10 Tips to Freshen up Your Old iPhone Instead of Buying the iPhone X

With the release of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, a lot of tech nerds, collectors and Apple cultists are upgrading ASAP. Whether they’re interested in the iPhone X’s edge-to-edge display, the iPhone 8’s snappy new a11 chip or simply to enjoy the tingling feeling they’ll get when someone sees they have the latest and greatest from Apple, they’re making sure they’re the first to get their hands on it. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with any of that.

But not everyone will be looking to upgrade. Some critics don’t see a large enough difference between the 7 and 8 to care, and others don’t see the justification of dropping a thousand buckaroos to cop the X. Trust me, I get it.

Just because you’re not looking to make the leap and upgrade yet doesn’t mean your current phone is trash. In fact, there’s a lot you could be doing to make sure you’re squeezing every ounce of sauce out of your old iPhone.

1. Disable Push Notifications

Power Clean

When you get push notifications delivered to your phone — from apps, game updates, the stock market, news, weather, emails, etc. — it makes your phone light up. It might not sound like that big a deal, but every email, every text message, every snap, every fucking Groupon deal (seriously Groupon, cut the shit), means energy is getting drained from your battery — even when you’re not using it.

If you go to Settings > Notifications, you can control exactly which apps have the ability to send you push notifications. Turn off the non-essentials, and keep as much of your battery life as possible.

2. Take a Look at Your Hard Drive Space

Your apps use a lot of space on your phone. And the “bulkier” and more bloated those apps become, they not only take up more physical storage on your hard drive, but they also take up more RAM and gum everything up. Some podcast apps save entire podcasts, even after you’re finished listening to them. Photo apps like Instagram will save duplicate photos to your Camera Roll, even if you don’t post the photo. Even Tinder takes increasingly more hard drive space with every match you get and conversation you start. Don’t even get me started on those bloated-ass games we all play for a week and then forget about. Of course, every single text message you send and receive is also stored on your iPhone’s hard drive.

All that crap takes up hard drive space and processing power that’s slowing your phone down and it’s all worth having a look at — and, potentially, deleting. Settings>General>iPhone Storage.

3. Disable Unnecessary Location Services

One of the coolest (and creepiest) features of your iPhone (and most smart phones, these days) is that it is always keeping tabs on where you are. Whether it’s to use the phone’s Find My Phone or Compass features, or whether it’s to grab a Lyft home from the bar, your phone always knows where you are. The problem is that certain apps request access to your location even when they’re not in direct use, and the more apps you have doing that at the same time, the more battery you’re going to use.

If you go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services, you can turn Location Services off completely, or you can go through each individual app on your phone and decide whether or not you want it to have access to your location. Some apps, like Uber, require users to have location services on at all times (regardless of whether they’re looking for a ride), while others, like Lyft, only require users’ locations when they’re actually using the app.

4. Give It a Makeover

Most of the stuff listed here are easy things you could do to make your older iPhone run and operate like new again, so I wanted to include at least one little bit about what you can do to make it appear different. The obvious answer is to buy a new case. Even though the 8 and X are out hogging the spotlight, developers are still putting out some pretty wild and creative cases for the older models. You can also fiddle with your background and lock images, give it a good cleaning, etc. Take pride in your stuff.

5. Turn off That Bullshit Background App Refresh

Your apps are always refreshing themselves in order to update the content in your respective feed. The idea is that when you launch them, you’re getting the most recent information. It sounds great in theory, but in practice, it means that some of these apps — Facebook, in particular — suck up a lot of battery in the background. If you notice your phone’s battery is getting weaker from prolonged use and charging periods (a side effect for every Lithium-ion battery, by the way), turning off Background App Refresh (Settings > General > Background App Refresh) will help ensure that apps are only consuming your precious battery life when you’re actually using them.

6. Close All Non-Essential Apps

This is an old one, but it’s still good as gold. If you were to look at how many apps are open on your phone right now, I bet you’d be shocked and perhaps even a little horrified at what you’d find. I did it just for the sake of proving my own point just now and found 42 apps open. Forty-fucking-two. Every single one of those apps is running in the background, sucking up tons of valuable battery life. Double tap Home to bring up the multi-tasking view, and then just swipe up on every app you want to exit. It’s that simple.

7. Lower Your Brightness

Apple iOS

Of course, there’s always the old “lower your brightness” trick. If you’re trying to conserve as much battery as possible, there’s absolutely zero reason to keep your screen brightness maxed out. The simple answer is: be smart. If you’re editing photos or reading an article, obviously up the brightness. But, when you’re done and don’t really need to use your home screen as a flashlight, toggle it down a bit. I keep my brightness at around 25% and I’ve never had a single problem with it.

8. Clear Your Safari Cache

Your Safari browser stores every single pieces of information you access from your phone on your phone’s hard drive. On one obvious end of the spectrum it’s convenient because pages will sometimes load faster, logins to your favorite sites are saved and your overall experience is generally pretty smooth. But when your phone gets to a point where it’s simply storing too much web data, it can make it things run sluggishly — particularly while web browsing. Sometimes you have to clear your history and free up the pipes a little bit. You can do that by going to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data. You’ll have to log back into all your favorite sites, but you’ll see an immediate difference.

9. Give It a Soft Reset

I’ll be the first person to tell you that technology can be a big pain in the ass a lot of the time. While we’re seeing new advancements every day, nothing is perfect — including the iPhone. Sometimes your phone will get caught up; certain apps won’t work right, things get buggy, apps stop responding completely, text functions don’t work, etc. Anything could go wrong at any time. If your iPhone is acting up and giving you grief, a soft reset will usually do the trick.

All you have to do is hold down the home and sleep buttonssimultaneously until the white Apple logo appears. It won’t delete any of your data and won’t revert back to factory settings, but it will completely reboot the phone, close out all apps and fire back up with a clean slate. A lot of the time, it’s exactly what the doctor ordered.

10. There’s an App for That

Power Clean

Of course, if all of that stuff sounds too good to be true (or too difficult for the not-so-technologically savvy out there), there are a ton of apps to help you get the most out of your phone. Apps like Power Clean-Remove, Battery Doctor and Battery Saver are just a few of the most popular apps out there.

via complex

Update your iPhone to avoid being hacked over Wi-Fi

It’s only been five days since Apple’s last security update for iOS, when dozens of serious security vulnerabilities were patched.

As we mentioned last week, the recent iOS 10.3 and macOS 10.12.4 updates included numerous fixes dealing with “arbitrary code execution with kernel privileges”.

Any exploit that lets an external attacker tell the operating system kernel itself what to is a serious concern that ought to be patched as soon as possible – hesitation is not an option.

After all, it’s the kernel that’s responsible for managing security in the rest of the system.

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Take this analogy with pinch of salt, but an exploit that gives a remote attacker regular user access is like planting a spy in the Naval corps with a Lieutenant’s rank.

If you can grab local administrator access, that’s like boosting yourself straight to Captain or Commodore; but if you can own the kernel (this is not a pun), you’ve landed among the senior Admiral staff, right at the top of the command structure.

So make sure you don’t miss the latest we-didn’t-quite-get-this-one-out-last-time update to iOS 10.3.1:

iOS 10.3.1

Released April 3, 2017

Wi-Fi

Available for: iPhone 5 and later, 
               iPad 4th generation and later, 
               iPod touch 6th generation and later

Impact:        An attacker within range may be able to 
               execute arbitrary code on the Wi-Fi chip

Description:   A stack buffer overflow was addressed 
               through improved input validation.

CVE-2017-6975: Gal Beniamini of Google Project Zero

This is rather different from the usual sort of attack – the main CPU, operating system and installed apps are left well alone.

Most network attacks rely on security holes at a much higher level, in software components such as databases, web servers, email clients, browsers and browser plugins.

So, attacking the Wi-Fi network card itself might seem like small beer.

After all, the attacks that won hundreds of thousands of dollars at the recent Pwn2Own competition went after the heart of the operating system itself, to give the intruders what you might call an “access all areas” pass.

Nevertheless, the CPU of an externally-facing device like a Wi-Fi card is a cunning place to mount an attack.

It’s a bit like being just outside the castle walls, on what most security-minded insiders would consider the wrong side of the moat and drawbridge.

But with a bit of cunning you may be able to position yourself where you can eavesdrop on every message coming in and out of the castle…

…all the while being ignored along with the many unimportant-looking peasants and hangers-on who’ll never have the privilege of entering the castle itself.

Better yet, once you’ve eavesdropped on what you wanted to hear, you’re already on the outside, so you don’t have to run the gauntlet of the guards to get back out to a place where you can pass your message on.

What to do?

As far as we know, this isn’t a zero-day because it was responsibly disclosed and patched before anyone else found out about it.

Cybercrooks have a vague idea of where to start looking now the bug that has been described, but there’s a huge gap between knowing that an exploitable bug exists and rediscovering it independently.

We applied the update as soon as Apple’s notification email arrived (the download was under 30MB), and we’re happy to assume that we’ve therefore beaten even the most enthusiatic crooks to the punch this time.

You can accelerate your own patch by manually visiting Settings | General | Software Update to force an upgrade, rather than waiting for your turn in Apple’s autoupdate queue.

via nakedsecurity