Essential Apple Podcast 289: So long Apple car… We never knew you at all!

This week Simon has a new microphone so hopefully the sound will be a little better. Meanwhile apparently the “Titan has Fallen”, the Apple car project is “officially” dead, Vision Pro returns are no worse than any other Apple product, there is new Post Quantum crytographic protection coming for iMessage, and more! Simon and Nick set to and try to make sense of it all…

MISSION TO SEAFARERS APPEAL

The Mission to Seafarers is looking for donations of old, but working, smartphones and internet capable tablets to give seafarers far from home a way to talk to friends and family
If you have any old smartphones or tablets cluttering your cupboard and drawers why not donate them to this worthy cause? If you are in the UK contact Rev. Andrew Dotchin Vicar@felixparish.com or your nearest Mission to Seafarers Centre, or if you live outside the UK and would like to help, simply visit missiontoseafarers.org and make a donation.

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Recorded 3rd March 2024

Listen to the show:

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On this week’s show

NICK RILEY

Spligosh in the Slack
Sutton Park Circuit church worship on YouTube
Nick’s church stream videos on You Tube

APPLE

The Apple Car project is reportedly dead – Engadget
- Crash of the Titan: a short history of Apple’s doomed car project – The Verge
- Apple Car project cost Apple $10 billion over a decade of work – AppleInsider
- In loving memory of the Apple Car – Creative Bloq
Apple Vision Pro return rate is about the same as the iPhone 15 Pro – AppleInsider
Apple TV+ to get the most exciting sci-fi TV series to be greenlit in years – T3.com
Apple Wont Remove Home Screen Web Apps From iOS After All – PC Mag UK
Apple Adds M3 Macs to Its Do-It-Yourself Repair Program – iDrop News
Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’ movie is now streaming on Apple TV+ – 9to5Mac
Apple ID could get a branding makeover to Apple Account – Cult of Mac
Gurman: No Apple Event Planned for Upcoming iPads and Macs – MacRumors
Apple hit with class action lawsuit over iCloud’s 5GB limit – 9to5Mac
Zoom Pulls the Plug on Older Versions of iOS – PC Mag UK
Netflix Subscribers Can No Longer Pay Through Apple’s App Store – MacTrast

TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE

Windows 11 borrowing Apple’s ‘iPhone as a webcam’ feature for Android – 9to5Mac
- No physical buttons, but the bottom of the trackpad still clicks.
- Tap-drag to drag*.
- Three finger swipe up reveals all windows and desktops.
- *The the tap-drag gesture is tragically flawed, however, as it does not have any form of drag lock, so you have to be able to complete the drag in the available area of the trackpad. Which is nowhere near as big as Apple’s.

SECURITY & PRIVACY

Blog – iMessage with PQ3: The new state of the art in quantum-secure messaging at scale – Apple
- @Dougee Says: iMessage lacked post-compromise security. In the Signal protocol, your communication keys are constantly updated and “ratcheted” forwards. This means that a compromised phone/backup won’t be useful for long. You’ll replace the stolen keys within a few minutes. In iMessage this wasn’t true: public keys were long-lived. The new update adds periodic rekeying using elliptic curve cryptography, to ensure that compromised keys quickly become useless, both in the future and for decrypting past messages. This closes an important threat vector. Along with key transparency, this makes iMessage a state-of-the-art cryptographic protocol. Even with those improvements, the remaining problem is that elliptic curve crypto is not secure against future quantum computing advances. This doesn’t matter today, but if such computers are built in the future, they could be used to decrypt past conversations. So Apple has made two changes in this update.
- Frequent elliptic curve rekeying.
- Second “post quantum secure” algorithm: Kyber.
  - This algorithm rekeys as well, but a little less frequently. (This is because Kyber cophertexts are much bigger and “eat” more space on the wire.) An important note here is that the two main encryption algorithms are arranged into a “combiner”: this means that as long as one algorithm remains secure, nobody should be able to break the encryption. This means Apple gets the safety of elliptic curves today, plus PQC in the future (maybe.)
- Ok, so what? You might point out that this is overkill. Quantum computers are years away, and key compromise is rare. So why should I care about this? The answer is you probably don’t need to care. It is overkill. But sometimes overkill sends a useful message, one that should be heard by people who aren’t technical at all.

VINNE & THE SQUIRRELS VS THE ANALYSTS

Forget the M3 and A17 Pro, Apple might already be designing chips using 2nm – iMore
New Apple Watch bands tipped for Spring launch iOS 17.4 code reveals… – iMore

WORTH A CHIRP / ESSENTIAL TIPS

10 New Things Your iPhone Can Do in Next Week’s iOS 17.4 Update – MacRumors

JUST A SNIPPET

For things that are not worth more than a flypast

Apple TV+ Gains Over 50 Movies for a Limited Time – MacRumors

Essential Apple Recommended Services:

All Things Secured – Online security made simple by Josh Summers.
Pixel Privacy – a fabulous resource full of excellent articles and advice on how to protect yourself online.
Doug.ee Blog for Andy J’s security tips.
Ghostery – protect yourself from trackers, scripts and ads while browsing.
Simple Login – Email anonymisation and disposable emails for login/registering with
33mail.com – Never give out your real email address online again.
AnonAddy – Disposable email addresses
Sudo – get up to 9 “avatars” with email addresses, phone numbers and more to mask your online identity. Free for the first year and priced from $0.99 US / £2.50 UK per month thereafter… You get to keep 2 free avatars though.
ProtonMail – end to end encrypted, open source, based in Switzerland. Prices start from FREE… what more can you ask?
ProtonVPN – a VPN to go with it perhaps? Prices also starting from nothing!
Comparitech DNS Leak Test – simple to use and understand VPN leak test.
Fake Name Generator – so much more than names! Create whole identities (for free) with all the information you could ever need.
Wire and on the App Stores – free for personal use, open source and end to end encryted messenger and VoIP.
Pinecast – a fabulous podcast hosting service with costs that start from nothing.

Essential Apple is not affiliated with or paid to promote any of these services… We recommend services that we use ourselves and feel are either unique or outstanding in their field, or in some cases are just the best value for money in our opinion.

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