Just a short podcast for you today, with a heartwarming FaceTime story, news from Google’s tech conference this week, and an upcoming security update in iOS 11.4 that will make it even more difficult for law enforcement officers to get personal data off of iOS devices:
- A soldier thought he was going to miss out on the birth of his daughter due to an early delivery and a flight delay. FaceTime saved the day
- Google announces ML Kit, a machine learning software development kit that allows developers for iOS and Android to build machine learning enabled apps
- iOS 11.4 will apparently have a new feature called USB Restricted Mode that will disable data transfer over USB if a device isn’t unlocked after a week
The text version of the podcast can be read below. To listen to the podcast here, click the play button on the player below. Apple News readers need to visit Apple World Today in order to listen to the podcast.
Text Version
This is Steve Sande for Apple World Today, and you’re listening to the AWT News Update podcast for Tuesday, May 8th, 2018.
Here’s another heartwarming story about an Apple product. Army soldier Brooks Lindsey was heading home to Jackson, Mississippi to be with his wife Lindsay as she gave birth to their daughter. Flying from Fort Bliss in El Paso Texas to Dallas, and then on to Jackson, Brooks found that his wife was going to have an induced delivery — meaning she’d deliver early. Couple that with flight delay in Dallas as it looked like Brooks would miss out on the birth. Fortunately, the flight delay made it possible for Brooks to sit on the airport floor with his iPhone and watch his daughter being born thanks to FaceTime. Brooks’ mother was in the delivery room and made the FaceTime call, and Brooks was recorded watching the delivery on FaceTime by another traveler who said that she “wanted to make sure people don’t forget about our soldiers who serve us every day and the sacrifices they make.” If Brooks’ flight had been on time, he would most likely have missed the FaceTime call and witnessing the delivery.
Last year, Apple announced the Core ML platform to allow developers to add machine learning-based features to their apps. Today, Google launched a similar machine learning software development kit called ML Kit so developers of both iOS and Android apps can add those features to apps. The features include image labeling, text recognition, face detection, barcode scanning, landmark detection, and smart replies. Many of the same features are available in Core ML, but this gives cross-platform developers a chance to put machine smarts into iOS and Android versions of the same app.
The upcoming version 11.4 of iOS will add a new feature that will disable data transmission over USB if the device isn’t unlocked for a period of 7 days. This new feature is designed for security purposes, and will most likely also foil the devices being used by law enforcement officials that try to crack passcodes via brute force methods. They use a USB connection through the Lightning port of an iPhone or iPad, and can take a while to crack a long passcode or password. By causing the USB data connection to drop after a week, those devices are likely to be useless until companies like Grayshift and Cellebrite can find workarounds.
That’s all the news for today – join me tomorrow afternoon for another edition of the AWT News Update.
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