Free Republic

After security researcher Jeffrey Paul upgraded the operating system on his MacBook Pro last week, he discovered that several of his personal files had found a new home — on the cloud. The computer had saved the files, which Paul thought resided only on his own encrypted hard drive, to a remote server that Apple controls. “This is unacceptable,” thundered Paul, an American based in Berlin, on his personal blog a few days later. “Apple has taken local files on my computer not stored in iCloud and silently and without my permission uploaded them to their servers — across all...

Storing indiscreet photos in the “Cloud”is stupid. Jennifer Lawrence and a long list of other Hollywood starlets, models, and personalities must certainly now agree. The dust has settled somewhat surrounding the criminal hacking of Apple’s iCloud and the subsequent theft of nude photos stored there by a naive group of female celebrities. It’s easy to see that a crime has been committed and any rational person must agree that the perpetrator ought to be brought to justice, on this point there really is no debate. However, this incident is pregnant with irony. In monotonous unity and with the tempo of...

After the nude celebrity pictures leak, two Guardian Australia journalists try to break into each other’s iCloud accounts Accessing someone’s Apple account requires only three things: their email address, their date of birth, and the answers to two out of three security questions. This is assuming they don’t have two-step verification enabled. If you have all these, you’re able to reset their Apple ID password to one that only you know and then access their iTunes and iCloud accounts. You don’t require access to their email. Once you have access to their Apple ID, you can access recent photos and...

Apple's iCloud storage service and other parts of Apple, along with operations at several large banks, run inside A.W.S. (Amazon Web Services), say people familiar with the service who spoke on the condition they not be named so they could sustain relations with the powerful cloud company. But Apple is usually obsessed with micromanaging every aspect of its technology and services. So some of its users might be surprised to learn that they're storing their backups and other personal data not on Apple servers, but on ones rented from Amazon. It's not totally clear that anyone should care about that, but...

Engadget reports that Apple has fixed a major bug in its Find My iPhone software that allowed hackers to gain access to iCloud accounts. The fix comes just hours after a hacker leaked hundreds of nude celebrity photos on 4chan in return for Bitcoin donations. Apple's Find My iPhone login page was discovered to have been vulnerable to so-called "brute force" hacks. Hackers are usually locked out of sites if they try to gain access using multiple passwords, but it was discovered that the Find My iPhone API allows users to repeatedly try different passwords. Security researcher Alexey Troshichev revealed...

A flaw in the 'Find My iPhone' function of Apple's iCloud service may have helped a hacker to steal nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and '100 other celebrities', it today emerged. The hacker claims he or she broke into stars' iCloud accounts, including those of the Hunger Games actress, Kate Upton and Rihanna, before publishing them on 4chan, the image-sharing forum. A list of the alleged victims of the hack - 101 in total - has also been posted online; most of whom have not seen any photographs leaked by the hacker. A spokesman for Oscar winner Lawrence confirmed to...

Full Title: Nude Photos Of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Ariana Grande Leak In Massive iCloud Hack Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande, and Kate Upton were among a handful of celebrities whose nude photos were leaked late Sunday afternoon following what appears to be a large-scale hack. The photos first appeared on a 4Chan thread (very NSFW). So far, only Lawrence’s publicist Bryna Rifkin has confirmed, in an official statement to Buzzfeed, that the photos were of her client... ...The leaked photos were apparently obtained via a massive hack of Apple’s iCloud. They were then posted on 4chan by users offering more...

What would you do if your entire digital life started evaporating before your eyes and there was virtually nothing you could do about it? This is the nightmare scenario that greeted US technology journalist Mat Honan, who had all of the contents of his iPhone, iPad and Macbook Air wiped, and lost control of his Gmail and Twitter accounts, all in the span of just over 15 minutes.

In 2007, Apple released its first take at cloud computing, an intriguing service called MobileMe which apparently bombed with consumers. Certainly, MobileMe was a bit buggy out of the gate. But what most people don't realize is that Apple actually fixed the bugs and delivered a pretty excellent service for a few years there, one that really did follow-through on its original promise of bringing Microsoft Exchange capabilities to the masses.This past year, then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs infamously dissed MobileMe during the introduction of the service's follow-up, iCloud. But as the laughter subsided, I became intrigued. It was immediately...

Apple announced today that CEO Steve Jobs will show off a new service called "iCloud" -- "Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering" -- next Monday at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. (Join us for live coverage!) It's reasonable to assume that iCloud will be some sort of Internet-based storage service, potentially including music and movie syncing, and maybe supporting iOS apps, too. And maybe even photos, or even some of the MobileMe and iWork storage for email, calendars, docs, contacts, etc. It's all fair game. But we're most curious about how much it's going to cost and who's...