iTunes is officially dead with the release of macOS Catalina today. Apple decided to break apart the app into separate Apple Music, Podcasts and TV apps. "Each is better at its individuals task than it was as a section within iTunes, which was teetering on collapse like the Jenga tower of various functions it supports," writes Dieter Bohn via The Verge.

"In the early days, iTunes was simply a way to get music onto Apple's marquee product, the iPod music player," reports Snopes. "Users connected the iPod to a computer, and songs automatically synced -- simplicity unheard of at the time." It was the first service to make songs available for 99 cents apiece, and $9.99 for most albums -- convincing many people to buy music legally than seek out sketchy sites for pirated downloads. "But over time, iTunes software expanded to include podcasts, e-books, audiobooks, movies and TV shows," recalls Snopes. "In the iPhone era, iTunes also made backups and synced voice memos. As the software got bloated to support additional functions, iTunes lost the ease and simplicity that gave it its charm. And with online cloud storage and wireless syncing, it no longer became necessary to connect iPhones to a computer -- and iTunes -- with a cable."

What did you like or dislike about iTunes? When you look back at the media player, what are you reminded of?

ugen (Slashdot reader #93,902) writes: Something I discovered today, while trying to change a MAC address on a new MacBook Air (as I did for years on other MacBooks): ifconfig en0 ether "new mac" no longer works. It appears that this is a change made sometime last year, applicable to all Apple newer MacBooks.

Implications of permanently fixed MAC addresses on privacy and security are hard to underestimate. Given that Windows now supports complete Wifi MAC address randomization — I am sad to admit that Microsoft looks like a champion of privacy here. What are your thoughts? Solutions anyone knows of (I'll take a reasonable technical hack).

Here are a few mentions of this elsewhere:
Mac Rumors forums
The GitHub repo for SpoofMAC
A discussion on Stack Overflow
I've seen other theories about what's going on, though the bigger question is still what's the solution? Leave your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

And did MacOS stop allowing changes to wifi MAC addresses?

CNBC reports that a popular Twitch poker star has been accused of cheating: Stones Gambling Hall in Sacramento, California says it will not livestream poker games pending an investigation into cheating allegations made against one of the game's players, Mike Postle... The original accusations were made by Veronica Brill, another poker player who has played with Postle on "Stones Live." Since then, others have come forward with similar complaints. Brill has no specific accusation of what Postle is doing and even admits that she can't be sure he is cheating. So why does she think he is cheating? His results are too good, according to Brill. She said (and several professional pokers players who talked to CNBC, agreed) no one could do as well as he has, for as long as he has, on these livestreamed games...

It's not just that Postle is winning, it's how he's winning, that is drawing suspicion. Poker commentator Joey Ingram, poker pro Matt Berkey, and others have spent hours reviewing hands Postle played and found several times where Postle made a fold or a call that wouldn't seem "right" but happened to work out in his favor. Berkey said Postle made plays no pro would ever make, and he did them often, and they worked. Poker is a game of incomplete information. Berkey said Postle played "as if he had perfect information."

Stones Gambling Hall said it has hired an independent investigator to look into the accusations. In a statement Stones Gambling Hall said: "We temporarily halted all broadcasts from Stones. We have also, as a result, halted the use of RFID playing cards." The RFID cards contain chips, that combined with readers in the poker table, transmit information about each player's hole cards, so that viewers can see the cards on the broadcast (which is on a 30-minute delay to protect game integrity). At this point, there is no specific allegation, no "smoking gun" as Berkey said. But many pros are pointing to those RFID cards and the hole card information, saying it's just not possible for Postle to play the way he does and win the way he does.

dryriver shares a report from Euronews: Iraq's government shut off internet access, imposed curfews and deployed elite forces to secure key facilities on Wednesday amid widespread protests aimed at toppling the country's regime. Five people were killed and more than 200 were wounded in the largest display of public anger against Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi's year-old government. Domestic instability could prove to be the final nail in the coffin of Abdul Mahdi's fragile coalition government, sworn in last year as a compromise between rival factions after an inconclusive election.

Counter-terrorism troops were deployed to Baghdad airport where its men fired live ammunition and tear gas at protesters, preventing them from storming the facility. They were also deployed in the southern city of Nassiriya after police "lost control" when gunfights broke out between protesters and security forces, police sources said. Curfews were later imposed in Nassiriya and two other southern cities, Amara and Hilla, the police sources told Reuters, as protests that began on Tuesday over unemployment, corruption and poor public services escalated. Demands on Wednesday included the "fall of the regime" and government and political party buildings set ablaze in two other southern provinces. According to blockage observatory NetBlocks, internet connectivity has fallen below 70% in the capital Baghdad. Additionally, social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as WhatsApp, all appeared to have been disabled across Iraq except in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region which has a separate internet infrastructure.

At Microsoft's annual Surface press event today, the company announced the Surface Earbuds to rival Apple's AirPods and Amazon's newly announced Echo Buds. What's unique about the Surface Earbuds is that, unlike the other two wireless earphones, they can be used with Alexa, Bixby, Google Assistant, Siri, or any other competitor -- not just with Cortana. VentureBeat reports: Like the Surface Headphones, the Surface Earbuds don't do anything until you pair them. Surface Earbuds communicate over Bluetooth 5.0 with an Android, iOS, or Windows 10 device. Once paired, you can tap and hold either of the buds to trigger the default assistant on your device. To use a different virtual assistant with the Surface Earbuds, just change the default assistant on the paired device.

"Out of the box, it just works," said Surface Earbuds product lead Mohammed Samji. "On PC, it launches Cortana. On iOS, it will launch Siri, unless you've changed it. And I think it might vary depending on the distribution of Android, but all the ones I've tested, the first time I do it, Android asks me what I want as my default." Surface Earbuds still offer a better experience with Cortana (although without the "Hey Cortana" wakeword), Samji made sure to emphasize. Surface Earbuds can do everything with Cortana that the Surface Headphones can do, like chit-chat, interact with your email, check your calendar, get your daily update, and create to-dos. Samji said his team created a more streamlined flow for all this Cortana functionality. It's called Surface Audio. One of the biggest new abilities with the Surface Earbuds is gestures. "Surface Earbuds' gestures include double tap (go in and out of the call, or play/pause), swipe up and down (control volume), or even swipe forward and back (switch tracks in music, switch slides in PowerPoint)," reports VentureBeat. "Specifically on Android, there's also a triple tap to launch Spotify under your phone's lockscreen -- you can triple-tap again to have Spotify to choose another song using its ML."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: So there's a British woman who's been in the news recently for diagnosing herself with a sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation. She sleeps in a $500 EMF-blocking sack and has reportedly stayed in the sack, from time to time, for 30-hour stretches. The woman -- 70-year-old Rosi Gladwell of Totnes, Devon -- helps lead a small advocacy group on the issue of EMF-related health issues, and she even got the mayor of the Spanish village where she now lives to look into ways to limit Wi-Fi access for residents. She fears that the introduction of 5G mobile networks will kill her. Now seems like a good time to remind readers that there is no evidence to support the idea of "electromagnetic hypersensitivity." The World Health Organization calls it "idiopathic environmental intolerance with attribution to electromagnetic fields," or IEI-EMF.

Since diagnosing herself years ago, Gladwell has taken to sleeping in a sack woven with silver and copper and wraps herself in a protective sheet, according to several British news outlets. (You can find similar on Amazon.) She says that exposures to Wi-Fi and other EMF make her weak, short of breath, and give her pins-and-needle feelings in her face. She spends much of her time in a remote Spanish vacation home where her exposure to EMF is reduced. Still, Gladwell is holding firm in her thinking. Two years ago, she even reportedly got the mayor of the Spanish village Polopos to consider limiting the village's Wi-Fi access. "I am immensely impressed with our local mayor and how seriously he is taking this," Gladwell told the Olive Press at the time. "When talking about the dangers of Wi-Fi technology, he came up with the idea of limiting the hours of access in the village by putting timer switches on the routers in the school, Town Hall, and doctor's surgery." It's unclear if the town enacted the restrictions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Soon it may be easier to get your hands on a cable that looks just like a legitimate Apple lightning cable, but which actually lets you remotely take over a computer. The security researcher behind the recently developed tool announced over the weekend that the cable has been successfully made in a factory. MG is the creator of the O.MG Cable. It charges phones and transfers data in the same way an Apple cable does, but it also contains a wireless hotspot that a hacker can connect to. Once they've done that, a hacker can run commands on the computer, potentially rummaging through a victim's files, for instance.

After demoing the cable for Motherboard at the Def Con hacking conference this summer, MG said "It's like being able to sit at the keyboard and mouse of the victim but without actually being there." At the time, MG was selling the handmade cables at the conference for $200 each. Now that production process has been streamlined. This doesn't necessarily mean that factories are churning out O.MG Cables right now, but it shows that their manufacture can be fully outsourced, and MG doesn't have to make the cables by hand.

Wired reports on both Sidewalk, Amazon's new low-bandwidth long-range wireless networking protocol, and Apple's new position- and distance-measuring U1 chip (mentioned in a recent keynote). Apple's U1 chip -- which allows precise, indoor positional tracking via the latest iPhones and will power, at the very least, directional AirDrop file-sharing -- popped up on screen but was never even mentioned. The interest-piquing phrase "GPS at the scale of your living room" was saved for the online iPhone product pages rather than the bombast of the Steve Jobs Theater... Both Amazon and Apple have the hardware scale to build up the base of access points needed to create a useful network before reaching out to, most likely, iOS developers in Apple's case, and hardware makers already on board with Alexa in Amazon's case. For Amazon, in fact, that work has already begun as Sidewalk originally came out of the Ring team's ambition to extend its connected security devices out into gardens. "Ring lighting was the first time we ran into it as a company, because we wanted to extend out onto the sidewalk," says Daniel Rausch, VP of smart home at Amazon (which owns Ring).

The smart outoor Ring lights are already out. Products like the Smart Floodlight and Pathlight list a "wireless connection to the Ring Bridge" in the tech specs but eagle-eyed Ring owners had already started to figure out what band Amazon was playing with for this connection, before the Sidewalk announcement. "They've been using an internal version of the protocol on the freely available and unlicensed 900MHz part of the spectrum already," explains Rausch. "What we realised was 'woah, we can actually do something special'. We can make a version of this protocol which is secure and have this unbelievably ubiquitous coverage if we bring it all together, neighbours and neighbours and neighbours...." An innocent smart dog tracker like Ring Fetch fits perfectly into this model of Amazon-networked communities sharing video, alerts and location tracking.

JustAnotherOldGuy quotes ItsFOSS: The GNOME Foundation is facing a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes its patent.

Neil McGovern, Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation says "We have retained legal counsel and intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit. Due to the ongoing litigation, we unfortunately cannot make any further comments at this time."

While Neil cannot make any further comments on this issue, let me throw some lights on this matter. The patent in the question deals with wireless image distribution. The patent is ridiculous because it could mean any software that transfers images from one device to another could be violating this patent.
BoingBoing adds: Rothschild was only recently awarded a patent relating to wifi image transfers, but he has a long history taking companies like Apple and Samsung to court. His LLC was named in 2015 as the single largest nonpracticing entity by defendant count; a NPE is a company or person who holds patents but makes no products, instead pursuing companies that do for settlements. One website counts 30 lawsuits filed since June involving Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, with more than 100 ongoing.
ZDNet argues the suit " doesn't make much sense. But when has that ever stopped a patent troll?"

An anonymous reader shares a report: Yes, 5G is coming and data rates will improve, but we, the mobile industry, still have a lot of work to do. We could regale you with litanies of woe about roaming and hand-offs, or belabor the small cell backhaul density logjam. But perhaps the best example of roadblocks to 5G is much easier to grasp -- Heat. 5G phones get hot. Really hot. Probably not hot enough to ignite your battery (probably), but enough to generate a definite burning sensation in your pants pockets. At Mobile World Congress in February, we spoke with an engineer from Sony who was demo'ing a phone (behind glass) that was clocking 1 Gbps speeds. Wow, fast. We asked the engineer why it was not going faster and he said "It overheats." A good solid answer, from a nuts-and-bolts-and-antenna person. We will wager any amount that at next year's show, no one on the floor will be as open about this problem.

The big improvement in data rates for 5G will only come with mmWave radios. This is a whole new spectrum band that allows for really high data rates (again, let's set aside the whole densification issue for now). The trouble is that mmWave radios generate a lot of heat. To greatly oversimplify, mmWave frequencies are pretty close to microwave frequencies, as in the thing we use to reheat our lunches. From some of our very recent industry conversations we know that the handset industry is using a tried-and-tested method for dealing with this problem -- ignoring it and hoping it goes away. The whole issue strikes us as one of those issues where middle management really does not want to raise the subject with senior management who have wrapped themselves so tightly around the 5G flagpole. "Uh boss, your pants are literally on fire."

At its annual hardware event in Seattle, Amazon today announced Sidewalk, a new low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol the company is developing to connect all of the IoT devices in and around your house. TechCrunch reports: Amazon argues that Bluetooth and WiFi don't have enough range, while 5G takes too much power and is too complex. "We came up with something that we call Amazon Sidewalk," Amazon's device chief Dave Limp said at the event today. "Amazon Sidewalk is a brand new low bandwidth network that uses the already existing free over the air 900 megahertz spectrum. We think it will be great for keeping track of things, keeping things up to date -- but first and foremost, it will extend in the distance at which you can control these kinds of simple, low-cost, easy-to-use devices.

The details here remain a bit vague, but Amazon says that you may be able to use Sidewalk to connect to devices that can be up to a mile away, depending on how the base station and devices are positioned. Amazon already sent out 700 test devices to households in L.A. to test the access points -- and once you have a lot of access points, you create a network with some pretty broad coverage. Amazon says it'll publish the protocol so that other device makers can also integrate it into their devices.

tearmeapart writes (edited to add more details): Cloudflare is opening up its security and speed-focused mobile VPN service called WARP and WARP Plus to the general public. WARP is a mobile app for Android and Apple to establish a VPN to CloudFlare's huge global network. Cloudflare is promising:
1. No user-identifiable log data to disk;
2. No selling browsing data;
3. No need to provide any personal information
4. Regularly get audited. This is the second time Cloudflare is launching Warp. The VPN builds on Cloudflare's existing mobile app 1.1.1.1, which encrypts domain name system connections. But Warp goes beyond this protection to encrypt the whole journey from your device to a web server and back -- even if the website itself still isn't offering HTTPS web encryption. And all of this happens quickly, without draining your battery, and without complicated setup. In an interview with Wired, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said: Yeah, what we thought was going to be easy back in April turned out to be a lot harder than we expected. We had been testing this primarily in San Francisco and Austin and London, which is where the teams that were working on this are based. But as soon as users started to get anywhere that didn't have a fairly reliable internet connection, just all hell broke loose. The report adds: In describing the hurdles Cloudflare faced getting Warp off the ground, John Graham-Cumming, the company's chief technology officer, and Dane Knecht, its head of product strategy, note that many of the challenges came from dealing with interoperability issues between mobile device models, operating system versions, and different mobile network and Wi-Fi configurations around the world. For example, Warp is built on a newer secure communication protocol for VPNs known as WireGuard, which isn't ubiquitous yet and therefore isn't always natively supported by devices. The team also faced challenges dealing with web protocols and standards that are implemented inconsistently across different wireless carriers and internet service providers around the world. Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 focuses on encrypting DNS connections specifically, but Warp aims to encompass everything in one protected tunnel. Keeping everything together as data traverses the labyrinth of servers that make up the internet, including Cloudflare's own massive network, was tough. Warp is free to use without any bandwidth caps or limitations. But Warp Plus, which is being offered through a monthly subscription fee, offers a "faster version of Warp that you can optionally pay for. The fee for Warp Plus varies by region and is designed to approximate what a McDonald's Big Mac would cost in the region. On iOS, the Warp Plus pricing as of the publication of this post is still being adjusted on a regional basis, but that should settle out in the next couple days. Warp Plus uses Cloudflare's virtual private backbone, known as Argo, to achieve higher speeds and ensure your connection is encrypted across the long haul of the Internet. We charge for it because it costs us more to provide," the company said in the blog post.

Microsoft's Xbox One game streaming service, Project xCloud, will get a public preview test in October, letting select testers play games like Gears 5 and Halo 5: Guardians on phones and tablets. From a report: The public preview of Project xCloud will initially be limited to players in the United States, United Kingdom, and Korea. Halo 5: Guardians, Gears 5, Killer Instinct, and Sea of Thieves will be playable as part of the preview, and Microsoft says it will add more titles over time. Testers won't need to own the Xbox One games available during the Project xCloud preview in order to play them. Players interested in taking part in the Project xCloud public preview can register for the closed beta based on their country. Microsoft says it will roll out invitations in a phased approach, starting with a "small number of participants," and opening it up to more players over time. Project xCloud's public preview test will initially be limited to Android devices running Android 6.0 or higher with Bluetooth 4.0. Participants will also need a Microsoft account and a Bluetooth-enabled Xbox One wireless controller. Project xCloud will be compatible with WiFi and cellular networks, and Microsoft says it's working with a number of cellular providers worldwide: SK Telecom in Korea, T-Mobile in the U.S., and Vodafone in the U.K.

A U.S. House panel unveiled bipartisan legislation this week that would authorize $1 billion for small and rural wireless providers to replace network equipment from companies including Huawei and ZTE that lawmakers say pose a national security risk. From a report: The legislation is similar to a bill approved in July by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee that would authorize about $700 million in grants to remove Huawei equipment, in a bid to boost the security of the U.S. telecommunication network's supply chain. The top Democrats and Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said in a joint statement the bill would protect the "nation's communications networks from foreign adversaries by helping small and rural wireless providers root-out suspect network equipment and replace it with more secure equipment."

"An electric patch makes hairless mice grow fur and may reverse balding in men when fitted inside a specially designed baseball cap," reports New Scientist: At the moment, men who don't want to go bald can treat hair loss using minoxidil lotion, finasteride pills or hair transplant surgery. But minoxidil doesn't work for everyone, finasteride can reduce sex drive and fertility, and surgery is painful and expensive. Stimulating the scalp with electric pulses has also been shown to restore hair growth. However, it isn't a very practical treatment because it involves being hooked up to a machine or battery pack for several hours a day.

To overcome this hurdle, Xudong Wang at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues have developed a wireless patch that sticks to the scalp and generates electric pulses by harnessing energy from random body movements. The 1-millimetre-thick plastic patch contains layers of differently-charged materials that produce electricity when they come into contact and separate again -- a phenomenon known as the triboelectric effect. When the flexible patch was attached to the backs of rats, their movements caused it to bend and stretch, activating the triboelectric effect. The resulting electric pulses stimulated faster hair re-growth in shaved rats compared with minoxidil lotion and inert saline solution...

Wang also tested the patch on his father, who has been going bald for the past few years. "It helped him to grow a lot of new hairs after one month," Wang says. His team has now designed a baseball cap that encases the whole scalp in the triboelectric materials to stimulate hair growth, and is seeking approval to test it in men in a clinical trial... However, the hat will only work in men who are currently losing their hair or have recently become bald, because the skin loses its ability to generate new hair follicles after many years of baldness, Wang says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: AT&T is arguing that its customers can't sue the company for selling location data to bounty hunters, according to recently filed court records. AT&T says the customers signed contracts that force them into arbitration, meaning consumers have to settle complaints privately with the company rather than in court. The filing is in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The issue circles around mandatory arbitration; that is, forcing consumers to settle complaints privately with the company rather than in court.

"Each time they entered into a new Wireless Customer Agreement with AT&T, they [the plaintiffs] not only agreed to AT&T's Privacy Policy but also agreed to resolve their disputes with AT&T -- including the claims asserted in this action -- in arbitration on an individual basis," AT&T's filing from last week reads. When the plaintiffs, who are AT&T customers, accepted AT&T's terms and conditions when, say, purchasing a new phone, they also agreed specifically to the arbitration clause, AT&T argues. The Arbitration Agreement on AT&T's website reads, "AT&T and you agree to arbitrate all disputes and claims between us. This agreement to arbitrate is intended to be broadly interpreted." The class-action lawsuit comes after multiple investigations found that T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T were selling access to their customers' location data to bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it. All of the telecom giants have since stopped selling the data, but that hasn't stopped lawyers from filing class-action lawsuits.

According to The Wall Street Journal, AT&T is exploring parting with its DirecTV unit as customers are leaving the service in droves. From the report: The telecom giant has considered various options, including a spinoff of DirecTV into a separate public company and a combination of DirecTV's assets with Dish Network, its satellite-TV rival, the people said. AT&T may ultimately decide to keep DirecTV in the fold. Despite the satellite service's struggles, as consumers drop their TV connections, it still contributes a sizable volume of cash flow and customer accounts to its parent. AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 for $49 billion. The company's shrinking satellite business is under a microscope after activist investor Elliott Management Corp. disclosed a $3.2 billion stake in AT&T last week and released a report pushing for strategic changes. Elliott has told investors that AT&T should unload DirecTV, The Wall Street Journal has previously reported.

Jettisoning DirecTV would be an about-face for Mr. Stephenson, who billed the acquisition of the company as a bold move to diversify beyond the wireless phone business and tap into a growing media industry. The deal made AT&T the largest distributor of pay TV channels, ahead of Comcast. DirecTV is now part of an entertainment and consumer wireline unit that made up 27% of AT&T's $173.3 billion 2018 revenue. For Mr. Stephenson, who has helmed AT&T for 12 years, parting ways with DirecTV would be an acknowledgment that a major cornerstone of his diversification strategy hasn't gone as planned. It also adds pressure for AT&T to deliver on the promise of the Time Warner deal. Mr. Stephenson has signaled he is prepared to step down as CEO as soon as next year, the Journal reported last week. The Journal goes on to say that AT&T may ultimately decide to keep DirecTV because of "AT&T's towering net debt load, which stood at more than $160 billion earlier this year. The cash generated by the pay-TV giant has helped pay down that debt and fueled other investments in the rest of the company."

"Any spinoff of DirecTV would be unlikely until mid-2020 at the earliest, five years after the deal closed, to make it a tax-efficient transaction for AT&T," the report adds.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization that oversees implementation of the Wi-Fi standard, is launching its official Wi-Fi 6 certification program. "That might sound boring, but it means the Wi-Fi 6 standard is truly ready to go, and tech companies will soon be able to advertise their products -- mostly brand new ones -- as certified to properly support Wi-Fi 6," reports The Verge. From the report: So the point of Wi-Fi 6 is to boost speeds within a crowded network. The theoretical maximum speed for Wi-Fi is increasing, too -- to 9.6 Gbps from 3.5 Gbps -- but those numbers don't really matter since you'll never get them at home. What matters is that Wi-Fi 6 has a bunch of tools allowing it to operate faster and deliver more data at once, so the speeds you actually get will be higher than before. Those gains will be most noticeable on crowded networks, where the efficiency improvements will make up for the higher Wi-Fi demands. (Wi-Fi 6 also mandates a major security improvement.)

Really, though, today's launch is largely a formality. The Wi-Fi certification program -- while important, and very much marking the beginning of the Wi-Fi 6 era -- isn't required, and companies have been rolling out Wi-Fi 6 devices for months that likely work just fine. But the Wi-Fi Alliance is made up of members of the tech industry big and small, and its actions represent what wireless features and technologies they're interested in delivering, so this is a clear sign that Wi-Fi 6 has arrived. All that said, this week's biggest news for Wi-Fi 6 has no immediate connection to the Alliance: it's that the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro go on sale, and both support Wi-Fi 6. That's going to quickly put millions of Wi-Fi 6 devices into people's hands, meaning adoption of the new tech will very suddenly be well underway.

According to leaker and former Apple blogger Sonny Dickson, the iPhone 11 lineup includes the necessary hardware for a two-way charging feature that was widely rumored for the devices, but Apple has disabled the feature on the software end. MacRumors reports: For months ahead of their unveiling, the latest iPhones were rumored to feature a Qi-based device-to-device charging feature, allowing for an Apple Watch, AirPods, and other accessories to charge on the back of the iPhones. The feature was expected to be similar to Wireless PowerShare on Samsung's Galaxy S10. The centered Apple logo on the iPhone 11 models was even believed to be partly intended to help customers know where to place their AirPods, Apple Watch, or other accessories to charge on the back of the iPhone.

Just hours before Apple's event this week, however, noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the feature appeared to have been canceled. In a note seen by MacRumors, Kuo said the feature was possibly abandoned because "the charging efficiency may not meet Apple's requirements." Teardowns of the iPhone 11 models will soon confirm whether the two-way charging hardware is in fact present in the devices. Deliveries to customers and in-store availability will begin Friday, September 20.

T-Mobile has a feature that gives its customers more protection from hackers trying to steal their phone number, but you probably don't know it exists because the company doesn't advertise it publicly and won't even talk about it. From a report: It's called "NOPORT" and, in theory, it makes it a bit harder for criminals to hijack phone numbers with an attack known as "SIM swapping," a type of social engineering that is increasingly being used to steal people's phone numbers. SIM swapping attackers usually trick wireless providers into giving them control of a target's phone number by impersonating the victim with a company's customer support representatives -- usually on a phone call. T-Mobile's NOPORT feature makes this harder by requiring customers to physically come to a store and present a photo ID in order to request their number to be ported out to a different carrier or a new SIM card.

In theory, this should make it impossible for someone to do a SIM swap (also known as SIM hijacking or port-out scam) over the phone. But it's unclear whether all T-Mobile customers can have NOPORT or how effective it really is. T-Mobile doesn't even inform customers that it exists. I learned about it from a tipster, and then confirmed that it is indeed real. I was able to activate the feature on my own T-Mobile account by calling customer service and asking for it to be put on the account, but the company has declined to answer specific questions about the feature.