In Apple’s iOS 18.4 software update, there’s a new Ambient Music feature available in the Control Center options on iPhone. It’s free to use, and does not require an Apple Music subscription. It’s also more customizable than most users probably realize.
This is accessed via Control Center and seems to be iOS-only, unlike the similar Background Sounds feature that still exists for iOS and Mac under Accessibility.
Previously:
Apple today updated its iWork apps Keynote, Numbers, and Pages with new features that require iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, or macOS 15.4.
For example, in the latest version of each app, you can now make text edits using Writing Tools directly in a presentation, spreadsheet, or document.
[…]
Each app also received a few other enhancements that are not tied to the latest software updates.
Perform complex calculations with over 30 new functions. For example, you can use a LAMBDA function to create and name custom functions, the SORT function to organize the contents of a range or array, or the LET function to perform calculations using defined variables. See the Formula and Functions user guide.
There’s a whole family of higher order functions: LAMBDA, LAMBDA.APPLY, BYCOL, BYROW, MAP, REDUCE, and SCAN (via Hacker News).
This is cool, but I’ve never really gotten into using Numbers, despite repeatedly trying. There are definitely some things that it does better than Excel, but others, like tables not expanding to fill the window, still feel weird to me after all these years. Anything with interactive collaboration I do with Google Sheets. Anything with manual collaboration I do with Excel. Any time I need to keep important records for a long time, I feel more comfortable with the Excel file format. Same with large data sets. That doesn’t leave much for Numbers, and I haven’t found anything that hooked me.
Previously:
Update (2025-04-08): Tom Harrington:
Apple Numbers is making a strong push for the most useless, incomprehensible error message of the year. It might as well say “Stuff might or might not be different, good luck finding the differences (if any)”
I get that maybe most people don’t get as excited about an update to Apple’s spreadsheets app, but I am, frankly, a Numbers enthusiast.
[…]
Fortunately, the addition of the FILTER function solves this problem by letting me simply ignore months that haven’t happened yet, and instead just run my calculations on the subset of applicable values. I was not only able to create a median measurement I never have to update, but I could also remove that hidden month field and replace the AVERAGEIF function with a simpler filtered version too. All of that saves time and means less manual tweaking of the sheet.
[…]
It’s true that Numbers still doesn’t let you include a link to a file, even though it has long had a HYPERLINK function that can make text into a clickable link.[…] However, it occurred to me that I could use a URL scheme to run a shortcut. And surely I could create a shortcut that could simply open a specific file?
While I didn’t, strictly speaking, need any of Numbers’s new powers to do this, the LET function ended up being a timesaver, since it let me avoid having to do lengthy operations either in a separate, hidden field, or repeated within in a single cell.
Update (2025-04-09): Dan Moren:
Fortunately reader Neil came to the rescue: using the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine, he retrieved an older version of Apple’s list of functions and compared it to the new version, thus isolating all the new functions.
I don’t know why Apple couldn’t just document which functions are new, but great work from Neil.
Bruce Schneier (March 31, Hacker News):
“I didn’t see this loser in the group,” Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. “Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out.”
Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may have hacked his way in was followed by a report from CBS News that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had sent out a bulletin to its employees last month warning them about a security “vulnerability” identified in Signal.
The truth, however, is much more interesting. If Signal has vulnerabilities, then China, Russia, and other US adversaries suddenly have a new incentive to discover them. At the same time, the NSA urgently needs to find and fix any vulnerabilities quickly as it can—and similarly, ensure that commercial smartphones are free of backdoors—access points that allow people other than a smartphone’s user to bypass the usual security authentication methods to access the device’s contents.
There’s a debate over whether the information shared constituted “war plans” and whether it was technically classified. But putting that aside, there are some interesting privacy and design questions here. Did they use Signal simply because it’s more convenient than the official government system? Because they didn’t trust the government system? Because they wanted to evade record-keeping requirements?
Did Waltz add Goldberg by mistake, e.g. picking the wrong name in auto-complete, in which case maybe there was someone intended to be in the chat who never actually got added? Did he add Goldberg on purpose, to sabotage, without knowing it would be traced back to him? If, as he insists, he never met or communicated with Goldberg, how did the number get into his phone? Can they really figure out whether Waltz did it and where the phone number came from?
It has always seemed to me that the privacy danger with systems like Signal and iMessage is not that someone would be able to decrypt the messages but that there would be a vulnerability that allows covert participants to be injected into the conversation, i.e. become part of the E2EE group. But if there is such a vulnerability in Signal, it’s hard to see why an adversary country or rogue elements within the NSA would want to waste it in this manner. It’s got to just be a mistake.
I was thinking about how this might have worked differently with iMessage. Would iOS ever look up Goldberg’s name or address or would he only show up as a phone number for participants who didn’t have him in their contacts?
The main issue with iMessage is that I don’t trust the device added to your account notifications. I get these all the time, and they’re seemingly unrelated to when I’m actually logging into iMessage or updating a device that uses it. Even assuming that there’s no way to add a device to an iMessage account without triggering this alert, device names can be spoofed and I don’t see how I would be able to detect if someone removed a device that I don’t frequently use and added a fake device with the same name. Without checking the serial number (which itself could perhaps be spoofed) or checking that the original device was still logged in, how do you know that the listed devices are what they claim to be? And how many people even check the device list every time this notification pops up?
Hugo Lowell (April 6, via Hacker News):
According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.
Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.
Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.
[…]
According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.
This seems plausible, though it’s unclear to me how they were able to track down this history with any certainty. I don’t think we can discount the possibility that Waltz really did know Goldberg. But the data detectors explanation does have the advantage of explaining both how Golberg’s number got into his phone and how he inadvertently added Goldberg to the conversation without realizing his mistake. His phone, I guess, would have shown Hughes’ name in the conversation.
Previously:
Update (2025-04-08): CM Harrington:
I still find the data detectors idea implausible. You can try and recreate that scenario, and it won’t work (admittedly, in my limited single test).
Also, how does signal do the rectifying between phone number and internal contacts (ie, in the app, not the initial contacts.app dump). If it doesn’t do any server lookup, it should still have Hughes’ name in the chat list. If it does server verification matching, you would see that immediately.
It doesn’t add up.
Presumably, this is related to Siri suggestions. This version of events sounds plausible to me, if a little too perfect, but stranger things have happened.
The distrustful and cynical voice deep inside me wants to think Waltz has been a source or contact for Goldberg, and that this is a neat way to keep that secret. There is no evidence for this.
I’ve seen a lot of people doubt this report and suggest that Waltz was secretly leaking stuff to Goldberg and that’s why he was in his iPhone to be added to the Signal chat, but the explanation that it was an unthinking “tap yes to add” tap that led to a ticking time bomb in Waltz’s contacts file rings true to me.
As a Mac user since the ’90s, it pretty sad that the explanation for this as a data detector failure is immediately believable to me, whereas it would have been part of a Switcher commercial in the early 00s.
