It’s summertime, and with high temperatures comes the need to stay hydrated. The trouble is, you’re busy and have a lot going on every day, which can make it hard to remember to grab a glass of water, let alone keep track of how much you’ve had during the course of a day.

That’s where Funn Media’s WaterMinder app comes in. It’s the easiest way to remember to stay hydrated throughout the year and keep track of the liquids you consume.

WaterMinder makes tracking hydration incredibly simple. The app features an elegant interface and myriad ways to input the water and other drinks you consume throughout the day. The app is available on all of Apple’s platforms, is highly customizable, and includes support for Shortcuts, widgets, and Apple Watch complications. With WaterMinder’s rich charts for tracking, hydration reminders, and integration with Apple Health, you’ll have your hydration on track in no time flat.

The latest update to WaterMinder was version 6.2, which added the ability to create multi-ingredient cups and a simplified mode that hides some of the app’s more advanced features to create a focused, streamlined experience. The app is always being updated with new and innovative features. In fact, the team at Funn Media is currently working on interactive widgets for iOS 17 and a visionOS version of WaterMinder for the VisionPro’s release in 2024.

Get started on the road to proper hydration with WaterMinder by visiting the app’s website today to learn more about this fantastic app.

Our thanks to WaterMinder by Funn Media for sponsoring MacStories this week.

It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle. And front line workers are following suit–experimenting with AI so they can work faster and do more.

In the few short months since ChatGPT debuted, hundreds of AI-powered tools have come on the market. But while AI-based tools have genuinely helpful applications, they also pose profound security risks. Unfortunately, most companies still haven’t come up with policies to manage those risks. In the absence of clear guidance around responsible AI use, employees are blithely handing over sensitive data to untrustworthy tools. 

AI-based browser extensions offer the clearest illustration of this phenomenon. The Chrome store is overflowing with extensions that (claim to) harness ChatGPT to do all manner of tasks: punching up emails, designing graphics, transcribing meetings, and writing code. But these tools are prone to at least three types of risk.

1. Malware: Security researchers keep uncovering AI-based extensions that steal user data. These extensions play on users’ trust of the big tech platforms (“it can’t be dangerous if Google lets it on the Chrome store!”) and they often appear to work, by hooking up to ChatGPT et al’s APIs. 
2. Data Governance: Companies including Apple and Verizon have banned their employees from using LLMs because these products rarely offer a guarantee that a user’s inputs won’t be used as training data.
3. Prompt Injection Attacks: In this little known but potentially unsolvable attack, hidden text on a webpage directs an AI tool to perform malicious actions–such as exfiltrate data and then delete the records. 

Up until now, most companies have been caught flat-footed by AI, but these risks are too serious to ignore. 

At Kolide, we’re taking a two-part approach to governing AI use.

1. Draft AI policies as a team. We don’t want to totally ban our team from using AI, we just want to use it safely. So our first step is meeting with representatives from multiple teams to figure out what they’re getting out of AI-based tools, and how we can provide them with secure options that don’t expose critical data or infrastructure.
2. Use Kolide to block malicious tools. Kolide lets IT and security teams write Checks that detect device compliance issues, and we’ve already started creating Checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Now if an employee accidentally downloads malware, they’ll be prevented from logging into our cloud apps until they’ve removed it.

Every company will have to craft policies based on their unique needs and concerns, but the important thing is to start now. There’s still time to seize the reins of AI, before it gallops away with your company’s data.

To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.

Our thank to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.