You can tune into this call live every Tuesday.Visit acb.community to learn more about what is up coming.An automatically generated transcript can be found below.Here's the link mentioned in this podcast episode.

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Here's the link mentioned in this podcast episode.

Security Bits — 23 January 2022

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Unmute Presents - Ios 16.2

The Your Own Pay Podcast Network Transcript

Music

Marty Sobo: [0:13] Hey all, we are back today with another Unmute podcast. Update of 16.2 has been released. This has been released to all of the things. So it's on your computer, it's on your phone, iPad, watch, all across the board. It is everywhere. And there's some great new features that have come out and we're going to discuss those today. With me, I've got Michael Babcock, say hello Michael.

Michael Babcock: [0:42] Hello, Michael.

Marty Sobo: [0:44] And I've got Michael Dois with me as well, say hello Michael.

Michael Doise: [0:47] Hello everyone.

Marty Sobo: [0:49] So we're going to start out with an app that they actually have on all of the devices. So you have it on the Mac computer as well as iPhone and iPad. And this is called the Freeform. This is an infinite place that you can jot down your ideas. You can either type, you can use a pencil or pen, all of the things. So to get more in detail and really talk to us about what you can do with Freeform, today we're going to have Michael discuss with us what Freeform is, what you can do with it, how it works. So Michael, why don't you give us a primer on it?

Michael Doise: [1:26] Sure. So Freeform is a new app in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. It's a collaboration tool. And what it lets you do is it's an infinite canvas where you can add shapes and lines and arrows and, visual elements to create like flow diagrams and things like that to this canvas. And you You can add text boxes or sticky notes or things like that, to this canvas, change colors and all those things. And the neat thing is it's all accessible with voiceover. So I can drag and drop an item onto the canvas. I can even grab the handles of that box to resize it with voiceover, double tap and hold and drag, or use rotor actions. That works as well to do all these things. So it's a really neat app. And I feel like it was delayed. It was originally supposed to be out in 16, but I'm glad they took some more time on it and really filled that out. So Freeform is pretty neat to play with. I haven't found a general purpose for actually using it, but I know a lot of business folks and people will be able to share accessibly with that. So at least check it out, figure out if you like it or not, and go from there.

Marty Sobo: [2:47] Yeah, it's a great way to share if you're having a meeting and you want to jot stuff down and you want everyone in the meeting to be able to see, you know, notes or diagrams, you can import all kinds of documents, PDFs, markup, all that kind of stuff. So it's good in that sense. One thing I will say, which I feel is a little bit of a bummer, but it just all depends on your preference. It does not have dark mode. So you're always going to have that bright white background unless you drag a black shape onto the work area. But as a default, there is no dark mode. Anything else that you can think of that you want to say about it? It does work with voiceover and the other accessibility features, so that's good.

Michael Doise: [3:38] It works with zooming and all those things, so it's worth checking out for sure.

Marty Sobo: [3:43] All right, so the next thing that we have is Apple Music Sing. So this is where Apple Music is now showing the lyrics so that you can do karaoke. So anyone want to chime in and discuss how this works?

Michael Doise: [4:00] So Apple Music Sing, they've always shown, or for several versions, they've shown the lyrics so you could do karaoke and so you can read the lyrics as it goes on. The difference here is that from what I've understood, you can lower the vocal track in a song so that you can sing out the lyrics and you can probably do share play and things like that so you can do karaoke online with your friends. So it's more of a, you know, online karaoke tool, which I think is pretty neat where you could just lower the track and do those kinds of things. It's not on every song though, folks, so I believe only certain songs are supported with Apple Music Sing.

Michael Babcock: [4:41] Somewhere else.

Marty Sobo: [4:44] The next feature that was released was called iCloud Enhanced Data Protection. And what this does is it encrypts all of your data for end to end. So Michael, you want to talk about this a little bit and what this does?

Michael Babcock: [4:58] Sure, sure. So not only did Apple increase the encryption levels and security aspects of iOS, which they talked about in the WWDC of 2022, but they also have brought in these features and made them live. I am super excited about iCloud Private Relay, which allows you as the end user to be able to browse the web like you normally would without having to make any changes to your network settings. For example, not having to join a VPN and what it looks like in my understanding, full caveat or full transparency, I am not the most smartest network person out there, but my understanding is that traffic is encrypted, to the DNS provider. And then from the DNS provider to the website web host, it is also encrypted. So that means your internet service provider will know that you're making a search, but they don't know where you end up at at the end. And I'll put a link in the notes for this episode to an amazing explanation done by Bart Bushots over at SecurityBits from the NoSillyCast. So that way you can better understand it because he does a great job at explaining it. But more importantly, the fact is it's live.

[6:18] You may run into some interesting problems unless those have been solved with some web pages, but you can go in and tap on your name, tap iCloud and then tap on the setting to switch it on. But Michael, they also announced some interesting airdrop updates and you have some opinions about these.

Michael Doise: [6:36] Yes, I do. So it has been a political issue where in China they've had some protesters that have used airdrop as a way to send.

[6:51] Where they've used airdrop to send data to or information to people Nearby by using airdrop if they if people have their settings set to everyone so Apple originally said well for folks in that, demographic we're going to, set airdrop to only work with, Everyone for 10 minutes, and then it goes to contacts only well now in 16.2.

[7:20] It has been set to Everyone for 10 minutes only if you have the everyone setting turned on, My view on this is that AirDrop is a feature not a lot of people use. If you're going to see family for Christmas and you do use AirDrop, and you say, hey, I want to send you this great picture of all of us, or I want to just AirDrop it because that's the easiest way to do it. Well, if your family member is not in your contact list for some reason, or if they're a distant family and you want to send it to everybody, everybody, you could just tell them, hey, go to settings, turn it to everyone.

[8:00] And they can just leave it that way. AirDrop requires 30 feet of distance or less to be able to see an iPhone to send to that phone, usually even less than that. So typically you're not going to be getting things that you don't want. And so now somebody may go turn that to everyone. and then 10 minutes later, they go to use AirDrop again and they don't know why it doesn't work and they're not tech savvy to go figure out, oh, I need to go change that setting back to everyone again. So I feel like it's really not the best approach if you want people to use a feature to set that or make that a rule for, well, everyone, to be limited to a 10 minute interval. But you will have a only 10 minutes if you change your setting to everyone in AirDrop. So that is an update that's come out this year.

Marty Sobo: [8:57] Very good. So. Moving on the next feature, which isn't quite as big of a deal, but is for some, which is always on display, always on display is on your lock screen, it never turns off all the way. So you can see if you set it on the table, if you're not having it in the pocket or whatever, you can look and you can see that the screen will always be on. It'll be in a dimmer state. But one of the things that people were complaining about is that it takes up a lot more battery power to be able to run always on display. So one of the features that they added in this go-around was the ability to be able to turn off wallpapers. So what that means is your screen is always black.

[9:47] It's not showing any animation or any kind of wallpaper or any of that. It's just a solid black screen with nothing else. And you'll see the time and the date and your widgets that you choose to have on the home screen. They're saying that this is gonna save the battery a lot. We'll actually have to see since the update just came out yesterday, there hasn't been enough time to see how much it actually will save the battery. So we'll have to test this. We'll check it out and see what happens over the next week and see how different it really is, how much battery it actually saves, all of that good stuff. So, you guys have anything you wanna chime in on with the always on display?

Michael Doise: [10:33] And I believe they have it where you could turn off notifications on there as well, so that's also gonna help.

Marty Sobo: [10:40] Definitely, anything to save battery, that's gonna be the most important thing, because if you don't have battery, don't have access to anything.

Michael Doise: [10:47] Right, you know, I just want to say I think it's a pretty big update one thing from a low vision standpoint on the iPad is that, There was a major zoom issue with with moving around with three fingers, you would zoom out and it would almost cause the system to hang while you're scrolling and doing different things on the iPad. This was on my iPad Mini and Pro, and that appears to be fixed, so you're going to have a better zoom experience in the full version of 16.2, so everybody with low vision, you'll really enjoy that.

Marty Sobo: [11:23] Yeah, I would definitely highly recommend updating it. It's got a lot of security features across the board. It's got some good stability issues and I would say it's working pretty solid so it's safe to update. It didn't take that long. I got it going. It started downloading immediately and I think 15-20 minutes later it was installed. So it was pretty easy to install. It didn't take a whole lot of time and as we move forward and more and more people have it installed, there'll be less you know strain on the servers and it would be even faster to download. So if you have internet that's not so great or maybe you're only running over cellular, I would suggest maybe wait in a few days until a lot of people already have it downloaded and installed and it might go a little bit faster for you and take a little less time if that is something that you're concerned about. All right, well I think that's going to cover it for today. Thank you, Michael D. Anything you'd like to say in departing words? Definitely. And thank you for coming.

Michael Doise: [12:27] I would just like to thank you both for having me and I look forward to be on more of these and you know, it's been great talking to you guys about this new update and And I hope to see everybody around.

Marty Sobo: [12:42] And we'll definitely talk with you again soon. And Michael B, you got any departing words?

Music

Michael Babcock: [12:49] I always have something to say. Just want to thank everyone for listening. Appreciate it. And remember that on Tuesdays at 10 a.m. Pacific time, that's 1 p.m. Eastern, you can join the Unmute Presents Community Call at acb.community for more information and to ask your questions, especially after doing this update. Thanks a lot, Marty.

Marty Sobo: [13:10] Thanks you guys. and we'll see you next time.

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