Category: Apple Insider

Revealed on Twitter on Saturday, Brandon Azad confirmed he was leaving Project Zero in favor of a position at Apple in the following week. He will be joining Apple to “continue my work improving Apple device security.”

Project Zero is Google’s security research team that concentrates on finding security issues and vulnerabilities in software, both in Google’s own products and of other major firms. The team works to improve the security of devices and software the general public uses by pointing out the issues to device producers, before performing an ethical disclosure of its findings.

This includes a collection of zero-click bugs in Apple’s Image I/O framework affecting all of Apple’s major platforms, and discovering exploits in hacked websites targeting iPhones.

Azad is known for his work on iOS issues, and has been credited in Apple’s patch notes for both iOS and macOS releases multiple times. By moving to Apple, Azad may be able to assist in plugging some of the security holes he finds externally before they get discovered by research teamd like Project Zero.

In tweets, Azad calls his time at Project Zero “amazing” and says it’s “been an honor to share in this wonderful mission.” His teammates were among “the kindest and smartest people I’ve met, and I’ve learned so much from them,” he adds, before thanking them and urging to “keep on hacking.”

Recently made available to watch via the Apple TV+ video streaming service, “Tiny World” is a nature documentary program that showcases the smaller creatures on the planet. The show, which is narrated and executive produced by Paul Rudd and made by filmmaker Tom Hugh-Jones, uses high production values and goes to great lengths to capture footage of the often hard to see wildlife.

In a behind-the-scenes video posted to the Apple TV YouTube channel, videographers for the show are seen setting up cameras in very close proximity to the creatures they want to film. For typical nature documentaries, cameras are set up at a distance and rely on zoom lenses so as to not disturb the creatures, but such techniques are largely impractical for “Tiny World.”

As well as using standard macro lenses, the team had to also employ lenses that are meant for “scientific purposes” to capture some of the extremely close-up shots. In some cases, such as filing thumbnail-sized strawberry poison-dart frogs wrestling, the creatures would sometimes interact with the lens itself, climbing on or inside as if it is part of the existing environment.

To capture footage the point of view of a goshawk flying through trees, a first-person-view drone was used, one reinforced to take the high-speed knocks from branches. One filmmaker also took three years to film a specific gecko in the wild, using a motion control rig to perform highly precise motion shots that are still cinematic at such a small scale.

The show compiles footage that took almost ten years to collect, filming over 200 species of animal. It has been compiled into six 30-minute episodes, which can be viewed on Apple TV+.

You have to go back to 2011 to find the last time that Apple didn’t bring out a new iPhone in the month of September. Even then, it was close — the iPhone 4s was announced on October 4, 2011.

So bumping the iPhone to October does have a precedent, but of course the coronavirus does not. And if Apple wasn’t able to bring out the “iPhone 12” on schedule, still it did a remarkable job releasing anything at all.

September 2020’s “Time Flies” event was another virtual one instead of the old in-person, on-stage, live presentations. Apple does these videos so extremely well that you can forget how hard they are to make, and you can forget how devices have to be ready to show in time for filming.

In its second longform video launch of the year, Apple again whisked us around Apple Park — with Craig Federighi having to duck out of our way — and released four major hardware releases. Plus there was a bundle of services, and a new fitness addition, too.

This was arguably the major announcement, the tentpole for the whole launch — or at least, according to Apple. The new Apple Watch Series 6 got a lot of attention, a lot of noise, and it is without question the very best Apple Watch ever made.

It’s also, without any question at all, the best smart watch that there is. And yet for all it added, for all the new health features and improvements, it wasn’t a giant leap forward.

Whereas the Apple Watch SE is likely to have more of an impact. Depending on how you look at it, the Apple Watch SE is an Apple Watch Series 6 with some lower-cost case options, and fewer key health features.

Or if you’re Apple, it’s the big step up from the Apple Watch Series 3. All of the comparisons Apple made were to that model, the oldest Apple Watch still being sold.

Apple also came as close as it ever does, or perhaps ever will, to using the word “cheap.” The Apple Watch SE is aimed at everyone who hasn’t yet got an Apple Watch, and for them the key feature is its lower cost.

That would always be a factor, but Apple added some extra leverage to the appeal of that lower cost by introducing Family Setup. Now for less than the price of an iPhone — and considerably less than the price of an Apple Watch Series 6 and an iPhone together — your children or elderly relatives could stay connected.

So Apple wants to spread the appeal wider, it wants to grow the market for Apple Watches. That’s hardly a new thing, but September’s event also seemed to press down hard on this with the new iPad releases.

It was expected that a new iPad would be announced, chiefly because it was clear from regulatory filings late in August that some were coming. However, Apple managed to make a big deal out of its updates to the regular 10.2-inch iPad — and then an even bigger deal about the new iPad Air 4.

That’s quite a feat that Apple managed. Here’s a brilliant new product, but then here’s one that’s even better. The new iPad Air 4 is indeed better than the new 2020 iPad, which shouldn’t be a surprise given their $270 price difference.

What perhaps was a surprise was how you can now make a really strong case that the iPad Air 4 is a better buy than the 11-inch iPad Pro. That costs $200 more and it does offer benefits, but so few that Apple might as well have put a sign up saying a refreshed 11-inch iPad Pro is coming soon.

Apple’s plan for its September event was less “Time Flies,” and more “Make Things Affordable.” That makes great sense given the current world situation, except that can’t be why Apple is doing it — or why it began doing it a surprisingly long time ago.

The Apple Watch SE follows the iPhone SE, and the MacBook Air, in keeping to Apple’s repeated emphasis on quality, but adding a new cost-conscious element. And Apple also brought that same approach to its services with the announcement of Apple One.

This is the reasonably long-rumored bundle of Apple services under one fee. It means you get ones you want, like Apple Music, together with ones you’re not that fussed about, like Apple Arcade, and in theory you pay less.

Apple is determined to keep us fit

In practice, the varieties of bundles that will be available, when this launches later in 2020, are pretty specific and limited. You may save, but you may not, and it all comes down to precisely the collection of Apple services that you have now — or that you want.

Perhaps tipping the scale, though, is how Apple’s list of services has now grown by one. Apple Fitness+ was announced this September and it is either $9.99 per month — or is included “for free” in the most expensive Apple One Premier bundle.

Apple One still sounds like a starship, but in the right circumstances, it is a good deal. If you don’t happen to use a mix of Apple services that would get you a saving, then that’s a shame, but you don’t lose out.

You might well have expected there to be some complaints from people who’d like more options for Apple One. But what you surely couldn’t have foreseen was that it would be Apple One that anybody would get upset about.

Spotify leapt on the new Apple One bundle as somehow being Apple stifling the market. Apple replied by saying “Eh?”

Okay, Spotify actually said that Apple One “threatens our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect.” And Apple actually responded that “customers can discover and enjoy alternatives to every one of Apple’s services.”

“We’re introducing Apple One because it is a great value for customers and a simple way to access the full range of Apple’s subscription services,” continued Apple. “We’ll be recommending the Apple One plan that saves you the most money based on the subscriptions you already have.”

In case that didn’t persuade Spotify, Apple also threw in the fact that “you can cancel anytime.”

Apple would’ve obviously liked September to be the month where its “Time Flies” event dominated, and where its lack of an iPhone launch wasn’t a problem. Instead, right alongside its launches, Apple got more and more of companies like Spotify basically dissing it.

None more so that Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, whose dispute with Apple goes back to August. In September, though, Epic Games first warned its users that Apple was going to shut off the use of Sign In With Apple — and then told them that Apple had backed down.

Apple told the US District Court for the Northern District of California that Epic Games was really just using all of this as a “marketing campaign” to boost flagging interest in Fortnite.

In a hearing, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers repeatedly said that the whole case was of Epic’s own doing. However, she also said that there were antitrust issues to consider.

The judge proposed that the case should go forward, and be decided in a jury trial. Apple had wanted that, but reportedly then agreed with Epic Games to have the case be decided without a jury, in order to speed proceedings.

But, speed is relative. The trial looks like it will start in July 2021, but the appeals and so forth may take years.

After months of people complaining about the App Store, and Apple attempting to defend it, the company rolled up its sleeves and amended its rules. Not by a giant amount, but one of the changes does mean that streaming game services could now be allowed.

Some users reported losing GPS tracking data in watchOS 7

It wasn’t just big companies who had complaints, though, as some Apple Watch users were seeing problems too.

The problems with Apple Watch failing to record GPS data when you’d just been on a nine-mile hike, were down to issues with watchOS 7. However, overall the reception for both that and iOS 14 have been mostly very positive.

Apple did make developers choke on their lunches, though, when it decided to announce the imminent availability of iOS 14 during the “Time Flies” event. Developers suddenly had 24 hours to make their final updates to ensure compatibility, and few made it.

Predictably, but still disappointingly, developers did get criticisms from users for not being ready for iOS 14.

Whereas Apple got a lot of praise for how iOS 14 now let users choose to replace key Apple apps with third-party ones that, presumably, were ready. While there are still limitations and security conditions, Apple has made it possible to switch away from Mail, and Safari.

It’s a bigger internal iOS change than it might appear, though, and it wasn’t done without some bumps along the road.

You could say the same thing about TikTok in September, which initially seemed to have been given a choice by President Trump. Either sell to a US company by September 20, or be banned.

In August, it had been less than the clear choice it seemed, but in September it became simultaneously clearer and more acrimonious. TikTok secured a deal with a US consortium of Walmart and Oracle, but President Trump said no anyway.

Then he said yes. But a judge also stopped his executive order banning WeChat on similar grounds, and on the same date.

This story keeps going, but on the surface it appears to be an issue between the Government, TikTok, and WeChat. It’s potentially crucial for Apple, though, as a WeChat ban is likely to severely damage iPhone sales in China.

WeChat on iOS, for now.

September also saw another deal which doesn’t involve Apple directly, but which the company will have been watching carefully. As we all wait for Apple Silicon to launch with Apple’s own design of ARM processor, the ARM company has been sold.

Nvidia announced that it is buying the company for $40 billion. It plans to build an Artificial Intelligence supercomputer.

AppleInsider‘s reviews of the month tend to ignore rumors that circulated at the time. Often by the end of the month, such rumors have been confirmed or when there’s an Apple event, either proved or disproved.

However, September did see a lot of predictions about the future and if most of them will be settled whenever Apple releases the “iPhone 12” range, one will not be. It’s the question of what will happen to Tim Cook.

In September, we learned that Apple is increasingly looking at its succession plan for whenever Cook steps down.

Just as happened when Steve Jobs handed over to Cook, we can only really know that Apple does have a plan, we can’t know what it is. But speculation is that Cook’s obvious replacement is Jeff Williams, Apple’s Chief Operating Officer.

It won’t happen in October, though. Whereas the “iPhone 12” launch will — and we can get on with looking for more rumors about the “iPhone 13.”

The Digital Services Act is designed to curb anticompetitive behavior by major tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. It would mark the first significant overhaul to the EU’s standards for regulating the internet in two decades.

One proposed measure would be to force larger companies to share customer data with their smaller competitors.

According to the Financial Times, the draft features a line that states tech giants “shall not use data collected on the platform… for [their] own commercial activities… unless they [make it] accessible to business users active in the same commercial activities.”

It’s anticipated that many of the large companies will push back against the Digital Services Act. Google has gone on record stating that it believes the existing regulatory rules should be modernized, instead of providing entirely new frameworks.

They also claim that regulators are overestimating the power companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple have in the digital market. According to Google, the digital ecosystem is “extremely diverse and evolving rapidly.”

Regulators in Europe are drawing up a “blacklist” of activities that technology companies would be required to stop, as well as a “sliding scale” of penalties for non-compliance. Some of the antitrust rules include policies that prevent users from switching platforms or systems that force users to rely on a single service.

These two new mobile USB-C drives are major upgrades over what were already well recieved drives including better performance, better warranties, and higher security.

The most impressive of the two new devices is the SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD. Relying on custom NVMe technology, SanDisk says it can get up 2000 megabytes per second read and write speeds, up from 1050MB per second.

It retains the popular design with an aluminum core that acts both as a rigid structure as well as a heat sink. It is coated in liquid silicone for good grip and two-meter drop protection and carries an IP55 water and dust resistance rating.

Another change is the move to 256-bit AES hardware encryption, rather than the software-based encryption it used to have.

The USB-C SanDisk Extreme Pro comes in a 2TB capacity at launch for $499 and a 1TB version will launch this holiday season.

The Pro version pushes the limits of an NVMe drive but may be above what’s necessary. That is where the SanDisk Extreme comes in. It is cheaper and still has twice the performance of its predecessor.

SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2

Many aspects of the SanDisk Extreme have been upgraded, including from a SATA SSD to NVMe media like the Pro. The move to NVMe as well as the move from USB 3.1 Gen 2 to USB 3.2 Gen 2 aids a massive boost in performance. It has improved from 550MB per second to 1050MB per second read speed and 1000MB per second write speed.

SanDisk has increased the warranty now to five years and the drive is protected with two meters of drop resistance and an IP55 rating. It too has 256-bit AES hardware encryption for securing your files.

The SanDisk Extreme V2 is available in 500GB and 1TB sizes at launch for $119 and $199 respectively. A 2TB configuration is arriving this holiday season.

If you blinked in confusion at the claim widgets were this great security risk, we’re with you. If you looked at your iPhone and wondered what a calendar widget could possibly do with the information that you tapped on it once, we’re still right there with you.

The idea, though, is that having installed a rogue widget, it doesn’t just notice when you tap on it. Instead — and trust us, we cannot underline enough that this is such nonsense that we want to use a stronger word — it enables a keylogger.

That is, after you’ve installed this, anything you type is recorded and sent to a nefarious developer. All your passwords, all your account details, every one of those Messages — who knows, maybe even including emoji — now in the hands of a bad actor.

If there’s a department in Apple collating reactions to all of the new features in iOS 14, they’ve just opened a document they’ve called “Give us strength.” They might also be scribbling into it that you just can’t please some people.

Apple was doomed for not having Android-style widgets, now it’s destroying our lives and wrecking our children’s future. Or something.

We don’t come to knock widgets, they are a great and useful addition to iOS that we are all having a very good time playing with. But really the only thing that is different between a widget and the app icons we’ve had since 2007 is the size, and what they use that size for.

Aside from Apple’s own Clock app, which has always displayed the current time, apps show an icon which you tap on to open the app. Widgets show very big icons which you tap on to open the app.

No widget does anything else but show big icons and open an app when you tap on them. And that’s because no widget can do anything else.

The big icons are great because instead of just being an app developer’s logo, they can be actually useful. Widget icons can display text, images, news headlines, anything.

It is precisely this which makes them useful — and it is precisely that which makes them actually slightly less useful than you’d hope. It would be brilliant to be able to tap on, say, a Notes or a Drafts 5 widget and start writing something immediately.

You can’t.

A widget may display lots of different information, but it is only displaying it, and it is only waiting for you to tap to open its app. Every widget might as well be an app’s icon, because there is nothing else going on here at all.

Apple’s logo for WidgetKit, the developer resource for making widgets.

We are tempted to say, “search us,” but there are reasons some people have thought widgets are doing this, and why others have agreed they must be. The first is that on upgrading to iOS 14, some users are getting notifications that their passwords have been compromised.

This is not iOS 14 shouting out your passwords to everyone, it’s iOS 14 doing a good job of notifying you of a problem. If you’re really lucky, it’s a recent problem. More likely, you’ve been using passwords on sites that have long since been compromised.

Then most people who are adamantly saying online that widgets are evil, are saying it because their phone slowed down suspiciously when they installed the widget.

They didn’t install the widget. They installed iOS 14 and then they installed a third-party widget, or they added one of Apple’s built-in ones.

The key thing there is iOS 14. Any update of the operating system is a huge difference and it will regularly slow down your device at first while it rebuilds the indexes that make search work. The indexes that mean when you want to launch an app, iOS knows where it is and opens it immediately.

People who think it’s more than this are convinced that anyone capturing your keystrokes must have done it so badly that they visibly slow your phone. People who are certain that this is what happened have even been known to completely wipe their iPhones of all data and start again from nothing.

Yes. Your iPhone will be faster. It would be faster anyway if you’d just waited a while, but a completely wiped iPhone with nothing on it will feel faster because there’s no search index rebuilding going on. Because there’s nothing there to search.

We would love for widgets to be more interactive, to be more than posters for their main apps, but they’re not. Right now, they cannot be.

It’s not as if it’s arduous having to swipe left or right on your Apple Watch to change the face. Not unless you have 30 faces and 6 of them are the Infograph one with different complications to suit different jobs you do.

Now, though, with watchOS 7 and iOS 14, you can tell your Apple Watch to display Infograph number 3 on Mondays, Modular number 29 from Wednesday-Thursday. Or to just switch from any face with complications to a simple one at the end of the working day.

It’s all done via Shortcuts, and whether you’ve ever or never used iOS’s Shortcuts before, this is about as simple as that gets. You can choose to have the face change at certain times — or certain locations.

Part 1 – set when (or where) you want the Watch face to change

1. Open Shortcuts on your iPhone
2. Tap the Automation tab at the bottom of the screen
3. Tap the plus sign at top right
4. Choose Create Personal Automation
5. Tap to select Time of Day
6. Choose from Sunrise, Sunset, or Time of Day to tap in a specific time
7. Choose whether to repeat this Daily, Weekly, or Monthly
8. Tap Next
9. Tap Add Action
10. Scroll or search for Set Watch Face and tap that
11. Tap on the box at the end of the words Set active watch face to
12. Choose from the list of faces that are on your Apple Watch
13. Tap Next
14. Turn off Ask Before Running
15. Confirm by tapping Don’t Ask in the dialog that appears
16. Tap Done

You may hit a problem when you reach the section where you have to choose what face you want to switch to., because the faces are shown to you in a list by name. The name is that of Apple’s official title, and if you do have six Infograph faces then the list will just say, “Infograph” six times.

However, the list is in order of how the faces are arranged on your Watch. The top one on the list is the one that you get if you swipe all the way to the left.

Note, too, that if you choose Sunrise or Sunset instead of a specific time of day, you’ll be prompted to say more. You can choose exactly sunrise or sunset, and the change will happen at the right time any day, or you can elect to choose options such as 45 minutes before sunrise.

Then it’s important to be sure you switch off Ask Before Running. If you don’t, then at sunrise, sunset, or whatever time you’ve specified, the face won’t change. Instead, your iPhone will ask you if you want to run this Shortcut.

That rather takes away the whole point of automation, having to manually say yes, you want something to happen automatically. Curiously, Apple does not give you the option of this Ask Before Running if you instead want the face to changed depending on your location.

Part 2 – set what face you want to change to

1. Open Shortcuts on your iPhone
2. Tap the Automation tab at the bottom of the screen
3. Tap the plus sign at top right
4. Choose Create Personal Automation
5. Tap to select either Arrive or Leave
6. Tap on the word Choose
7. Search for a map location, tap Current Location, or choose from recent destinations
8. Tap Done
9. Choose between Anytime or Time Range to specify what times or days you want this change to happen on
10. Tap Next
11. Tap Add action
12. Scroll or search for Set Watch Face and tap that
13. Tap on the box at the end of the words Set active watch face to
14. Choose from the list of faces that are on your Apple Watch
15. Tap Next
16. Tap Done

Now, for instance, you can have your Watch automatically switch faces when you leave home in the morning, or leave work in the afternoon, but not on Thursdays. This is how you can have your Watch face switch to one that has travel apps, or podcast ones, for your commute, and so on.

Note that whenever you do it in this particular way, you are telling the Watch to change to a particular face, and that’s it. You can’t tell it to change to that for an hour, for instance, and then change back. Not using this method.

So if you do want a face to appear only during work hours or just on the weekends, the easiest thing is to do all of this twice. Once for the start when you want the face to change to something, then once again for the ending time or the ending location when you want it to change to something else.

There is a way to make it start and stop automatically, though. It involves diving a little deeper into Shortcuts.

You can have your Watch face change every time you go to a particular theater.

That Add action step is how you make any Shortcut. Actions are the steps and the building blocks of all Shortcuts automations, and as well as making something happen, they can be used to check things.

You can only use one action when you go through the Automation step, but you can have have action be Run Shortcut. Then you can build up as complex a Shortcut as you like, and have it automatically be run when you leave or arrive somewhere, or at certain times of day.

So your shortcut could first check whether today is a weekday or the weekend, for instance, and then switch faces. Or look to see if it’s Wednesday afternoon, your calendar is empty, the surfing conditions are great, then change your Watch face to the Solar Dial — and text your partner to say you’ll be late.

That can be arduous to set up, especially when you compare it to swiping left or right on your Watch. But it is also excellent fun and what’s more, when you’ve done it once, you never have to do it again.

From then on, a single glance at your Watch will remind you that you should be at your desk or that you could be out at the beach.

The latest in an occasional AppleInsider series, looking at the world of Apple-related crime.

Surveillance video surfaced in mid-September of police from New York City’s Department of Homeless Services handcuffing a Queens man after he photographed them without masks. The video also shows the officers pulling off the man’s mask and attempting to unlock his iPhone with FaceID, but the man said he was able to swerve out of their way.

According to Patch, which obtained and published the video, the footage contradicts earlier statements by the officers, who have since been suspended.

An alleged drug dealer in Wisconsin is accused of beating a man with a glass bong, as part of an alleged home invasion that included the theft of two iPhones and an iPad. The Racine Journal Times reports the incident arose out of a dispute over THC vaping cartridges, and the stolen items include an iPhone 7, an Apple iPhone XS Max, an iPad Pro, an Xbox One, and $2,700.

The accused assailant, who is only 18 years old, was charged with two felony counts of armed robbery, a felony count of substantial battery, and a felony count of burglary of a building or dwelling, the newspaper said.

Forbes reported September 16 that Apple agreed to hand over iCloud data to the FBI, to apprehend a man accused of firebombing two police cars in Seattle. The firebombing took place on May 30, during the early days of the protests following the killing of George Floyd.

The data included screenshots of both the suspect in the act, a list of “ingredients” for a Molotov cocktail, and even incriminating videos. The man was arrested and brought up on federal charges of unlawful possession of a destructive device and arson.

A student who lives in Malaysia lost his iPhone for a day in early September and feared that it had been stolen. But it’s not the kind of theft that’s going to lead to an arrest, because the phone was actually taken by a monkey, who proceeded to take several selfies.

Per The Hindustan Times, the man found the phone after losing it, and a relative suggested that he check the photo library for clues, since more than one iPhone theft has been solved that way in the past. But instead, the culprit turned out to be a monkey, who had retrieved the phone from a jungle behind the man’s house:

Police in Calgary said September 15 that a cache of 192 smartphones was stolen from an area warehouse in August, and that customers should be aware of any phone they buy and make sure they’re not stolen.

In addition to phones from Samsung, LG, and Huawei, the missing phones include iPhone SE, iPhone XR, and iPhone 11 models. Police added that the phones cannot be activated on a wireless network, although they could work with Wi-Fi.

Those who followed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation closely may remember that multiple people indicted by Mueller, including Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, were incriminated by material found in their iCloud accounts. Now, there’s controversy related to the iPhone security habits of Mueller’s team.

Per Fox Business, Congressman Doug Collins of Georgia on September 15 demanded that Tim Cook provide information about iPhones belonging to Mueller’s staff, following the release of Justice Department records showing that several members of Mueller’s team wiped their iPhones due to “forgotten passcodes, irreparable screen damage, loss of the device, intentional deletion or other reasons.”

Nefarious as the wiping of the phones may sound to Mueller skeptics, journalist Julian Sanchez found a note in a report from the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General which stated that the office investigating the origins of the Russia investigation was able to get most of the data it needed. In addition, per that report, “the [Justice] Department routinely resets mobile devices to factory settings when the device is returned from a user to enable that device to be issued to another user in the future.”

A police officer in Wisconsin was at a nightclub investigating a stolen iPhone when an apparently drunk driverstruck his squad car. The incident, according to Patch, took place at 3 a.m. on September 12, and the driver was arrested.

Panyaza Lesufi, a regional member of the Executive Council in South Africa, claimed an iPad Pro with “sensitive information” was stolen from his state-owned BMW in a break-in.

Opera News reports Lesufi had parked his car at a country club.

An Ohio woman who was indicted on charges that she embezzled $65,000 from a Band Boosters club over three years used some of the money on an iPad and two laptops. According to The Dayton Daily News, the woman was the treasurer of the organization and was caught after her successor found discrepancies in financial records.

TikTok is facing a rapidly approaching deadline as Trump’s executive order calling for a ban of the popular social media app takes effect at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday. The company attempted to stop the measure by filing an emergency injunction with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia this week, and now the DOJ has responded.

The Justice Department argues that blocking the ban will “infringe on the President’s authority to block business-to-business economic transactions with a foreign entity in the midst of a declared national-security emergency,” reports The Verge. Today’s late-night filing was heavily redacted, but snippets show an aggressive defense of Trump’s order.

Referring to the supposed security threat that TikTok poses, the agency called Zhang Yiming, CEO of TikTok parent company ByteDance, a “mouthpiece” for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He is allegedly “committed to promoting the CCP’s agenda and messaging,” according to the DOJ.

The argument for banning TikTok in large part deals with user data, specifically where said information is stored. While a section detailing where the agency believes TikTok is holding U.S. data is redacted, a legible portion notes “US user data being stored outside of the United States presents significant risks in this case.”

TikTok is looking to avoid an all-out U.S. ban and is in the middle of hammering out a deal with Oracle. A tentative version of the agreement was approved “in concept” by Trump last week.

Terms of the arrangement call for Oracle and its partners to receive a 20% stake in a U.S. TikTok entity, with the remaining 80% held by ByteDance. Oracle will also be granted access to TikTok’s source code to ensure the software does not include backdoors. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week said the new business would be “controlled by Americans,” with ByteDance acting as a “passive shareholder.”

Following news of the deal, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross delayed enactment of Trump’s executive order by one week to Sept. 27.

As of watchOS 7, you can now buy and download faces for your Apple Watch. It’s not what users and developers have been wanting from the start, though, as it’s still not possible to entirely design every element of a face.

Apple’s limitations mean there’s only so much a third-party company can do. Ultimately, it comes down to offering images as backgrounds to Watch faces, just as you could do yourself from your Photos album.

However, we are just at the start of this. Apple is continuing to inch toward making the Apple Watch be a standalone device, and part of that was last year’s addition of the App Store.

This year it’s allowing the ability to share faces, and third-party companies are beginning to find ways of using this.

1. Open the App Store on your Apple Watch
2. Tap Search
3. Tap the microphone icon to dictate your search term
4. Dictate “watch faces” and tap Done
5. Scroll through the listings that appear
6. Tap Get to buy

How to find and buy Watch faces directly on Apple Watch

You can of course search for anything — and you can scribble your search instead of dictating. What tends to happen is that you either get no search results at all, or you get quite a long list.

The App Store on the Apple Watch is automatically filtering the results so that it only shows you what’s relevant. However, there are so many of these that it’s worth doing the search on your iPhone instead, and putting up with the odd non-Apple Watch app in the listings.

Unfortunately, at the moment you are going to have to turn to your iPhone at some point. Even though you can now share faces, and even though you can now buy them straight from the App Store, you can’t actually install them directly on Apple Watch.

Instead, your new Watch app will ask you to open the accompanying iPhone app. This is a bit messy, and it’s not helped by how some Watch face developers word their instructions.

Equally, some apps we tried were clunky to use. Ultimately, though, they all ask you to select a face, and then they open the iPhone’s Watch app. Just as with sharing a face from an individual, you’re then walked through adding that face to your Watch — with or without the apps used in its complications.

In each case, the face you buy comes as part of an app which contains hundreds, or quite possibly thousands, of different ones. Clearly the choice of which watch face you’ll use is up to you, there’s no way to narrow down your options.

Unfortunately, there’s not much in the way of narrowing down which collections of faces you should get. However, most or possibly even all, such collection apps offer you a free trial.

There are also other ways to get new Watch faces rather than via the App Store. Now that Apple’s watchOS 7 enables sharing of faces, you can download them.

You’re going to have to use your iPhone to actually instal the new Watch face

You can expect that there are going to be a lot of sites offering Apple Watch faces. Again, none of them will contain very much in the way of customization. There won’t be any that have an entirely new and different arrangement or sizes of complications, for instance.

What you can already find on sites such as Facer — which is also available as an app — currently boil down to three types of Apple Watch face. The simplest is the photo-based one, which offers you assorted backgrounds for your Watch face.

Then there are ones where people have spent a lot of time finessing Apple’s own Watch faces to offer particularly good balances of color, complications, and so on. Lastly, there are ones that aim to offer useful functions.

They’re really just exploiting the larger complication on a face such as Apple’s Siri one. But there can be, for instance, a language face where every time you turn your wrist to look at the Watch, it displays a new phrase for you to learn.

It will still be better when Apple allows developers to create entirely new faces. And until that happens, you are in theory very limited in what you can get for your Watch.

However, if there are few different capabilities that developers can use, they are already exploiting those en masse. There are thousands upon thousands of Watch faces available to download, even for free.