u/beyondthetech recently posted in the Apple subreddit about ways to improve the Phone app. I think it’s an interesting list, and it could improve the iPhone experience.

I certainly believe that these changes are not too difficult to implement, and I’ve been asking Apple for years to make this happen. Maybe CallKit and Do Not Disturb were their first implementations to my request, but honestly, they’re still both very basic and very naive. With everything else in iOS getting more robust and more smart, Apple needs to really take a fresh look at this area and address it much better this time around in time for iOS 12’s release, or at least in a 12.1 release, if they are already time-constrained.

Cyber warfare has three aspects: physical, informational, and cognitive. So writes Richard Forno for The Conversation. It seems to me that cognition would be a subset of informational warfare, instead of being a separate dimension. Cyber tools can be used to target your thoughts and perceptions of reality, and we’re seeing this virtually in real time.

However, I believe this isn’t a new form of war at all: Rather, it is the same old strategies taking advantage of the latest available technologies. Just as online marketing companies use sponsored content and search engine manipulation to distribute biased information to the public, governments are using internet-based tools to pursue their agendas. In other words, they’re hacking a different kind of system through social engineering on a grand scale.

Flash is dead and any remaining support for the former king of online multimedia officially ends in 2020, so Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is urging U.S. government agencies to drop the platform. In a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology he said,

While Flash will continue to exist past this point, it will no longer receive necessary technical support, significantly magnifying its existing cybersecurity deficiencies.

Considering the ridiculously long list of security flaws in Flash, ditching the platform is something the government should’ve done long ago.

Check out this great account from former NeXT employee Chris MacAskill. He talks about how a phone call he made behind then-NeXT CEO Steve Jobs’s back (as you do) to Intel CEO Andy Grove probably played a role in Apple eventually buying NeXT. It’s a long story with lots of anecdotal details about working at NeXT and the things that were happening there in the lead-up to Apple buying the company. I love this stuff, I love the lore and the behind-the-scenes stories of how things happened. Mr. MacAskill isn’t taking all the credit for Apple buying NeXT, but he played a (hidden) role. If you like Apple history, this is a must-read. Here’s just a tiny taste:

The thing I loved most about working in developer relations at NeXT was how Steve could call anyone.

He would burst in my office and say, “I’m gonna call Bill about TrueType,” and gesture for me to follow. A minute later he’d have Bill Gates on the speaker phone with me in fly-on-the-wall mode.

“BUT BILL! You ripped off Adobe and made John cry.” (John Warnock was the CEO of Adobe.)

“Steve, we didn’t want to get into the font business. It’s a nightmare. But Adobe wouldn’t open their fonts until they had competition.”