Apple

Apple is brewing a fix to patch an iOS password flaw that allows credentials to be stolen from backups.

Elcomsoft researcher Oleg Afonin says the flaws mean cracking efforts against iOS 10 backups are 2500 times faster compared to similar efforts against iOS 9. If successful, the attack will grant access to device keychains.

The latest iOS released earlier this month allows six million passwords to be attempted each second compared to 2400 a second against iOS 9, using an Intel i5 processor. Afonin conducted his research using a commercial tool.

A flaw Apple introduced in iOS 10 has made it far easier for password crackers to brute-force data backed up to iTunes, including credentials stored in Keychain.

iOS 10 might be the most secure version of Apple's mobile OS, but Apple reportedly made a serious blunder in its implementation of password verifications for iOS 10 backups to iTunes on Mac and Windows PCs.

When Mac OS X (as it was then called) first moved to a yearly release cycle in 2011, Apple had trouble defining its scope for each release. Lion, the first in this cadence and the first release to pull in a significant number of features from iOS, feels like a half-finished version of Mountain Lion in retrospect. Mavericks stripped out some of previous versions' skeuomorphism and superfluous texture, but the Mac didn’t fully match with iOS 7 until Yosemite came out a year later.

Heralded at the 2016 WWDC, Apple has brought its Siri voice assistant technology to MacOS Sierra, which even in its first incarnation on the desktop brings a wealth of possibilities for workflow expansion and knowledge navigation.

Siri isn't constantly listening to the user like it can on iOS, nor is there a setting to allow it to do so in Sierra — and this is a good thing. Users can easily bring up the function with a keystroke, by clicking on the menu bar, or invoking the feature through the dock icon.

By nature, iOS is not a permissive operating system. Apple started from a position of not trusting third-party software developers, fearing those outsiders could screw up the company's platform (a completely reasonable position to take, incidentally). Every new version of iOS since the second one has been very cautious and deliberate about what new capabilities are given to third-party apps.

Another iOS release, another slew of devices experiencing temporary death. But after a rash of Twitter users reported that the iOS 10 update bricked their iPhones and iPads, Apple says it’s fixed the problem.

“We experienced a brief issue with the software update process, affecting a small number of users during the first hour of availability,” Apple said in an emailed statement. “The problem was quickly resolved and we apologize to those customers. Anyone who was affected should connect to iTunes to complete the update or contact AppleCare for help.”

Up until now, every one of Apple’s iPhone hardware updates has been additive. New iPhones do all the stuff that the old ones could do, plus some new stuff. Moving to bigger screens and swapping the 30-pin connector for the Lightning connector have caused a little pain for developers and users (respectively), but even those more disruptive updates were fundamentally giving you more of something than last year’s offering.

Perhaps you’ve got too much money and need to have the newest thing. Perhaps your iPhone 6 or 5s still works fine and you’re considering treating yourself to the recently announced iPhone 7. Perhaps you should hold that thought and wait for the iPhone 8.

2017 marks ten years of iPhones, and rumor has it that Apple has something very special planned. The iPhone 7 is more of the same, and though it’s a capable device, the next big thing is already in development and it’s likely to be a real stepping stone.

The rumors got a lot right about the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Its design isn't too far off from the 6S and 6S Plus, it has an immovable Home button, the Plus has a dual-camera setup to simulate optical zoom, and (crucially) that headphone jack is gone.

Tech journalists who got their hands on an iPhone 7 Wednesday sometimes felt uneasy with what they were touching.

The most off-putting feature seemed to be the Home button. The once satisfying click of the button has a new sensation thanks to a Taptic Engine. The response to its touch ranged from “awful” to “weird” to the more delicate “it will take some getting used to.”

“It doesn’t feel like a button at all,” Dieter Bahn of The Verge wrote. “It’s a bummer.”