Benjamin Mayo

As reported by Deadline, Apple has won out in the bidding war for Sundance favorite ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’. Apple Original Films division has nabbed worldwide rights to stream the film on Apple TV+ later this year, in a deal said to be worth around $15m.

By the numbers, that’s the biggest Sundance 2022 deal but it doesn’t beat out Apple’s record-setting acquisition of CODA (which has a lot of buzz heading into awards season) at last year’s festival.

Apple has pushed back the enforcement of some rules that were previously set to come into effect on January 31st.

Firstly, during the first 2020 lockdowns, Apple allowed apps offering realtime group services to use payment methods other than In-App Purchase. This exception was introduced to help businesses trying to adapt to pandemic life. Citing the recent resurgence of COVID, this exception is now being extended to June. Apple has also deferred previously-announced rules that would require apps to offer simple in-app account deletion.

The Eurasian Economic Commission database has been a common source of Apple leaks in recent years, with the company legally required to report upcoming products that use encryption technology to the institution.

As spotted by Consomac, the database is now revealing new model numbers for new iPhone and iPad models, which most likely represent the upcoming iPhone SE and iPad Air revisions, rumored to be launching in the coming months.

A serious Safari bug disclosed in this blog post from FingerprintJS can disclose information about your recent browsing history and even some info of the logged-in Google account.

A bug in Safari’s IndexedDB implementation on Mac and iOS means that a website can see the names of databases for any domain, not just its own. The database names can then be used to extract identifying information from a lookup table. You can try it out for yourself with this live demo.

In order to comply with a ruling from The Netherlands authorities, late on Friday Apple announced that it would allow developers of dating apps to offer alternative payments systems other than Apple’s In-App Purchase system, thereby circumventing Apple’s traditional 15-30% IAP cut. However, Apple will still charge a commission on these purchases regardless (details yet to be disclosed).

However, implementing this will not be straightforward. Developers will need to create and maintain a completely separate app binary which includes special entitlements, and is only made available in the Netherlands App Store.

Update: Firefox says the problem has now been resolved: “Earlier today, Firefox became unresponsive due to a change in defaults by a cloud provider which triggered a Firefox HTTP/3 bug. We disabled the configuration change and confirmed this fixed the issue. If you’re still affected, please restart your browser. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.“

A bizarre bug in Firefox has cropped up that means users of Firefox are unable to load any website in the Mac, Windows and desktop Linux versions of the browser. While the developers work on a solution to the bug, there is a fix you can apply to workaround the issue …

The latest viral craze on Twitter is a word game called Wordle, where players get one chance per day to guess a five-letter word. Somewhat unusually for modern society, this viral sensation is only available as a mobile website, garnering hundreds of thousands of daily hits.

However, it hasn’t taken long for rip-offs of the game to hit the App Store. Here is ‘Wordle — The App’, a direct clone of the game’s format, and using the same name. Whilst the real Wordle is completely free, this copycat version is enhanced with a $30 annual subscription.

Ming-Chi Kuo continues his stream of reporting on the supply chain for the upcoming Apple headset device, which is expected to feature a combination of augmented reality and virtual reality features. The user is expected to put on the headset and look at ultra-high-resolution OLED displays, one for each eye, which will show a camera feed of the world around them and render virtual environments atop it.

However, such capabilities mean the CPU and GPU demands of the device are high, and that equates to higher power draw. In fact, Kuo says Apple will ship the headset with a 96 watt power charger, the same one that comes with the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

In a report published today from the New York Post, Apple is said to be in ‘serious talks’ as part of negotiations for Major League Baseball broadcast rights. Apple has been rumored to be exploring sports rights for a while.

Presumably, Apple would bundle sports streaming as part of Apple TV+, or some kind of add-on tier. The Post says that if a deal is reached, Apple would start airing MLB games from next season.

One of the major new iCloud features announced last year was Private Relay, which seamlessly sets up an encrypted VPN-like tunnel for all iPhone Safari traffic. Private Relay is currently available as an opt-in beta in iOS 15. Apple says that this feature means that no one in the chain — including Apple — knows who you are or what website you are browsing to.

It seems carriers in Europe don’t like that idea too much. Via The Telegraph, operators including Vodafone, Telefonica and T-Mobile signed an open letter voicing their opposition to the rollout of the feature. In fact, some carriers are already blocking support as shown in screenshots from readers below.

Deadline reports that Apple is near to closing a deal for a racing film starring Brad Pitt. It’s unclear if Formula One will be officially involved in the project, although esteemed British F1 driver Lewis Hamilton is attached.

The publication says the package is in the $130 million range, an enormous figure that has somehow become the norm for top movie deals of late as streamers fight out for top content.