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

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.

Why not come and join the Slack community? You can now just click on this Slackroom Link to sign up and join in the chatter!

Recorded 3rd March 2024


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 litt