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Facebook Rolls Out End-to-End Encrypted Chats for Everyone

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

End-to-end encrypted chats are now available for all users of Facebook Messenger, the company announced. This includes group chats and calls.

Last year, we announced that we began testing end-to-end encryption for group chats, including voice and video calls. We’re excited to announce that this feature is available to everyone. Now you can choose to connect with your friends and family in a private and secure way.

These secure chats remain opt-in only, instead of encrypted by default like actual private messaging apps.

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An NFT on OpenSea Can Steal Your IP Address

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

An NFT found on the OpenSea marketplace can steal visitors’ IP addresses, according to a repot from Motherboard.

Of course, websites often collect and store visitors’ IP addresses in virtue of how the sites function. OpenSea itself likely collects the IP addresses of visitors, like plenty of other sites, apps, or services. But here, an outside third party—the NFT seller—is able to gather information themselves on the people viewing the NFT, potentially without them knowing.

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Contactless iPhone Payments May Be Just Around The Corner

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Contactless iPhone payments could be enabled in a future iOS update, Mark Gurman wrote on Wednesday. It means that small business could accept credit card payments directly with an iPhone, without needing a terminal such as Square. Jeff Butts has more information here.

In order to accept payments on an iPhone today, merchants need to use payment terminals that plug in or communicate with the phone via Bluetooth. The upcoming feature will instead turn the iPhone into a payment terminal, letting users such as food trucks and hair stylists accept payments with the tap of a credit card or another iPhone onto the back of their device.

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ID.me CEO Admits Company Uses '1:Many' Facial Recognition

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

ID.me CEO Blake Hall wrote in a LinkedIn post that his company uses 1:many facial recognition. Cyber Scoop explains how this contradicts a press release saying ID.me does not use this technology. 1:many means the technology can identify people within mass databases of photos. It’s the opposite of the 1:1 face match proposed in the IRS + ID.me verification.

“We could disable the 1:many face search, but then lose a valuable fraud fighting tool. Or we could change our public stance on using 1:many face search,” an engineer wrote in a message posted to a company Slack channel on Tuesday. “But it seems we can’t keep doing one thing and saying another as that’s bound to land us in hot water.”

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Apple M1 Max vs Intel Alder Lake Core i9 - Who Wins?

Charlotte Henry · · 2 Comments

Benchmarks are out for Intel’s Alder Lake Core i9 chip. The raw numbers look like a win for PC users, even when compared with Apple’s M1 Max. However, as Macworld pointed out, there is a bit more to consider when making comparisons.

Geekbench 5’s OpenCL graphics benchmark results look dramatic. The PC laptops PCWorld tested have expensive discrete GPUs that offer peak performance, and it shows in the results. But a more applicable comparison is to examine the results for the integrated GPUs. In this case, the M1 Max and its 32-core GPU posts a 183 percent increase over the Alder Lake’s integrated GPU, an Iris Xe.

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Analysts Confident Apple Ahead of AAPL Earnings Call

Charlotte Henry · · Add Comment

Some analysts believe that Apple has managed to deal with supply-chain issues caused by the Covid pandemic better than its rivals at the end of last year. It could also surpass Wall Street growth targets of six percent when it announces its latest earnings on Thursday. Reuter has a nice round-up of analyst opinion.

We expect Apple to reach its highest market share in China since Apple entered the market in 2008,” said analyst Nicole Peng of Canalys. Investment firm Wedbush Securities forecasts record iPhone sales of more than 40 million units during the holiday period from Black Friday to Christmas. Morgan Stanley estimates total holiday quarter iPhone shipments at 83 million, representing a 4% increase from the previous year. Wall Street analysts expect Apple to post about $118.7 billion in revenue, representing 6.48% year-over-year growth, and quarterly earnings per share of $1.89, according to Eikon data as of Tuesday.

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A Designer's Perspective on AirPods Annoyances

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

UI designer Philip Ardeljan wrote a blog post on AirPods annoyances and how they don’t fit Apple’s mantra of “Just Work.”

Annoyance 1: If you have 2 devices, say iMac and iPhone connected to AirPods, when you are using your iMac and unlock your iPhone to check something, sometimes, the AirPods switch to the iPhone. But you didn’t want them to. I get that Apple is trying to be clever and anticipate your moves, which I genuinely appreciate, but when it gets in the way it’s annoying.

This one in particular annoys me too.

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A Crypto Wallet Crack Recovered $2 Million in Tokens

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

The Verge had a fascinating story out yesterday about a crypto wallet crack that helped two friends get their tokens back. It’s a long-ish read but not overly technical.

Reich gave up and wrote off the money in his mind. He was willing to take the loss — until the price started to rise again. From a low of around $12,000, the value of their tokens started to skyrocket. By the end of 2020, it would be worth more than $400,000, rising briefly to over $3 million. It would be hard to get into the wallet without the PIN — but it wasn’t impossible. And with potentially millions on the line, Reich and his friend vowed to find a way inside.

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Google Topics Will Categorize Your Browsing for Advertising

Andrew Orr · · 1 Comment

Google Topics will track your browsing and divvy it up into 300 categories for advertising. It replaces Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

When you hit upon a site that supports the Topics API for ad purposes, the browser will share three topics you are interested in — one for each of the three last weeks — selected randomly from your top five topics of each week. The site can then share this with its advertising partners to decide which ads to show you. Ideally, this would make for a more private method of deciding which ad to show you — and Google notes that it also provides users with far greater control and transparency than what’s currently the standard. Users will be able to review and remove topics from their lists — and turn off the entire Topics API, too.

 

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Cooking Over FaceTime? New Recipe App 'Pestle' Can Help

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Sarah Perez writes about a new app called Pestle that helps with cooking over FaceTime. It makes use of SharePlay released with iOS 15.1.

The result is a well-built recipe app that provides a better experience for the end user, and one which tries to respect the creator content it organizes by offering source links, tools to discover more recipes from the same creator as they’re published, and a feature that encourages repeat visits to recipe sites. But some of Pestle’s other features make it almost too easy to bypass creators’ websites, which could cause concerns.