Linked List: July 29, 2024

Monday, 29 July 2024

Apple Intelligence Hits Beta With New Beta OS Releases for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and MacOS 15.1 Sequoia ★

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

Not all features, as I said, will be available to try out in this release. Among those included are the systemwide Writing Tools features to help proofread and rewrite text; inbox prioritization, summaries, and smart reply in Mail; the new Reduce Interruptions focus mode; natural language search for photos and videos as well as the ability to create Memories movies on demands; summaries for transcriptions; and, perhaps most enticingly, improved Siri functionality, including the ability to move between voice and typing, more resilient requests for when you stumble over your words, and answering questions about Apple products.

As for what you won’t find here, don’t expect the contentious image generation features like Image Playground, the ability to clean up and remove unwanted details from photos, and integration with ChatGPT. It’s unclear if those will appear in future builds of these betas, or as subsequent updates after public release. Also unclear is whether there will be a public beta of these versions down the road for non-developers.

I wish I would have predicted that Apple was going to start seeding these .1 OS betas previewing Apple Intelligence features while the .0 versions remain in beta until (presumably) release in September, because in hindsight it seems obvious. Will there be public betas of these Apple Intelligence OS versions soon? Unknown at the moment.

1Password ★

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired longtime DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. When the EU enacted GDPR in 2018, executives and security professionals waited anxiously to see how the law would be enforced. And then they kept waiting ... and waiting ... but the Great European Privacy Crackdown never came.

But the days of betting that you’re too big or too small to be noticed by GDPR are over. Recently, EU member nations (plus the UK) have started taking action against data controllers of all sizes–from the big (Amazon), to the medium (a trucking company), to the truly minuscule (a Spanish citizen whose home security cameras bothered their neighbors).

If you’re an IT or security professional, you may be wondering what to do. Unfortunately, GDPR compliance isn’t the kind of thing you can solve by buying a tool or scheduling a training session. The best place to start is to adopt a policy of data minimization: collect only the data you truly need to function, on both customers and employees. After that, your second priority should be securing the data you have — keeping it only as long as you absolutely need to, and then destroying it.

1Password can help with all aspects of GDPR compliance. To learn more about GDPR compliance, check out this post at 1Password’s blog.