iCloud

The death of passwords is at hand, or at least that's what proponents of biometrics security would like to say. It might be a while before it becomes as commonplace as the password field but every small step takes us closer. The next small step will seemingly come from Apple who is now testing ways to more securely and more conveniently log into iCloud.com using not strong passwords but stronger fingers and faces instead.

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The three big tech companies, namely Google, Apple, and Microsoft, can best be described as being best frenemies. They are rivals and critics in the industry but also can't but help cooperate with each other to some extent. Usually that involves making services and apps available on the others' platforms even if they're dying to keep them exclusive. The latest proof of that unavoidable cooperation is the all new iCloud app for Windows that has just became available on Microsoft's app Store.

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It's not been a great week for cloud behemoths, with Apple's iCloud the latest online service to suffer embarrassing downtime in the past few days. More than four hours passed with users complaining of being unable to access files stored in iCloud Drive, synchronize their calendars, and more.

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Gaming on an iPhone or an iPad could get a lot more interesting if this morning's news of an Apple game subscription pans out. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple's plans include a subscription service for games - something like Netflix, but for mobile gaming titles. This sort of subscription service is already live for other platforms - like NVIDIA's GeForce NOW - though that's for full-power AAA gaming titles streamed from NVIDIA's gaming PCs on the GeForce NOW cloud service.

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Windows 10’s October 2018 major update, a.k.a. version 1809, is turning out to be quite the nightmare, most especially for users. It was rolled out early lost month with a nefarious file-deleting bug that allegedly affected only a small number of users. Microsoft has since pulled out the update and re-released it but the nightmare is far from over. The latest is a still unfixed bug that is causing problems for iCloud users trying to sync their shared albums.

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It's not unusual these days for some popular Internet service to experience an outage. Many of the big ones last a few hours at most. The most recent that drove the Internet nuts was YouTube, which went back up in around an hour. Unless your livelihood depends on YouTube, however, that may have not had much practical impact. When some of Apple's iCloud services like Documents, Backup, and even Sign-in go down for almost half a day, however, you can be forgiven if you find it odd there wasn't much uproar over it.

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Apple doesn't really offer any free trials for its iCloud services, but it seems a rare promotion is being offered ahead of this year's new iPhone models. New and existing iPhone users can get two months of iCloud's 200GB of storage for free, which is a hefty amount of space but not for very much time. The promotion is only available in the US, unfortunately, as it requires users subscribe to one of the four big carriers (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint).

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Apple would really like you to start paying it for iCloud, and it's rolling out a new promo to encourage users to get a taste for a bigger chunk of online storage. The new promotion applies to users who are currently taking advantage of the free iCloud storage tier, in an attempt to coax them into making more use of the paid services.

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Your iCloud data may in fact be living on Google servers, Apple has quietly confirmed, as new security documentation details exactly what part of the cloud the iOS and macOS uses for its remote storage. Apple's iCloud service launched in late 2011, as the company's remote storage option for documents, photos, and more.

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Apple has quietly brought back one of its most eagerly-anticipated - and sorely missed - messaging features in the iOS 11.3 beta 1, which has been released for developers today. Messages in iCloud had been part of the original iOS 11 release back in mid-2017, promising to not only synchronize all of your conversations more effectively across any device signed into the same Apple ID, but also save space in the process.

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Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away. One of the most compelling features for iPhone users has been unexpectedly removed in the latest beta version of iOS, with Messages in iCloud being axed - at least for the moment. The surprise removal occurred with the release of iOS 11 beta 5 today, with Apple yet to comment on why it disappeared.

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Computing devices are getting more powerful, more varied, and more ubiquitous, but the data storage in these devices hasn't changed that much. We are still beholden to the HDDs, SSDs, and eMMCs or UFS of yesteryears. In fact, the storage story has become even more complicated because each device has its own storage that you have to manage or keep in sync with other devices.

Enter cloud computing and cloud storage, with its promise of being able to access your data anytime, anywhere. Well, as long as you have an Internet connection, that is. It is an inescapable fact of modern day computing life and it pays to know the choices you have. Here are ten of the top cloud storage options this half of the year.

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