Apple News Plus was launched by the Apple company 2 days ago to give users the opportunity to buy subscriptions to newspapers and magazines. Apple News Plus was presented as a premium service by Apple, costing $9.99 per month, and offering access to a wide range of newspapers and magazines that would cost about $8000 annually if purchased separately.
Apple News Plus the content of the platform is not protected in any way with DRM technology, so anyone can download newspapers and magazines in PDF format, if they know the links to them. A well-known application developer for the iOS platform managed to demonstrate how easily this can be done by downloading PDFs for some of the magazines in Apple News Plus.
Apple News Plus was BROKEN IMMEDIATELY after Launch
Apple News Plus has integrated in an application file and links to download any kind of content offered by Apple's subscription-only partners. All this information was discovered in the Apple News application for macOS, which does not benefit from the same protection as that for the iPhone, where analyzing this data would be impossible.
It gets better! Even without a subscription, the magazine preview in Apple News downloads a manifest which happens to list all the pages. All of which, hosted in public, sans any protection. So it takes minutes to write a tool that downloads an entire magazine issue page by page pic.twitter.com/anh4BoGKN6
- Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) March 26, 2019
Apple News Plus is available in macOS in an application that seems to have been ported from iOS, and Apple's engineers don't seem to have protected it properly. Of course, Apple will solve the problems in a future update for the application, but those who now have the links for Apple News Plus, will be able to enjoy the newspapers and magazines offered at the beginning for free.
