodeWeavers announced that CrossOver 20 now works on Apple Silicon Macs, which means that the new M1 Macs can run Windows software right on macOS.

more…

The post M1 Macs can now run Windows apps and games through CrossOver 20 appeared first on 9to5Mac.

As we detailed earlier today, it’s easy to download iPhone and iPad apps from the Mac App Store to run them on the new M1-powered MacBook Air, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro. However, Apple gives developers the ability to opt-out of having their application available on the Mac, and many have taken that option.

A user on Reddit has now discovered that it’s actually possible to install app files, or .IPA files, from your iPhone on an M1 Mac.

more…

The post Here’s how to install almost any iPhone or iPad app on M1 Macs, including Netflix, Instagram, and more appeared first on 9to5Mac.