News Roundup 7/22: Franken Threats, Bugs, New Betas, And Common Sense

Apple Is A Big Fat Monopoly

Al Franken has decided that Apple needs to be taken to task for their App Store practices. Specifically he thinks that it is unfair to ask other streaming services to withhold information that subscriptions would be cheaper through their own websites, and Apple’s 30% cut of their now competitor’s revenue. In a letter to the Justice Department, Franken has asked them to investigate Apple for anti-comeptitive business practices. You can read the whole letter on Franken’s Senate page.

Hacking Team Leak Reveals OS X Bug

There is a flaw in OS X that was revealed from the leaked Hacking Team files. The app uses Apple’s error logging features introduced in Yosemite, and it allows for a malicious app to open any file or write files to any directory. It is important to note that this takes downloading the file locally, so you can’t run into this just browsing the web. So if you download a lot of files from the more disreputable side of the internet, you may want to be a bit more careful. The beta of 10.11 doesn’t have this vulnerability according to Ars Technica, so a patch for this may come sooner than later.

Apple Releases Latest Betas

Speaking of OS X 10.10, Apple has released the latest beta for El Captain to the public. The beta for iOS 9 was released to the public as well. There are many people starting to recommend people go all in on the upgrade, citing both OS’s are stable enough for everyday use. App Advice was pretty adamant that all users move to the OS’s right now, but you should exercise some caution and not upgrade your main devices.

Apple Enforces Common Sense

If you’re using the newly released iOS 9 beta, you’ll find that you are no longer able to leave reviews on the App Store. This cures one of developer’s biggest complaints about the Public Beta program, that users would leave bad reviews for problems on unreleased OS’s. Apple World Today has the story, citing that developers are still not able to release binaries for iOS 9.

Mac geek? Gamer? Why not both? Mike is a writer from Wisconsin who enjoys wasting immense amounts of time on the Internet. You can follow him on Twitter.