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The High-Profile Edition Tuesday, February 11, 2025

iOS 18.3.1, iPadOS 18.3.1, And iPadOS 17.7.5 Block USB Restricted Mode Attack, by Adam Engst, TidBITS

Apple has released iOS 18.3.1, iPadOS 18.3.1, and the older iPadOS 17.7.5 to address a “highly sophisticated attack” that disables USB Restricted Mode on a locked device. Apple credited Bill Marczak of The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto with reporting the vulnerability. The Citizen Lab has identified numerous high-profile attacks on Apple products over the years.

Security Updates For macOS 15.3.1, watchOS 11.3.1, And visionOS 2.3.1, by Adam Engst, TidBITS

There’s no need to drop everything, but install these updates sooner rather than later.

Stuff

Apple Music Adds A Better-sounding Spatial Audio Version Of Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl Halftime Show, by Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch

If you want to relive Kendrick Lamar’s headline-making Super Bowl halftime show, Apple Music just dropped a replay of the performance in its surround sound-like Spatial Audio.

Apple Sports App Updated With NASCAR Support Ahead Of Daytona 500, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

Apple today updated its Sports app for the iPhone with NASCAR support, ahead of the annual Daytona 500 race on Sunday, February 16.

Don’t Trust Your Brain: How To Improve Your Capture Habit With Reminders, by Lando Loic, MakeUseOf

You tell yourself you’ll write it down later, but later never comes. That’s because memory is unreliable, especially when life gets busy. A good capture habit starts with reminders—ones that prompt you at just the right time to save those fleeting thoughts.

The Practice Pro App Has All The Tools I Want For Music Rehearsal, by Wes Davis, The Verge

It features a customizable interface with widgets like a digital tuner, metronomes, and audio recorder.

Notes

Apple's Latest Updates Re-Enable Apple Intelligence On Some Devices, by Tim Hardwick, MacRumors

Some users are reporting that Apple's latest software updates are quietly re-enabling Apple Intelligence features, even after they had explicitly disabled them in the previous update.

AI Chatbots Unable To Accurately Summarise News, BBC Finds, by Imran Rahman-Jones, BBC

It found 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.

Additionally, 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors, such as incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates.

[...]

She called on the tech companies to "pull back" their AI news summaries, as Apple did after complaints from the BBC that Apple Intelligence was misrepresenting news stories.

Bottom of the Page

If I need to fact-check summaries, if I cannot always trust, what then, pray tell, is the point of the tool?

I am not convinced that AI can do anything that doesn't require manual checks. Image Playground and Writing Tools and Genmoji are fine on my iPhone, because I get to check and approve before using whatever is generated. Notification summaries are not okay, because I am the recipient, and no humans decide whether they are ready to be presented to me.

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Thanks for reading.