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Apple Music Editorial Content To Be Better Integrated With News

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple Music and Apple News are starting to form a much closer relationship, with editorial content from the former set to appear in the latter. The start of the process was spotted by MacStories, which compared the current progress to how Apple New was integrated with Stocks in the past.

The integration of Apple Music and News, which Apple said nothing about during its event on April 20th, is clearly just getting going, so there’s not a lot to see yet. However, it’s also the sort of integration that has the potential to differentiate Music from competitors like Spotify and give users a much-needed reason to visit News. This is a feature we may learn more about next week when iOS and iPadOS 14.5 are released to the public, and that we’ll be keeping a close eye on and as we learn more about Apple’s plans for the fall during WWDC.

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How Privacy Sits At the Heart of Apple's New AirTags

Charlotte Henry ·

After years of rumors, Apple finally unveiled AirTags at its ‘Spring Loaded’ event on Tuesday. Fast Company looked at how privacy sits at the heart of the new product.

“When it came to designing our own product, we thought carefully about how to get this right in a way that no one else in the industry’s ever done before,” says Kaiann Drance, Apple’s VP of worldwide iPhone product marketing. I spoke to her and Ron Huang, the company’s senior director of sensing and connectivity, about Apple’s newest, tiniest gadget. “You’ll see that we designed for the privacy of AirTag owners and nonowners, as well as making these benefits opened up to third-party products as well.” And from a privacy standpoint, that’s what’s really remarkable about the AirTag: Apple isn’t just thinking about the privacy of AirTag owners themselves, or even solely about users in Apple’s ecosystem. The company designed the AirTag with the privacy of everyone in mind—yes, even Android users and people who have never owned an Apple product.

This App Can Load Your Business Card into Apple Wallet
Cool Stuff Found

This App Can Load Your Business Card into Apple Wallet

Andrew Orr ·

An app I discovered a while back called Social Card lets you put your business card into Apple Wallet. By that I mean the app helps you create a personalized card where you can add information like email, phone numbers, websites, and links to social media like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and others. You can share you card with Airdrop, iMessage, email, or a QR code. You can create a card for free with limited options, and various in-app purchases gives you customization options to add a background, change the color, add a logo or your portrait, and more.

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Here’s How Signal Broke Into Cellebrite’s Hacking Device

Andrew Orr ·

Moxie Marlinspike of Signal wrote on Wednesday how he was able hack into a Cellebrite device. These devices are used by entities like law enforcement to brute force their way into devices like iPhones.

Given the number of opportunities present, we found that it’s possible to execute arbitrary code on a Cellebrite machine simply by including a specially formatted but otherwise innocuous file in any app on a device that is subsequently plugged into Cellebrite and scanned. There are virtually no limits on the code that can be executed.

A fascinating write-up. One can only imagine the thrill of taking a walk, seeing a package fall out of a truck, and finding out that it’s a Cellebrite device.

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Authoritarian Governments May Not Like Satellite Internet

Andrew Orr ·

An interesting report today examines how authoritarian governments will handle the challenge of satellite internet like Starlink.

Russia’s space chief Dmitry Rogozin, in August of 2020, said that Starlink is “a rather predatory, clever, powerful, high-technology policy of the USA, which uses Shock and Awe in order to advance, before all, their military interests.” Rogozin publicly stated the more humanitarian aspects of Starlink, in that it would provide internet access to people living in remote areas, “nonsense.”