Online backup service Backblaze will soon increase the price of its unlimited plan from $5 to $6 per month. Annual and bi-annual discounts will remain available, and current subscribers can extend subscriptions by a year at the old rates.

It’s time to take a stand. We’re sick and tired of apps (Netflix!) and Web sites (CNN!) assaulting our ears and eyes with audio and video that starts playing on its own, without so much as a by your leave. Let’s fight back.

If you make your living in the Apple world as a consultant, developer, designer, or tech, there are a wide variety of conferences you can attend to hone your skills, learn new topics, network with your fellow wizards, and open your mind to new ways of thinking. Here’s our list for 2019. Be sure to let us know if you run across any others.

A bug in Group FaceTime has been discovered that enables anyone initiating a FaceTime Video call to hear audio from the other person’s iPhone before they accept or reject the call. Apple has disabled Group FaceTime and promises a fix “later this week.”

Jason Snell of Six Colors has published his fourth annual report card on Apple’s performance in the last year, drawing once again on ratings and comments from a large group of industry observers.

Were you at Macworld Expo San Francisco in 1994, when Connectix unveiled the magical utility RAM Doubler, which did exactly as its name promised? Read on for a trip down memory lane, and be sure to share your stories of that time in the comments.

Apple continues to take the high ground when it comes to user privacy, and CEO Tim Cook has penned an op-ed to encourage comprehensive privacy legislation.

In an attempt to recover from the loss of 500 members, we sent an email appeal last week that resulted in over 500 people signing up for the TidBITS membership program and putting us back on firm footing. Thank you!

In the wake of Nuance discontinuing its Dragon Professional Individual speech-to-text software for the Mac, we shine a light on some ways that macOS’s built-in speech recognition needs to improve to provide a viable alternative.

Susan Bennett, the original voice of Siri, sat down for another interview to discuss her career and how she dealt with her voice suddenly being famous.

Faced with his mother’s iPhone suddenly being unable to dial favorites correctly in the Phone app, Adam Engst discovers that iOS region settings can get corrupted. Here’s the solution.

A couple of recent episodes of the Mac Admins podcast are worth checking out. First, Adam and Tonya joined the hosts to talk about Internet technical publishing and a wide variety of other topics—you’ll enjoy the stories. Second, the Mac Admins hosts managed a rare coup, getting two Apple employees on the show to talk publicly.

For the first time in 18 years, Apple has revised its guidance to investors, lowering revenue estimates by $5 to $8 billion. The company blamed the lowered earnings on economic slowdowns in the Greater China market hurting iPhone sales but noted that it would still set revenue records in the US, Canada, and a number of European nations.

Facebook has been caught sharing data on its 2.2 billion users with other tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and even Russian search giant Yandex. Apple is in the list too, but not in a way that makes sense.

iOS 12.1.2 fixes eSIM and cellular issues for Apple’s 2018 iPhones and provides unspecified security fixes, but the main reason for its existence may be to work around a ban on selling some iPhone models in China due to alleged infringement of Qualcomm patents.