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#1626: AirTag replacement battery gotcha, Kindle Kids software flaws, iOS 12.5.6 security fix

Following recent security-focused updates to iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, Apple has issued iOS 12.5.6 to fix the same serious WebKit vulnerability for older devices. If you still use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that can’t upgrade past iOS 12, you should update it immediately. Do the batteries in your AirTag need replacing? Josh Centers explains why Duracell batteries might leave a bitter taste in your mouth. In the category of technology outside the Apple world, Josh recently purchased a Kindle Kids ebook reader for his son but found that its software gives parents insufficient control over what their kids read. Notable Mac app releases this week include ChronoSync 10.3 and ChronoAgent 2.2, Fantastical 3.6.10, Nisus Writer Pro 3.3 and Nisus Writer Express 4.3, Bookends 14.1.2, and Paprika 3.7.1.

Josh Centers 3 comments

iOS 12.5.6 Fixes Serious WebKit Vulnerability for Older Devices

Apple has released iOS 12.5.6, a small but important security update for older devices to fix a serious WebKit vulnerability also addressed by iOS 15.6.1 (see “iOS 15.6.1, iPadOS 15.6.1, and macOS 12.5.1 Monterey Address Serious Security Vulnerabilities,” 17 August 2022). You can install the update from Settings > General > Software Update. Because this vulnerability has been exploited in the wild, we recommend that you update immediately if you’re still using any of the following devices:

  • iPhone 5s
  • iPhone 6
  • iPhone 6 Plus
  • iPad Air (1st generation)
  • iPad mini 2
  • iPad mini 3
  • iPod touch (6th generation)

Apple noted that iOS 12 was not affected by the kernel vulnerability fixed in iOS 15.6.1.

Josh Centers 37 comments

Here’s Why Your AirTag Battery Replacement Is Not Working

Apple released its first batch of AirTags last April (see “Apple’s AirTag Promises to Help You Find Your Keys,” 20 April 2021), and they have a one-year battery life, so if you haven’t already changed your AirTags’ batteries, you’ll likely need to do so soon. You can’t check how much life is left in an AirTag battery, but your iPhone will both warn you when it’s getting low and display the status in the Find My app.

AirTag low battery notifications

Unusually for an Apple device, you can easily change the battery:

  • Flip the AirTag so the shiny metal cover is facing you.
  • Press down on the cover (I use my thumbs) and rotate it counterclockwise to unscrew it.
  • Remove the cover.
  • Pop out the battery.
  • Place a new CR2032 battery inside, with the positive side up. (It’s flat and emblazoned with a +.)
  • Reattach the cover by screwing it in clockwise

One last step: open the Find My app on your iPhone to the Items tab and ensure that it detects a full AirTag battery. This check is key because you want to make sure that you installed it correctly and that it’s compatible. If the battery is full and working correctly, you won’t see a battery level. So why is Find My reporting that the battery is weak in the screenshot below?

AirTag battery level in in the Find My app

I failed to check the battery indicator when I recently changed my wife’s AirTag battery, which was a mistake. We didn’t discover the problem until she lost her keys a few days later, only to discover that the AirTag wasn’t working. Here’s what went wrong.

Buy AirTag Batteries Carefully

The AirTag takes standard CR2032 batteries, but some CR2032 batteries won’t work with the AirTag. Per Apple’s documentation:

CR2032 batteries with bitterant coatings might not work with AirTag or other battery-powered products, depending on the alignment of the coating in relation to the battery contacts.

Since these small batteries are a choking hazard, many companies warn buyers to keep them away from small children. At least Duracell goes one step further and coats the batteries with a bittering agent that tastes absolutely awful so young children will spit them out. It’s a good idea, but the bitterant can interfere with the electrical connection. It’s not just AirTags; Garmin also warns against using Duracell’s CR2032 bitterant-coated batteries.

Unfortunately, I don’t know any reliable method to remove this coating. Some suggest that you can clean the battery with rubbing alcohol. I tried that on a battery with a cotton swab and 91% isopropyl alcohol, but it didn’t make any difference.

If you hold the battery up to the light, you can see the edges of the bitter coating on the negative side of the battery. For the sake of science, I licked both sides of the battery to confirm that—the negative side did indeed taste terrible and gave me a tiny shock. I attempted an aggressive attack on the bitterant with alcohol, fingernails, and a pocket knife but had no luck removing it. If I were desperate, I’d work it over with fine sandpaper. But as long as the supply chain holds up, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Bitter coating on a Duracell button battery

Your best option is to make sure to buy batteries without the coating. Specifically, avoid Duracell batteries since the company now coats all its button batteries. The coating is denoted on Duracell’s packaging by a cartoon drawing of a disgusted child.

Duracell battery packaging

What about other battery manufacturers? Although numerous articles waffle the issue by talking about batteries from “many companies,” I could find no indication of companies other than Duracell coating their batteries with bitterant. Neither Energizer’s product safety page nor a Panasonic article on battery safety mention bitterants, and Adam’s packages of Sony and Toshiba batteries lack any indication of bitterant coatings. That may be because Duracell has a 2020 patent on the process, one that, in what might be a bit of corporate one-upmanship, cites another now-expired 1991 UK patent owned by Ever Ready, Ltd. (currently part of Energizer Holdings).

Whatever batteries you buy to revitalize your AirTags, look closely at the packaging to ensure that they don’t have the coating, and after installing, make sure they’re working in the Find My app.

Josh Centers 11 comments

Avoid the Tempting but Flawed Kindle Kids Ebook Reader

Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite might be my favorite non-Apple gadget. It’s longer-lived than many electronics (I’m still using one I bought when I started at TidBITS in 2013), the battery lasts forever, and I can sideload whatever ebooks I want over email or USB. In fact, it has gotten better with age: PDF support has improved greatly, there’s the great “page flip” feature (see “Amazon Introduces Page Flip for Kindle,” 28 June 2016), and Amazon is even rolling out EPUB support.

That’s why I thought a Kindle Kids ebook reader would make a great gift for my oldest son’s ninth birthday. Harris has recently started to enjoy reading, and I thought he’d appreciate a Kindle of his own rather than having to borrow his mother’s iPad. Plus, as a parent, I was excited to give him an electronic device that doesn’t have Minecraft, YouTube, and other time-wasting frivolities.

Getting a Kindle Kids was a huge mistake. Do not buy this product for your children or grandchildren. Let me explain why you shouldn’t bother.

What Makes a Kindle a Kindle Kids?

There’s nothing special hardware-wise about the Kindle Kids: it’s just a standard Kindle bundled with a magnetic cover that puts the Kindle to sleep when closed. The covers come in blue, pink, “rainbow birds,” and “space station,” which is either good or bad depending on how traditional your views of gender roles are.

Kindle Kids

Most models of the Kindle Kids are sold out, and I suspect Amazon may be phasing out the base product to replace it with the more-expensive Kindle Paperwhite Kids, which includes more gender-neutral covers like black, “emerald forest,” and “robot dreams.” (I don’t recommend the Kindle Paperwhite Kids either, as you’ll see—my issues are not with the hardware.)

The chief difference between the two models: the Paperwhite has a higher-resolution screen that’s easier on the eyes and is waterproof. Both models have some form of internal light for reading in the dark and support Bluetooth audio for listening to Audible audiobooks.

Other than the cover, two things distinguish these Kindle models from regular adult Kindles:

  • Longer Warranty: A two-year warranty, as opposed to a one-year warranty for adult Kindles. Amazon advertises it as a “worry-free warranty,” saying, “if it breaks, return it, and we’ll replace it for free,” implying that if your kid breaks it, Amazon will replace it. However, checking the fine print, the warranty covers only the standard “defects in materials and workmanship under ordinary consumer use.” That said, Kindles are largely resistant to damage other than screen scratches, which the cover should mitigate.
  • Child-oriented content: A one-year subscription to Amazon Kids+, which provides access to an Amazon-selected library of age-appropriate books and would cost $4.99 per month once the free year is up. Irritatingly, there is no way to see a full list of these books or even search what the service offers. It includes old and new standards like Black Beauty, The Hobbit, and the Harry Potter series, along with what my wife Hannah refers to as “twaddle”: books about Minecraft, Star Wars, and other pop culture franchises. (Sure, The Hobbit and Harry Potter are now pop-culture franchises, but they started as books, dammit!)

As part of the Amazon Kids+ package, you can put the Kindle into an Amazon Kids mode instead of the standard interface. With that set, you as the adult sync the Kindle Kids with your Amazon account and set up a profile for your child. Then the Amazon Kids interface takes over the Kindle home screen to keep your kids from messing with your romance novels and asking awkward questions about the muscular long-haired man on the covers. If you exit Kindle Kids, the device looks and works like any other Kindle, with your adult library waiting for you.

That all make sense on the surface, but the Kindle Kids veneer is so problematic that it ruins the package.

A Byzantine Process

Adding titles from your library to your child’s Kindle is one of the most passive-aggressively user-hostile interfaces I’ve ever seen. You can do it directly from the Kindle:

  1. Tap the three dots in the upper-right corner.
  2. Tap Exit Amazon Kids.
  3. Enter the Parental Control PIN you created during setup.
  4. Tap the three dots in the upper-right corner… again.
  5. Tap Settings.
  6. Go to Parental Controls > Amazon Kids and tap the pencil icon next to your child’s profile. (There is no backing out of this screen: your only choice to return to Settings is to close out of Settings and start over. Did I mention this is a slow E Ink screen?)
  7. Tap Add Books.
  8. By default, it shows only books Amazon deems “kid-friendly,” so you’ll probably have to tap All to see your entire library.

Now comes the fun part. In theory, this is simple: select the books you want to add and tap Done. Don’t worry about flipping pages here, as it keeps your selections as you page through your library.

Selecting books to add to the Amazon Kids library

There is just one problem: your entire library—226 books in my case—appears in alphabetical order with no sorting or search options. You have to page through the entire thing, scanning closely to find the books you want. Also, while you’re flipping pages, it’s easy to add a book to your child’s library accidentally. I apparently mis-tapped somewhere and gave Harris the Audible version of The Sex Lives of Cannibals (it’s not what it sounds like!). If you accidentally add a book, return to the Amazon Kids settings screen above, uncheck the book, and tap Done.

You can also perform this process from the Amazon website, but it still requires quite a few steps. From the Amazon home page:

  1. Click Accounts & Lists > Content & Devices.
  2. Click Books.
  3. Select as many books on a given page as you want to transfer.
  4. Click Add to Library.
  5. Select your child’s library.
  6. Click Make Changes.

The Web interface is much better than the on-device approach because you have different sorting options and can search for specific titles. Again, it maintains your selections while paging through your library.

What I dislike about Amazon’s Web interface (other than being hard to find if you don’t know where to look among the myriad options) is that there’s no review of what you’re sending over. So you could easily mis-click an item on the second page, get to the last page of your library, forget how many books you’ve selected, click Make Changes, and inadvertently send a steamy Danielle Steele novel to your kid’s Kindle. There are a few ways to remove a title using the website. The easiest is to follow the steps above and click Remove from Library instead of Add to Library.

Who’s the Boss?

Our objective with the Kindle Kids was to load it with Harris’s school books and let him read from it every day. Given my experience with the adult Kindle, I didn’t think this would be a problem. The Amazon Kids+ subscription seemed like icing on the cake, giving Harris free rein to pick things to read for himself. Even if it were “twaddle,” it would hopefully encourage his love of reading.

However, I quickly discovered that while the adult Kindle interface puts your library up top in large icons, along with a separate tab for just your library, the Amazon Kids interface promotes Amazon’s subscription titles at the top. By default, the books you add appear halfway down the second page.

Kindle adult vs. Kindle Kids
On the left is my Kindle home screen. The books in my library appear at the top with large icons, and I can tap the Library tab at the bottom to view just my books. On the right is the Kindle Kids interface, which has buried the books we added in Added For You on page two, as you can see by the scrollbar to the right.

It’s also hard to scroll down to that second page without accidentally opening a completely different book with an errant tap. Overall, the interface made me uneasy because Amazon gives precedence to the content it seemingly wants my kids to read, not what my wife and I explicitly added to the Kindle. There is no Library tab like on the regular Kindle interface, only Home and Recent.

I did discover something of a workaround. If I manually opened a book I had added to Harris’s library, it appeared in a previously hidden Recent section at the top. However, unlike the regular Kindle interface, the icons are the same size as every other listed title, and they have to compete with the eye-catching titles from Amazon’s other kid books.

The Recent section in Kindle Kids

There is no obvious way to hide an Amazon Kids+ book if you find it objectionable, but I eventually discovered the trick: on Amazon’s website, go to Accounts & Lists > Content & Devices > Devices > Kindle > Child’s Kindle > Go to Parent Dashboard. Then click the gear icon, click Kids+ Subscription Content, go down to the cellar with a flashlight (careful, the stairs are gone), and open the locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard.” In there, you’ll find controls to hide individual books from Amazon Kids+, but again, you’re going to view them one page at a time (30 titles at once, out of thousands of books), so it’s an incredibly slow and tedious process.

In the tech world, we call techniques like these “dark patterns”—interfaces designed to manipulate your behavior to encourage or discourage certain actions. Usually, they’re used to trick you into buying something or forgetting about canceling your subscription. If you’ve ever unintentionally purchased something from Amazon, you know how good the company is at exploiting these dark patterns.

With hard-to-use and hard-to-find settings and a limited interface with few customization options, you’re almost completely at Amazon’s mercy when it comes to what’s displayed on your child’s device. That’s both unnecessary and unacceptable, but it wasn’t the final straw that led me to return the Kindle Kids.

Stuck Inside Amazon’s Walled Garden

One of my favorite things about the Kindle is how open it is. You can connect it to your Mac and drag and drop entire folders of books into it through the Finder (use Calibre to convert formats if necessary). Every Kindle device also has an email address that lets you send documents to your Kindle, which opens all sorts of possibilities, like sending long articles from Instapaper to your Kindle. Gumroad, a service that enables individuals to sell digital goods, lets you send purchased books directly to your Kindle through that address. One of my favorite uses is to add books from Standard Ebooks—a project to clean up and beautify texts from Project Gutenberg—to my Kindle (see “Standard Ebooks Makes Classic Texts Beautiful,” 10 May 2021).

Sadly, I discovered there is no way to sideload content to a child’s Kindle Kids profile. You can only add content purchased from Amazon, as I learned when my wife sent me an ebook and asked me to add it to Harris’s Kindle.

That was it. Game over. One of the main reasons I have been so loyal to the Kindle platform is that it readily accepts whatever random ebooks and documents I throw at it. And my wife—who’s a teacher—has amassed a huge collection for Harris while scouring the Internet. If we can’t add those to the Kindle, it’s pointless.

Sure, there are workarounds. The easiest solution would be to create an Amazon account for Harris, add him to our Family Library, and then register the Kindle under his account. However, there are some problems with this approach:

  1. He wouldn’t have access to the Amazon Kids+ service, which was one of the reasons I bought the device. I may not want it front-and-center, but I do want him to be able to browse for other titles.
  2. I would have another account to manage, and I’d have to register a credit card, which could cause all sorts of issues.
  3. Amazon has a tendency to recommend racy or controversial books, and I don’t want him exposed to that.

I could also let him use my account, but I have some books I don’t want him to access at this point, and he would inevitably mess up my reading place in books.

So I’m sending the Kindle Kids back. It’s not worth the bother. It was a nice idea for a present, but Harris can read his books on Hannah’s iPad. We normally have to keep it hidden to limit how much he uses it—perhaps we can lock it down sufficiently with Screen Time.

I couldn’t be more disappointed in the Amazon Kids interface. Throughout, it feels as though Amazon is placing its agenda over the concerns and needs of customers. It’s bad enough when the end user is an adult, but it’s even more problematic with a product aimed at children.

I would much rather have a simple library view that presents books we’ve hand-selected to be on his device: whether from our libraries, the Amazon Kids service, or, yes, sideloaded onto the device via USB or email. And the interface to add those books should be discoverable and user-friendly. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

The first rule of any digital device tailored to kids is that the parents should be in charge. They’re the ones paying for it and dealing with the consequences of its use.

Watchlist

ChronoSync 10.3 and ChronoAgent 2.2 Agen Schmitz No comments

ChronoSync 10.3 and ChronoAgent 2.2

Econ Technologies has released ChronoSync 10.3 and ChronoAgent 2.2 with enhancements and bug fixes for the synchronization and backup tools. ChronoSync 10.3 adds a new Data Volume backup Operation and Setup Assistant that supports the full backup of just the Data portion of boot drives using macOS 11 Big Sur and later. The release also ensures that SmartScan on Monterey requires admin access, modifies the Bootable Backup and Data Volume backup list of automatically excluded items, updates a variety of readiness warnings to deal with Data Volume Backup and SmartScan issues, adds the capability to alter iCloud application container collection behavior via plist settings, and resolves a crash caused by removing a rule from an expanded rule group.

Both ChronoSync 10.3 and ChronoAgent 2.2 add logic to detect certain types of File System Events (fsEvents) database problems associated with updating fsEvents on the same volume from different macOS versions. ($49.99 new for ChronoSync with a 20% discount for TidBITS members, free update, 88.8 MB, release notes, macOS 10.12+; $14.99 new for ChronoAgent, 42.7 MB, release notes, 10.12+)

Fantastical 3.6.10 Agen Schmitz No comments

Fantastical 3.6.10

Flexibits has issued Fantastical 3.6.10, improving Zoom conference URL detection. The calendar app also resolves an issue where all-day tasks would convert to timed tasks when dragging and dropping in month view, plugs a memory leak when Fantastical is open for a long time, fixes a bug where changing time zones could cause temporary visual issues, and improves German localization (ausgezeichnet!).

Flexibits also notes that this will be the final version of Fantastical that will support macOS 10.13 High Sierra, 10.14 Mojave, and 10.15 Catalina. If you cannot upgrade to macOS 11 Big Sur, your Flexibits Premium subscription will continue to work, but you will not receive new features or bug fixes. ($39.96 annual subscription from Flexibits and the Mac App Store, free update, 67.3 MB, release notes, macOS 10.13.2+)

Nisus Writer Pro 3.3 and Nisus Writer Express 4.3 Agen Schmitz 1 comment

Nisus Writer Pro 3.3 and Nisus Writer Express 4.3

Nisus Software has released Nisus Writer Pro 3.3 and Nisus Writer Express 4.3, both of which restore the Spanish localization and address crashes when running in the macOS 13 Ventura public beta. The word processors resolve an issue that caused the macOS text translation menu to be unavailable when a selection spanned multiple paragraphs, change the behavior of the Delete key in tables to clearing contents instead of deleting cells, resolve possible Page View crashes and hangs, ensure the capability to remove a Dropbox folder from the Document Manager, and improve inverting of blue colors in Dark mode. Nisus Writer Pro also ensures that very long TOC entries are truncated when exporting to EPUB to accommodate limits in Apple Books and updates the Join Files macro to use the first joined file as a template. (Nisus Writer Pro: $65 new with a 25% discount for TidBITS members, free update, 280 MB, release notes. Nisus Writer Express: $26 new with a 25% discount for TidBITS members, free update, 73 MB, release notes. Both require macOS 10.11+)

Bookends 14.1.2 Agen Schmitz No comments

Bookends 14.1.2

Sonny Software has released Bookends 14.1.2 with enhancements and bug fixes for the reference management tool. The update adds an option to print the PDF you are viewing to the PDF Action pop-up menu, enables copying and pasting of multiple smart groups at once, improves the display of exported PDF annotations, improves handling of corrupted PDFs, automatically removes HTML from abstracts obtained from Crossref, enables you to Control-click on the Abstract field to create a new notecard from the selected text, and fixes a bug that prevented Bookends from launching on some Macs when the system language was set to Japanese. ($59.99 new with a 25% discount for TidBITS members, 101 MB, release notes, macOS 10.13+)

Agen Schmitz 3 comments

Paprika 3.7.1

Hindsight Labs has released Paprika 3.7.1 with several improvements for the popular recipe manager. The update moves the recipe search field selection into the search options bar to make it easier to find; increases the size of the category selection dialog; adds the capability to select the Favorites, Uncategorized, or Trash categories in the recipe search options; remembers the last selected grocery list when re-opening the app; and increases the maximum timer limit to 99 hours for really slow food. ($29.99 new from the Mac App Store, free update, 17.5 MB, 10.13+)

ExtraBITS

Josh Centers 6 comments

T-Mobile Offers Three-Month Network Pass Test Drive

We’ve previously covered T-Mobile’s generous 30-day Test Drive, which took advantage of the iPhone’s eSIM feature to let you easily try out T-Mobile’s network (see “T-Mobile’s Network Test Drive Puts 5G on Your iPhone’s eSIM,” 5 July 2021). Now T-Mobile is sweetening the offer with its new Network Pass, which gives you 3 months to test T-Mobile’s network. The previous Test Drive limited you to 30 GB of data, but the new Network Pass is unlimited. T-Mobile has also made it easier to switch to its network using the eSIM capabilities of current iPhones, so if you’re pleased with the Network Pass performance, there’s no need to wait for a SIM card to arrive in the mail. All you need to do is download the T-Mobile app to get started.

Josh Centers here. I’m going to save my Network Pass—you can only use a trial once—for when (if?) T-Mobile’s partnership with SpaceX comes to fruition. It promises to leverage SpaceX’s Starlink constellation of satellites to deliver cellular coverage for text messages to the entire United States except for parts of Alaska. My road is currently a dead zone for all three major networks, and Wi-Fi Calling is often spotty, especially with group text messages, so satellite access could be a game-changer.

Josh Centers 3 comments

Walmart.com Listed Fake 30 TB SSDs For Sale

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Vice shares the story of security researcher “Ray [REDACTED],” who couldn’t resist buying a 30 TB SSD on AliExpress for the insanely low price of $29.99, later finding the same product on sale at Walmart.com for $17.99. What he found inside were two 512 MB SD cards. However, when he plugged the SSD into a Windows machine, it reported that each SD card held 15 TB thanks to hacked firmware that wrote new data over old data while keeping the fake directory structure intact.

Walmart has since taken down the listing, but there are surely countless more scams on its website and many others. Unfortunately, by allowing nearly any vendor to list items on their sites, major online retailers like Amazon and Walmart have turned their storefronts into virtual flea markets full of sketchy third-party sellers. Be careful what you buy, even on “respectable” sites!

By the way, 30 TB SSDs do exist but will set you back more like $6200; these scam SSDs are the modern version of getting a Polaris Nuclear Sub from the back of a comic book for $6.98.

Josh Centers 13 comments

macOS’s New XProtect Remediator Now Regularly Scans for Malware

On his Eclectic Light Company blog, Howard Oakley has published an analysis of XProtect Remediator, a modular malware scanner that Apple built into XProtect in macOS 12.3 Monterey and backfilled into macOS 10.15 Catalina and macOS 11 Big Sur (see “Apple Releases iOS 15.4, iPadOS 15.4, macOS 12.3 Monterey, watchOS 8.5, tvOS 15.4, and HomePod Software 15.4,” 14 March 2022). XProtect Remediator consists of 12 modules that briefly but regularly scan your Mac for specific nasties during periods of low user activity. (XProtect has seemingly subsumed Apple’s original MRT—Malware Removal Tool—since one of those modules is MRTv3.) It’s unclear as yet what the user will see, if anything, when XProtect “remediates” (removes) malicious software, but it will likely happen silently in the background. Read Howard’s posts for the technical details and instructions on how to check if XProtect Remediator is running on your Mac manually—you could also use the latest version of his Mints tool or his new XProCheck utility.