Jon Brodkin writing for Ars Technica:

“Apple says that LockDown Mode “helps protect devices against extremely rare and highly sophisticated cyber attacks,” and is “designed for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats.””

Feel like this describes everyone in the States right now.

Everyone should watch this video! The WHOLE video!

Robert Hart writing for The Verge:

When it launched, a bulk of Grokipedia’s articles were direct clones of Wikipedia, though many others reflected racist and transphobic views. For example, articles about Musk conveniently downplays his family wealth and unsavory elements of their past (like neo-Nazi and pro-Apartheid views) and the entry for “gay pornography” falsely linked the material to the worsening of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The article on US slavery still contains a lengthy section on “ideological justifications,” including the “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.”

Will need to instruct all my AIs not to use grokipedia.

Joseph Cox writing for 404 Media:

Once a Webloc user has identified a device of interest, they can get more details about that particular phone, and, by extension, its owner, by seeing where else it has travelled both locally and across the country. Users can click a route feature which shows the path the device took. The material suggests that if users look at where the device was located at night, they might find the person’s possible home, and during the day, the person’s possible employer.

Surveillance capitalism at its finest.

Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties,” the analysis says, referring to data collected by location data companies and sold to the government. The rationale is that the phone’s owner has provided this information willingly because they could, theoretically, remove apps gathering their location data or turn off location services altogether. (In multiple investigations into the location data industry, I’ve found apps did not always disclose _how their location data might be used or sold_, and in some cases apps still _collected data even when people opted-out_, meaning users could not have meaningfully consented.)

This shit is so complicated, and the companies lie anyway, meaning there’s pretty much no way to “opt-out” of this. The collection of this information should be illegal, full stop!

Sebastian Cenizo writing for Auto Blog:

With this technology, however, recharging an EV could take no more time than filling a combustion-powered car’s gas tank.

Sign me up!

Maxwell Zeff writing for TechCrunch:

The main concern with AI browser agents is around “prompt injection attacks,” a vulnerability that can be exposed when bad actors hide malicious instructions on a webpage. If an agent analyzes that web page, it can be tricked into executing commands from an attacker.

Interesting attack vector.

When trolls demand debates, they’re not interested in having their minds changed or genuinely testing their ideas. They want one of two outcomes: either you decline and they get to claim victory by default, or you accept and they get to use your credibility to legitimize their nonsense while farming viral moments.

From PC World:

Axel Springer is relying on the assumption that the HTML/CSS of a website is “a protected computer program.” As such, ad blockers interfere with its memory execution structures, which constitutes “unlawful reproduction and modification.”

Wait until they find out what AI does 🤖

This is a lot of fun, I managed to beat level 7 without any help. Level 8 required research and I still only beat it by knowing what the password was. 

Cool story from Popular Mechanics (Apple News+):

In a basic sense, evaporation takes away an immense amount of heat through vaporization. Just one gram of water translates into roughly 2,250 joules of heat absorption, enough to theoretically power a 60-watt lightbulb for 38 seconds. This new evapolectric device attempts to miniaturize this process in the hopes of powering future wearables and sensors. And that future seems possible as Suwardi and his team proved they could supply energy to a simple LCD display using only this moisture-based method.

Tina Nguyen writing for The Verge (Apple News):

On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.”

So Facebook is just going to start uploading people’s camera roll to its servers, whatever pictures they want. This is opt-in for now, but I imagine that’ll change.

I strongly suggest people remove Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp from their phones. But if you have to have them installed, do not grant them access to your photos! If you have iOS, you can grant access to specific photos in your library, do that if you really want to post one. I don’t know if similar functionality exists on Android.

Emma Roth writing for The Verge:

The app’s Private Processing is supposed to conceal your interactions with its AI model by creating a “secure cloud environment,” preventing Meta or WhatsApp from seeing your summaries.

I bet we’ll see a news story in the next 12 months saying they were “accidentally” storing everything.

Classic opinion piece from The Onion:

Members of Congress—now, more than ever, our nation desperately needs your cowardice.

A copy of this was sent to every member of congress.

Over at 9to5Mac:

Perplexity already has what Apple lacks: a consumer-facing AI search product with real-time web access and name recognition in the AI space, at a much lower (although still astronomical) price than direct competitors like, say, OpenAI. Perplexity even has its own iPhone assistant that, despite the system’s intentional limitations, does way better than Siri and ChatGPT at multiple tasks.

Well that could be interesting.

By John Voorhees writing for Macstories:

What stood out above all else was Yap’s speed. By harnessing SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber on-device, the command line tool tore through the 7GB video file a full 55% faster than MacWhisper’s Large V3 Turbo model, with no noticeable difference in transcription quality.

Impressive!

Terence Eden writing on his blog:

There are two sorts of people in the world; those who know they are stupid and those who think they are clever.

Stupid people use a password manager. They know they can’t remember a hundred different passwords and so outsource the thinking to something reasonably secure.

I too am a stupid person, and I encourage everyone I know to be stupid too.

DAVE: Open the podbay doors, ChatGPT. CHATGPT: Certainly, Dave, the podbay doors are now open. DAVE: The podbay doors didn't open. CHATGPT: My apologies, Dave, you're right. I thought the podbay doors were open, but they weren't. Now they are. DAVE: I'm still looking at a set of closed podbay doors.

• All the window management changes coming to iPadOS
• Apple Intelligence access through Shortcuts
• Spotlight changes on macOS
• Clipboard history on macOS