Earlier this week, Apple launched its Apple News+ service, which offers magazine subscriptions and top news publishers at a price of $9.99 per month across US and Canada. However, it seems that the iPhone-maker has not secured the service well enough and one can easily download magazines without actually subscribing to the service, MSpoweruser reported. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith was able to discover a key flaw in the way Apple News+ service works on iMacs and MacBooks and shared his results on Twitter. Watch our iPad Pro 2018 review He observed that the magazines in Apple News+ are not using the company's FairPlay technology, that offers digital rights management (DRM) tools, which Apple uses to protect copyrighted audios on its iTunes store. While iOS limits the way one can tweak or tinker with apps on iPhone or iPad, the desktop version of News+ app is quite different. Apple News+ Magazines doesn't seem to use FairPlay (😐), and preloads the first few pages of PDF-based issues regardless of whether you have a subscription (🤦♂️). Thus, you can just rip them out of the cache on macOS and reconstitute the original PDF. Kinda irresponsible pic.twitter.com/FudLFjngZe — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) March 25, 2019 It seems the News+ app preloads the pages from magazine's PDF versions and stores them in a cache folder of macOS where they can be accessed and used to reconstruct the PDF itself. While this is valid for the first few pages of every issue, Smith observed that News+ also downloads a list of all the pages with their unique URLs, which are hosted publicly and can, therefore, be accessed directly once you have the specific address. Also read Apple TV+, Apple News+, Apple Arcade and a credit card: Everything announced at Apple’s March 2019 event Smith created a basic tool that goes through all the links and downloads all the pages, which later can be easily combined into a PDF. Apple launched a new streaming service at its event earlier this week, which is called Apple TV+ along with a paid games subscription called Apple Arcade. Both these services will roll out in fall 2019. Apple has not confirmed if the paid news subscription service will come to other countries.
