Kevin Beaumont (via Stephen Hackett): Microsoft told media outlets a hacker cannot exfiltrate Copilot+ Recall activity remotely. Reality: how do you think hackers will exfiltrate this plain text database of everything the user has ever viewed on their PC? Very easily, I have it automated. […] Microsoft are going to deliberately set cybersecurity back a decade & endanger customers by empowering low level criminals. Kevin Beaumont: Every few seconds, screenshots are taken. These are automatically OCR’d by Azure AI, running on your device, and written into an SQLite database in the user’s ..read more

Josh Whiton: A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out. But the new wired, iPhone, lightning-cable headphones didn’t work. Strange. […] By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed, until one of the girls says in Spanish, “You need to have bluetooth on.” Oh yes, everyone else nods in agreement. Wired headphones for iPhones definitely need bluetooth. […] With a little back and forth I realize that they don’t even conceptually know what bluetooth is, while ..read more

ICQ (via Hacker News): ICQ will stop working from June 26 You can chat with friends in VK Messenger, and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace Wes Davis: ICQ was started in 1996 by Israeli company Mirabilis, which AOL bought in 1998. ICQ grew to 100 million registered users at one point, at least according to a 2001 release from Time Warner, which had combined with AOL in a famously doomed merger. AOL sold the service to Digital Sky Technologies, the firm that owned VK, then known as Mail.ru, in 2010. Via Mark Christian: ICQ really was something special to me. I was absolutely glued to it for m ..read more

Elisha Fieldstadt (via Hacker News): An Apple AirTag led to the arrest of an airline subcontractor accused of stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of items from luggage at a Florida airport. […] Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputies investigating both suspected thefts cross-referenced Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport employees who lived near Kathy Court and found De Luca at his home. He was arrested Aug. 10. The items reported missing on Aug. 9 were recovered, and De Luca admitted to rummaging through someone else’s luggage and removing an Apple AirTag, the sheriff’s office said. The woman’s lug ..read more

Brian Krebs: Both Apple and Google operate their own Wi-Fi-based Positioning Systems (WPS) that obtain certain hardware identifiers from all wireless access points that come within range of their mobile devices. Both record the Media Access Control (MAC) address that a Wi-FI access point uses, known as a Basic Service Set Identifier or BSSID. Periodically, Apple and Google mobile devices will forward their locations — by querying GPS and/or by using cellular towers as landmarks — along with any nearby BSSIDs. This combination of data allows Apple and Google devices to figure out where they ar ..read more

Apple (Hacker News, Slashdot): Apple and Google have worked together to create an industry specification — Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers — for Bluetooth tracking devices that makes it possible to alert users across both iOS and Android if such a device is unknowingly being used to track them. This will help mitigate the misuse of devices designed to help keep track of belongings. Today Apple is implementing this capability in iOS 17.5, and Google is now launching this capability on Android 6.0+ devices. Android 6 is the equivalent of iOS 9. With this new capability, users will now ge ..read more

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon): Yesterday I took the M1 MacBook Pro to my local Apple-authorized service provider that I’ve been going to for many years, who performed all of the work on my Intel MacBook Pro, including the battery replacements and a Staingate screen replacement. This is a third-party shop, not an Apple Store. To my utter shock, they told me that they couldn’t replace the battery in-house, because starting with the Apple silicon transition, Apple now requires that the MacBook Pro be mailed in to Apple for battery replacement! […] As a Mac owner for over twenty years, I’ve always been ..read more

Juli Clover: YouTube is the latest company to introduce mobile games that are available outside of the App Store, today announcing the official launch of “Playables” in the YouTube app. […] YouTube is focusing on “lightweight, entertaining games,” so many of the options are games that are meant to be played for a short period of time rather than longer games that you might find on the App Store. YouTube: Playables are a fun, interactive way to experience YouTube — with lightweight, entertaining games like Angry Birds Showdown, Words of Wonders, Cut the Rope, Tomb of the Mask, and Trivia Cra ..read more

OatmealDome (via Steve Troughton-Smith): Apple modified their App Store guidelines to allow retro game emulators in the App Store. This week, Delta, a multi-system emulator that was previously only available via AltStore, was released on the App Store. Since these events happened, we’ve been asked many times if we will submit DolphiniOS (our fork of Dolphin) to the App Store. Unfortunately, no. Apple still does not allow us to use a vital technology that is necessary for Dolphin to run with good performance: JIT. Joe Rossignol: Apple told us that emulators that can load games (ROMs) are per ..read more

TN3162: The CloudKit infrastructure is shared by all apps and services. The resources are finite, and so high utilization from one app can negatively affect others. To avoid this kind of impact and optimize the overall experience, CloudKit implements a number of limits and controls on incoming traffic, which are known as throttles. CloudKit can enforce throttles when it deems necessary on any app or service that uses the CloudKit framework, CloudKit Web Services, CloudKit JS, NSPersistentCloudKitContainer, and NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore. This technote discusses how to identify CloudKit throttl ..read more