Bluetooth

macOS Big Sur 11.2 promises to fix all your Bluetooth connection woes

Mac customers have been painfully aware that the Bluetooth protocol is a bag of hurt. Various unreliability issues that have been plaguing owners of the new M1 Mac computers only exacerbate the underlying problem. But Apple may be fixing unreliable Bluetooth connections on Apple silicon Macs with the upcoming release of the macOS Big Sur 11.2 software update.

Radio proximity security attack targeting up to iOS 13.5 detailed by Ian Beer

Matrix code hacked iPhone.

Accomplished security researcher Ian Beer, known for releasing a host of iOS exploits used by modern jailbreak tools, dropped a bombshell on Twitter late Wednesday evening after sharing a detailed blog post about a jaw-dropping radio proximity exploit affecting up to and including iOS and iPadOS 13.5.

The blog post summary goes on to explain that the hacker can remotely trigger kernel memory corruption through the execution of arbitrary code. Furthermore, it can force affected iOS and iPadOS devices in radio proximity to reboot with no user interaction needed or put privacy at risk by breaching user data or utilizing cameras and microphones without the user’s knowledge.  Scary indeed…

New to Mac? Here’s all the tools in the Mac Utilities folder

macOS Utilities Folder

If you’ve just purchased your first Mac, and especially if you’re coming from Windows, you might be wondering about the Utilities folder. You may see the folder but have yet to open it or you might be looking for a specific tool and don’t realize it’s in that folder.

Whatever the case, we’re here with another in our New to Mac series to help you out! We’ll explain what’s in the Utilities folder and what each tool is for.

Crystal brings volume-based active noise cancellation toggling to AirPods Pro for jailbreakers

AirPods Pro

Apple’s AirPods Pro quickly rose to become one of the market’s most popular active noise cancellation-equipped wireless earbuds. Out of the box, they isolate users’ ears from their surroundings via active noise cancellation; and in the event that you need to hear somebody, they support transparency mode, which allows a person’s voice to pass through the AirPods Pro’s microphone and into the user’s ear canal as audio.

One thing worth noting is that when using the AirPods Pro, the user must manually switch between active noise cancelation mode and transparency mode with a gesture when either feature is desired. With that in mind, iOS developer Litten devised a way to make this behavior more autonomous based on the user’s circumstances, and as such, a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called Crystal was born.

Review: WT2 Plus translation earbuds bring us one step closer to a Babel Fish type experience

If your foreign language skills leave a lot to be desired, these specialized earbuds from a Chinese brand, called TimeKettle, provide near real-time translation from one language to another, with 95 percent translation accuracy and support for enough language pairs to cover more than 80 percent of the world’s population. Here’s how they work in real life.

BTManager+ gives jailbreakers more control over Bluetooth peripherals

iOS is a very user-friendly platform when it comes to Bluetooth device connectivity. On the other hand, ease of use comes with certain trade-offs, such as the scope of configurability and advanced settings and/or features.

If you walk among the plethora of iPhone power users out there, and you use a lot more Bluetooth devices than the average Joe, then we think you might benefit from the likes of a newly released and free jailbreak tweak dubbed BTManager+ by iOS developer Beckett O’Brien.

Rename Bluetooth devices via your pwned iPhone with BTDeviceRenamer

One of the great ways you can amplify your iPhone’s user experience is through the extension of Bluetooth accessories, including but not limited to headphones and/or speakers. But have you ever tried to pair your newly acquired Bluetooth device only to find that it had an odd or unappealing name in the Bluetooth list?

If you answered yes to the question above and have a hard time distinguishing between one device from the next, then we’d like to recommend an excellent new and free jailbreak tweak dubbed BTDeviceRenamer by iOS developer Tr1fecta. Just as the name implies, this tweak lets you rename virtually any Bluetooth device that you’ve paired with your jailbroken iPhone or iPad.