Charlotte Henry

A critical bug found in Slack could allow an attacker access to users’ private channels and conversations. Threatpost broke down the details of the flaw in the popular messaging and collaboration app.

To exploit the bug, attackers would need to upload a file to their own HTTPS-enabled server with a payload; then, they could prepare a Slack post with an HTML injection containing the attack URL pointing to that payload (hidden in an image). After that, they need only to share that post with a public Slack channel or user. If a user clicks on the booby-trapped image, the code will be executed on the victim’s machine. As for accomplishing the HTML injection, the issue lies in the way Slack posts are created, according to the researcher. “[Creating a post] creates a new file on https://files.slack.com with [a specific] JSON structure,” according to the writeup. “It’s possible to directly edit this JSON structure, which can contain arbitrary HTML.”

The first Apple Silicon devices are imminent, but we’re still waiting to really see what it all means in reality. Rene Ritchie at iMore thinks the Mac mini could benefit from the shift away from Intel. I certainly hope so!

My biggest hope with Apple Silicon is that we start getting Mac mini updates every 12-18 months, just like iPad Pro updates. Whatever the next-generation equivalent to the AX-Series for iPads is, put it in the Mac version of that. 14X, 15X, 16, and on. Other than that, I expect we’ll see the same type of improvements from Apple Silicon in the Mac mini they we’d see from Apple Silicon in the MacBook Air — way better performance, especially for graphics, and especially for anything and everything Apple includes custom accelerators for, like 4K and above video rendering, H.265 encode and decode, hypervisor acceleration for virtual machines, and a few other things to make developers and power users alike just smile just a little or a lot wider.

For many of us organizing documents and the like on our iPhones is dull and something we’d rather the device did. As Bradley Chambers noted on 9to5Mac, the often overlooked Files app makes that possible.

Before the release of the Files app, I had my documents in separate buckets. I kept personal documents in iCloud Drive, shared folders in Dropbox, and work files in Google Drive since my school uses G Suite. After the Files app’s release with iOS 11, it became the app I used 99% of the time to search for and open files regardless of which cloud provider they were stored in. For people who live and breathe technology every day, I could generally tell you where my files are stored, but for people who see technology as a path to getting something done, trying to locate files is a chore. Thanks to Apple’s Document Provider API, the Files app becomes a centralized place to search for, manage, and open files.

Owning Apple products has lots of advantages, but there is another, perhaps unexpected one. Having items like an iPhone or AirPods in your dating profile photos can land you up to 76 percent more matches, according to data from Comparemymobile.com, reported by 9to5 Mac.

Here’s the impact of having Apple kit visible in your dating photos, where the percentage is the increase in matches with the product visible in the photo: iPhone, +76% Apple Watch, +61% AirPods, +41%. The only positive impact seen with any other brand of smartphone was Samsung, with a 19% increase. All other brands tested had a negative effect.

Tim Cook says that he’s “never been more hopeful than I am right now.” Writing in the September issue of Vogue, he highlighted the determination to tackle racial inequality and communities coming together in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic as reasons for his positivity.

I think you have to look back 60 years to find an equivalent. You have to look back to the late John Lewis marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Or fast-forward a few years, and you have Stonewall. Both of these were key moments that kicked off a sudden change—for African Americans and for the LGBTQ community. And I think this is an exciting and hopeful time because as a nation we have struggled with racial equity for our whole existence—and it feels good to be at a point where there’s going to be significant, massive, positive change. The other thing I would say is that this pandemic is a crisis that we’re all facing. And if you look around, there are lots of good things happening: There are neighbors helping neighbors again, which was sort of a lost art for a while.

The UK has the worst 5G speeds, with the U.S not far behind. That’s according to new data from 12 countries in tests conducted by Opensignal, reported 9to5 Mac.

The UK was worst, with average download speeds of 32.6Mbps, with the US almost as bad at 33.4Mbps. For reference, the US speed is only 1.8 times faster than 4G. This contrasts with the fastest 5G speeds, found in Saudi Arabia and Canada. In Saudi, average download speed was 144Mbps, or 14 times faster than 4G. Canada delivered 90Mbps, perhaps not surprising when you consider that its 4G speeds are already twice as fast as in the US. The US did better when it came to how often you’ll find yourself on 5G, at 19.3% of the time, putting it in first place. The UK was last, with a pathetic 4.5% of the time. Saudi Arabia again led the way, delivering a 5G connection 34% of the time.