Jesse Squires:
I am often in a situation where I have a number of tabs open in Safari. I may be reading a collection of blog posts about how to implement a new iOS API, or I may be researching something I need, like new running shoes. I cannot always complete the task in that moment and I want to revisit it another time, or I want to save all the links for later. If they stay in Safari (even as bookmarks) they will be lost forever to me. I need to save them into OmniFocus. So I wrote an AppleScript to do that.
AppleScript Mac macOS 10.15 Catalina OmniFocus Open Source Safari
Kyle Mizokami (via Espionage News):
The NSA eventually shipped all of the electronics located at the embassy back to the U.S. for study. They struck gold: parts inside an IBM Selectric typewriter had been cleverly duplicated but rigged to transmit the typist’s keystrokes. The typewriter still worked, but it also quietly broadcast the keystrokes, using Soviet over-the-air TV signals as a form of electronic camouflage. It was in effect a non-digital form of the keylogging malware that hackers install on PCs.
Robert W. Lucky:
A solid aluminum bar, part of the structural support of the typewriter, had been replaced with one that looked identical but was hollow. Inside the cavity was a circuit board and six magnetometers. The magnetometers sensed movements of tiny magnets that had been embedded in the transposers that moved the typing “golf ball” into position for striking a given letter.
Other components of the typewriters, such as springs and screws, had been repurposed to deliver power to the hidden circuits and to act as antennas. Keystroke information was stored and sent in encrypted burst transmissions that hopped across multiple frequencies.
Previously:
History IBM National Security Agency (NSA) Privacy Russia Security
Glenn Fleishman:
More recently, the Chicago Tribune published the results of testing from a firm it had hired to check if emissions from modern smartphones truly fell below FCC safety limits. In those tests, many appeared to exceed regulatory limits. The Tribune didn’t overstate its results, but the bottom line was, more or less, positing that smartphone makers were all deceiving the FCC and the general public. This plays into our fears, even though the work was presented rigorously. (Smartphone makers dispute the methodology of the testing; the Tribune stands by its research. Regardless, there’s a big difference between detecting higher-than-approved emission levels and proving a link between those levels and cancer.)
[…]
To achieve the promised high rates of speed and serve new categories of devices, 5G networks will draw from a much broader range of frequencies, some far higher (or shorter) wavelengths than current technologies. And many times as many base stations will need to be deployed.
But the newness and differentness of 5G don’t matter. Whether we’re talking about 5G, 4G, 3G, Wi-Fi, or other consumer-level wireless technologies, the sum total of results from many studies and many years of research paints a straightforward picture—there’s nothing to worry about.
Antenna Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Health iOS Mac Wi-Fi
Bluetooth SIG (MacRumors, Hacker News):
As the names suggest, Classic Audio operates on the Bluetooth Classic radio while LE Audio operates on the Bluetooth Low Energy radio.
[…]
LE Audio will include a new high-quality, low-power audio codec, the Low Complexity Communications Codec (LC3). Providing high quality even at low data rates, LC3 will bring tremendous flexibility to developers, allowing them to make better design tradeoffs between key product attributes such as audio quality and power consumption.
[…]
LE Audio will enable the development of Bluetooth hearing aids that bring all the benefits of Bluetooth audio to the growing number of people with hearing loss.
[…]
LE Audio will also add Broadcast Audio, enabling an audio source device to broadcast one or more audio streams to an unlimited number of audio sink devices. Broadcast Audio opens significant new opportunities for innovation, including the enablement of a new Bluetooth use case, Audio Sharing.
Andrew Liszewski (via John Gordon):
[One] of the biggest improvements it will include will be a feature called Multi-Stream Audio. Bluetooth is currently limited to streaming audio to just a single device. That’s fine for portable speakers and headphones where both sides are connected with a wire, but for wireless earbuds, such as Apple’s AirPods, your smartphone can actually only connect to one side. That earbud then has to forward the audio stream onto the one in your other ear, which requires some clever software tricks to ensure everything remains in sync.
AirPods Audio Bluetooth iOS Mac
