NC_2023_10_01
[0:00] Music.
[0:11] First 2023 and this is show number 960. I know everybody's playing with their new iPhones and and all that and playing with the new operating systems and wanted to tell you just one quick, thing that I'm doing differently than I've ever done before. I'm setting up my iPhone from scratch.
I did essentially a clean install and I've never done that before and it's kind of interesting because I think I actually got started using it faster than Steve did doing the transfers.
So I am spending a lot of time installing new apps, but I know that I just I've installed 8 million things. Sorry, Steve, I'm exaggerating. He says I always exaggerate, but I don't always exaggerate. Anyway, I have a ton of apps that I never use, and I know it's really hard to clean them up, but I decided this time I'm going to do it from scratch. And it really wasn't that bad.
It was kind of fun because it made it feel like new. Thought it was really fun way to go.
[1:02] Anyway, let's get into a couple of fun things here. If you've been listening to the Nosilla a cast for a long time, or maybe even a short time, you will have heard me mention Stephen Goetz many, many times. We became friends through the podcast, but I don't actually remember how long ago that was. I'm thinking like 10 years ago, but maybe longer. Anyway, over the years, I've leaned on him for about a zillion tech questions. I can get him to research just about anything for me. He's got a particular affinity for photography questions, but this research that he does also extends to things as complex as setting up a Synology. He helped me pick mine out. He helped me know how to format the discs.
It was a lot of fun. And we have a lot of fun together. We chat at least three times a day. I'm sorry, three times a week, probably, through Telegram.
Well, you might be wondering why I'm talking about Stephen Getz so much. It's because last Friday, we got to meet Stephen Getz in person. Steve, our daughter, Lindsay, and I all traveled to upstate New York to a wedding. I realized it was two hours from Niagara Falls and that Stephen lives two hours from Niagara Falls up in Canada.
So we started plotting together whether we could pull off a meetup.
Months ago, we started working on this.
Now, the ironic thing about this meetup is that Lindsey and her husband, Nolan, were in Toronto a few years ago and Stephen drove out to meet them there.
So Lindsey actually met Stephen before I did.
[2:20] Anyway, we had a great time, even though we got to only spend a few hours together.
I keep saying that I never expected things, so many crazy, cool things from doing the podcast.
And I have to say that my friendship with Stephen is one of the most precious and unexpected of all.
If you take a look at the show notes, I put a couple of photos in there so you can see us in the classic blue ponchos at Niagara Falls and one of Steve and me just together.
It was a great time and I'm so happy you took the time to meet us there.
A Word with Tom Merritt
[2:47] This week, I had the great pleasure of being a guest on Tom Merritt's show called A Word with Tom Merritt. It's an interesting show. He and the guest choose a single word to have a conversation about. There's no structure to speak of, and it's great fun because, well, Tom is just great fun to talk to. We chose for our conversation the word demo, and I'll leave it to you to find out where we went with that. Now, I put a direct link to this episode in the show notes, but I highly recommend that you subscribe to A Word with Tom Merritt in your podcatcher of choice. Now, I'd like you to take a look on the ACAST website where the link is, because he published an extra episode of A Word that's audio that landed on the cutting room floor in the official episode. I have not yet listened to that part. I'm a little worried about what might be in that. Also this week, I got to play with Micah Sargent and Dan Morin
I was on Clockwise #522
[3:35] on Clockwise again, this time joined by the awesome Jeremy Burge. As always, the four panelists bring four topics to the group, and this time we talked about, first of all, our favorite or least favorite macOS Sonoma features, our harrowing AppleCare stories, this one was my topic and you'll hear why, whether we use smartphone cases, and did we upgrade to the iPhone 15.
Jeremy is hilarious and I adore Dan and Micah, so it's an awful lot of fun.
Check out clockwise number 522 called Take That Jason Snell, and you can look for that in your podcatcher of choice.
Bart on Kilowatt Podcast with Bodie Grimm
[4:09] Now that I'm done plugging my own appearances, I also want to plug a fantastic episode of the Kilowatt Podcast with Bodhi Grimm. Bart joined Bodhi for part three of his super awesome EV journey. Bart is a Tesla Model 3 driver and he's going to be replacing it early next year. He's gone on a quest to find a car that's at least as good as the Model 3 and yet isn't under the capricious control of Elon Musk. This episode is part three of his journey as I mentioned, and it looks like he may very well have found his next car.
You can find this episode at the link in the show notes, or better yet, just subscribe to Kilowatt in your podcatcher of choice.
What Would Make an iPhone Answer on Speaker?
[4:46] A couple of years ago, Steve started having a problem with his iPhone while connected via Bluetooth to his Tesla Model Y's entertainment system. If, while actively playing a podcast, he received a phone call, the iPhone would disconnect from Bluetooth, which would of course stop the podcast, and it would answer instead on the iPhone's speaker. As annoying as that was, when he hung up the phone, the phone did not reconnect to Bluetooth and instead would play his podcast out of the speakerphone. This is obviously not what he wanted. He took his car into Tesla service for some other small ailment and while he was there he asked them to check it out to see if they could figure out why the Tesla system was acting this way. They were unable to find the root cause or even reproduce the problem. Over the last few years I've got to have a really good reason to call Steve while he's driving because I know that until he stops his car he won't be able to get his podcast playing properly again until he ends his drive. Now, not everyone else is as courteous as me so he was often in this annoying situation. Now to be fair we don't get all that many phone calls these days, but it sure did really bother him when it did happen. We did a ton of experiments with my phone in his car and his phone in my car because they're both Teslas, and there seemed to be something wrong with his phone rather than his car. But for the life of us, we could not figure out what was causing it. Now, in the time he's been suffering this issue, he's upgraded his phone twice and the problem trotted along following, him. But we couldn't think of any more experiments to run to narrow down what was causing this this frustrating behavior.
[6:16] This last week, we were on a plane and we just landed in Los Angeles.
Steve received a phone call and to the annoyance of everyone around him when he answered it, it was on speakerphone.
When he got off his call, I asked him, how did that happen? And he said, oh, my phone always answers on speaker.
It's really annoying.
[6:34] Now, even though we hadn't talked about the problem in his car for many months, I suddenly wondered whether the two things could be connected.
Rather than searching the internet for iPhone Tesla Bluetooth disconnect, as we had been doing, which got us no help at all, this time I searched for stop iPhone from answering on speaker.
Now, I was rewarded with the opposite answer, how to enable speaker on answer, but luckily I'm clever enough to read instructions backwards.
It turns out there's a setting that controls this behavior, and you would simply never find it accidentally or on your own. If you have the use of your hands, you'd naturally look in the iPhone settings. But this feature isn't for people without mobility challenges. Imagine you're a quadriplegic and you can't answer the phone by touching a button. Wouldn't it be swell if it just answered on speakerphone automatically?
That word touch is your clue for where to look. The setting to control this function is in settings, accessibility, and then go into touch. Nothing to do with the phone, just going to touch. Within that section, you look for something called call audio routing. When we looked at Steve's phone, call audio routing was set to speaker.
The other two options are Bluetooth headset and automatic. When we looked at my phone, it was set to automatic. We changed Steve's to automatic and we were quite anxious to get home and find out whether we'd finally solved his problem.
[7:55] When we got home from our trip, our new iPhones 15 were waiting for us, thanks to our dear friend Pat Engler who picked them up and delivered them to us while we were gone.
We spent our first evening home setting up the new phones with delight.
The next morning, Steve went out for a drive and he asked me to call him while he was listening to a podcast to see if we'd fixed it.
The Tesla app lets me see his car, see exactly where it is, and I can even see whether he's listening to audio.
Not only that, I can actually see what he's playing and I can even mess with it, like Like I could rewind a bunch of times or something, but I haven't taken the opportunity to just keep hitting rewind remotely to see if I can get him to lose his mind, but I could.
One reason I don't do it is I've given him access to my car in his Tesla app.
Anyway, I digress. When I called him on the phone, he was positively giddy that the phone answered on the car's speaker over Bluetooth.
And even better, when I hung up, the car's audio system resumed playing his podcast.
[8:51] But then I realized something. He had a brand new phone. It's possible we had fixed it, but we had not definitively done a properly controlled test.
Rather than move his eSIM back to his iPhone 14 Pro to run the test, he suggested he just toggle the touch setting and accessibility back to speaker to see if it went back to the old behavior. Sure enough, that setting caused his phone to answer over the iPhone's speaker, just like it says on the tin. He put it back to automatic, and Bluetooth was again happily working. Now, remember up front I said that I had done a clean install on my phone?
One of the things I'm learning by doing that is I'm learning how things work again.
Because each time you learn a new trick, you do it, you know, you implement it on your phone, but then you forget about it years later how it works. This is the kind of thing that followed Steve because he was doing the migration each time. So it would have gone away if he had done a clean install. I'm not saying anybody else should do a clean install like I'm doing, but it is very interesting to get to learn how these things work again and have to figure it out because you have to know how to do it in order to get this to work.
Anyway, this is one of those obscure tips that may just help one person someday if they come across this article, but it made Steve so happy we wanted to share.
How’s that MacBook Pro Battery Problem Going?
[10:02] It's been quite a while since I gave you an update on my seemingly never-ending battery saga with my 14-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro.
I haven't talked about it because I've pretty much hit an impasse with Apple.
Let me do a quick recap to bring everyone up to speed. I bought the MacBook Pro in October of 2021, the day they were released.
Within a few months, I noticed that the battery life was nothing like the promised up to 11 hours of wireless web. After several months of working with Apple, they gave me a new battery and at the same time they politely erased my machine.
So I did a clean install of all my apps and within a very short time, my battery life was nothing like that promised.
In April of 2023, I began taking metrics as I worked with Apple, because it was happening again.
The laptop gets around 6 hours of battery life on wireless web, which is amazing compared to an Intel machine, but it's barely half of what it should be getting.
We often have these views of what should be true, and then a company will go, well, that's not what we really meant.
In this case, every person I've talked to at Apple have said that this is not right.
Something is definitely wrong.
Now, my main concern is that while using the laptop, I lose about 15% per hour.
But what became even more interesting during our testing was that it also loses 15% overnight when it's asleep.
[11:22] This happens when it's disconnected from power and all peripherals.
Over 23 phone calls and visits to Apple we've tested on different networks. We've tested with and without iCloud logged in. It happens without Time Machine. It happens with sharing services disabled. We removed all of my internet accounts. We tested it with Wi-Fi disabled. We even ran malware bytes, which was actually recommended by Apple, so I thought that was interesting.
Finally, we installed a fresh version of macOS Ventura on a new APFS volume, transferred none of my apps, settings, or data and logged into iCloud, and it lost 14% over 12 hours while asleep.
[12:02] Now when it was logged out of iCloud, not out in iCloud, the MacBook Pro lost 0% overnight while sleeping. So clean install, logged into iCloud, lose 14%, not logged into iCloud, loses nothing. Seems to me that a clean install on a separate volume really pointed either to to hardware or to iCloud. Now, Apple seemed to agree because at that point, I discovered the engineer that was working behind the scenes on this was on the software side, and he kind of threw it over to the hardware engineering side. But that was in May, and we are no closer to figuring out the root cause than we were in April. At this point, Apple Engineering have declared that the only solution is for me to do a full nuke and pave where I don't migrate any apps or settings. Now, you know, I'm, I'm a fan of that and it's the kind of thing I would do, but they haven't given me a satisfactory explanation of why this is any different than the clean install they had me do on a separate volume. With Sonoma finally here, I think I'm probably going to go ahead and do that nuke and pave, but I.
[13:07] Have a problem with what they want me to do after I do the clean install. They want me install each of my apps one by one and after each app install run a battery test. They say this is the only way we'll know which of my apps is causing the problem. So let's do a little bit of math here.
I have 181 apps installed on my MacBook Pro. We know Apple pre-installed 40 apps which means I have to do 161 battery tests. I mean potentially could be the first thing I install that does it, but up to 161. I've been doing these tests overnight, which is the best way to really measure, you know, get a consistent measurement, and that's where it loses 15%. So that would mean I would have to test for 161 days. That could be as much as five and a half months of testing.
[13:55] As I said earlier, Apple have not given me any reason why doing a full clean install on my Mac is any different from doing it on a new volume, but I had the opportunity to talk to a friend of mine who recently retired from Apple working on the server hardware side of the business, and he said that at a very low level, there is a difference between a full clean install and just doing it on a new volume. That's the only reason I'm going to follow their instructions.
[14:20] Now, Margo, the wonderful and dedicated Apple senior advisor who's been with me for so many months, she suggested that we get some data before I do the reinstall of my apps that could potentially reveal something interesting for engineering.
So Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and even Apple TVs can run a self-diagnostic called SysDiagnose, and the files generated are what engineering pour over to try to figure out what's going wrong.
Over these many moons, Margo's been sending me what she calls a capture data, which is a file that she sends me and it contains code to run the sysdiagnose.
In all this time, I've always waited for her to send me the capture data so I can run the sysdiagnose and send the files back to her.
But in my research, I've discovered that you can actually do this on your own.
The reason you might want to know about this is because if you want to submit a bug report to Apple, adding a sysdiagnose will help them work on it for you.
If they choose to look at it, of course.
Now you can search the web for instructions on how to run a SysDiagnose for your particular device.
I also found a company called HCS Technology Group who have published a single PDF with fabulous instructions on how to run a SysDiagnose for every Apple device I just listed.
They even have pictures of the keyboard highlighting what keys to hold down or which buttons to press on other devices.
[15:35] Now that I know I can run a SysDiagnose on my own without waiting for Margot to send me instructions, I can run the early test she suggested.
Here's what she suggested I do before I start installing apps.
As soon as Sonoma is available, create an installer file on an external drive.
Wipe my entire drive. Next install Sonoma from scratch.
At this point, without doing anything else, put the Mac to sleep for enough time to see how it does in the sleep department.
Now it usually takes a couple of hours before I can tell if it's draining, especially if I start at 100%.
If it's down a little bit, it goes down faster, but if it's 100%, it takes a little while.
So I might even have to do that first test overnight. After the first sleep test is complete, she wants me to run a cys-diagnose and send it to her.
Then, and only then, she wants me to log into iCloud. Then put it to sleep again for sufficient time to test whether it loses battery, run the cyst diagnose again and send both of them to her.
[16:29] Now, I'll record battery levels during this process for my own record, but she says at that point I'm free to start installing apps.
On a good week, it takes me about a week to get my Mac back into fighting form with all of the settings and messing around I do.
I actually made her screen share with me so I could show her my mind map of doom of everything I do when I do a reinstall and she was suitably amazed at how much stuff I would have to do.
Now, you've been maybe wondering how I've been able to create the podcast and enjoy my Mac happy life with my MacBook Pro, tied up doing so many battery experiments.
A few months ago I broke down and I bought an M2 MacBook Air.
It's the only reason I haven't thrown in the towel and just lived with a $4,000 laptop getting half the battery life promised.
David Roth keeps telling me to just go down to the beach and throw it in the ocean and get on with my life, but I can't quite do that.
Anyway, the MacBook Air is a delightful machine and for now my MacBook Pro is essentially a super powerful desktop computer.
I'm anxious to do the Nuke and Pave on my MacBook Pro and to see if we learn anything at all.
I have a feeling everything will be dandy at first and then at some point, which I won't be able to readily notice and therefore document and reproduce, things will go belly up again.
I'll see you on the other side after macOS Sonoma is installed and I'll let you know what I learn.
[17:44] After I wrote up this story, Dan Wiedler wrote a comment on the blog post and he said, It was nice that Margot tried.
I believe that if you send a note to Tim Cook explaining all the things you've gone through with and without support, it might get swapped out.
I've seen that happen numerous times and the amount of time you've spent on it should make it a no-brainer for Apple.
And Dan's exactly right. I've had problems like this before where I've begged for help from Tim Cook and it usually gets obviously sent to somebody else who can help solve the problem.
So I wrote what I thought was a very carefully written short email to Tim Cook where I gave kind of the too long, didn't read part so that he could just see what the problem was or his aides could see what the problem was, asking for somebody to help me. I didn't ask for a new laptop. I just said, we got to get something else. The solution isn't going to work for me. And I would like to read to you the email I received back this time. I have gotten out before. This is what I got this time. Hello, Allison. Thank you for your recent correspondence to Apple. Due to the nature and complexity of technical issues, Apple does not offer support through written correspondence, but we have several resources for you to explore.
For any queries regarding your Apple products, you may also visit our official Apple Support site at support.apple.com.
[18:56] We regret that you have experienced issues with your MacBook Pro.
Although we are committed to providing the best experience to our customers, Apple does not warrant that the operations of the product will be uninterrupted or error-free.
Technical support is available over the phone by calling Apple Support at blah blah blah blah blah. Help is available seven days a week.
[19:15] You can also provide feedback to Apple by going to apple.com slash feedback.
We appreciate your support of Apple's products and services.
So in other words, pound sand. We'll see what happens next.
Do You REALLY Need a MacBook Pro?
[19:29] When the first Apple Silicon-based MacBook Pros came out, we had a lot of options to choose from, but we had very little information on the repercussions of those decisions.
The possible configurations were so vast that I wrote an article to accommodate a diagram I created called M1 Pro and M1 Max Decision Tree, a diagram of every configuration. I'm rather proud of that diagram because I published it right when people needed to make the decision of what to buy.
There was just one problem with my diagram. While it did a great job of showing you that if you, say, chose an M1 Pro, you'd only be able to get a 14 or 16 core GPU, but if you went for the M1 Max, you could get a 24 or 32 core GPU, it didn't tell you whether you needed a 32 core GPU.
It showed you the M1 Pro was limited to 200 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, while the M1 Max could go up to 400 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth.
How do you know whether your applications require that much memory bandwidth?
I suspect there are people out there who positively know that they need the GPU cores and or the memory bandwidth. And there are people who know they have simple needs and don't need any of those. But in between those two sets of folks sit the rest of us, nerds that will have FOMO, you know, fear of missing out if they buy the wrong thing.
[20:44] Now, while Steve does some video encoding and matches the and manages the live video show from his laptop on the road, and I do a lot of audio recording obviously, and some video encoding with my ScreenCastsOnline tutorial videos, does that mean we needed double the GPU cores and memory bandwidth? Well, you know, we feel like we're pros, so we must have needed the M1 Pro Max.
But do we even know we need a MacBook Pro in the first place? How do we know the MacBook Air couldn't do just what we needed to do? Well, I used to be able to justify the MacBook Pro because it had four Thunderbolt ports instead of just two on the MacBook Air, but they took one of my precious Thunderbolt ports away and replaced it with a MagSafe connector. I know other people love MagSafe, but on a laptop that gets 20 hours battery life, is it really that important to replace the more versatile Thunderbolt port that can also charge? Anyway, as it turns out, because of the mess that is my M1 MacBook Pro Max's ongoing battery issues, I've had the opportunity to use the M.2 MacBook Air I bought as my primary laptop and the MacBook Pro has been relegated to that desktop position for now.
The good news is that my M2 MacBook Air is a hearty little machine that can honestly do everything the MacBook Pro can do, albeit just slightly slower on only the heaviest lifting.
[22:01] In my world, heavy lifting consists of transcoding audio from uncompressed multi-track recordings down to mono, mono compressed files I should say, processing audio for noise removal, transcribing audio with large language model artificial intelligence and transcoding screen flow video files to compressed versions. So I ran five tests on the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air to compare speed. Let's talk first about the specs of the two machines so you understand the context of this. The MacBook Pro is an M1 Max Apple Silicon processor because I knew I needed that. So it has a 10 core CPU, 24 core GPU, 64 gigabytes of RAM.
It's got that 400 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth that I'm positive I needed, and the price out the door with a 4 terabyte SSD and AppleCare was around $5,000.
Yeah, just a minute ago I said $4,000, but it was really $5,000.
[22:59] So the specs on the MacBook Air in comparison are an M2, or the other one was an M1, but it's an M2 Apple Silicon processor.
No Macs, no Pro, just plain old M2.
It has an 8-core CPU, so 20% fewer than the MacBook Pro.
It has a 10-core GPU, less than half the cores of the MacBook Pro.
It's only got 16GB of RAM, which is a quarter of what the MacBook Pro has.
And that memory bandwidth? It's only 100GB per second, not 400 like the MacBook Pro.
Price out the door with the 2TB SSD and AppleCare was $2,500.
[23:33] So, I'm comparing a $5,000 machine to a $2,500 machine with a lot lower specs.
For the audio encoding timing test, I used the audio from my MacStack presentation, which was 25 minutes long, and it was a little bit over 50 megabytes.
For the video transcoding test, I used a 1.2 gigabyte screen flow file about the application's shutter.
So, I ran Hush to reduce the noise. I ran the small language model from MacWhisper to do a transcription.
Then I ran the large language model from MacWhisper to do the same transcription, but it takes longer with the large language model.
Then I transcoded the uncompressed audio to an M4A using Hindenburg.
And finally, I transcoded the screencast in ScreenFlow to a compressed mp4.
The performance varied between tests in a surprising way. The MacBook Pro was 33 to 40% faster than the MacBook Air on the more challenging audio tests with noise removal and transcription, but the MacBook Pro was only 18% faster transcoding that huge video file in ScreenFlow.
But there's a better way to look at this. If I add up all of the tests together, the MacBook Pro saved me a total of nine minutes.
The MacBook Pro took 18 minutes for all of these tests, and the MacBook Air took 27 minutes.
If I take out the large language model transcription from the tests, I only saved three minutes with the MacBook Pro over the MacBook Air.
[24:55] So let's recap. The MacBook Pro cost me twice as much money. It has more CPU cores, more than double the GPU cores, four times as much RAM, and four times the memory bandwidth.
And on my most challenging work, I saved less than 10 minutes.
It's also important to note that every one of these operations is something I run in the background, and I'm able to still keep using my Mac while it's churning away.
The MacBook Air is a delightful machine to carry around on travel and moving about the house.
It has a smaller screen than the 14-inch MacBook Pro, but it's not that much smaller.
Only six tenths of an inch smaller because the 13 is really a 13.6. But you know, so in any case, I don't miss that extra inch. Now it does have one fewer Thunderbolt port, boo, and it doesn't have HDMI and it doesn't have an SD card slot which doesn't bother me at all. The one thing it does, that is a downside of the MacBook Air, is that it only goes up to a 2 terabyte SSD. I have a huge photos library. Between photos and video it's over 100,000 items and so I can't keep the originals on the disk of the MacBook Air. So I ask you, am I a pro or am I not a pro? I'm pretty sure I don't need a MacBook Pro and I'm 100% certain I don't need that max processor at all. So ask yourself next time you're going to buy a machine, do you really need a MacBook Pro or would a lovely little MacBook Air be a great machine for you.
[26:21] And I should point out that right now I'm recording this podcast, the live show, with all of my equipment plugged in. I've got an external display attached.
I've got an iPhone being used as my camera.
I've got a light attached. I've got an XLR microphone with an XLR interface.
I'm running Thunderbolt through a Thunderbolt dock and this little MacBook Air has not choked at all.
So it really does do everything I need.
Support the Show
[26:46] If you enjoy The Nosilla Cast, Chitchat Across the Pond, Programming by Stealth, or all three, and you find that you get value out of the shows, it would be terrific if you would consider supporting the show financially.
Turns out servers, software, and hardware to make the show are not free.
So the folks who donate regularly through podfee.com slash patreon and those who do one-time donations through podfee.com slash paypal are those who keep the show afloat.
Them and gain my undying gratitude.
Security Bits — 1 October 2023
[27:14] Music.
[27:34] Indeedy. Well, let us start then with some follow up from a long running story.
LastPass have decided that now is a good time to force everyone to strengthen their master password.
Oh my gosh. Cart, horse, gone. Now we'll lock the barn doors.
It's funny you should say that because Brian Krebs' chosen headline was LastPass, horse gone barn bolted is strong password.
No way. Oh, that's so funny. I did not read ahead in the show notes to see that. That is so funny. I thought it was so funny.
[28:09] Are they also retroactively changing the number of passes on everybody's account to what was, it? 200,000? What's not?
Yes. Yes. By forcing a password reset and having the new default, that also has the effect that that new password kicks in with the right number of rounds of PBDFK.
Okay, so the seven users they have left who didn't leave after the last couple, that's great.
Oh, that's disappointing. The thing to bear in mind is that if you think that there are going to be people who think that this solves the problem and they don't have to worry about the stuff in their vault that they lost, this, no effect.
You still have to change all of your passwords if you want to be safe.
Or you can trust that you're unlikely to be targeted, but I don't know about that.
Do you feel lucky? In better news, passkeys continue their march into the mainstream. 1Password have rolled out first-class passkeys to support in their desktop, iOS and iPadOS clients and their browser extensions. So you can now sync passkeys cross-platform. So not just within the Apple ecosystem but between ecosystems.
Because… How is it between ecosystems? Well, because 1Password would run on Windows, it would run on the Mac.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah. Not Linux. Yeah. And of course with 1Password you have family sharing and stuff.
It does run on Linux.
[29:38] I don't believe I said so, because I don't think it does. Okay, okay, you said yes, right? It's probably a syncing issue here.
Okay, that's good. I have got to find some other sites to start trusting to try PASKEY, because I have ended up in a world of hurt with Google. It's still, I often simply can't log in, but it's not, I don't think it's PASKEY that's causing it.
I had my alisonapodfee.com address through Google domains, and I now have it through iCloud.
So I don't have a login at Google for alisonatpodfeet.com, but I can't get rid of it.
So I go to some Google service, and it says, okay, alisonatpodfeet.com.
And I have to say, no, open a different account. And I say, okay, do a different account.
It says, okay, do you want to use your PASKE? Yes, I want to use my PASKE.
It says, you don't have a PASKE for alisonatpodfeet.com. And I get stuck in this circle, and sometimes I break out, or break in, I can get it to work, and then sometimes I can't.
I wonder where that's stuck, because that is, your browser is remembering and now dead account.
[30:43] Yeah, well, it's not so much my browser. Google still thinks it exists. It's still there in some vampire, you know, zombie mode, and I need to spend some quality time in Google.
It's just like with Microsoft, I accidentally created a business account and backed out, and I can never get rid of that, so I always have to bypass it and go know my personal account, because there is no business account.
And I think I need to spend some quality time in Google trying to figure out how to get rid of Allison at pubg.com.
Yeah, because you moved the domain, but you didn't delete the Google account.
Right.
So that means that the account doesn't exist. Well, it should be the same as you left it.
It should be exactly like you left it. Yes, I agree.
Should be. Okay, yeah, okay. Oh, and if you try to do a password reset...
So it's not PASKEY's fault, but because of the PASKEY, that's how we run into trouble.
Just enter my password, which I can eventually get it to give me, but I have to fight my...
I'm just like climbing through jungle stuff. So I swear at paskeys every time, and I don't think it's paskey's fault. GitHub, that's your chance to do paskeys on a nice site.
[31:52] Okay, I'll try that. An important one. So yeah, yeah. Well, good news. One password across. So this is all with iOS 17 Yeah, so the iOS and the iPad versions are for iOS 17 plus and the Mac version, I'm not, I think the Mac version is the last two versions of Mac OS if memory serves and then the browser plugins are the browser plugins.
Okay, because I know when I, I'm still on Ventura and I did get offered something about one password and passkeys and I went, ah, and I closed the window.
You're right. Yes. No, that proves it because I did too. And this machine has not been upgraded because this is my podcasting machine and you do not do this one early.
My work laptop was updated last thing Friday, so tomorrow morning I would either have a great day at work with a new OS or a very bad Monday morning. One of the two.
Wow. Our work laptops were always the last thing on earth. In fact, there's probably still Windows XP machines where I used to work.
Oh no, everyone else in works is not updated. I'm the guinea pig. Okay, good.
[33:02] I work in IT. I get to go first. Oh, I worked in IT and I wouldn't...
Anyway, we don't want to go down that red hole now.
All right. Do we have a deep dive?
We have two. So we're doing bad news, good news, I guess. So deep dive one is about a fairly nasty bug.
Now, I do get to say TL the or too long didn't read.
If it's an app that talks to the Internet, make sure it's fully patched.
That is really the takeaway here. Patchy, patchy, patch, patch.
Right. If it doesn't matter if it's a browser, if it's any other app, if it's asking you for an update and it in any way talks to the Internet, just say yes now, because there is a very low level open source library called LibWebP and the web probably gives away that it likes to talk to the Internet. It's actually a Google thing, which they have succeeded in convincing Apple and others to start using.
It's an image codec designed to be better for the Internet because it is, and I quote, A modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.
Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.
WebP lossless is 26% smaller than PNG And WebP-Lossy is 25-34% smaller than JPEG.
[34:30] Wow. This is quite good by the sounds of it. That sounds great.
Yeah. Problem is, libwebp had a nasty bug in it, and people didn't know that's what the problem was.
So two weeks ago, we talked about Pegasus making a very unwelcome return, and we said that Apple had patched Safari.
Apple had actually patched WebKit, and what they'd really patched was libp in WebKit.
Google patched Chrome the next day after we recorded, but they had actually patched libwebp in Chrome. All of the Chromium browsers then got the update from Google, and then someone dug a little deeper and went, guys, why did you put the metadata of Chromium on this?
This is libwebp. Libwebp is used outside of Chromium. This is an open source project.
And so Google refiled a brand new CVE number with the correct information. And when it it was scored, it got a vulnerability score of 10 out of 10.
Oh, geez. I didn't know they had a vulnerability score. It's a perfect bug.
Yeah, that's not good. So there's something called a CVSS. It's a standard rating for, bugs. And basically zero means not a problem. Ten means a ooga, a ooga, a ooga. And anything above 8.0 is officially called critical. So when someone says a critical bug in, there's There's actually a number. It's an 8.0 or higher.
This is a 10.
[36:00] Anyway, the point is, it's two years, it's two weeks more patched than we would expect, because for two weeks we thought it was a Chromium problem.
So one password is an Electron app that got its update ages ago.
As soon as people realized it was WebP, another very important piece dropped, Firefox realized they had a problem.
So Firefox has now been patched as well.
Oh, the Chromium browsers have been patched, but really, Electron apps like Discord and stuff, they've also been patched. You need to make sure you're on the latest versions.
And then the last one people may not think of is LibreOffice, that also got a patch.
So are you saying that Electron apps are Chromium?
No. Well, yes, actually. Under the hood, that's...
Electron apps are basically webpages stuck pretending to be an app.
And the JavaScript brain of an Electron app is the JavaScript brain from Chromium.
So when they patched Chromium to, well...
[37:04] Two weeks ago, they patched what? Chromium or...? Two weeks ago, they patched Chromium and WebKit.
Which would have patched the Electron apps.
And then Electron pulled the latest version of Chromium into Electron, and then the Electron apps would have been able to get the latest version of Electron into themselves.
Got that, got that. Okay, okay. So that's why they would have been ahead of it. But since it's not just Chromium, Firefox and LibreOffice and other Linux distros, they didn't.
Didn't get it. Right, because they didn't know there was anything to get.
Yeah, they thought it was a Chromium problem until Google fixed the metadata on the bug report and they was like, oh my, we use that.
We need to patchy, patchy, patch, patch.
A zero day, 10 out of 10 critical bug that they mistakenly let sit out there for two extra weeks.
Yeah. Oops.
By putting the wrong label on it. Yeah. So everyone was in a rush to fix it.
Yeah, there's no fire extinguisher because that didn't seem quite right, but if you stay, patched you are fine and you have been fine. It's just… Be extra careful that if there's something with a little badge saying please update me, yes. Just say yes. It's a little bit of hassle, but say yes.
Super always true right now.
[38:24] Exactly. Now, happy deep dive. We have new operating systems to play with, and they have lots of fun features, which is always nice, and people who don't buy new hardware get to play along too, as do people who live in countries where Apple's web store collapsed in a heap and they couldn't order their new toys until half past the hour when they were all gone. My iPhone arrives in two weeks. I ordered it the minute the store in Ireland was not broken. So I have a watch though, so I'm happy about my watch, but I have no, phone. So anyway, we all get to play the games.
You're changing phones dramatically, but to be honest, going like from a 15, 14 pro to a 15 pro, I think I will have talked about this by this time in the show, but I did a clean install on my phone just so that it'll feel more different.
So that tells you you're upgrading too often when you have to do something to make it feel more different. But what feels more different is some of the I was 17 stuff.
Yeah, my phone feels quite different and it's the same phone because I don't have a new phone yet.
But I have managed to convince myself that my phone is small.
I now mentally see my phone as small. My phone isn't any smaller than it used to be, but I'm preparing myself for my first ever, Max.
[39:37] Good luck. Good luck. Yeah, I'm very, I'm very fed up with fingerprints on stainless steel. I've been busy ignoring them for years, even though they've been under the hood of knowing me, but apparently the titanium doesn't do that. Yeah, just don't buy the ever by the midnight blue MacBook Air.
[39:58] When they say fingerprint magnet, I have fingers that are so dry. I never have to clean my iPhone on screen unless someone else's touches it.
That's how dry my fingers are.
And my my laptop looks like a Doberman licked it at all times. It looks terrible.
So, yeah, they're not space gray laptops. I don't know why I'm boring.
Like, I want a really blue iPhone and Apple never make it blue enough, but on a laptop, I don't know.
I just want it. Yeah.
Dark grey. So what's fun in the deep dive area for this? Right. So we have all the cool features, But actually, we also have a whole bunch of security and privacy features.
And we talked about them at WWDC because they were shiny.
[40:39] But that's the start of the summer. And we're now into the fall.
I don't know about you, but I've forgotten a lot of stuff that Tim Cook said. All of it.
So I figure, how about we look at the highlights of what just arrived on our Apple devices, whether we got new devices or not?
So the big thing is that if you have friends and family who don't need the very advanced features of a password manager like 1Password, you can now do almost everything through Apple's built-in ecosystem because you now have sharing of passkeys and passwords within the Apple ecosystem.
So you can make a group inside the keychain where you can put other Apple IDs, and then, you can add any password you'd like to that group or passkey and then everyone in that group gets that in their keychain.
So it's basically like family sharing within one password.
So I thought passkeys were device-specific.
[41:32] No, they're public-private key pairs, and there are rules for how they are protected.
And one of the ways that the spec says you can protect them is with a biometric.
So people think that they're a biometric, but actually they can be shared and they're already synchronized. If you've been using passkeys on the Mac for the last couple of months, they have already been synchronizing between your Mac through Apple Keychain, sorry, through iCloud Keychain if you enabled it.
And now they can synchronize to your iOS devices with iOS 17, and you can share them with friends and family within the Apple ecosystem with.
[42:08] But they're just public private key pairs. So I've proven that I have not gotten the hang of this yet.
See previous comments, but I know that when I've tried to use my Google login that I have to keep going through something when I try it on.
Like when I got my new phone, I had to do something, I had to do stuff.
Which makes sense. I want to have to do stuff, but...
[42:32] So unless you move that private key around in a secure way, you have to set a different private key in every device.
You don't use iCloud Keychain if memory serves. Oh, that's correct.
Therefore you do not have anything moving your private keys for you.
So you have to have a separate private key in every machine.
Okay. Oh, good. That helps me understand it then. So if I do whatever switches need to be done over in one password, I could avoid having to do that.
You could indeed, because one password can then manage the private key for you and it can move it not just between your iOS devices, but it could move it to the Windows machine you don't have anymore. Or you could share one or more of your passkeys with Steve through the family share.
Cool, yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be handy.
Okay, good.
Excellent, yeah, so I'm really happy with that. And then now we have basically, it's not as many bells and whistles as a 1Password, and I'm not gonna stop you.
I would never say that a business should stop using a service like 1Password, but for a lot of people, there's now enough here in the basic ecosystem, especially because they now have a plugin on Windows for Chrome.
[43:45] As well as for Edge. So even Windows people can get into the Apple ecosystem now.
So if you have an iPhone, an iPad, or whatever, you can still sync your passkeys to your Windows machine, as long as you use Edge or Chrome.
Yeah, so that's pretty good. We also have much better privacy in Safari, and this is a bit of a sleeper feature, because it's very difficult to make it sound exciting.
But Safari now has the ability to give you multiple instances of itself, So, if you think of Safari up to now, you have had a copy of Safari, with a jar of cookies, a set of plugins, basically a set of everything.
[44:25] You can now have as many of those as you want, and they do not talk to each other.
It is like we used to say, use Firefox to log in as your personal self, and Safari to log in as your work self.
You can now use Safari Profile 1 to be your work self and Safari Profile 2 to be your personal self. There is no crosstalk between these profiles.
So they're completely separate, but they're all in the same beautiful UI.
So you can have right next to each other a Google tab where you are logged in as your personal self and a Google tab where you're logged in as your work self and they are just perfectly happy with each other as long as each window is in a different profile.
And that's convenient.
So this is in Sonoma, and iOS 17. iPadOS 17 would probably be a more likely place to try to do something like that.
How do you switch profiles? Is it you go into preferences and say, now I want to be in this other profile?
So you've kind of had to think of it like this. You used to have the choice between private windows and not private windows.
Now in that same interface, you now have the choice of public windows, private windows, or any other main... Every profile you create just shows up on that list now.
[45:41] It was funny, I noticed that on my iPhone. I don't ever notice it on my Mac.
I'm sure it's in there, but I don't think I've ever... I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.
I want to create an incognito window.
Right, but whatever mechanism you used to use for switching between public and not public, you can now use that to switch between your profiles.
And you can even have different plugins in the different profiles.
And they're completely separate. They do not see each other's cookies.
They don't see anything of each other.
So I'm going to use this for something that nobody else will probably think of using it for because I don't have two personas. I'm sort of me all the time everywhere and don't worry about that.
But what I have a problem with is caching in Safari or in WordPress or in a web browser app where I'm making changes to my code and it's not reflecting in like either it keeps working when it shouldn't or it doesn't get fixed when it should because I've made some change and I have a heck of a time saying, no, no, I really need refresh.
I could now open another Safari window and it would be a new Safari experience, right?
If I had another profile.
[46:51] Yeah, but then you'd end up caching, you'd have a different cache in both profiles.
So it's not really a way of helping caching where I think people.
So it's convenient from the point of view of people who have two Microsoft accounts or two Google accounts or two Slack accounts, I mean, there's all these services that we that we have corporate identities and personal identities and they can now live side by side, which is nice, but there's a security angle here.
So sites like Facebook, they track you around the web because you log into Facebook and if you were to log out every time and then browse the rest of the Internet, the little Facebook buttons wouldn't be following you.
Well, if you make a profile called Spying Evil Apps and you log into Facebook in Spying Evil Apps profile, that Facebook login is not in any other of your profiles.
So you can browse the web with all the Facebook like buttons and none of them are tracking you because it's in a completely separate persona.
Or sorry, a separate profile.
[47:50] How many identities can you have? Infinity, really. The other useful thing to do.
So it is generally a good idea to have your banking stuff be completely separate from everything else in case there's some sort of cross-site scripting issue or something.
So you can just make a persona called banking and in there you might do your bank and your PayPal or one or two things, but just those very few things that never log into anything else but your banking stuff in that profile, keep it nice and safe.
So at the moment, I use a different browser for banking, but now I can just do it all in Safari with different profiles.
Now, sadly, I know this happened to me and it happened to somebody else I was talking to recently.
The bank that I was using, which I no longer use.
[48:34] Uses a third party to process, I forget what it was, whether it was bank transfers or something like that. So you had to allow cross-site scripting.
Well, that's perfect because that's perfect. So that would keep that. Yeah. You keep it inside my banking safari, allow the cross-site scripting, but in all my other rising. Okay. Okay, cool.
If all you do is banking, then yeah, in theory, it has access to everything you do, but there is no anything else. Problem solved. Yeah, yeah. Like I say, it's not being peddled as a security feature, but it's a security feature. It's a really nice way to isolate things.
[49:14] The other big change then is sensitive content protection has gone from a parental control to an opt in feature for everyone. So for the last year and a half or so, if you set up an iPhone as being a child's iPhone within an iCloud family plan, you can put limitations on that child's phone.
One of the limitations was it could use on-device AI to scan within messages any photos to see if they were probably nude images.
And it would blur the image and it would give a very child-friendly warning saying, look, you've received this image. It's not your fault. You haven't done anything wrong.
If you think it's wrong, by all means, you can have a look. We're not going to tattle-tale on you, but...
You know, it was basically very good. They got help from child protection agencies and stuff with the wording.
It was very nicely done.
That same intelligence has now been expanded.
It's not just in messages anymore. It's also very importantly, when you enable it, it also gets enabled for contact posters because you can now, tell other people what to show when you phone them, which is open to abuse.
[50:25] Potentially. Right. So especially since there's so many spam phone calls, so you could have a contact card come up from, you know, Spammer Bob or Spammer Sally, and it's a photo that you really didn't want to see.
Correct. Exactly. So now this protects those, which is cool.
It also protects the other thing that's been horribly abused, airdrop.
So we have had lots of issues of people on airplanes getting all sorts of stuff airdropped at them they didn't want. So it also kicks into airdrop.
However still, it's now an API that's available as part of the core operating system.
So any other app on your Mac can choose to make use of this API.
So other messaging services, anything you like, any other developer can now make use of this.
So because people don't like AI turned on without their permission, this is an opt-in feature.
So if you would like to opt in, you go into settings, into the privacy area, and you turn it on.
And then it will have your back in any app that uses the API.
And all of Apple's... All the places Apple would sensibly put it, they have put it.
And more and more third-party apps will start using it.
[51:32] Very cool. Oh, I like that. I did not, I don't remember hearing about that one.
I'm not sure they made as big a noise about it because people conflate it with the scanning stuff in iCloud, which is completely different.
And that that Apple got in so much hot water overdoing. So I think they're being a little quieter about it than they would otherwise completely unrelated feature. But people conflate things because they're not right.
You know, we're not similar. Yeah.
So the name of it is under privacy and security is called sensitive content warning.
And it says detect nude photos and videos before they are viewed on your iPhone receive guidance to help make a safe choice. Apple does not have access to the photos or videos.
So I can turn that on on my phone and now it's turned on for airdrop, contacts, messages and video messages. And you can allow analytics if you want. But again, that's a separate opt out.
[52:24] Yeah. And again, notice the wording, how careful. Notice how careful they were at the wording to say that, you know, we don't get to see what's being scanned. They're being very careful on this one, which is sensible.
Another important one to remind ourselves of is the check-in feature. So this is an advanced variant of location sharing, designed to solve the problem of, I am leaving my friends after we've had a nice dinner in a restaurant, I am walking home, or I am taking public transit home, and we're all a little bit worried, did I make it home safely? And so instead of having to proactively check every couple of minutes, is your friend safe, you can actually have Apple sort of make the whole process smoother for you. And so the person who's doing the traveling is in full control. And when you go to leave, you basically set it up so you start a messages thread with the people you want to check in with. And then you click the little plus button where the apps are. And then one of the apps in there is check in. And when you click that, you'll be guided through a quick little wizard that sort of asks you, you know, how much do you want to share? How well you know how often you want to share where is your intended destination. And then And once that's done.
[53:38] Apple sort of take care of letting people know proactively what's going on.
So when you get home safely, Apple will tell all of the people you had as your check-in people, yeah, Bart made it home safely. If you stop making progress towards your specified destination, Apple will proactively let the people who you're checking in with know that you've stopped making progress. If your phone, it captures extra data like your current battery level, or sorry, the last seen battery level, the last seen location, all those kind of sensible things you might want to know are also included. So it's a tweaked, better version of location sharing for this specific problem. And that's now live.
I really like the battery part, because if your battery dies, you will look like you stopped moving.
Exactly, false positive. If it tells you that it was at 1%, it's like, ah, she's still coming. She just let her battery, die.
Exactly. I mean, it is actually very important to know. So it's a very well thought out feature and that is now live.
And so I think we just need to remind people about it.
[54:41] I didn't realize you had to start a message thread. That's kind of interesting.
I just went through the process and you do have to.
So there's a list of standard things that you can normally do when you hit the plus button on the left side.
So it's camera, photo, sticker, Apple Cash, audio, location, but then it says more and you have to go down into more to get to check-in, which as Bart says, it's a little yellow circle with a check mark in it.
I wonder if that list updates over time to the stuff you actually use.
Might, might do, yeah.
[55:13] I really like that interface better. The sliding sideways was always dodgy and they would get big and small.
And I didn't like that. Yeah, I think I was hit the wrong.
I was hit them while trying to do other things. And yeah, where am I? What am I?
What just happened? Where's my keyboard? What?
[55:30] Was it just me? Oh, no. Oh, no. There's a mastodon client I have that every time I try to type, I end up suddenly in the completely wrong window because the buttons are too close to the top of the keyboard. I hate it.
Hate it. Anyway, something which is more of a don't panic. People got very worried about the name drop feature. So this is this cool thing where if you take two iPhones or an iPhone or an iPad or whatever, and you put them nose, you sort of touch them off each other, you can initiate a contact share. You can basically, I think Samsung used to do this and they used to call it bumping.
There was a there was a third party app that was called bump.
Ah, yes. OK, that's what it was. I knew there was a bump. Yeah, I knew there was a bump.
All the cool kids used it for about a minute.
I didn't have anyone to bump with. Sad. Anyway, name drop is kind of a similar feature.
And there was a lot of concern that what if you're in a crowd, couldn't people just steal your contact data?
Well, no, is the answer. So basically, Apple designed this well, so you can't, no one can name drop with you without your explicit update.
It can't happen by mistake. You absolutely have to be an active participant in the transaction.
So when you touch them off each other, it effectively starts a request, but you then have to be face ID recognized.
And then you get basically an option saying, receive or send and receive.
[56:54] So if you bump each other and both of you say receive only, then nothing will happen.
Because no one is sending anything. without me at the end of that. few.
[57:02] If you if one of you choose to send and receive and the other one chooses just to receive then you get a one way transaction.
Or if you both choose to send and receive then it goes both ways.
[57:13] So it is very much confused by this or one of the if you haven't got a chance to play with it it's super fun you push the two phones together and there's this blue sort of watery glowing thing that happens it's super fun steve and i actually turned it off.
Because whenever we tried to show each other something on our phones, if the other person's phone was near, it would go bloop, and it was actually covering the thing we were trying to show.
It might be over time, it wouldn't be a problem, but it was right while we were setting up our new phones, and it just kept constantly getting in our way. We'd probably turn it back on.
But my understanding is you can also do AirDrop that way, not just NameDrop.
Right. Sure. But with AirDrop, again, you're proactively sending in file, and then you have to choose to receive it. So it's the same concept of people who are extra worried about name drop because it's your contact information, right?
Imagine imagine if this was done badly and you were in a crowded tube, you know, sorry, subway tube, whatever, but they were in London or New York or on the Bart.
Like it would be terrible if that all you had to do was just knock into someone while you're jostling in a carriage or something and you had their email address, their phone number, their name.
I mean, it would be catastrophic.
No one should be surprised Apple did this. Right. but just in case you were worried, yeah, Apple did it right.
Good, good. So they are— I like the order you did those stories.
That was definitely the way to go. I'm all happy and smiley.
[58:35] That was the intention. Lots of links in the show notes for more information, including actually, Ken Raid did a nice summing up on the checklist podcast, number 345, which is a cool number. So there you go.
[58:47] Action alerts. Apple have patched everything for a bunch of zero days.
No, this is not the WebP ones. This is a whole different set of zero days.
Oh, I was hoping you were going to say that was connected. They are actively being exploited by spyware. No, not Pegasus. One of Pegasus's competitors called Predator, which is probably a more accurate name, actually. Predator sounds appropriately scary. Anyway, Apple have patched all of their stuff. And so you need to be sure you're on the latest version of iOS 17, 16.7, Safari's been patched, basically everything all over the place has been patched, including iOS 16. However, if you are too far back, right, so watchOS 9 you're fine, watchOS 8 you are not fine, iOS 16 you're fine, iOS 15 you are Not fine. In terms of the Mac, it's even further back. It was, where is it?
By not fine, do you mean there's no patch form? Yep, that's what I mean.
Why? Well, because Apple only go back one version of iOS, so it's 16 and 17.
[1:00:04] But on the Mac, they go back further. So on the Mac, it's as far back as Big Sur.
So you have Monterey and Big Sur.
And wine country, Sonoma. I don't know who it was I heard say, they were joking before the keynote, oh yeah, MacOS Wine Country.
And then it came up and it was Sonoma. I was like, yep, MacOS Wine Country.
So patchy, patchy, patch, patch, basically.
Again.
These are nasty bugs being actively exploited. So patch, patch, patch.
[1:00:36] Also a related story I thought it was worth mentioning is that if you are upgrading to a new iPhone 15, there is a nasty bug that will not fully brick, but make your life very awkward.
And there's a link in the show notes to how to unbrick your phone if you do this. But if you try to upgrade before you hit 17.0.2 on your old phone, the transfer will go terribly horribly wrong and you'll end up in a giant big mess that you can recover from, but it won't be pleasant.
Which are you saying the old phone has to go to 17.0.2 before you go to transfer to a new phone?
Yes. So get your old phone fully patched and then initiate the process, whether you're using it through an iCloud backup restore or whatever way you're doing it, make sure your old phone gets all the way to 1702 before you do the transfer. Apparently, Apple have proactively added a warning before you hit this exact bug. It doesn't affect every mechanism for transferring.
So apparently people won't get it by accident unless you're very, very unlucky. But either way, I would say just go to 1702 because there's a known issue and then you should be, you're not treading in a minefield.
[1:01:49] Okay, Lindsay and Nolan are getting our iPhone 14s, and just before I got on the call, she said, should I update my old phone before? Whatever the end of that sentence is, yes.
Yes. Yeah, definitely. I ended up on the virtual version of the, what is it you call it?
The counter of sadness?
Yeah, well, there's the phone call of sadness, the chat of sadness, the table of sadness is the original.
Yeah, so I ended up on the phone of sadness three times before I got my watch working because I was before they had released the very latest versions of everything and I think I may have gotten snagged up on some of this shenanigans, but it got very bad.
I ended up with a watch that couldn't go forward or backward and it just kept on saying, continue on your phone and the phone was like, nope, no watch here. Oh no. Oh no. Anyway, I got there in the end. I have a really, I'm really happy with my Ultra 2. So we are there in the end, but it was, it was three calls, including getting escalated, which was nice. The escalating person was much more knowledgeable. Anyway, another related note, there is a nice little how to from Cult of Mac. How to reset your iPhone before trading it in or selling it, so that you protect your privacy.
[1:03:10] It's not difficult, but, you know, let's think. Is the Cultimax article different than what Apple tells you to do? No, they just tell you in friendlier ways.
[1:03:19] Okay.
[1:03:21] Alright. Moving on then to worthy warnings. I'm taking this as a timely reminder that you should turn on multi-factor authentication or two-factor authentication everywhere you can, because passwords get leaked like there's no tomorrow. There is, ironically, a cybersecurity company called DarkBeam. And as one of the services to their customers, they track password leaks so so they can warn their customers if they've been caught up in a password leak.
It's like a private version of have I been pwned.
They forgot to password protect their database of passwords.
They accidentally exposed billions with a B of username and password combinations that work from all over the Internet.
[1:04:15] All sorts of data breaches previously known and not previously known.
So basically, like the Yahoo one, there's loads of passwords out there now.
So two-factor auth everywhere you can.
Because that is your protection against this kind of shenanigans.
I think this is a first.
There was no notable news.
Everything sort of fit into action alerts and worthy warnings.
I also have no top tips, no excellent explainers, but I do have an interesting insight, which is a little bit of podcast listening you may enjoy.
There is a fantastic NPR podcast called Fresh Air, which is an interview show.
So it really could be about anyone, because it's talking to people who've done stuff that's cool.
[1:05:00] Well, the interview I'm linking to is by a new, I think she's New York Times.
Regimes. She did a deep expose on Clearview AI, the very controversial company that basically hoovered up everyone's faces from all of the social media and sell it to, well, they say law enforcement, but it does include some rather dodgy regimes. It's a very interesting expose on what's going on. I think it's good to know. It won't make you feel happy, happy, joy, joy, but it is good to know what's going on. And it's a very clear interview, not intimidating it all. So I will recommend that episode. And that sets us up very well for some palate cleansing because we definitely need it after listening to that.
So I have a strange podcast recommendation. One of my favorite recent discoveries is going on hiatus. Therefore, I'm recommending it to you, which sounds a little strange, right?
The podcast is called Patented or Patented History of Inventions. And it's a whole bunch of half hour episodes that dive deep into the invention of something you might think of as simple like The Pencil or The Refrigerator or you know a whole range of interesting episodes.
Completely timeless because these things have been around for decades or hundreds of years or whatever so you can dig into the back catalogue and thoroughly enjoy every minute of it.
[1:06:22] So the show is going on hiatus so I figure now's a great time to just scroll through the back catalogue and stick into your queue anything that takes your fancy and then you just enjoy it over the next couple of weeks or months, you know, road trip or whatever.
[1:06:34] If you're curious what the... So the invention of the refrigerator isn't going to change if you listen to it two years after that episode comes out.
But precisely, I mean, we may develop a whole new refrigerator that does something amazingly different, but probably not. And even then, everything in that episode is still true.
It's just not the whole truth, right? They're always really, basically.
[1:06:56] The host is an interesting chap. He's called Dallas Taylor. He's a Brit who spent most of his life in America, and he's called Dallas, which means it's a very transatlantic podcast, which is why he actually constantly goes between patented and patented. He says it twice in every episode, which is always funny. But he interviews a guest who's written about the invention and it's a very fun sort of a tone he sets. It's very playful, casual, but you learn a lot and you don't realise you have really enjoyable shows. The final episode is completely different to every other episode and yet is the perfect example of the show's feel. So the final episode is about the invention of a parody or a joke philosophy called Resistentialism, which is the philosophy that our devices are proactively resisting human progress.
[1:07:49] It's an interview with the daughter of the columnist who wrote the parody. It's fantastic.
He wrote it before we had computers, so he'll be swearing at his lawnmower, But the concept that are things are out to get us is it feels is true today doesn't it oh well let's just talk photocopiers for a minute right we know they have evil intent.
I did this is slightly different than that but i just saw a little quick meme on mastodon that said that it helps to think of autocorrect as a very helpful and engaging.
Elf that's sitting in your side your phone helping you except they just happen to be drunk.
I got it. I like it. I got a palate cleanser for us to an alistair posted this in our slack at pod feed dot com slash slack in the delete me channel which alistair basically owns it I sometimes try to compete and get something good but alistair rocks it.
It's a link to a pod a sorry next kd cartoon.
[1:08:54] And I don't have the XAD URL, unfortunately, but this really resonated to me.
It's a little line drawing of a person with a phone in their hand and they got headphones on and they're thinking, I need more podcasts to listen to while doing chores.
Hey, someone should do a podcast where they just like read through a book.
And then each podcast could be an episode, each chapter could be an episode.
Below it it says every now and then I reinvent audio books from first principles.
And of course, there's always hover text.
[1:09:27] I've been working my way through this 1950s podcast by someone named John Tolkien, called Lord of the Rings. It's a deep dive into this fictional world he created. Good stuff. Really bingeable.
I love it. I didn't get the hover. I always forget about that. But this also reminded me of Kyle, my son Kyle, he just sees through things and says what I need to be told. I I was telling him about this really cool technology many years ago.
He was like 12 years old or something. And I said, I said, well, it's this really cool thing where you record your voice and then it turns it into text and then it sends the text to someone.
But when it gets to the other side, it comes out in audio. And he said, so you mean like a phone call?
[1:10:16] Shut up, Kyle, nobody likes you. I was gonna say voicemail. Yeah, voicemail, that would be, maybe it was voicemail, he said. In any case, well, this worked out, and your voice actually lasted, Bart.
I'm sounding a little gravelly, but you sound great.
Yeah, I would say I have about five minutes left by the feel of it.
But yeah, perfect. Yeah, we're done. We have all of our stuff.
We made it out of the wire.
Yeah. And remember, it's extra, extra, extra important this time.
Stay patched so you stay secure.
[1:10:45] All right, wait, everybody, before you go, two weeks from now, we are going to be going to see an annular eclipse in Utah And we will be gone for the weekend, so there won't be any live show, but there's also, we're going to be gone a bunch of days.
So believe it or not, I am begging for content again.
I think this might be the last trip. I think so.
The last one that's going to really make it hard for me to do the show.
So if you've got something you can record, I would really appreciate it.
But that is going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at Allison at podfeed.com anytime you like.
That's where you can send in those reviews.
If you have a question or suggestion, just send it on over. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeet at chaos.social.
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[1:11:50] Music.
[1:12:09] You.