Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

The broadband industry has lost another attempt to block California’s net neutrality law.

After ISP lobby groups’ motion for a preliminary injunction was denied last year in US District Court for the Eastern District of California, they appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A three-judge panel unanimously upheld the ruling against the broadband industry in January, after which the industry groups petitioned for a rehearing with all of the appellate court’s judges (called an “en banc” hearing).

The answer came back Wednesday: no judges on the appeals court thought the broadband industry’s petition for a rehearing was even worth voting on.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Security researchers said they uncovered a vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to commandeer millions of Android devices equipped with mobile chipsets made by Qualcomm and MediaTek.

The vulnerability resided in ALAC—short for Apple Lossless Audio Codec and also known as Apple Lossless—which is an audio format introduced by Apple in 2004 to deliver lossless audio over the Internet. While Apple has updated its proprietary version of the decoder to fix security vulnerabilities over the years, an open-source version used by Qualcomm and MediaTek had not been updated since 2011.

Together, Qualcomm and MediaTek supply mobile chipsets for an estimated 95 percent of US Android devices.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Apple announced today that it is formally discontinuing macOS Server after 23 years. The app, which offers device management services and a few other features to people using multiple Macs, iPhones, and iPads on the same network, can still be bought, downloaded, and used with macOS Monterey. It is also still currently available at its normal $20 retail price but will no longer be updated with new features or security fixes.

Server was never as widely used as the consumer versions of macOS, but macOS Server has a long history going all the way back to Apple’s late-’90s acquisition of NeXT and its NeXTSTEP software. NeXTSTEP was adapted into a project called “Rhapsody,” which added support for some longtime Apple software and a more Mac-like user interface and was initially released as Mac OS X Server 1.0 in March of 1999. This initial version of Mac OS X Server shared a lot of underpinnings with what would become Mac OS X but predated important user interface elements like the Dock and the Aqua theme, which would launch two years later in the first consumer version of Mac OS X.

Mac OS X Server remained its own totally separate version of the operating system, from the launch of that initial version through to Snow Leopard Server (version 10.6) in 2009. Starting in Mac OS X Lion, Apple began selling the Server software as a downloadable add-on app for any Mac, coinciding with the death of Apple’s last rack-mounted Xserve hardware. This transition also slashed the software’s price; a single Snow Leopard Server license cost $499, while the Server app cost just $50.