Apple pulls Bang With Friends from the App Store

Bang With Friends, a service that let users hookup with their Facebook friends, debuted on iOS earlier this month. However, just 10 days later, Apple has removed the app from the App Store.

The removal was confirmed by CEO Colin Hodge, who told ValleyWag:

Cofounder and CEO Colin Hodge told Valleywag that he’s working with Apple to get the app, which recently crossed the million user mark, back in the iPhone’s warm embrace.

[…]

Apple did not immediately responded to questions about why Bang with Friends was banned. “We are waiting to hear more from Apple as to why,” said Hodge.

While it’s not surprising that Bang With Friends was booted out from the App Store, we wonder how the app got an approval in the first place, given the nature of the service. Is Apple rectifying this mistake 10 days later only because the service became popular, or did the app violate an App Store guideline after it was approved? (One reason why the app might now have raised alarms at first was that it was named “BWF” and not “Bang With Friends.”)

Bang With Friends got popular due to their promise of “Your friends will never know you’re interested unless they are too!”  The Android app remains live on the Play Store, and there’s of course a website for the service.

How to use Siri to generate strong, unique passwords(source--iphonehacks)

Coming up with unique passwords all the time can be a struggle with you’re supposed to be doing a hundred and one other things. If only Siri, your in-phone digital assistant, could help. Fortunately, it can. As you may already know, Siri takes many of its answers from the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, and that includes generating random passwords.

There are several password-generating-apps on iOS – search iTunes for “password generator”. My personal recommendation would be LastPass as this gives management and secure notes, in addition to password generation.

However, if you only want a simple solution there’s no need to install anything. Simple say to Siri, “random password” or “generate password” (both work) and it will come back to you with a password, accompanied by many more details from Wolfram Alpha.

You’ll find that the password is translated into a phonetic alphabet; e.g. “sierra” for s, “foxtrot” for f, etc. Below that Siri, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha, provides a group of additional passwords.

If you’re wondering how strong your password is, the next section gives details on how long it would take to break the password (i.e. enumerate), how many passwords exist within the length and character set used, and how much entropy the password has. Science alert – Entropy is a measure of chaos. The password’s strength is judged by how chaotic (i.e. random) it is.

If after looking at the password’s statistics, you decide you want more strength, scrolling down a little further will reveal more passwords made from larger sets of characters. The more characters a password might have makes it even harder to guess.

After all of that, if you want an even stronger password (really?!), you can make Siri give you an even longer password than the default eight characters. For example if you want a 16 character password, just say “Random password 16 characters”, and Siri will comply. As you do, note how the entropy value increases.

Obviously you can give Siri any number for a password length – in my somewhat pedantic testing I found that the limit of characters was 300. Far more than you’d ever want to enter into your Facebook account!

The great problem with this method is that there’s no way to copy and paste the generated passwords from Siri’s output into your applications. This means you’ll need to write down or memorize the password which isn’t all that convenient. It’s with that in mind that we recommend you stick with something like LastPass.

Credit to OSXDaily for this Siri tip.

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Categories: How To, Siri

Apple may not be able to launch iRadio music streaming service due to licensing issues(source--iphonehacks)

Google just launched Google Play All Access music subscription service at the I/O conference earlier this week, and Apple’s widely expected to follow with the launch of the much rumoured “iRadio” streaming service in June at WWDC.

However, Apple is finding it hard to convince music labels to agree to its unconventional licensing model, which could potentially delay a WWDC launch.

Unlike players like Spotify, Rdio and more recently Google, Apple’s streaming model will be different, according to The Verge:

Google chose to offer a standard subscription music service very similar to those built by Spotify and Rdio, and that meant the terms had largely been established, according to multiple sources close to the talks. Apple, on the other hand, is pioneering a hybrid web and radio service — one that resembles Pandora but melds it with some on-demand features, the sources said. The licensing agreement had to be created from scratch.

Google was also open to paying music labels in advance, while Apple is known to not offer advance payments. Apple’s has however agreed to give record labels a cut from the ads iRadio will reportedly show, a per-play fee and a minimum guarantee.

While Apple has Universal and Warner Music on-board for iRadio, Sony/ATV and BMG remain unconvinced, and Apple’s Internet services team, led by Eddy Cue, would have to pull a miracle to get them ready by next month, in time for WWDC.

Gameloft’s Gangstar Rio, N.O.V.A 3 and ZeptoLab’s Pudding Monsters currently free on App Store(source--iphonehacks)

Two popular iOS gaming titles by Gameloft, Gangstar Rio and N.O.V.A 3, and Pudding Monsters by ZeptoLab of Cut the Rope fame are currently free on the App Store.

“N.O.V.A. 3 – Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance” is a sci-fi first person shooter game where your goal is to fight for mankind’s survival by fighting enemies on a war-torn Earth. The game is universal, that is, it runs on both the iPhone and the iPad, and was priced at $6.99 earlier. It’s a heavy 1.69GB download and requires iPhone 3GS and up, iPod touch 3rd gen and up or any iPad running iOS 4.3 or later. You can download the game from this link.

“Gangstar Rio: City of Saints” is a third-person shooter game based in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. You play the role of a gangster, taking him through 60 varied missions using a variety of weapons and vehicles. The game, priced at $4.99 earlier, is an 878MB download requiring iPhone 3GS and up, iPod touch 3rd gen and up or any iPad running iOS 4.3 or later. You can download the app from this link.

Pudding Monsters is a puzzle game by the folks at ZeptoLab best known for their popular title Cut the Rope. The gameplay revolves around sticking together multiple “pudding monsters” to save them from the fridge-owner, where they reside. The game is available as separate versions for the iPhone and iPad, and both those versions have gone free as a part of Apple’s free app of the week promotion. Pudding Monsters, earlier $1.99, can be downloaded for free for the iPhone using this link, and for the iPad using this link.

Semi-Restore: Upcoming tool claims to let you restore the device to a fresh version of iOS without losing jailbreak(source--iphonehacks)

Ever since Apple released iOS 6.1.3 and then iOS 6.1.4 (for iPhone 5), users who have a jailbroken iOS device have to be careful when they install tweaks to ensure it doesn’t mess up the device forcing them to restore their device. This would in turn mean that they would also lose the jailbreak.

So I was a little intrigued when one of the readers (thanks Alan!) sent me a link about a tool called Semi-Restore. The developer @Coolstar claims that the Semi-Restore tool will let you restore the device to a fresh version of iOS without losing your jailbreak.

It tool will be available for Mac, Windows and Linux users. There is also a SSH version in the works. It is supposed to work with iOS 5.0 to iOS 6.1.2.

The developer notes that the tool has the following requirements:

• 5-10 minutes of your time!
• A computer running Windows or Mac OS X
• OpenSSH and APT 0.7 Strict (NOT THE LIB) installed on your device
• An SSH client on your computer (USB version coming soon)

Semi-Restore website also highlights the following important points about the tool:

• There may be a better way to fix your current problem. For example, to fix “Safe Mode” issues, you can just uninstall Mobile Substrate from Cydia.
• Like any other restore, make sure you backup your data if you want it later.
• Avoid using your iOS device or anything related to iTunes or XCode. Why not actually go outside?
• This process can not and does not repair broken system files! Avoid all Siri Ports, as they are not only illegal (except for Spire on 5.0.1) but they also create problems and may potentially break system files (even Spire can cause this).
• Your device will respring several times during the semi-restore. This is perfectly normal, so don’t panic.

The developer has also released the following screenshot of the tool:

I was a little skeptical about it as I haven’t heard about the developer before. After some digging, it looks like the tool is simply a wrapper for iLEX R.A.T.

What’s ILEX R.A.T?

iPadForums.net user who is probably the developer of the tool, explains it quite well:

ILEX R.A.T. stands for Remove All Tweaks. Basically this removes each and every installed app, tweak and dependency EXCLUDING the defaults from Cydia, so after you’ve jailbroken your device a while back, and you installed your hundreds of packages, it’ll all be removed with a single command.

What this is primarily used for is if your device ends up in a state where you cannot enter Safe Mode since you don’t have it, or if your device is stuck on any screen but is still recognized by your PC, or, if your device can be placed into Safe Mode and you can’t remove the tweak for some reason. The bigger use for this would be the general request of “How do I clean my device of all jailbroken apps and start over without restoring”. We’ve all had that thought run through our minds once our devices start to act sluggish.

A popular use for this as well would be as a contingency for A5+ devices, or basically devices that can’t be downgraded even with appropriate blobs and APTickets saved, meaning your iPad 2, 3, 4, Mini; and iPhone 4S and 5, where restoring is not an option since you want to retain your jailbreak.

So say you have an iPad Mini, and you’re on 6.1.2. Your device is acting sluggish, and you want to wipe all your tweaks and such so that you can start afresh but because the latest iOS is not jailbreakable, you don’t want to restore and lose your jailbreak, and since you have every single Cydia tweak installed, it’ll take you ages to delete them all manually. This will be for you.

I have embedded the video, which gives a demo of iLEX R.A.T:

So while I won’t call the Semi-Restore tool a scam as that was my first reaction when I visited the site, the use of the word “restore” is misleading as it is not anywhere near a restore or a semi-restore tool. 

Just like iLEX R.A.T, it seems like an interesting solution to fix the reboot loop problem if this solution doesn’t work, or you’re not able to identify the tweak that is causing it. You can check out this link to find out how to use iLEX R.A.T (I haven’t test it yet so please proceed with caution).

The Semi-Restore GUI tool should make this process a little simpler. According to the status update on its website, it is currently 60% complete and in the second round of beta testing.

As always, we’ll keep you posted.