Banks, airlines, TV stations and health systems in countries around the world that rely on Microsoft’s 365 apps reported widespread outages Friday. Thousands of flights and train services were cancelled in the U.S. and Europe, and their were disruptions to many other public and retail services.
Microsoft 365 said on social media that it was “investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services” and that things were improving as the company worked to “reroute the affected traffic to healthy infrastructure.”
American Airlines, Delta and United Airlines said all pending flight departures were grounded. American Airlines said this was due to “a technical issue with CrowdStrike” that it said was impacting multiple airlines, and that the company was in contact with its planes currently in flight.
CrowdStrike is a global cybersecurity firm. When the Reuters news agency called CrowdStrike’s technical support line on Friday, a pre-recorded message said the company was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft systems related to its Falcon sensor. CBS News reached out to CrowdStrike for comment but has not yet received a reply.
People wait at check-in for a flight operated by Indian carrier IndiGo, amid a global IT outage, at an airport in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, July 19, 2024, in a still image obtained from a social media video by Reuters.
MarketWizarddd via X/via REUTERS
In Europe, Lufthansa and SAS Airlines reported disruptions. Switzerland’s largest airport, in Zurich, said planes were not being allowed to land, according to CBS News partner network BBC News.
Hospitals in Germany said they were cancelling elective surgeries on Friday, and doctors in the U.K. said they were having issues accessing their online booking system.
Britain’s Sky News and the BBC’s TV network aimed at children were both off the air on Friday.
This is a developing news story and will be updated.
New data shows that Resident Evil 7, which was recently ported to iOS devices, was purchased and downloaded by less than 2,000 players, yet another example of big games failing to succeed on Apple’s powerful portable devices.
Kotaku Goes Hands-On At The Apple Developer Showcase
Capcom’s fantastic survival horror sequel Resident Evil 7—originally released in 2017—launched on iOS earlier this month for $20. It’s the latest big console game to arrive on iOS devices as part of Apple’s ongoing push to get more AAA titles running natively on iPhones and iPads. Last year, Resident Evil Village and the Resident Evil 4 remake arrived on iOS. While they were playable and impressive, they were pretty awful ways to play such great games due to poor performance and crappy touch controls. And it seems players agree that these aren’t great versions of these games, as data shows that these ports are likely flopping hard on iOS.
As reported on July 16 by MobileGamer.biz, data seems to indicate that RE7′s iOS port, which launched on July 2, has only made Capcom around $28,000 via 2,000 people paying for the full game after downloading the free demo.
Other AAA iPhone ports have also failed to find much success on the App Store. As previously reported by the outlet in June, data indicates that after a month only 3,000 people had purchased Assassin’s Creed Mirage, even though its free trial version had been downloaded over 120,000 times.
2023’s Resident Evil 4 remake did a bit better after six months on the market. It was downloaded 357,000 times with data indicating that around 7,000 people paid the $30 to unlock the full game. Resident Evil Village, on the other hand, did horribly on iOS. In about the same amount of time, only around 5,700 people paid $15 to play Village on their iPhone or iPad.
Why AAA games are flopping on iPhone
So what’s happening here? Well, I think the higher price points for these AAA ports are scaring away a lot of mobile players who are used to free games. But I think the bigger issue is that these aren’t the kind of games people want to play on their phones in 2024. I love Assassin’s Creed Mirage. It’s a wonderful return to the stealth-focused gameplay and smaller worlds of older AC games, while still feeling modern and fun to play. Good shit! But I have zero desire to play that game on a tiny iPhone with a cumbersome controller attached or via terrible touchscreen buttons.
Capcom / TapGameplay
These AAA games were designed to be played for hours and hours, often in a comfy chair or couch, with a controller or keyboard and a big screen. And that’s just not the experience you get with a phone. The best mobile games are pick-up-and-play. Things you can open up, have a bit of fun with, and then drop a few seconds later because your bus arrived or your game finished installing on Xbox.
iPhones will for sure get more powerful and be able to run even more AAA games at high framerates and resolutions in the future. That’s a fact. But I’m not sold on any of these games finding success on the App Store because they just aren’t what most people want to play on their mobile devices.
So now the question is, with Capcom and other publishers not making money on these ports, how long before Apple stops (probably, this hasn’t been confirmed) funding them and all these AAA games stop arriving on iOS? How long before Apple tosses in the towel on gaming once more? We shall see…
The original proposal for the World Wide Web, written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, is an important piece of internet history. It also can’t be opened on modern computers.
John Graham-Cumming, a British software engineer and writer, attempted to open the Word document containing the proposal. Modern versions of Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages both utterly failed to open the file, as he outlined in a blog post. The open-source word processor LibreOffice worked, albeit with messy formatting. Graham-Cumming ultimately found a PDF exported by CERN in 1998, which was the only way he was able to see the document as it existed in 1989.
It’s worrying that such an important piece of history, in such a common file format, could be almost completely lost to the passage of time and software updates. Anyone with a collection of old digital documents, photos, and videos might be wondering if the same thing will happen to their files, which is the sort of question digital archivists deal with all the time, it turns out. So I reached out to one.
“Twenty years, in the digital realm, is ancient,” says Lance Stuchell, director of digital preservation services at the University of Michigan. His team is frequently tasked with recovering digital files from old computers and storage mediums. “We have a lab that can deal with old media—floppy drives, CDs, older computers. We can get that off of those types of media and move it into our preservation system while ensuring we don’t mess it up while we’re doing it.”
But getting the files off the drive is just the first step: Then you have to open them, and leave them in a state that will be openable for decades to come. It’s a job that’s given Stuchell a reason to think about strategies for keeping documents around as long as possible. I asked him what those of us who aren’t professional archivists should do to ensure our files last decades.
Use Open Formats
The Word document I mentioned before could no longer be opened by Microsoft Word because the software has changed over time. This is part of the challenge of archiving digital files.
“With physical stuff, the less you look at it the longer it lasts,” Stuchell says. “Digital stuff, we’re constantly fighting with obsoleteness. As the file moves through time, it’s losing information.”
Updates to software like Microsoft Word mean that files that opened fine in the ’80s don’t open in the 2020s. Part of the problem: Microsoft, and only Microsoft, controls the file format, or even knows how it works. For this reason, Stuchell says he encourages people to export files in an open file format—especially files they want to keep accessible for the long term.
For documents he recommends PDF/A, an open standard built on top of Adobe’s PDF format that includes everything the file needs in order to be opened, including the fonts used in the document. Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, and Adobe Acrobat all support exporting to PDF/A, meaning it’s relatively easy to make such a file. Stuchell recommends that you archive any document that you want to keep to that format.
Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of only a few thousand people. West herself is an example: She met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter cohort as “a community of old Web nerds.”
This month, the venerated site celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s amazing it has lasted that long; it made it this far in great part thanks to West, who helped stabilize it after a near-death spiral. You could say it’s the site that time forgot—certainly I’d forgotten about it until I decided to mark its big birthday. Metafilter is a kind of digital Brigadoon; visiting it is like a form of time travel. To people who have been around a while, Metafilter seems to preserve in amber the spirit of what online used to be like. The feed is strictly chronological. It’s still text-only. Some members may be influential on Metafilter, but they don’t call themselves influencers, and they don’t sell personally branded cosmetics or garments. As founder Matt Haughey, who stepped down in 2017, says, “It’s a weird throwback thing—like a cockroach that survived.”
When Haughey started Metafilter in 1999, he envisioned a quick way for people to share cool stuff they saw in what was then a few dozen key blogs. “I never even thought about free-flowing conversations, but it quickly went there,” he says.
For about a year the community was tiny, maybe 100 visitors a day, but in 2000 it was featured in a popular blog called Cool Site of the Day, and 5,000 people checked it out. That helped Metafilter morph from a niche link-sharing site into a community where smart people also discussed what was cool on the internet. In the early aughts, Haughey felt too many people were joining, so he cut off new membership. (People could still view the conversation as an outsider.) For years, the only way you could get in was to email him and beg. Later, when he decided to charge a $5 fee, 4,000 people signed up on the first day. The fee also helped to weed out potential trolls. That, and fairly paid moderators, maintained civility on the site. More importantly, the community itself didn’t tolerate awful behavior.
One popular feature from early on was “Ask Metafilter,” where members seek advice and tips from the Metafilter hive mind. “When you’re pitching a question to 10,000 really smart nerds, chances are somebody has to be experienced in the thing you’re asking,” says Haughey. It became an invaluable repository of knowledge, not just to the community but those who stumbled on the answers through Google. Quora later launched with a similar idea, but with ambitions for a mega-footprint. That wasn’t Metafilter’s thing.
“I didn’t want to be Walmart,” says Haughey. “We’re just the neighborhood corner store.” At one point he consulted with a kid named Aaron Swartz, who had an idea for a site that would be like a social-media wiki for everything. Then Swartz joined the first Y Combinator batch and hooked up with some founders starting a company called Reddit, which was basically Metafilter with limitless ambition.
Haughey was OK with that. In the early 2010s, things were pretty cush. Metafilter’s core community was tight, and millions of tourists dropped in, drawn by Google search results. Haughey monetized them via Google ads and was able to drop his day job as a web designer, buy a house, and raise a family. But beginning in 2012, Google made a number of spam-fighting changes to its ranking algorithms, and Metafilter, for mysterious reasons, suffered collateral damage. Over the next couple of years, revenue plunged and Metafilter had to lay off some employees.
London — Eton College, arguably the poshest, most elite boarding school in Britain, is banning incoming students from having smartphones.
Eton, located near the royal palace in Windsor, just west of London, is renowned for its academic excellence. Notable alumni include Princes William and Harry, as well as novelist George Orwell, James Bond creator Ian Fleming and a long list of former prime ministers, including recent leaders Boris Johnson and David Cameron.
The ban, which is due to take effect in September, comes after the U.K. government issued guidance backing school principals who decide to ban the use of cellphones during the school day in an effort to minimize disruption and improve classroom behavior.
Eton College, west of London, is seen in a Jan. 10, 2024 file photo.
Andrew Matthews/PA Images/Getty
Parents of first-year students at Eton — where tuition exceeds $60,000 per year — were informed of the changes in a letter, which said that incoming 13-year-old boarders should have their smart devices taken home after their SIM cards are transferred to offline Nokia phones provided by the school, which can only make calls and send simple text messages.
Eton’s previous rules on smartphones required first-year students to hand over their devices overnight.
“Eton routinely reviews our mobile phone and devices policy to balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools,” a spokesperson for the school told CBS News on Tuesday, adding that those joining in Year 9, essentially the equivalent of freshman year in high school for American students, “will receive a ‘brick’ phone for use outside the school day, as well as a school-issued iPad to support academic study.”
Eton College boys celebrate the first wicket of the day during the Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lords Cricket Ground, in a May 12, 2023 file photo in London, England.
Tom Jenkins/Getty
The spokesperson added that “age-appropriate controls remain in place for other year groups.”
According to Ofcom, the U.K. government’s communications regulator, 97% of children have their own cellphone by the age of 12.
In the U.S., a recent survey published by Common Sense Media found around 91% of children own a smartphone by the age of 14. Similar policies on smartphones have been introduced in schools around the U.S., varying from complete bans to restricted use in specific times or areas. The 2021-2022 school year saw about 76% of schools prohibit the non-academic use of smartphones, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Bans have been met with mixed reactions, as some argue these personal devices can also have curricular benefits, such as allowing students to engage in live surveys or access content and data during lessons. Some parents have also raised concerns that phone bans could prevent their children from reaching them during potential emergencies.
Disclosure: Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you’ll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, Entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners.
Every entrepreneur has a host of important data that they don’t want falling into the wrong hands. When you connect to public Wi-Fi, you put that data at least a little at risk. So, when you’re traveling and connecting to Wi-Fi at the airport, on the plane, and at the hotel, it’s important to give yourself the protection you need. With the Deeper Connect Air Portable VPN Travel Router, you’ll be covered, and you can get it on sale during our version of Prime Day.
This plug-and-play security solution is fully loaded with a Decentralized VPN (DPN), ad blocker, and cybersecurity features to keep your device and data safe without any subscription fees. When you plug it in, you’ll connect to a decentralized, military-grade encrypted network that lets you access your work files and bypass geographic restrictions no matter where you are in the world.
The travel router can connect to more than 80,000 nodes worldwide, allowing you to reach speeds of up to 300Mbps when connected to a powerful enough network. The intelligent software switches nodes automatically according to your internet usage to optimize speeds and always blocks ads—even YouTube ones. It’s also set up to support more than 80 Web3 features.
Whether you’re a remote worker getting online at a coffee shop or traveling abroad and need safe internet access, this travel router has you covered.
Enjoy a better, safer internet experience while traveling or working remotely.
In 2002 a group of friends in Italy started developing an action-platformer with RPG elements for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance handheld. Then 22 years passed and now, in 2024, Kien is finally launching on GBA, ending one of the longest delays in video game history.
Kotaku’s Hopes For Spyro The Dragon’s (Reported) Comeback
Over the decades, there have been numerous games with protracted development cycles and delayed releases. One of the most famous is Duke Nukem Forever, which was first announced in 1997 but didn’t end up shipping until 2011, nearly 15 years later. But Kien took even longer to finally arrive.
As reported by The Guardianand Patricia Hernandez (former EIC of Kotaku), Kien was developed by a small group of friends in Italy back in 2002. None of them had experience making games. But for the next two years, the pals worked extremely hard to develop Kien, taking very few breaks and crunching a lot. After a few years of development, the game was finished and ready to be published. However, the high costs of shipping the game on Game Boy carts and the risk that Kien might not be successful led to no publisher wanting to release the game.
GameTrailers / Incube8
Eventually, only one member of the original development team remained: game designer Fabio Belsanti. Despite believing in the unpublished game, he moved on with his life, founded a new development company, and began creating educational games for kids and teens. Through it all, though, Belsanti never gave up hope for Kien. When he noticed recently that retro games and consoles were popular again, he decided to return to Kien and give it another chance.
“I believe we are in a phase similar to [the revival of] vinyl or cassettes for music,” Belsanti told The Guardian, “a return to previous, more primitive forms of the medium driven by nostalgia from the generations who lived those eras, and curiosity by those who came after such technology.”
Belsanti teamed up with Incube8, a publisher focused on releasing and supporting new games for classic consoles, like the GBA. Incube8 was a perfect fit for Kien and in June it finally launched, 22 years after development had started on the action-platformer.
“On a romantic level, the thought of releasing the game on its original console is simply magical,” said Belsanti. “To see Kien come to life on the very platform it was designed for is a dream come true.”
Kien is out now. You can pick up a physical version of the game for Game Boy Advance or buy a digital version that you can play on an emulator.
Who has time for summertime sadness when there are new gadget releases to check out? This month, we got an update on the Insta360 GO and a new mini-LED QLED from Sony. We also went hands-on with the ROG Ally X, which boasts a bigger battery than the Steam Deck. These waterproof JBL speakers are affordable and perfect for going out on the boat, bike, or wherever blasting music is somewhat socially acceptable. Here’s what we loved in June 2024.
Vizio’s Latest TVs Go All Quantum
Insta 360 GO 3S
Image: Insta360
The $400 Insta360 Go 3S isn’t just an action camera for pets, but why would you use it for anything else? This is the update to last year’s GO 3 with up to 4K shooting at 30 fps—up from a maximum of 2.7K on the regular GO 3—so there’s less distortion as you move. The GO 3S has a wider lens than the regular GO 3—16mm compared to the previous GO’s 11mm—which helps cut down on edge distortion.
Samsung Odyssey OLED G8
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
The $1,300 4K Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 brings all the saturation and vividness of the brand’s smartphones to your gaming experience on a PC or console with a 240Hz maximum refresh rate. If that isn’t enough, the Odyssey will let you stream all your favorite apps and games without a console.
ROG Ally X
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
The $800 ROG Ally X launched this month, barely a year after its predecessor hit the scene. But it’s already boasting more promising battery life and performance due to its bigger battery pack and increased memory offering. The chassis has also been redesigned to be more comfortable for long-term gaming sessions.
Asus ProArt Laptops
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
Asus’s new ProArt laptops are two-in-one devices with AMD and Qualcomm chips. They are part of the Microsoft Co-Pilot+ rollout, but at least they seem more promising than the other manufacturers’ AI-first PCs. The base ProArt P16 laptop is basically an ROG Zephyrus G16 gaming laptop in a thinner, tote-able chassis.
Sony Bravia 7 Mini-LED QLED 4K TV
Photo: Artem Golub / Gizmodo
Sony TVs continue to be compelling buys. The $2,000 65-inch Sony Bravia 7 doesn’t stand out from the other QLEDs’ designs, but its HDR colors are bright and beautiful for watching content. The only caveat is that you need to ensure you don’t have any direct light shining toward the TV since it tends to produce glare.
JBL Clip 5 and Go 4
Photo: Dua Rashid / Gizmodo
Summertime is the perfect time to invest in a waterproof Bluetooth speaker, especially if you’re heading somewhere where you can enjoy listening to music. The JBL Clip 5 and Go 4 each weigh less than one pound, which makes toting them around in a backpack or beach bag an easy sell. They’re $80 and $50, respectively.
Harry Murphy | Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
LONDON — The boss of British financial technology giant Revolut told CNBC he is optimistic about the company’s chances of being granted a U.K. banking license, as a jump in users saw the firm report record full-year pre-tax profits.
In an exclusive interview with CNBC, Nikolay Storonsky, Revolut’s CEO and co-founder, said that the company is feeling confident about securing its British bank license, after overcoming some key hurdles in its more than three-year-long journey toward gaining approval from regulators.
“Hopefully, sooner or later, we’ll get it,” Storonsky told CNBC via video call. Regulators are “still working on it,” he added, but so far haven’t raised any outstanding concerns with the fintech.
Storonsky noted that Revolut’s huge size has meant that it’s taken longer for the company to get its banking license approved than would have been the case for smaller companies. Several small financial institutions have been able to win approval for a banking license with few customers, he added.
“U.K. banking licenses are being approved for smaller companies,” Storonsky said. “They usually approve someone twice every year,” and they typically tend to be smaller institutions. “Of course, we are very large, so it takes extra time.”
Revolut is a licensed electronic money institution, or EMI, in the U.K. But it can’t yet offer lending products such as credit cards, personal loans, or mortgages. A bank license would enable it to offer loans in the U.K. The firm has faced lengthy delays to its application, which it filed in 2021.
One key issue the company faced was with its share structure being inconsistent with the rulebook of the Prudential Regulation Authority, which is the regulatory body for the financial services industry that sits under the Bank of England.
Revolut has multiple classes of shares and some of those share classes previously had preferential rights attached. One conditions set by the Bank of England for granting Revolut its U.K. banking license, was to collapse its six classes of shares into ordinary shares.
Revolut has since resolved this, with the company striking a deal with Japanese tech investor SoftBank to transfer its shares in the firm to a unified class, relinquishing preferential rights, according to a person familiar with the matter. News of the resolution with SoftBank was first reported by the Financial Times.
The fintech giant on Tuesday released financial results showing full-year pre-tax profit rose to £438 million ($545 million) in 2023, swinging to the black from a pre-tax loss of £25.4 million in 2022. Group revenues rose by 95% to £1.8 billion ($2.2 billion), up from £920 million ($1.1 billion) in 2022.
Victor Stinga, Revolut’s chief financial officer, said the company’s growth stemmed from a record jump in user numbers — Revolut added 12 million customers in 2023 — as well as strong performance across all its key business lines, including card fees, foreign exchange and wealth, and subscriptions.
“We consider 2023 to be what we would call a breakout year from the point of view of growth and profitability,” Stinga said in an interview this week.
Revenue growth was driven by three main factors, Stinga said, including customer growth, strong performance across its key revenue lines, and a significant jump in interest income, which he said now accounts for about 28% of Revolut’s revenues.
He added that Revolut made exercising financial discipline a key priority in 2023, keeping a lid on operating expenses and adopting a “zero-based budgeting” philosophy, where every new expense has to be justified and accounted for before it’s considered acceptable.
This translated to administrative expenses growing far less than revenues did, Stinga said, with admin costs growing by 49% while revenues nearly doubled year-on-year.
Revolut has been investing more aggressively in advertising and marketing, he added, with the firm having deployed $300 million in advertising and marketing last year. The company’s business banking solutions are also a top priority, with Revolut devoting about 900 employees toward business-to-business sales.
OneSpan DigiPass FX1 BIO Sicherheitsschlüssel mit Fingerabdrucksensor im Test
Heute habe ich ein kleines, aber feines Gadget im Test und zwar den OneSpan DigiPass FX1 BIO. Hierbei handelt es sich um einen kleinen Sicherheitsschlüssel, mit dem ihr euch an eurem Rechner authentifizieren könnt und der für mehr Sicherheit sorgt. Wie das ganze funktioniert, das schauen wir uns in diesem Testbericht an.
Werfen wir zuerst einmal einen Blick auf das kleine Gadget. Und wenn ich klein sage, dann meine ich auch klein, denn mit nur 35 x 35 x 10,8mm ist es wirklich superkompakt, passt in jede Tasche und ihr könnt es überall mit hinnehmen. Wir haben hier auf der Vorderseite drei LEDs, einmal für die Bluetooth-Verbindung, dann ein Hinweis wann man seinen Finger auflegen soll für die Fingerabdruckerkennung und dann noch eine Status-LED für den Akku, denn hier ist auch ein 65mAh Akku verbaut. Integriert ist hier auch ein kurzes USB-C Kabel, damit könnt ihr den Sicherheitsschlüssel einfach mit eurem Rechner verbinden. Es geht zwar auch via Bluetooth, aber am einfachsten ist natürlich die USB-Verbindung.
Dieser Sicherheitsschlüssel kann für die Zwei-Faktor-Authentifizierung genutzt werden, er bietet euch also zusätzliche Sicherheit neben eurem Passwort. Dadurch dass hier auch noch der Fingerabdruck benötigt wird, werden eure Zugänge zu Anwendungen und Diensten noch sicherer.
Video
Einrichtung
Die Einrichtung des DigiPass FX1 BIO gestaltet sich sehr einfach und schnell, denn unter Windows gibt es hier in den Einstellungen unter Konten und Anmeldeoptionen den Punkt Sicherheitsschlüssel. Hier kann man den DigiPass FX1 BIO dann einfach hinzufügen. Hierzu müsst ihr einfach nur euren Fingerabdruck hinterlegen. Von Fingerabdrucksensoren eures Smartphones oder Notebooks kennt ihr die Einrichtung vielleicht schon, hier müsst ihr einfach nur den Finger mehrfach kurz auf den Sensor legen und auch ein wenig variiren und auch den Fingerrand einscannen. Nach einigen Scans ist der Fingerabdruck dann erfolgreich eingerichtet und ihr könnt direkt loslegen. Auf Wunsch kann man natürlich auch mehrere Finger registrieren.
Man kann ihn auch kabellos über Bluetooth verbinden, dafür einfach die Taste an der Seite gedrückt halten, dann geht er in den Pairing-Modus über und kann unter Windows gefunden werden. Was aber zu beachten ist, er arbeitet bei der kabellosen Verbindung über Bluetooth langsamer, denn es muss sich ja immer verbunden werden. Deshalb bevorzuge ich die Verbindung über USB-C.
Praxiseinsatz
Der DigiPass FX1 BIO wird als Sicherheitsschlüssel für die Zwei-Faktor-Authentifizierung eingesetzt und wird bereits von vielen Apps unterstützt. So funktioniert er mit einem Microsoft Account, einem Google Account und auch Twitter kann damit geschützt werden. Ihr könnt auch euer Onlinebanking mit N26 damit schützen oder auch einen Passwort-Manager wie 1Password. Einfach schauen ob eure Dienste kompatibel mit einem Fido-Sicherheitsschlüssel sind.
Der DigiPass FX1 BIO ist für alle interessant, denen ein Passwort nicht sicher genug ist. Dank der Zwei-Faktor-Authentifizierung mittels Sicherheitsschlüssel und Fingerabdrucksensor haben wir hier eine Authentifizierung die euren Account besonders sicher macht.
Mit einem Preis von aktuell 60 Euro ist der Sicherheitsschlüssel mit Fingerabdrucksensor auch für den privaten Anwender interessant der seine wichtigen Accounts effektiv sichern möchte. Aber besonders für Unternehmen ist solch eine Authentifierung mittels Sicherheitsschlüssen besonders wichtig, damit sensible Daten nicht in die falschen Hände gelangen.
Preis & Verfügbarkeit
Der Digipass FX1 BIO ist bereits auf dem Markt und hat eine UVP von 59,90 Euro. Falls ihr Interesse habt, dann findet ihr hier den aktuellen Preis und die Verfügbarkeit:
TikTok is in trouble: In April, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation that forces ByteDance, the popular social media app’s Chinese parent company, to sell its majority stake to a U.S.-based firm. If it fails to do this, the app will be banned in the United States.
Various dubious arguments have been deployed against TikTok, but Congress’ stated prime motive to force its divestiture is that the app’s Chinese owners are beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and thus having their tech on so many Americans’ phones is a dire national security risk. The CCP is an authoritarian menace, and there is some evidence the Chinese government pressures TikTok to censor content about Tiananmen Square and the religious sect Falun Gong, and criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Of course, the U.S. government has also pressured American tech companies to censor content on social media. Thanks to the Twitter Files, the Facebook Files, and other independent investigations, we know that multiple federal agencies instructed social media platforms to take down content relating to Hunter Biden, COVID-19, and other subjects. When President Biden decided the companies had been insufficiently deferential to his pandemic-related diktats, he accused them of killing people and threatened to take action against them.
If Congress really wanted to do something about government censorship of content on social media, legislators could rein in the feds. Instead, they are singularly focused on TikTok, which has responded with a lawsuit.
The legislation approved by Biden would apply to any social media company that is designated as a “foreign adversary controlled application.” U.S. law currently defines China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran as foreign adversaries. The law further stipulates that an app is deemed to be controlled by a foreign adversary if it satisfies at least one of three different criteria: It is headquartered in one of those countries, the government of one of those countries owns a 20 percent stake in it, or the app is subject to “direction or control” by one of the foreign adversaries.
This law creates a blueprint for taking future action against social media companies beyond just TikTok. In the wake of the 2016 election, Democratic lawmakers, mainstream media pundits, and national security advisers accused Facebook and Twitter of being complicit in Russia’s various schemes to sow election-related discord online. The thrust of this argument was that the CEOs of those companies had allowed their platforms to be compromised by Russian misinformation—even though subsequent studies have shown foreign social media influence campaigns had very little impact on the outcome of the election.
Despite the bill’s passage, the federal government is not likely to take direct action against Facebook or X tomorrow. But Biden has rubber-stamped language—”direction and control”—that is exceedingly slippery. It is not difficult to imagine a future where vengeful bureaucrats accuse a disfavored app of promoting contrarian views, gin up a connection to a “foreign adversary,” and punish it accordingly.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “The TikTok Slippery Slope.”
The developers behind Space Marine 2 have announced that a planned multiplayer beta has been canceled as the team wants to focus all of its attention on the retail game and its launch. And after the last few years, which saw many big games launch in rough shape, this sounds like a smart move.
The Week In Games: A Star Wars Classic Returns & More New Releases
Announced in 2021, and then delayed in 2023, Space Marine 2 looks pretty dang rad. I’m very excited to check out the third-person shooter when it launches later this year. And I’m not even a big Warhammer 40k guy! I just loved the original Space Marine, which launched on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2011. And this new entry looks to be even bigger and better. But if you were excited to check out the upcoming Space Marine 2 before its launch via a beta, well, bad news: It ain’t happening anymore.
On June 28, developers Saber Interactive confirmed that it was not going to hold a previously planned Space Marine 2 online multiplayer beta test. The devs say that the game is “almost ready” and that they are focused on optimizing, polishing, and fixing any remaining bugs and issues. As such, the devs decided to cancel the beta as they claimed it would take “the development teams away” from preparing for launch.
“We know this is disappointing news for some of you,” said Saber Interactive in a Steam post on Friday. “As a thank you to those interested in participating, players who registered via the online signup before June 28, 2024, midnight Paris Time, will receive the limited Bolt Pistol skin.”
“We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we work towards delivering the exceptional game you deserve,” said Saber.
Focus Entertainment / Saber Interactive
The now-canceled beta test was first teased in August 2023, with players able to sign up for access on the game’s official website. At the time there was no release date or window for the beta. After that initial tease, however, Saber Interactive went radio silent on the beta, leaving some fans worried about whether it was going to happen at all. Now we know.
On Steam, some fans expressed concern that Saber Interactive was trying to hide the game from players before launch. Others were confused as to why it took so long to announce this news. Personally, I’m hopeful that the team being allowed to focus on finishing and polishing up the main game instead of running a beta will give Space Marine 2 the best chance at launching in solid shape.
We will have to wait and see if canceling the test paid off. Space Marine 2 finally arrives on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on September 9.
Screenshot: 343 Industries / Claire Jackson / Kotaku
It ain’t perfect, but damn do I love Halo Infinite. So naturally, I wasn’t all too thrilled when it suddenly kept crashing before it even reached the main menu and nothing seemed to fix it. Verifying the game’s file integrity, reinstalling it, restarting Windows, casting spells and rituals in the forest. Nothing! Turns out, the problem for me and many other players was that we were using Nvidia driver 555.99.
Long-Lost Halo Demo Comes To Life
Released on June 4, 2024, Nvidia Game Ready and Studio Driver 555.99 caused quite a bit of havoc for many fans of Halo Infinite as it rendered the game unplayable for most who had an Nvidia card and were timely with their driver updates. The workaround, of course, was to roll back to driver version 555.85. Halo developer 343 Industries acknowledged the issue early on. It released a statement via the official Halo Support X account stating that it was working with Nvidia to be sure the issue wouldn’t persist into the next driver update. Thankfully, driver version 556.12 was released on June 27 and lets Halo Infinite launch and run without issue.
How to update your Nvidia driver to play Halo Infinite
Odds are if you found your way to Nvidia driver 555.99, you probably know how to update your system to the latest version to get back into some Halo. If not, you can download the driver via Nvidia’s GeForce Experience app (which is how I prefer to manage my drivers), or by downloading the driver directly from Nvidia’s website. The latter is a handy way to locate past drivers should you run into any other issues.
While rolling back to the previous driver was the solution to playing Halo Infinite on a PC with an Nvidia card, it’s usually preferable to keep your machine’s drivers as up-to-date as possible. But now that 556.12 fixed the Halo issue, I have a can of Monster energy, an aggressively frantic metal playlist, and endless rounds of Husky Raid with my name on them.
AT&T wants the seven biggest and most profitable tech companies, namely Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, to help subsidize Internet and telephone access in the U.S.
AT&T CEO John Stankey said on Monday at a telecoms forum that big tech companies should be required to contribute to the Universal Service Fund (USF), a federal program that spends $8 billion a year on phone, Internet, and other telecommunications services.
The fund supports lower-income customers, customers who live in rural areas, or those who reside in high-cost areas. It also brings internet and phone service to eligible schools and libraries.
“The seven largest and most profitable companies in the world built their franchises on the internet and the infrastructure we provide,” Stankey said, per a Reuters report.
“Why shouldn’t they participate in ensuring affordable and equitable access to the services of today that are just as indispensable as the phone lines of yesteryear?” he added.
John Stankey, AT&T CEO. Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As a telecommunications company operating in the U.S., AT&T is required to contribute to the USF.
The fund takes a percentage of AT&T’s revenues, starting at 15.5%.
AT&T charges its customers a Universal Connectivity Charge based on the USF percentage — so at the end of the day, AT&T’s customers pay an additional cost that goes towards the fund.
“In the competitive industry we are in, we cannot afford to absorb the costs associated with the USF that have been imposed on AT&T,” a company webpage reads.
Stankey isn’t the only AT&T executive to recently call attention to the USF fee. Earlier this month, AT&T executive vice president of federal regulatory relations Rhonda Johnson wrote that the company’s USF contribution percentage was now 34.4% — and had remained at above 30% for the past four quarters.
Johnson wrote that Congress should expand the USF’s sources of funding to “tech companies – like Meta and Google – that utilize consumer broadband connections.”
These big tech companies have profited from having Americans online and should also contribute to a reformed fund, according to Johnson.
Snapchat is working to make it harder for teenagers to be contacted on the app by people they don’t know, its latest effort to stop the sexual and financial exploitation scam known as sextortion.The company on Tuesday announced a set of new safety features, including expanded warning pop-ups that appear when a teen receives a message from someone they don’t share mutual friends with or have in their contacts. Now, teens will also receive a warning message if they receive a chat from a user who has been blocked or reported by others or who is from a region where the teen’s other contacts aren’t located, “signs that the person may be a scammer,” Snapchat said in a blog post Tuesday.Related video above: FBI warns of growing sextortion threat targeting young peopleAnd Snapchat will now prevent the delivery of friend requests for teens to or from an account that they don’t share mutual friends with that is also located in regions often associated with scammers.In addition to expanding Snapchat’s broader suite of youth safety measures, the new features are aimed specifically at preventing financial sextortion, a worrying and growing type of scam across social media where bad actors gain the trust of young users, convince them to send sexual or explicit photos and then demand payment in exchange for keeping the pictures a secret.”These features were designed to better protect teens from potential online harms and to enhance the real-friend connections that make Snapchat so unique,” Snap’s Global Head of Platform Safety Jacqueline Beauchere said in an exclusive statement to CNN ahead of the announcement.Video below: FBI agent shares tips for parents to prevent sextortionLaw enforcement officials have in recent years warned of an uptick in online sextortion scams, in which bad actors, typically located overseas, target children and teens, often with profiles that appear to belong to friendly fellow teenagers. In some cases, sextortion has resulted in suicides.Meta in April also announced new features aimed at combating sextortion, including informing users when they’ve interacted with someone who engaged in financial sextortion. And the chief executives of Meta and Snap, along with other social media leaders, were called to testify earlier this year in a Senate subcommittee hearing about their efforts to protect young people from online exploitation.Also among Snapchat’s announcements on Tuesday are improvements to the app’s blocking tools, which will prevent users from simply creating new accounts to get around a block. Now, when a user blocks another account, any new accounts created on the same device will also automatically be blocked.Snapchat is also introducing more frequent reminders to all users, including teens, about their location settings on the app’s “Snap Map” feature, which is toggled off by default but which users can update to share their location live with friends. The company said it will make it possible for users to update their location settings, remove their location from the map and customize which friends they share their location with – all in one spot on the app.The updates build on Snapchat’s existing teen safety features, which include a “Family Center” where parents can supervise the behavior of 13- to 17-year-old users, and mechanisms for removing age-inappropriate content.Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 (or 800-273-8255) to connect with a trained counselor or visit the NSPL site.
Snapchat is working to make it harder for teenagers to be contacted on the app by people they don’t know, its latest effort to stop the sexual and financial exploitation scam known as sextortion.
The company on Tuesday announced a set of new safety features, including expanded warning pop-ups that appear when a teen receives a message from someone they don’t share mutual friends with or have in their contacts. Now, teens will also receive a warning message if they receive a chat from a user who has been blocked or reported by others or who is from a region where the teen’s other contacts aren’t located, “signs that the person may be a scammer,” Snapchat said in a blog post Tuesday.
Related video above: FBI warns of growing sextortion threat targeting young people
And Snapchat will now prevent the delivery of friend requests for teens to or from an account that they don’t share mutual friends with that is also located in regions often associated with scammers.
In addition to expanding Snapchat’s broader suite of youth safety measures, the new features are aimed specifically at preventing financial sextortion, a worrying and growing type of scam across social media where bad actors gain the trust of young users, convince them to send sexual or explicit photos and then demand payment in exchange for keeping the pictures a secret.
“These features were designed to better protect teens from potential online harms and to enhance the real-friend connections that make Snapchat so unique,” Snap’s Global Head of Platform Safety Jacqueline Beauchere said in an exclusive statement to CNN ahead of the announcement.
Video below: FBI agent shares tips for parents to prevent sextortion
Law enforcement officials have in recent years warned of an uptick in online sextortion scams, in which bad actors, typically located overseas, target children and teens, often with profiles that appear to belong to friendly fellow teenagers. In some cases, sextortion has resulted in suicides.
Meta in April also announced new features aimed at combating sextortion, including informing users when they’ve interacted with someone who engaged in financial sextortion. And the chief executives of Meta and Snap, along with other social media leaders, were called to testify earlier this year in a Senate subcommittee hearing about their efforts to protect young people from online exploitation.
Also among Snapchat’s announcements on Tuesday are improvements to the app’s blocking tools, which will prevent users from simply creating new accounts to get around a block. Now, when a user blocks another account, any new accounts created on the same device will also automatically be blocked.
Snapchat is also introducing more frequent reminders to all users, including teens, about their location settings on the app’s “Snap Map” feature, which is toggled off by default but which users can update to share their location live with friends. The company said it will make it possible for users to update their location settings, remove their location from the map and customize which friends they share their location with – all in one spot on the app.
The updates build on Snapchat’s existing teen safety features, which include a “Family Center” where parents can supervise the behavior of 13- to 17-year-old users, and mechanisms for removing age-inappropriate content.
Editor’s Note:If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 (or 800-273-8255) to connect with a trained counselor or visit the NSPL site.
The internet is ephemeral, with the average life of a web page – before it’s changed or deleted – about 100 days. And so, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been making backups of websites every day since 1996, with nearly 900 billion pages preserved, available to all. But making books and music freely available has led to several lawsuits brought by record labels and the book publishing industry. Correspondent David Pogue reports.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
As Apple eulogized its commitment to purportedly non-invasive AI during its annual developer conference, the iPhone maker neglected to disclose a critical update that’s coming to the next evolution of its Mac operating system — macOS Sequoia.
The New M3-Powered iMacs Are Triggering Serious Deja Vu
As 9to5Mac first reported, Apple last updated the Chess app a dozen years ago, back when it still named its Mac operating system releases after big cats. With OS X Mountain Lion, Apple added Game Center support to Chess, along with a glossy background and some other small additions laid out in an ancient AppleInsider post. The app’s 2012 upgrade looked like this, per AppleInsider.
Screenshot: AppleInsider
The following year, Apple said it ran out of big cats and started naming Mac updates after “inspiring” places in California. In the years since, Apple kept its built-in Chess app around but neglected to update it until now.
Screenshot: 9to5Mac
The latest version of Chess for Mac features shinier and more realistic-looking pieces as well as a textured, gradient background. However, 9to5Mac reports that the revamped game includes fewer themes. The update specifically punts a rather gritty-looking grass theme option, though it’s technically possible that Apple has other changes coming to the app before macOS Sequoia exits beta and sees a wider release.
Apple’s new Apple Intelligence system is designed to infuse generative AI into the core of iOS. The system offers users a host of new services, including text and image generation as well as organizational and scheduling features. Yet while the system provides impressive new capabilities, it also brings complications. For one thing, the AI system relies on a huge amount of iPhone users’ data, presenting potential privacy risks. At the same time, the AI system’s substantial need for increased computational power means that Apple will have to rely increasingly on its cloud system to fulfill users’ requests.
Apple Unveils Its iPhone 15 and Apple Watch Series 9
Apple has historically offered iPhone customers unparalleled privacy; it’s a big part of the company’s brand. Part of those privacy assurances has been the option to choose when mobile data is stored locally and when it’s stored in the cloud. While an increased reliance on the cloud might ring some privacy alarm bells, Apple has anticipated these concerns and created a startling new system that it calls its Private Cloud Compute, or PCC. This is really a cloud security system designed to keep users’ data away from prying eyes while it’s being used to help fulfill AI-related requests.
On paper, Apple’s new privacy system sounds really impressive. The company claims to have created “the most advanced security architecture ever deployed for cloud AI compute at scale.” But what looks like a massive achievement on paper could ultimately cause broader issues for user privacy down the road. And it’s unclear, at least at this juncture, whether Apple will be able to live up to its lofty promises.
How Apple’s Private Cloud Compute Is Supposed to Work
In many ways, cloud systems are just giant databases. If a bad actor gets into that system/database, they can look at the data contained within. However, Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (PCC) brings a number of unique safeguards that are designed to prevent that kind of access.
Apple says it has implemented its security system at both the software and hardware levels. The company created custom servers that will house the new cloud system, and those servers go through a rigorous process of screening during manufacturing to ensure they are secure. “We inventory and perform high-resolution imaging of the components of the PCC node,” the company claims. The servers are also being outfitted with physical security mechanisms such as a tamper-proof seal. iPhone users’ devices can only connect to servers that have been certified as part of the protected system, and those connections are end-to-end encrypted, meaning that the data being transmitted is pretty much untouchable while in transit.
Once the data reaches Apple’s servers, there are more protections to ensure that it stays private. Apple says its cloud is leveraging stateless computing to create a system where user data isn’t retained past the point at which it is used to fulfill an AI service request. So, according to Apple, your data won’t have a significant lifespan in its system. The data will travel from your phone to the cloud, interact with Apple’s high-octane AI algorithms—thus fulfilling whatever random question or request you’ve submitted (“draw me a picture of the Eiffel Tower on Mars”)—and then the data (again, according to Apple) will be deleted.
Apple has instituted an array of other security and privacy protections that can be read about in more detail on the company’s blog. These defenses, while diverse, all seem designed to do one thing: prevent any breach of the company’s new cloud system.
But Is This Really Legit?
Companies make big cybersecurity promises all the time and it’s usually impossible to verify whether they’re telling the truth or not. FTX, the failed crypto exchange, once claimed it kept users’ digital assets in air-gapped servers. Later investigation showed that was pure bullshit. But Apple is different, of course. To prove to outside observers that it’s really securing its cloud, the company says it will launch something called a “transparency log” that involves full production software images (basically copies of the code being used by the system). It plans to publish these logs regularly so that outside researchers can verify that the cloud is operating just as Apple says.
What People Are Saying About the PCC
Apple’s new privacy system has notably polarized the tech community. While the sizable effort and unparalleled transparency that characterize the project have impressed many, some are wary of the broader impacts it may have on mobile privacy in general. Most notably—aka loudly—Elon Musk immediately began proclaiming that Apple had betrayed its customers.
Simon Willison, a web developer and programmer, told Gizmodo that the “scale of ambition” of the new cloud system impressed him.
“They are addressing multiple extremely hard problems in the field of privacy engineering, all at once,” he said. “The most impressive part I think is the auditability—the bit where they will publish images for review in a transparency log which devices can use to ensure they are only talking to a server running software that has been made public. Apple employs some of the best privacy engineers in the business, but even by their standards this is a formidable piece of work.”
But not everybody is so enthused. Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, expressed skepticism about Apple’s new system and the promises that went along with it.
“I don’t love it,” said Green with a sigh. “My big concern is that it’s going to centralize a lot more user data in a data center, whereas right now most of that is on people’s actual phones.”
Historically, Apple has made local data storage a mainstay of its mobile design, because cloud systems are known for their privacy deficiencies.
“Cloud servers are not secure, so Apple has always had this approach,” Green said. “The problem is that, with all this AI stuff that’s going on, Apple’s internal chips are not powerful enough to do the stuff that they want it to do. So they need to send the data to servers and they’re trying to build these super protected servers that nobody can hack into.”
He understands why Apple is making this move, but doesn’t necessarily agree with it, since it means a higher reliance on the cloud.
Green says Apple also hasn’t made it clear whether it will explain to users what data remains local and what data will be shared with the cloud. This means that users may not know what data is being exported from their phones. At the same time, Apple hasn’t made it clear whether iPhone users will be able to opt out of the new PCC system. If users are forced to share a certain percentage of their data with Apple’s cloud, it may signal less autonomy for the average user, not more. Gizmodo reached out to Apple for clarification on both of these points and will update this story if the company responds.
To Green, Apple’s new PCC system signals a shift in the phone industry to a more cloud-reliant posture. This could lead to a less secure privacy environment overall, he says.
“I have very mixed feelings about it,” Green said. “I think enough companies are going to be deploying very sophisticated AI [to the point] where no company is going to want to be left behind. I think consumers will probably punish companies that don’t have great AI features.”
At WWDC 2024, Apple unleashed a blitzkrieg of software updates to put AI, or “Apple Intelligence,” front and center in your iPhones, iPads, and Macs. After Samsung and Google pushed AI on phones, it’s now Apple’s turn to try and flip the script to make smartphones, tablets, and laptops “smarter” by introducing an AI of its own.
Apple Unveils Its iPhone 15 and Apple Watch Series 9
If you woke up this morning hoping for some big hardware announcement, or hell, even a hint or teaser for a new phone or Mac design, it’s best you return to your comfortable cave and hibernate until the next big Apple showcase. Regarding software, Apple Intelligence will be available in most user-end apps with automatic summarizations and AI-enhanced photo editing. ChatGPT is coming to the latest iPhones as the Cupertino, California tech giant is set to make the chatbot accessible anywhere on the phone without needing the app.
WWDC 2024 — June 10 | Apple
If you have no interest in AI, there are a few new updates to get excited about. iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 are incoming, promising some long-awaited features. One is the iPhone lock screen update, which allows users to place their widgets and icons where they want. Another is the update to Messenger that will finally enable it to use the RCS protocol. Say goodbye to those green bubbles forever.
Meanwhile, iPads and Macs are getting a few new, unexpected features, like a full-on Calculator app that supports scribbling and iPhone mirroring on macOS Sequoia. Many of these updates are slated for fall of this year, though the betas should start rolling out in the next few months.
What’s Up With ‘Apple Intelligence’
Apple Intelligence is Apple’s Big AI Product for All of its Ecosystem
Screenshot: Apple
First on the list is “Apple Intelligence.” The Cupertino company’s AI is just what it says on the tin: an entire ecosystem for navigating users’ lives. There’s a lot going into it, but—eventually—the software should be able to include multimodal AI vision capabilities and work within all the apps on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The only problem is that we still don’t know exactly when any or parts of these features should be available.
Apple Intelligence can Rewrite or Proofread Text
Apple promises the new AI writing tools can summarize your text and add an easy “TLDR” to the top of emails. Like Google’s Gemini, the rewriting feature could include different text styles to make it sound more “Friendly” or “Concise.” You also have the option to add tables, lists, or summaries to the text. This should work in pretty much all Apple apps and some third-party apps.
Apple’s Emails Will Summarize Important Points Before You Open them
The Priority feature in the Mail app will show you your most important emails or messages for when you have a lot of them coming in at once. These condensed notifications will show this right on the lock screen of your iPhone. This works with a new Focus that cuts down on the number of notifications and only shows the most important ones.
Apple Will Let You Create AI Images, Including ‘Genmojis’
Screenshot: Apple
Of course, Apple wouldn’t stay its hand from the AI image generation game. The new Image Playground is built into Pages, Messages, Freeform, and several other apps.
You have three styles on offer: animation, illustration, or sketch, but you have the regular prompt bar to make it create whatever (somewhat disturbing) images you desire. There are also new AI-generated emojis called ‘Genmoji,’ which will come out as a sticker or Tapback. You can also create one of your friends if you trust it enough. Apple promises all its images are generated on-device.
There’s also a new Magic Eraser-like tool in Photos to remove unwanted elements from an image before filling in those missing pixels.
The Apple Intelligence Can Pull Up Your Files and Photos
There’s a lot of big promises coming about thanks to AI. Apple claims their new AI system will eventually let the AI perform rather complex actions, like pulling up photos and files from any of your apps. It should be able to work between apps so that it will know when your meetings are and what your plans are for that day when you ask it to send a text that helps you work around your schedule.
Apple Promises Its AI Won’t Save Your Data
Some of the AI running on Apple’s devices are on-device, but those are supposed to run through Private Cloud Compute. Apple promises to maintain your privacy by determining if a request needs any off-device AI. Then, it will only send parts of the request to the cloud. Apple promises outside agencies will be able to look at Apple’s servers to verify the big privacy claims.
Siri Has a New Look and a Whole Lot More Capabilities
Screenshot: Apple
Poor, beleaguered Siri is finally receiving those long-rumored AI upgrades, but we may need to wait a long time to see them in action. The Siri updates will allow the assistant to interact with iPhone and iPad apps far more than it currently can.
For one, Siri now has a new logo and look, making the borders of the screen wavy whenever the assistant gets called up. Siri will maintain conversational context and will be able to work off your previous requests. Now you can type to chat to Siri as well. Double tapping on the bottom of the screen allows you to communicate with Siri directly.
Siri can also take actions happening on-screen. It can also take actions across apps, like adding a photo from the Photos app to the Notes app. Eventually, the idea is that Siri can take specific actions in more apps over time.
The digital assistant should also become more engrained with users’ “Personal Context.” Siri should know your emails, plans, calendar events, and texts to find all the necessary information.
Siri Will Be Your Best How-To Machine for Apple Products
Siri should be able to send you a how-to guide for anything related to your Apple products. This comes baked into Siri and will work with all the most commonly asked questions about Apple products.
Siri Can Use ChatGPT ‘Seamlessly’
Screenshot: Apple
While we don’t have a good idea when Siri will receive its most important updates, we know that the current stopgap will be ChatGPT integration directly on users’ devices. The app will be accessible straight from Siri and the new compose feature. You can use the chatbot to generate DALL-E images as well. Apple promises this integration will be powered by GPT-4o for free without paying for an account.
Apple promises your activities won’t be logged, and you can access the ChatGPT paid features if you link your account. ChatGPT integration will be coming to all the Apple ecosystem’s new updates later this year.
iOS 18 is Promising some Long-Awaited Customization Features
iOS Now Supports RCS
Screenshot: Apple
As a last-minute note to end its talk about iOS 18, Apple confirmed that the next version of iOS will support RCS protocol. There’s no word yet exactly what form this will take, though Android Authority first recognized that it could be RCS Universal Profile 2.4. This could be the true end to green bubble tyranny, but we’ll learn more as we get close to release.
iOS 18 Lets You Finally Rearrange Your Home Screen Apps
Screenshot: Apple
iOS 18 will be a big one for folks who have long demanded Android-like customizability on the iPhone. Now, you can rearrange all your apps and widgets on the home screen however you like, so you can finally frame your background wallpaper without having an app covering up your kids’ faces. Apple goes further by allowing users to set the tint and tone of the app’s icons themselves.
You Can Soon “Lock” Any App in iOS 18
The next iPhone update will allow users to lock and hide apps so anyone using your phone won’t have immediate access without biometric scanning or a PIN. Similarly, you can now hide away apps into a select hidden folder if you don’t want visitors to your iPhone to get into some of your more sensitive apps without a passcode.
Messenger Includes Full Emoji Tapbacks
Screenshot: Apple
Are you annoyed you can’t do full emoji reactions to texts like you can on Android? The iOS Talkback feature is receiving full emoji support, so you can respond to your friend’s queries with as many poop emojis as their messages require.
Messenger Text Effects Will Let You Emphasize Certain Words
The Messenger app in iOS 18 is expanding the ability to emphasize words. Now, instead of just emphasizing the names of people or other words, users can use Text Effects to make certain words blow up or jiggle. The app will automatically suggest specific effects for certain words. There are new effects, and you can add them to any text you want.
Messages are also gaining the ability to use text formatting, allowing you to underline, bold, or italicize words or phrases.
Game Mode on iPhone
Mac’s Game Mode is getting a version on iPhone. The mode should automatically kick in while in a game. This minimizes background tasks to put as much processing power into the game. It should improve latency with controllers or AirPods.
Messages Via Satellite
If you find yourself without cellphone service, Apple will let you use your iPhone to text friends and family when off the grid on Messages. You can still send emojis and Tapbacks, and Apple claims its E2E encrypted. This will only be available with the iPhone 14 or later, which comes with satellite support.
Apple Maps Now Allows You to Get Hiking Trail Info
Screenshot: Apple
Apple Maps now has access to topographic trail maps, allowing hiking loops on your phone. This will show the overall length and elevation gain of the trail or loop and the various entry points on the app.
Tap to Cash Allows You to Pay Your Friends With Your Phone
Those iPhone users keen on Apple Cash will soon be able to send money to each other using the same action you can use to send folks your contact information. Hovering both phones with the active cash app will send and receive money from your wallet. Additionally, event tickets are being redesigned to show you details about the venue and other essential information.
Photos App is Gonna Look a Hell of a Lot Different
The Photos app now has a new design that shows all your photos in a single grid. You can find different photos based on months or years and filter your photos to eschew screenshots.
The new Collections will let you section different photos into topics like People & Pets or Recent Days. This will let you see your photos in a collage. In selections like Trips, you can find your vacations or travels by date. You can also pin different collections.
The Favorites carousel now shows you a slideshow of photos from various favorite collections.
iPadOS 18 Promises Some New and Unique Features for Apple’s Tablets
Floating Tab Bar on iPad Might Make it Far Easier to Use
Screenshot: Apple
Apple is introducing a new floating tab bar for iPadOS 18. It essentially works as an easy-to-access menu that can morph into a sidebar for even more fine-tuned controls. It should work with most Apple apps on the iPad. There are also new animations to accompany this update. Apple added it’s working to make browsing through documents easier on Apple’s tablets.
SharePlay Tap and Draw Will Let You Remote Control Another iPad
The new SharePlay update will let you make annotations on a foreign device and act as a remote control for another person’s iPad. So, if you’re trying to describe to your mom how to access her iPad photos, you can use SharePlay and draw an arrow straight to them. Once you get frustrated enough, you can take control.
Calculator on iPad (‘Yay’)
Screenshot: Apple
Finally, the iPad is getting a calculator app, but it’s far more interesting than that. It may look like It also works with Apple Pencil. Math Notes comes up from the calculator button, and if you write out an equal sign, it solves it for you, updating it live depending on your different functions. It also works with lists that let you tabulate numbers rather quickly. Notes also have the same math capabilities as Calculator.
Notes’ Smart Script Will Fix Your Chicken Scratch as You Write
The AI will make your writing more legible as you go. The on-board AI should be able to take your loose handwriting and make it a bit more legible while keeping your writing “style.” You can paste it directly into the Notes app, which should mimic your handwriting style.
So, What’s New in macOS Sequoia?
macOS Sequoia Will Allow You to Mirror Your iPhone on Your MacBook
Screenshot: Apple
macOS Sequoia is getting a lot of the features you can find on Apple’s other products. Continuity will let you access universal apps on the rest of the Apple ecosystem. More importantly, it will let you mirror your iPhone on a Mac. Users can then select and work on any of the iPhone’s apps. The audio also comes through Mac.
The iPhone stays locked while you mirror it and works with Standby mode. When your phone is connected to the laptop, iPhone notifications will also appear on Mac, and when you click on them, your iPhone mirror will open up.
You Can Place Your Mac Windows into Tiles, Like Windows 11
Screenshot: Apple
macOS Sequoia is adding a few new tiling features to make organizing your desktop more seamless. Bringing a window to a corner of the screen should automatically reorient and morph to fit a clean style.
You Can Preview Your Camera When Doing a Facetime
Before hopping into a video meeting, Macs will let you preview what you look like on camera. It is better to help you fix your makeup or remember to put on a shirt. There’s also a built-in background replacer if you can’t access one in whatever app you use.
Passwords App Will Show All Your Stuff
There’s now an all-new Passwords app to act as your one-stop shop for your keychains and important, sensitive information. It should be present across the entire Apple ecosystem. This should contain everything from WiFi passwords to verification codes to Passkeys.
Safari Reader Function Summarizes Text
Screenshot: Apple
The new updates to Safari introduce several new AI functions. At the top of the list are AI-generated summaries for the content on web pages. The Reader mode changes the website’s look and brings up a table of contents. There’s no look whether it also removes ads while it’s at it.
Game Porting Toolkit 2 Adds Better Windows Compatibility
Apple first announced its Game Porting Toolkit last WWDC, and now there’s a sequel that promises to make porting more hardcore titles easier to Apple’s framework. The company detailed several new games coming to Mac, including Frostpunk 2 and Control. Assassins Creed: Shadows is also coming to iPad, and Prince of Persia: Shattered Crown is coming to Mac.
How About watchOS 11 and AirPods?
AirPods Can Sense Your Head Nods For Saying Yes to Siri
Screenshot: Apple
If you’d rather not be that asshole in the elevator talking on your Bluetooth headset, AirPods will soon get a feature that should track your head movements. If there’s an incoming call, you can nod or shake your head to respond yes or no to taking it. After it rolls out to AirPods, we’ll have to see what other uses this gesture has.
Apple Watch’s watchOS 11 Gets Training Mode
There are a few new features on the Apple Watch for those fitness fans. With Training Mode, an AI algorithm tells you what kind of effort you made during your recent exercise. This might tell you if you were going too soft or too hard on your recent workout. Plus, you can customize your Fitness app to see what kind of data you want to see at a glance.
The Next watchOS Update Includes a Vitals App
Screenshot: Apple
The Vitals app will look at your entire health data to check all your health metrics and even tell you whether your drinking has impacted your health. This might show your heart rate and tell you whether that’s in your typical range. If it’s not within normal levels, the app should give you a rundown of what’s happening and what could be causing the issue.
Apple Watch Will Open Up Different Widgets Depending on Context
Apple’s smart stacks will automatically add weather or translation widgets to your main screen if it thinks you need them. This might come up when it looks like it’s about to rain or if you’re traveling around a foreign country.
The Apple Watch Will Determine Which Photos Work Best for Your Home Screen
Screenshot: Apple
Like its new TV update, Apple Watches will look through your photos and select those with enough blank space to fit the time. It should also be able to stick the time in front or behind certain photo elements, making it look far more like the photo belongs on the home screen.
If you’d rather not be that asshole in the elevator talking on your Bluetooth headset, AirPods will soon get a feature that should track your head movements. If there’s an incoming call, you can nod or shake your head to respond yes or no to taking it. After it rolls out to AirPods, we’ll have to see what other uses this gesture has.
AirPods Pro Now Have Voice Isolation and Spatial Audio in Gaming
AirPods Pro is getting an update that will add voice isolation to remove background noise for the sake of whoever’s on the other end. Additionally, developers can access an API to add spatial audio for games. This will add a surround-sound type experience to the game, first coming to Need for Speed Mobile.
Is There Anything New Coming to Apple TV+ and Vision Pro?
AppleVision OS 2, the Squeekquel, Will Let You Project Your Mac Screen Into nearly 180 Degrees
Screenshot: Apple
Apple released Vision Pro in February, and its first major update of the year is a sequel to the first visionOS coming down the pike just a few months later.
The big new update includes several new spatial photo updates. The Vision Pro can turn 2D images into 3D-ish Spatial photos. You can share those spatial photos with SharePlay. Apple is adding a few new gestures to tap to open the home view or open the control center by turning your wrist. Later this year, Apple plans to update the OS to add better Mac screen integration. This will expand the total view of your projected Mac screen, and with dynamic foveation, it can create a wraparound screen that travels nearly 180 degrees.
InSight on Apple tvOS Will Offer a Few Details on What You’re Watching
Apple’s new InSight feature on Apple TV+ is essentially Amazon’s X-Ray. It lets you get a quick summary of the content you’re watching, plus information about the actors on screen and perhaps a little trivia about the scene as it plays. Plus, there are a few new screensaver animations, like one from Peanuts’ Snoopy, but your photos will now reframed to fit with a timestamp and look like they belong on-screen.
Update, 7:50 p.m. ET: AT&T says the issue has now been fixed, telling Gizmodo over email, “We collaborated with the other carrier to find a solution and appreciate our customers patience during this period.” The original article remains below.
Google’s Antitrust Case Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to AI
AT&T customers across the U.S. are reporting major network issues on Tuesday that’s stopping them from making calls to people with other network carriers. DownDetector appears to show reports from customers at T-Mobile and Verizon as well, though both carriers tell Gizmodo they’re not experiencing outages and those reports are from people simply trying to reach AT&T users.
“There is a nationwide issue that is affecting the ability of customers to complete calls between carriers,” an AT&T spokesperson told Gizmodo. “The carriers are working as quickly as possible to diagnose and resolve the issue.”
The company told ABC News that calls to 911 are not impacted and should be working normally.
AT&T suffered a widespread outage across the country back in February that hampered not only voice calls but any connectivity on the network nationwide. Initial suspicions online saw users speculate it may have been the result of a cyberattack, a rumor that AT&T denied.
AT&T eventually apologized for the outage and offered customers a $5 credit. Some customers complained, but AT&T defended the rebate by saying it was roughly the “average cost of a full day of service.”
Other tech companies have experienced major outages recently, with ChatGPT down for thousands of users Tuesday morning. The first ChatGPT outage appears to have started around 3:00 a.m. ET and a second outage hitting around 10:30 am ET. Things appear to be back up and normal with the AI chatbot service as of Tuesday evening.
Hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users experienced a serious outage earlier this year and LinkedIn saw the same thing back in March. It seems a number of companies are just struggling to keep their sites up for a host of different reasons.
