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The Fascinating-and-Embarrassing Edition Saturday, September 14, 2024

Keep Your Notes App Under Lock And Key, by Charley Locke, The Atlantic

The Notes app doesn’t have a specific purpose. Instead, it holds the jotted-down ephemera of daily life that might otherwise go on Post-it Notes and the backs of envelopes that we toss out: Why keep your Scrabble scores after game night is over? Users often don’t think about an audience when they write notes, but they also don’t always bother to delete them. Like a diary, the app keeps your thoughts in chronological order over a span of time; unlike diary entries, many notes are unmediated by self-reflection. The result is that the app functions like a years-long internal monologue—a lens into what someone is actually thinking.

In other words, Notes is fascinating—and embarrassing. Influencers sometimes share a peek into curated versions of their Notes app on social media; it’s so widely understood as an intimate medium that celebrities use apologies written in the Notes app to signal the authenticity of their (edited, vetted) statements. But the idea of unfettered access—letting another person in on your inner monologue—can be excruciating. Perhaps even more vulnerable is auditing the record of your own past self.

New iPhones

Apple's Johny Srouji Confirms All iPhone 16 Models Have 8GB RAM, More Details, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, confirmed the 8GB of RAM number in an interview with Geekerwan. This marks the first time that Apple has publicly confirmed the amount of RAM in the iPhone 16. Notably, this is a departure from previous years, as Apple typically shies away from sharing these types of specs publicly.

End Of An Era: iPhone 16 Won't Include Stickers In The Box, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

In messaging distributed to Apple Store teams this week and seen by 9to5Mac, Apple confirmed that the iPhone 16 will not come with Apple stickers in the box. Instead, the company says that stickers will only be available to iPhone 16 buyers upon request.

Stuff

The Easiest Way To Convert All-Caps Text, by Pranay Parab, Lifehacker

SmartCapsLock is a simple utility that lets you use the Caps Lock key to your advantage. Once installed, the app is unobtrusive, and does only one thing: If you've accidentally capitalized a few words, you can quickly select those words and tap Caps Lock again to convert them into sentence case.

Super Productivity Is My Favorite (Free) Task-Management App, by Justin Pot, Lifehacker

With it, you can quickly create a list of things you need to get done, estimate how long it will take you to do them all, and plan your time accordingly. The application is also built to track time spent on those tasks, helping you figure out how much time you're really spending on things.

Notes

Apple Seeks To Drop Its Lawsuit Against Israeli Spyware Pioneer NSO, by Joseph Menn, Washington Post

Apple asked a court Friday to dismiss its three-year-old hacking lawsuit against spyware pioneer NSO Group, arguing that it might never be able to get the most critical files about NSO’s Pegasus surveillance tool and that its own disclosures could aid NSO and its increasing number of rivals.

A redacted version of the filing in San Francisco federal court cited a July article in the Guardian, which reported that Israeli officials had taken files from NSO’s headquarters. The newspaper said the officials asked an Israeli court to keep the action secret even from those involved in an earlier, still pending hacking suit against NSO filed by Meta’s WhatsApp. Israeli ministry of justice communications that were hacked showed that officials were concerned about sensitive information reaching Americans, the newspaper said.

Zero-Click Calendar invite — Critical Zero-click Vulnerability Chain In macOS, by Mikko Kenttälä, Medium

I found a zero-click vulnerability in macOS Calendar, which allows an attacker to add or delete arbitrary files inside the Calendar sandbox environment. This could lead to many bad things including malicious code execution which can be combined with security protection evasion with Photos to compromise users’ sensitive Photos iCloud Photos data. Apple has fixed all of the vulnerabilities between October 2022 and September 2023.

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Yes, I will miss getting the Apple stickers. I have quite a few somewhere in my shelves from years of giving money to Apple, but I don't have a lifetime supply of Apple stickers yet. :-)

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Thanks for reading.