Link

Here are Steps to Take to Protect Your Privacy on Apple Devices

Andrew Orr ·

Macinstruct published a brief guide on protecting your privacy on Apple devices as a response to Apple’s CSAM detection plans.

We’re now encouraging readers to protect their privacy by disabling certain Apple features. In situations where privacy is a hard requirement, it may be necessary to consider using non-Apple hardware and software. This article provides an overview of our recommendations and your options.

It’s a decent guide except for the recommendation to disable iMessage in favor of SMS. iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, SMS is not. My advice for iMessage privacy is to prevent Messages from storing content in iCloud. When that happens, Apple has the capability to decrypt texts. On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Profile Name > iCloud, and turn off the toggle for Messages. Then go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages. Change it to auto-delete old messages after 30 days. Or, use a private messenger such as Signal.

Link

The H.266 Video Codec is Coming. Here’s What it Promises

Andrew Orr ·

The next codec for video compression is H.266, or Versatile Video Codec (VVC). It promises up to 50% better compression than H.265, or High-Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC).

The JVET decided to build H.266 (VVC) for applications beyond video streaming. The standard has support for beaming 4K to 8K videos seamlessly, along with support for 360-degree videos. This could be useful in VR and AR applications.

Bross mentioned that H.266 is designed in such a way that that you can access different regions of a frame directly in the bitstream. So a video streaming service could choose to streams regions that are not very important in the scence in a lower resolution to save bandwidth.