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Was That a Notchless Next-Gen iPhone on Ted Lasso?

Jeff Butts ·

We’ve been hearing speculation that the next generation of the iPhone will have a smaller camera notch than current models. Through either an unintentional leak or just a post-production editing mistake, the Ted Lasso audience got a peek of a notchless next-gen iPhone in the August 27 episode. The handset looks like an iPhone 12 from the rear, but images of the screen seem to show iOS 14 wallpaper without the usual cutout from the camera notch.

Apple is notorious for its secrecy, so it seems unlikely that this is a deliberate signal that the notch is disappearing from the iPhone 13. That said, it’s been rumored for months now that the iPhone 13 would have a much smaller notch or a hole-punch selfie camera. However, a completely notchless display isn’t believed to be in the cards for this year’s iPhone.

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Examining Apple's Carefree Attitude Towards Employee Privacy

Andrew Orr ·

Zoe Schiffer, writing for The Verge, investigates Apple employees and “the blurring of personal and work accounts.”

This is how it starts: a new Apple employee is told during onboarding that collaborating with their colleagues will require them to make extensive use of iCloud storage, and their manager offers a two terabyte upgrade. This will link their personal Apple ID to their work account — in fact, the instructions for accessing this upgrade explicitly say “you must link your personal Apple ID with your AppleConnect work account.”

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Private Search Engine 'Xayn' Releases Web Version of its App

Andrew Orr ·

An AI company based in Berlin, Germany called Xayn has launched a web version of its private search engine app.

Both versions of Xayn use Masked Federated Learning to protect users’ data privacy while still providing them with an individually tailored web experience. They are created with the same code base in Flutter, a developing framework that’s designed to function both on mobile and web. The team transferred the AI to work directly in the respective browsers with high speed via WebAssembly so that all personal data stays privately within the browsers.

Looks like it doesn’t work yet on Safari.

Update to Command Line App ‘a-Shell’ Can Force iCloud Downloads
Cool Stuff Found

Update to Command Line App ‘a-Shell’ Can Force iCloud Downloads

Andrew Orr ·

a-Shell is a terminal app for iOS and iPadOS that supports Python, Lua, Perl, C, C++, TeX, and all Unix utilities. It received an update recently with even more capabilities: New commands: ffmpeg, ffprobe, unrar; ffmpeg is compiled to Arm64 and uses hardware acceleration for fast conversion; iOS won’t idle while a-Shell is running a command (good for long running commands); If you open an iCloud directory with pickFolder, a-Shell will download all files in this directory; New commands: downloadFile and downloadFolder, to force downloading iCloud files; Shortcuts: You can run small python scripts or ImageMagick (convert) commands in extension; Improvements to lg2: lg2 merge –abort, lg2 reset –hard, documentation fixes.

Podcast

Remembering The Hokey Pokey — Mac Geek Gab 887

John F. Braun & Dave Hamilton · · Add Comment

How much Cool Stuff Found can your Two Favorite Geeks share? You’re about to find out! Listen as John and Dave share all of your (and their) Cool Stuff Found, PLUS answering a slew of your networking and networking-related questions. Good stuff this week, folks, and it’s all because of you. Press play, listen, and enjoy learning five new things!

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AdGuard: 'People Should be Worried About Apple CSAM Detection'

Andrew Orr ·

Adblocking company AdGuard is the latest to offer commentary on Apple’s controversial decision to detect CSAM in iCloud Photos. The team ponders ways to block it using their AdGuard DNS technology.

We consider preventing uploading the safety voucher to iCloud and blocking CSAM detection within AdGuard DNS. How can it be done? It depends on the way CSAM detection is implemented, and before we understand it in details, we can promise nothing particular.

Who knows what this base can turn into if Apple starts cooperating with some third parties? The base goes in, the voucher goes out. Each of the processes can be obstructed, but right now we are not ready to claim which solution is better and whether it can be easily incorporated into AdGuard DNS. Research and testing are required.