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TidBITS#1241/16-Sep-2014

iOS 8 is here, and we have answers to your questions, but Adam Engst also has a couple of warnings before you upgrade. Along with iOS 8 comes Apple TV 7.0, and with it, Apple’s recently acquired Beats Music service arrives in your living room. Apple gave every iTunes account holder U2’s new album for free, but if having it appear in your account felt a little creepy, Josh Centers has some thoughts on what turns a gift into an intrusion. This week in FunBITS, Josh also offers a crash course in the hit game Minecraft to give you a sense of why Microsoft just acquired it for a whopping $2.5 billion. Notable software releases this week include Audio Hijack Pro 2.11.3, Nicecast 1.11.3, and Airfoil 4.8.9, Security Update 2014-004 (Lion and Mountain Lion), Safari 6.2 and 7.1, BusyCal 2.6, and TunnelBear 2.4.2.

Adam Engst 9 comments

Turn Off Automatic iOS App Updates

With vast numbers of apps being updated for iOS 8 in the next few weeks, it’s safer to turn off automatic updates so you control which apps are updated and when. If it ain’t broke… don’t let it update so it doesn’t possibly break.

Josh Centers 9 comments

U2 Giveaway Shows We’ve Entered the Age of Digital Consent

When is a gift not really a gift? Who really owns your phone? What makes music so important to us? Josh Centers ponders the backlash against Apple’s free gift of a U2 album and concludes that it could have been handled far better, though perhaps that wouldn’t have served the promotional needs of either U2 or Apple.

Josh Centers 6 comments

FunBITS: A Minecraft Crash Course

Microsoft just paid $2.5 billion to acquire a single game. Read on to find out what makes Minecraft sufficiently special to warrant such a high price, along with a “brief” primer on how to survive your first day in Minecraft.

TidBITS Staff No comments

ExtraBITS for 22 September 2014

Tim Cook features heavily in ExtraBITS this week, with the second part of his interview with Charlie Rose along with another interview in Bloomberg Businessweek. Also, some bad news for tinkerers: the NFC chip in the iPhone 6 is only for Apple Pay, at least for now.