iCloud

It’s never a great experience when iCloud goes down and Apple services are affected, but it always helps to know it’s not just you having issues. Apple typically acknowledges ongoing outages on its System Status site with a brief description of the problem, and this week Apple has updated its design to emphasize last known issues.

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According to a new report from TechCrunch, Apple recently acquired the domain name iCloud.net, one of the last remaining pieces related to iCloud that the company itself did not own. While it’s unclear when Apple made the purchase, the social network previously linked to that domain will shut down by the end of this month.

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Apple appears to be planning to further expand its data center presence in Northern Nevada according to a newly surfaced building permit. An application that was filed and withdrawn on February 2 points to a $50 million data center codenamed Project Isabel with Apple listed as the client.

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A report shared earlier today by Elcomsoft’s CEO Vladimir Katalov claimed your iCloud account may have been storing more Safari history than it should, pointing to a database of “deleted” browsing history that could be extracted in plain text to reveal URLs. But the data is outdated and we’ve learned from sources that the problem has been fixed for the majority of users for almost a year and for the rest quickly after the issue was discovered.

The data that Apple does store is kept for good reason…
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Over the years Apple has made steady improvements to how our devices sync content. On the whole, it’s becoming more seamless to keep photos, videos and other content synced and organized across multiple iOS devices and Macs with software like iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Music Library.

However, one area I believe Apple could really improve the user experience is with photo and video management for multiple users. While iCloud Photo Sharing is a nice social way to share and organize photos with others, it’s not a great option to mange your photo and video collection. A feature I’d really like to see is iCloud Photo Library support for multiple Apple IDs.

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iOS 10.3 introduces new capabilities like Find My AirPods, but one change that went somewhat under the radar is a new feature aiming to improve Siri and artificial intelligence as a whole. As detailed by ZDNet, a new iCloud Analytics feature aims to collect data from users and use it do improve Siri and other smart features.

We’ve noted several times that Apple desperately needs to improve Siri, especially if a standalone Siri Speaker is in the pipeline. Would you opt-in to iCloud Analytics if you knew it would help Siri?

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After rolling out a redesigned iCloud Photos app to the beta site earlier this month, today the updated experience is now available to all through iCloud.com.

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Apple is rolling out a fix for the iCloud Calendar spam issue that has plagued users over the past few weeks. On iCloud.com, the company has added a new Report Junk feature. This lets users remove spammy invites from their calendar and reports the sender to Apple for further investigation.

The feature is currently only available on Apple’s iCloud.com Calendar web app but it is likely to roll out to the iOS and Mac native Calendar in a future software update …

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Apple is readying some upgrades to its iCloud Photos web app found on iCloud.com, first noted by MacMagazine. The Photos web app allows users to access their iCloud Photo Library through a web browser, across Mac and Windows computers.

However, it is somewhat rudimentary in its current state … but the beta.icloud.com site now includes a redesigned Photos app featuring a sidebar and thumbnail scrubber like what already exist in the native Photos app for Mac. Apple tests new features on beta.icloud.com before rolling them out to everyone, so the new features should be available for everyone soon.

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Some Apple users have been plagued with iCloud calendar invite spam in recent weeks, with calendar periods being blocked up with unsolicited events from anonymous senders (usually with Chinese names). It is thought that the spammers are mass targeting any iCloud email account it can find on the web, rather than targeting specific users.

Apple has now acknowledged the issue in a statement to iMore, starting with an apology to anyone who has received iCloud calendar spam. The company says it is actively “identifying and blocking suspicious senders” to try and stem the arrival of the junk messages.

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It was reported yesterday that Apple is disbanding the division of the company responsible for its wireless networking products: the hard drive-equipped Time Capsule and both AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express routers. The report was given additional credence by recent discounts and the fact that the products haven’t been updated in more than three years.

On one level, the decision seems like a no-brainer for Apple. The company is in the premium product basis. Back in the days when Wi-Fi was a new thing, it made sense for Apple to boost adoption rates by offering its own products; now it’s ubiquitous, there’s no reason for the company to be in what is today a very mundane product category.

But if the news is confirmed, it will sadden me a little – and worry me slightly as well …

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Update: Apple has not yet commented on the specific claims made, but tells us:

We offer call history syncing as a convenience to our customers so that they can return calls from any of their devices. Apple is deeply committed to safeguarding our customers’ data. That’s why we give our customers the ability to keep their data private. Device data is encrypted with a user’s passcode, and access to iCloud data including backups requires the user’s Apple ID and password. Apple recommends all customers select strong passwords and use two-factor authentication.

Elcomsoft – the Russian company which sells iPhone cracking tools to governments and corporations – says that iPhones send near real-time call logs to Apple servers even when iCloud backup is switched off, and that these logs are stored for up to four months.

Elcomsoft CEO Vladimir Katalov told Forbes that it also isn’t just traditional phone calls that are logged, and that iOS 10 has expanded the scope of the logging …

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Over recent weeks, iCloud users have started to notice an increased amount of spam coming to various aspects of their accounts. Email accounts, of course, are always vulnerable to spam messages and the root cause can be a variety of different reasons. This new type of spam, however, relates to iCloud’s Calendar and Photo Sharing functionalities…

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I love the Apple ecosystem. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’d say that the vast majority of the time it lives up to Steve’s famous ‘it just works’ promise. It’s the main reason that I have two Macs, an iPad and an iPhone.

So when a big Apple fan deliberately moves outside of that ecosystem, that’s a sign that something is very wrong. And I do so not just in one area, but two. The common theme? iCloud …

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Apple will unify its cloud service teams to improve product development and software quality, according to a new report by Bloomberg. Currently, employees that develop Internet services like Siri, Maps, iCloud, News and Apple Pay are housed in many different buildings mostly outside of the main Infinite Loop campus.

To improve collaboration and speed up product development, Apple will be moving all the relevant teams into the Infinite Loop buildings. This ultimately leads to a better services division, which is the leading source of revenue growth for the company. It is also unifying web products to run on a new backend, codenamed ‘Pie’ …

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One of the new features of macOS Sierra is that it can automatically ‘manage storage’ on your Mac. What this means is, if you’re getting low on SSD space, macOS can automatically upload older and larger files to iCloud and then delete them from your Mac. When macOS deletes a file, it leaves an alias that will download the file from iCloud as required.

Effectively, you don’t have to worry about how much physical storage your Mac has – you can just treat it as an infinitely large drive and macOS takes care of shifting things back and forth from the cloud as required.

That’s great in theory, but there seem to be a few flaws in practice …

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Apple has launched a new 2TB iCloud storage tier a little over a week out from the iPhone 7 launch event. The new 2TB plan, which is its largest plan available, will set users back $19.99 a month.

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It’s been a rough couple of days for Apple’s services. Apple Music took a lengthy hit on Wednesday with subscribers being signed out, then a widespread outage hit multiple services including iCloud on Thursday for several hours. All this during a quarter when Apple is selling itself to investors as a services company, not just the iPhone company, but these outages are way too common.

And it’s not just services. Apple had to re-release iOS 9.3.2 for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, a minor bug fix update that bricked the company’s latest tablet for a lot of customers. Mistakes happen but it’s Apple’s response after everything is resolved that bothers me…

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