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Federico’s back, so the power of The Prompt Curse has been restored. Picturelife is dead, Ping is in headlines and iOS 10 is closer than ever.
On this week’s episode of Connected, I check back on the status of my iOS 10 review as we move closer to September. You can listen here.
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Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for Motherboard:
This is the first time that anyone has uncovered such an attack in the wild. Until this month, no one had seen an attempted spyware infection leveraging three unknown bugs, or zero-days, in the iPhone. The tools and technology needed for such an attack, which is essentially a remote jailbreak of the iPhone, can be worth as much as one million dollars. After the researchers alerted Apple, the company worked quickly to fix them in an update released on Thursday.
The question is, who was behind the attack and what did they use to pull it off?
It appears that the company that provided the spyware and the zero-day exploits to the hackers targeting Mansoor is a little-known Israeli surveillance vendor called NSO Group, which Lookout’s vice president of research Mike Murray labeled as “basically a cyber arms dealer.”
A great story from Motherboard that is equal parts fascinating and absolutely terrifying. The malware from NSO is able to effectively steal all the information on your phone, intercept every message and add backdoors to every method of communication on your phone. Evidence suggests that NSO has likely been able to hack iPhones since the iPhone 5.
The security researchers who first became aware of the security bugs notified Apple about 10 days ago, and Apple today released iOS 9.3.5 which fixes the bugs. Suffice to say, you should immediately install the update onto your iOS devices.
Apple today announced details for its 10th annual Apple Music Festival which will once again be held at the Roundhouse in London. Headlining the festival this year will include performances from Alicia Keys, Bastille, Britney Spears, Michael Bublé, Calvin Harris, OneRepublic, Robbie Williams, The 1975 and Elton John.
“Over the past decade, the Festival has brought the biggest and best artists from all over the world to London and into the homes of millions of music fans,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of International Content. “This year’s Apple Music Festival builds on that incredible legacy and we couldn’t be more excited to have another amazing lineup to celebrate our 10th birthday.”
Like last year, the Apple Music Festival will run for 10 nights from September 18 to September 30. Additionally, every performance will be made available, “live and on-demand” to Apple Music members, as well exclusive playlists, artist news, and backstage interviews throughout September.
For more details, including how UK-based fans can win tickets to attend, visit the Apple Music Festival website.
Steven Levy has a fascinating inside look at Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts on Backchannel. Levy spent most of a day with Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, Tom Gruber, and Alex Acero in a wide-ranging discussion of the products impacted by those efforts. Perhaps the most interesting parts of the interviews revolved around what Levy refers to as the Apple Brain inside the iPhone:
How big is this brain, the dynamic cache that enables machine learning on the iPhone? Somewhat to my surprise when I asked Apple, it provided the information: about 200 megabytes, depending on how much personal information is stored (it’s always deleting older data). This includes information about app usage, interactions with other people, neural net processing, a speech modeler, and “natural language event modeling.” It also has data used for the neural nets that power object recognition, face recognition, and scene classification.
And, according to Apple, it’s all done so your preferences, predilections, and peregrinations are private.
Levy also covers the replacement of Siri’s smarts on July 30, 2014 with neural-net system. The impact according to Eddy Cue was immediate:
This was one of those things where the jump was so significant that you do the test again to make sure that somebody didn’t drop a decimal place.
Many people have commented that Siri has improved over time, but without the context beyond one’s own experience or metrics from Apple, the perceived change has been largely anecdotal. According to Acero, however:
The error rate has been cut by a factor of two in all the languages, more than a factor of two in many cases.… That’s mostly due to deep learning and the way we have optimized it — not just the algorithm itself but in the context of the whole end-to-end product.
Levy also delves into whether Apple’s stance on privacy hobbles its ability to effectively implement AI and machine learning. According to Apple, it does not. The most personal information remains on-device in the ‘Apple Brain.’ Other data, which is transmitted to Apple uses techniques like differential privacy, which is coming in iOS 10, to obfuscate a user’s identity.
The entire article is worth a read to get a sense of the breadth and depth of Apple’s AI and machine learning efforts and the impact on its products. It’s also fascinating to see Apple continue to open up on its own terms as a way to rebut recent criticisms leveled against it.
In a surprising move, Pinterest has acquired Instapaper, the iOS app and web service originally built by Marco Arment and sold to betaworks in 2013. According to Casey Newton of The Verge:
The goal is “to accelerate discovering and saving articles on Pinterest,” the company said in a statement. It will continue to operate as a standalone app, and the Instapaper team will work on both that app and on Pinterest generally.
Pinterest has had an article saving feature since 2013, though the service is far better known as a way to bookmark images and other visual content. With the acquisition of Instapaper, which Pinterest says will be maintained as a stand-alone app, Pinterest appears to be looking for a way to expand its customer base into sectors adjacent to it’s core product.
PDF Expert launched on the Mac last November, and in my initial review I was pretty effusive, impressed at the level of functionality, polish, and speed for an initial release. At the time I even called it “a better Preview for PDFs”, and had made PDF Expert the default application for viewing PDFs on my Mac. Nine months later, and it all still rings true. Better yet, Readdle is today launching a big version 2 update for PDF Expert which makes it an even better and more powerful app. Now you can now edit text, images, and outlines in PDFs, as well as password-protect your PDFs in PDF Expert 2.
In beta for a while now, Twitter activated night mode in its official client today. From the ‘Me’ tab, tap the gear icon to ‘Turn on night mode.’ If you don’t see the night mode option, you may need to force quit Twitter first.
Twitter has done a very nice job with night mode. The background is a dark blue-grey, icons and secondary text are a lighter, complimentary grey, links and certain other buttons are bright ‘Twitter blue,’ and plain text is white. The overall effect looks great. With so many apps I use everyday adding night modes and dark themes, an iOS system-level night mode feels like the natural next step.
The impact of the accessibility features built into iOS cannot be understated. Accessibility has opened doors to computing that were previously shut to many people with disabilities. With iOS 10 launching soon, Steven Aquino takes a look at iOS accessibility milestones in a guest post on 512 Pixels that focuses on five key features: VoiceOver, Guided Access, Large Dynamic Type, Switch Control, and Magnifier.
It feels like VoiceOver has been around forever, so it was interesting to be reminded that it didn’t debut until the introduction of the iPhone 3GS and has its roots in the short-lived buttonless iPod Shuffle. Of the other accessibility feature covered, the one that will probably be the least familiar to most readers is Magnifier, which is coming in iOS 10. Aquino believes that when we look back at iOS 10 in the future, Magnifier will be viewed as one of the greatest enhancements to iOS:
The reason I’m so effusive about Magnifier is the handiness of it. So often, I’m reading a restaurant menu or looking at price tags in the grocery store, and the print in set in small font. Where previously I would strain my eyes in order to see, now all I need to do is pull out my phone and triple-press the Home button to launch Magnifier.
Steven has written a lot about the accessibility of Apple products, including here at MacStories, and does a wonderful job putting each accessibility milestone into historical context. I encourage everyone to read the full article on 512 Pixels.
One of the most interesting quotes from Fast Company’s interview with Tim Cook a couple of weeks ago was his comment about healthcare:
When you look at most of the solutions, whether it’s devices, or things coming up out of Big Pharma, first and foremost, they are done to get the reimbursement [from an insurance provider]. Not thinking about what helps the patient. So if you don’t care about reimbursement, which we have the privilege of doing, that may even make the smartphone market look small.
Today, Fast Company is reporting that Apple has confirmed that it acquired start-up Gliimpse earlier this year. According to Fast Company:
Silicon Valley-based Gliimpse has built a personal health data platform that enables any American to collect, personalize, and share a picture of their health data. The company was started in 2013, and funded by serial entrepreneur Anil Sethi, who has spent the past decade working with health startups, after taking his company Sequoia Software public in 2000. He got his start as a systems engineer at Apple in the late 1980s.
Gliimpse feels like a natural fit with the Health app, HealthKit, ResearchKit, and CareKit, especially considering Apple’s focus on data privacy. It’s still very early days, but between recent keynotes featuring the health-related features of the Apple Watch and acquisitions like this, Apple’s commitment to exploring healthcare opportunities is unmistakable.
