Feedback & Followups
- COVID Exposure Notification/Contact Tracing apps continue to roll out:
- 🇺🇸 Virginia releases first Apple and Google-powered COVID-19 app in U.S. — www.imore.com/…
- 🇺🇸 North Dakota, Wyoming, and Alabama follow: Three more U.S. states launch contact tracing apps using Apple/Google tech — www.imore.com/…
- 🇬🇧 England’s contact-tracing app gets green light for trial — www.bbc.com/…
- Last Month’s Twitter Hack:
- Twitter updated their blog post explaining the hack with some more details — it was a well executed attack against the humans running Twitter (the squishy organic bit as I like to say 😉) — blog.twitter.com/…
- Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail — www.theverge.com/…
- After a year of trying to find a buyer, Troy Hunt has taken a different approach — Have I Been Pwned has gone open source: I’m Open Sourcing the Have I Been Pwned Code Base — www.troyhunt.com/…
- Social media companies continue to tackle abuses of their platforms:
- WhatsApp’s newest feature makes it easier to debunk hoaxes — www.imore.com/…
- After an initial false start, Twitter has rolled out reply-limiting to all users (when you post a tweet you can limit who can reply to everyone, just people you follow, or only those mentioned in the tweet — www.imore.com/…
- ‘Threema’ Now Supports End-to-End Encrypted Video Calls — www.macobserver.com/…
- Facebook begins merging Instagram and Messenger chats in new update — www.theverge.com/…
- 🇺🇸 Snapchat Voting Tools to Appear in September — www.macobserver.com/…
- 🇺🇸 Facebook launches 2020 Voting Information Center — www.imore.com/…
- 🇺🇸 Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation — www.washingtonpost.com/…
Deep Dive — 🧯’Unpatchable’ Secure Enclave Vulnerability
Security Researchers claim to have found a vulnerability in older versions of Apple’s Secure Enclave. The problem is in code that’s effectively burned into the secure enclave chip, making it impossible to patch via a software update.
The researchers revealed very little information, but based on what we do know it seems this is nowhere near as big of a deal as it sounds like. Why? Because the bug can only be exploited at boot-time, so it requires physical access to the device, and, it has already been fixed in the newer A12 and A13 chips, so only older devices are affected.
In short, unless you’re important enough to be the target of a very sophisticated attack, and yet, run an old phone, and, have lost physically control of it, you’re not at risk.
If you are important enough to be a target, and you’re using an older device, you have have a simple solution at your disposal — get a newer iPhone 🙂
More Details: Security Enclave vulnerability seems scary, but won’t affect most iPhone users — appleinsider.com/…
❗ Action Alerts
- Critical security updates have been released for Grub2, the open source boot loader used by many Linux distros. The updates include a patch for the catchily named BootHole bug — nakedsecurity.sophos.com/…
- Last Tuesday was Patch Tuesday, seeing the usual release of critical updates from Microsoft (Windows) & Adobe — krebsonsecurity.com/…
- Adobe have released security updates for Acrobat, Reader & Lightroom — us-cert.cisa.gov/…
- Apple have released security updates for all their major OSes — arstechnica.com/…
- Apple have released security updates for iCloud on Windows — us-cert.cisa.gov/…
Worthy Warnings
Notable News
- High profile YouTube channels are coming under attack, and those that fall are being used to spread bitcoin scams. YouTube seems incapable or unwilling to respond effectively — www.imore.com/…
- A deeper dive: How malware started a Bitcoin hack that YouTube just can’t keep up with — www.imore.com/…
- 🎧 Related: A good deep-dive into what’s going on: Checklist Episode 194 – YouTube Hijacking Bitcoin Blues with Stephen Warwick — overcast.fm/…
- Microsoft have launched Microsoft Family Safety, effectively mobile device management for families, on iOS & Android — www.imore.com/…
- LastPass will now monitor your accounts for breaches and at-risk passwords and alert you when you need to change them — www.imore.com/…
Top Tips
Excellent Explainers
Interesting Insights
Palate Cleansers
- 📊 The Periodic Table like you’ve never seen it before, colour-coded to show how the element was created (Big Bang, Supernova etc.) — [apod.nasa.gov/…](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200809.html
- A semi-accessible SVG version of the Periodic Table upload.wikimedia.org/…. I say semi-accessible because you have to interpret how VoiceOver reads out element symbols. Helium for example sounds just like He, which is how it’s spelled.
- ❣️ Breaking News: Macmillan Dictionary now includes over 50 emoji, carefully selected by lexicographer
@janesolomon: Emoji in MacMillon Dictionary
Legend
When the textual description of a link is part of the link it is the title of the page being linked to, when the text describing a link is not part of the link it is a description written by Bart.
| Emoji | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 🎧 | A link to audio content, probably a podcast. |
| ❗ | A call to action. |
| flag | The story is particularly relevant to people living in a specific country, or, the organisation the story is about is affiliated with the government of a specific country. |
| 📊 | A link to graphical content, probably a chart, graph, or diagram. |
| 🧯 | A story that has been over-hyped in the media, or, “no need to light your hair on fire” 🙂 |
| 💵 | A link to an article behind a paywall. |
| 📌 | A pinned story, i.e. one to keep an eye on that’s likely to develop into something significant in the future. |
| 🎩 | A tip of the hat to thank a member of the community for bringing the story to our attention. |