Items tagged with craig federighi
Apple is deep into damage control mode to clarify its messaging on its plan to protect children from online predators. Earlier this month, the company announced several features to stop the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). While well-intentioned, this move sparked a lot of backlash from the online community over customer privacy. One such feature involves communications involving children through iMessage. Apple said it uses on-device machine learning to determine whether images sent or received on a child's device contain sexually explicit photographs. When enabled, parents would receive a notification if such images trigger the Apple filter. For children under the age of 17, CSAM...
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Apple released iOS 13 back in late September alongside its new iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro smartphones. Roughly a week later, the company launched iOS 13.1, which was rather unprecedented for the company, and ever since it has been on what seems like a weekly schedule with new updates to fix bugs and various aliments for the operating system (there have been 8 patches within two months). Now, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is going into overhaul mode when it comes to its software development process for future iOS 13 updates and iOS 14. The move is being spearheaded by Apple's software chief, Craig "Hair Force One" Federighi, with a new system called "flags" according...
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It's bad enough we have to worry about sharks with frickin' laser beams attached, but now we have to be vigilant against the threat lasers present to smart home speakers and other devices with digital assistants. How so? Security researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and at the University of Michigan warn that relatively cheap laser points can be modded to inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice assistants. This method of hacking affects all of the popular voice assistants, including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Facebook Portal. "The implications of injecting unauthorized voice commands vary in severity based on the type of commands that...
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Everyone seems to have an opinion on the battle between Apple and the FBI over iPhone security, and specifically the iPhone 5c model that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple's position on the matter is clear—building a backdoor for the FBI to exploit would leave hundreds of millions of iPhones vulnerable. In an op-ed piece for The Washington Times, Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said it's "disappointing" that the FBI wants Apple to essentially "turn back the clock" on security.Federighi's position is that smartphones like the iPhone are more than just personal devices. Sure, they contain sensitive information like emails, text messages, photos,...
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