If a thief ever steals an iPhone out of your bag or even snatches it from your grasp, panic sets in immediately. You also may have a lot more to worry about beyond just the cost of replacing the phone. What if they saw me enter the passcode and now have easy access to all of my messages, photos, and sensitive information? While it definitely sucks to have your smartphone nabbed, turning on Apple’s Stolen Device protection can immediately cut thieves’ access to your smartphone data. This feature is not automatically enabled and needs to be activated before the crime occurs.
I absolutely love the new Camera Control button on iPhone 16, but the default settings aren’t for me. By default, I find it too slow to activate and too accident prone when taking photos. Fortunately, Apple gives you fairly granular control over Camera Control — even if the toggles are scattered around in the Settings app.
We might have just gotten our best look yet at Apple’s next affordable iPhone SE, shown in both video and photographs of what’s either a real phone or a convincing dummy unit. Despite some reports that the next SE would adopt recent iPhones’ Dynamic Island design, this model appears to stick with the older notch.
Gurman believes the home hub will be "Apple's most significant release of the year," as it represents the company's "first step toward a bigger role in the smart home." In his newsletter, he said the device will be like a "smaller and cheaper iPad" that lets users "control appliances, conduct FaceTime chats, and handle other tasks."
So, here’s a nightmare scenario: You open your work Slack on your phone so you can DM with a few colleagues. You talk with this group regularly, but you don’t see the chat in the list of active DMs on your phone, so you select all of the participants individually to pick the conversation back up. Without thinking too much of it, you accept an odd prompt that asks, “Do you want to include the entire chat history?”
Because yes, you think, of course it should include the chat history of the group DM you’ve been chatting in for ages. Who has time for this? There is business to conduct! Essential facts to convey! But the answer here is no, you do not want to do that. Because if you do, you will have ported your entire DM history with the first person you selected for the chat into the group DM.
A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.
All great stories are realist. I recently discovered this enduring truth by watching a TV show—neither realist nor, it must be confessed, a book. Television has ruined the imaginations of many writers, so it’s nice when the medium does us a favor. Returning with a second season on January 17th, AppleTV’s Severance is a compelling case-study for how the best stories are obsessed with reality, with getting some part of our world into the work in a way that surprises, confronts, offends, or distills our understanding. This is especially true when it comes to what we call genre storytelling.
There are two bugs, on macOS and iOS respectively, that force me to reboot the computers.
On macOS, I do use the accessibility feature Zoom quite a bit. I use it, for example, to zoom in to read comic strips. And when zoomed in, the screen is supposed to follow my mouse pointer and scroll. The bug is that the screen will sometimes refuse to scroll.
On iOS, I have a Shortcuts widget on the Today's View. When the bug hits, this widget became unresponsive, refusing to do anything when I tap on the shortcut buttons.
In both instances, I have no idea what I can do, except to reboot.
Remember when we have to reboot our computers quite frequently before Mac OS X? Of course Apple's operating systems have come a long way since then, and it is definitely more reliable nowadays, but it certainly looks like we still don't have forever uptime yet.
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