Tech News Weekly 397 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. We kick off the show by talking about that Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability. Then Jeff Carlson of CNET stops by to talk about using satellite texting from T-Mobile. Afterward, Dan Moren of Six Colors joins us to talk about AppleCare One, the subscription service and the public betas which just launched. Before I round things out with a conversation about being able to control our devices with impulses sent from our mind. Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly.

This is Tech News Weekly, episode 397, with Dan Moren and me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday, july 24th, 2025. Meta's new muscle-reading wristband. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where, every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and we will be joined later today in the show by my guest host this week, who is Dan Moren of Six Colors. Before we get there, though, I have an interview coming up, and before that, I've got an alert, a warning, a cautionary tale and everything in between.

So let's kick off the show by talking about security vulnerabilities. A critical security vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint has rapidly escalated from a concerning discovery to a full-blown cybersecurity crisis, because hundreds of organizations worldwide have fallen victim to what researchers are calling actually one of the most significant zero-day exploits in recent memory. The breach has compromised sensitive government agencies, including you know no big deal the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Institutes of Health, while security researchers warn that the scope continues to expand daily. What makes this particularly alarming is that Microsoft had no advance warning to patch the vulnerability before hackers began exploiting it, leaving thousands of organizations defensively scrambling against an attack that was already underway. So let's talk about this vulnerability kind of what we need to understand about how this happened. So it affects self-hosted versions of Microsoft SharePoint. So you know, on-prem you're doing it yourself. It's a collaboration software that companies use to store, to share, to manage internal documents, and this, of course, is unlike the SharePoint hosted in Microsoft's cloud. So where you don't have the on-prem, everything's fine. But if you're doing on-prem installations, where that means on-premises, meaning that it's local, it's in your office these installations require organizations to manage their own security, updates and configurations, whereas, of course, if it's happening over in the Microsoft Cloud, then Microsoft is taking care of that. So when this exploit is used, the bug allows an attacker to remotely run malicious code on the affected server, permitting access to the files stored inside as well as other systems on the company's wider network. So basically, it's coming close to free reign of you know that person's network, I think.

What's more, concerning iSecurity, the Dutch cybersecurity firm that first discovered the flaw, found that quote the bug involves the theft of digital keys that can be used to impersonate legitimate requests on the server. So that means, even if you patch it well, that's not enough, because organizations will have to rotate their digital certificates to prevent recompromise. So not only do you have the keys to the kingdom, but you have it's almost like you stole the royal key maker, and the royal key maker is now making you more keys, should you need them. So, instead of what they're having to do is say, or I should say, the royal Keymaker is now making you more keys, should you need them. So, instead of what they're having to do is say, or I should say, the Royal Lockmaker, you're stealing the Royal Lockmaker, and so you're able to continue to do that. What's happening, what's going to have to happen, is you got to get a new Lockmaker. You got to change those certificates to stop bad actors from being able to continue to use this exploit.

The vulnerability affects SharePoint versions that date back to SharePoint Server 2016. So that is a huge attack surface across organizations that haven't upgraded their infrastructure in nearly a decade. So let's talk about scale, right? Just how big and bad is this exactly? Well, the progression of the attack has kind of been one of the things that has brought this to the forefront. When iSecurity first published their findings on Saturday, they'd identified dozens of actively exploited SharePoint servers, but by the following week, that number had exploded to more than 400 confirmed compromises, with security researchers warning the actual number is likely much higher. So, to be clear, this isn't just an instance where we have discovered that this exploit exists on someone's on-premises system. Exists on someone's on-premises system? No, these are more than 400 compromises, meaning more than 400 times that someone, somewhere, used this exploit to gain access to these servers. So it's not great. Michael Sikorsky, who's the head of Palo Alto Network's Threat Intelligence Division, that's Unit 42, had this to say, quote If you have SharePoint on premise exposed to the Internet, you should assume them have been passing around this information to one another that this exploit exists and, you know, doing a good job, frankly, of keeping it a secret enough that researchers only just discovered it.

The US Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, that's CISA, moved quickly to sound the alarm, urging customers to take immediate recommended action and, in the absence of patches, to consider disconnecting potentially affected systems from the internet. Pull the plug, they said. I think the thing that sticks out the most to me at this point, though, because you hear about these and you're going okay, there are lots of companies all over the place that probably weren't updating their servers, that weren't doing what they were supposed to do with their SharePoint. Right, and that's bad, but it does feel like you know, it's sort of a disconnect from the everyday person. So we need to talk about who has been actually breached. No big deal Again, just the heart of critical US infrastructure and research capabilities.

Nnsa, that's the National Nuclear Security Administration. It's responsible for maintaining and developing the US stockpile, maintaining and developing the US stockpile of nuclear weapons and that organization confirmed yes, it was compromised. The official said that no classified information was affected. They say and only quote a very small number of systems were impacted. Now, that is sure. But understand that this agency helps keep 5,000 nuclear warheads secure and ready. So you know, just chew on that a little bit. The National Institutes of Health, the country's biggest funder of biomedical research, saw at least one SharePoint server compromised, with eight servers ultimately disconnected from the internet as a precaution. I'm imagining now just all of these people running around unplugging as many things as possible. I shouldn't laugh, it's not funny. The affected servers hosted websites for specialized institutes, including, of course, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and also, you know, for my dear John Ashley and many of my other colleagues, california's Power Grid, the California independent system operator, which manages most of the state's electric grid, was also targeted. Though the organization maintained that quote, there has been no impact to market operations or grid reliability.

Now, of course, we're trying to figure out who is responsible for this right. Which bad actor is actually at the heart of doing this in the first place? Well, google and Microsoft have both said that several China-backed hacking groups are responsible for exploiting the vulnerability. Of course, the Chinese government has denied the allegations. The Chinese embassy questioned the strength of the evidence, stating that cyberspace is characterized by strong. Okay, I love that, but I had to add this quote because I love it Cyberspace is characterized by strong virtuality, difficulty in tracking origins and diverse actors, making the tracing of cyber attacks a complex technical issue.

In other words, you don't know who did this, you can't prove it. It does follow a pattern, though, of Chinese attributed cyber attacks against Microsoft infrastructure, because, in 2021, the China-backed group Hafnium exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange servers which compromised more than 60,000 servers, not just in the US but worldwide, and two years later, chinese hackers stole a sensitive email signing key that gave them access to consumer and enterprise Microsoft email accounts. I remember that one. The geopolitical implications, of course, are significant enough that Treasury Secretary Scott Besant announced the SharePoint attacks quote would be discussed during trade talks with Chinese officials in Stockholm next week. So they feel the evidence is enough to suggest that China was behind this.

Hmm, interesting that our sort of the group in charge of making sure these cyber attacks don't happen or, if they do, that we get to the bottom of them, is at risk of losing quite a bit of funding. We also kind of have to talk about when it comes to these zero-day vulnerabilities and announcing these vulnerabilities and understanding these vulnerabilities. It's a race against time. You know, the zero-day nature is at the heart of what makes this so robust an attack. Microsoft had been alerted to a security weakness in SharePoint recently and had issued a fix, but hackers discovered that the fix was inadequate and figured out a way around it. So that left the organization in the impossible position of defending against an attack method that was unknown until it was already being exploited. Data suggests that hackers began exploiting the vulnerability as early as July 7th, giving them a significant head start before the security community became aware of the threat. So Microsoft has since released patches for all affected SharePoint versions but, frankly, the damage was already done, and, in particular, because we talked about the fact that it wasn't just a vulnerability to get in and gain access, but get in, gain access and take some keys with you so you could keep accessing even after you've left. I think another big issue here is the fact that this is not just a small little isolated incident. When you have so many companies and organizations and agencies making use of this technology. The incident highlights deeper systemic issues with cybersecurity infrastructure structure.

Senator Ron Wyden delivered a scathing assessment, saying government agencies have become dependent on a company that not only doesn't care about security but is making billions of dollars selling premium cybersecurity services to address the flaws in its products so sort of an argument that it's a protection racket. Right? You are selling the product and then you are also selling the software to protect the product, and then the product still runs into issues. Is that not a problem? Cisa, of course, the lead US agency for protecting civilian entities from cyber attacks. Dealing with huge budget cuts, dhs cut $10 million in funding to the non-profit Center for Internet Security. That, of course, routes cyber threat warnings to 18,000 state and local entities, and the resulting job cuts are reported to have slowed the notification of about 1,000 members exposed to the weekend hacking campaign, so perhaps some organizations and agencies could have been alerted sooner, but, due to budget cuts, were slowed. So let's talk about, then, kind of looking forward. What do we take away from this, as, frankly, it continues to play out Well.

Security expert Alex Stamos of SentinelOne said this nobody should be running Microsoft on-premise products anymore. Saying that it should be cloud-hosted versions that receive automatic security updates instead of doing it locally and not updating your systems Serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities inherent in legacy on-premise infrastructure. You've got a server in your basement and you're running it from there. As one security researcher noted, blueprints for attack methods have been circulating, including on public sites, so that the threat landscape is going to include not just these very sophisticated groups, but also other groups that are less sophisticated but suddenly have access to the information required to make use of it. For the hundreds of already compromised organizations, the work is just beginning. We've got to patch these systems, rotate the digital certificates, hunt for persistent backdoors, assess what data may have been accessed or stolen and let people know that their data has been accessed or stolen, and let people know that their data has been accessed and stolen and as it continues to unfold. It's a look at not just this technical failure but a look at how we kind of secure the digital infrastructure that underpins modern society. These are always reminders of, I think, just how rickety this situation is. Right that we've got these different backbones of infrastructure, that you target them and suddenly, uh-oh, things aren't looking good. So I think Michael Sikorsky, palo Alto Networks, had the right of it saying if you have SharePoint on-premises exposed to the internet, you should assume that you've been compromised at this point. So that's my first story. We are going to take a little break and then we will come back with my interview this week with Jeff Carlson of CNET.

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All right, we are back from the break and I am excited to be joined by Jeff Carlson of CNET, who recently went on a little bit of a trip to test some new functionalities I guess a new service from T-Mobile. Welcome to the show, Jeff. Hey, great Thanks for having me here, absolutely. So let's start by talking about your piece. It's titled I Tested T-Mobile's Satellite Service. The hardest part was finding a dead zone. So can you start first by telling us where you went to conduct this test and kind of what you were aiming to find out?

0:18:58 - Jeff Carlson
Yeah, so T-Satellite requires basically that you don't have a cellular signal and it's getting harder and harder to find areas that don't have cellular coverage. So in my case, I live in Seattle, so it's getting harder and harder to find areas that don't have cellular coverage. So in my case, I live in Seattle, so it's just blanketed. So I ended up driving two and a half hours northeast to the North Cascades and even like this is where we tend to go camping and had to drive even a little bit further than that to Lake Diablo, and at that point the bars finally disappeared and got the little satellite indicator and knew that then I could finally test this out, because if you have any kind of cellular coverage, you can't use the satellite. You can do a demo test, but you can't actually really use it, so needed to get away from it all just to test it.

0:19:50 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely Now. We know satellite texting. It's not new. Apple and Google have offered similar features for a little while now. But, based on your hands-on experience, what makes T-Mobile's T-Satellite service feel different, if it does, from those other options?

0:20:08 - Jeff Carlson
So the big difference is that they're trying to make this as seamless and frictionless as possible. So when you're using, say, an Apple device and you're using Apple's built-in service, you have to basically activate it. There's a little helper that will walk you through setting up a connection and you're basically pointing up to a satellite and making sure that you have a satellite connection and then, once that connection is solid, then you can text With the T-Mobile service. They're using Starlink, so a lot more satellites flying up above, and so what happens? What should happen and what happened when I tested this is I turned on my phone and basically was connected. So there wasn't that little dance to go through. It just knew that, even though I was outside of cellular coverage, there were T-Mobile satellites that it could latch on to and it just did it. I mean, I don't want to say that, you know it just works, but at first, like really it just worked.

0:21:12 - Mikah Sargent
Nice. Now you do describe the performance as mostly like normal texting, but sometimes slower. Can you talk about that experience and what was the speed like for sending texts versus sending a photo over the satellite connection?

0:21:30 - Jeff Carlson
sending a photo over the satellite connection. Yeah Well, it's going to be slower just by the nature of it, because you're bouncing data up to a satellite versus to like a cellular tower or ground station or something. So I found that sometimes texts would be like you would get a little bit of a lag sending a little bit of lag, somebody replying. But then there were other times when literally it just seemed like I wouldn't have even thought that I was connected to a cellular connection or, sorry, to a satellite connection. I was texting with my wife and it was just going back and forth, back and forth.

Now the image portion of it right now that's only available on Android and that is using the MMS service to send images and probably, like I think, you can send small audio files and things like that. So I snapped a picture of where I was and I sent it to my wife and that took about two and a half minutes to go through, which, like it's not terrible, but it's certainly a lot slower than what we're used to. And then I checked on her phone later and either the messages app on Android or maybe something in between had reduced the resolution of that. So it's it wasn't sending the full. I don't know what it was 20 megapixel image that the Samsung Galaxy captured, but still the quality was perfectly decent and I was able to say look, this is the pretty place that I ended up.

0:22:57 - Mikah Sargent
Nice and you know, kind of going a little bit further into the testing. You did talk about kind of running into some confusing moments knowing whether you were actually connected to the satellite, which I've experienced before with the iPhone using its satellite feature. Could you just talk about any of the challenges that you were facing as you continued to have to drive out for, oh, are we there? Is it cellular? Still what?

0:23:28 - Jeff Carlson
was that like? Well, it was interesting because I think some of this is as much an interface issue as maybe a technology issue. So there are two things basically On the Android phone and maybe this is because this was a Samsung S25 Ultra, so it's got like a really high resolution screen, but there's a little menu bar icon that shows a satellite and it's got like little bars indicating like the strength of the connection, and that is very tiny in the menu bar and so at one point when I was texting, there basically was no connection, like it lost the satellite connection, even the T satellite, and I couldn't tell because basically when it's connected there are very thin black lines, when it's disconnected there are very thin dark gray lines, and so there was no indication to tell me, oh well, you're not connected, other than I think once I texted, there was a little status that said, like you know, waiting to connect or something like that. So there wasn't anything that just sort of said, hey, buddy, you no longer have a connection. Maybe you need to do something about this. On the Apple side, when you're using Apple's service, it basically shows you in the dynamic island, it'll show you that you are connected. There's a little green dot that indicates your status and it's really obvious to tell that, hey, you are now connected.

So I did two things. So one I had the Samsung running just T-Mobile, and then I had my iPhone 16 Pro. That was running AT&T as the primary provider, but I had also loaded the T-Mobile beta as a secondary eSIM. And this is part of what T-Mobile is trying to do, because even if you're not a T-Mobile customer, you can sign up for the T-Satellite service and run it basically as like a secondary service.

So when I had lost connection using the T-Satellite service, the iPhone automatically switches to the next best thing, which would be Apple's service, and that shows a little dark colored, just satellite icon, no little beams, but just a little satellite icon in the menu bar. So I mistook that to mean, oh well, I still have a satellite connection, when in fact what that really means is satellite is available and specifically Apple's satellite service is available. And for some reason I don't know if this is a glitch, and I should also point out I mean in full fairness this was done three days before the actual launch. So technically this was all still in beta, but I didn't notice that I needed to take the steps to reconnect or to connect to Apple service. So there was a little bit of just like confusion there on my part because I couldn't tell the status of things that makes sense and in terms of doesn't make sense, right, exactly, absolutely.

0:26:45 - Mikah Sargent
Somebody asked a great question in the chat. Exactly, absolutely. Somebody asked a great question in the chat. This, of course, is talking about using the T satellite to send messages and photos. Is there a satellite phone option, or is this strictly limited here? This?

0:27:05 - Jeff Carlson
is strictly limited to text. I don't know if they've actually like promised phone stuff in the future, but it's definitely something that I think is technically possible. I know AT&T has talked about that as a possibility in the future. I think once a lot of this stuff gets nailed down, we'll probably see that.

Now what T-Mobile is doing is in October they're opening up a service so that other apps can use the data stream, because the biggest limitation here is you just can't push a lot of data back and forth between the satellites. But they're allowing developers to connect to an API so that, for example one of their examples is the AllTrails app you can get actual connection and be able to see the mapping and that sort of data as you're out hiking outside of cell coverage. Or maybe you use WhatsApp instead of messages and so like. Whatsapp could incorporate that as a feature but be able to send it through the satellite Cause. Otherwise the phone is basically saying look, satellite is a no-go for Instagram or TikTok, like like. None of those things are going to are going to have access to it for now, because there's just not the bandwidth for it.

0:28:27 - Mikah Sargent
That makes sense. I also want to ask one of the most interesting aspects that you note works on most modern phones and satellite service working for people who don't use T-Mobile as their primary carrier. Can you talk about the significance of that and how it works?

0:28:45 - Jeff Carlson
Yeah, definitely so. One of the things that is interesting about this, not just the fact that it connects automatically, but because T-Mobile is using the Starlink satellite network. They've actually set it up so that T-Mobile is using like a small slice of cellular bandwidth, so you don't have to have a phone that specifically has satellite hardware, and I think this is part of the reason why, once it sees that there's a satellite connection available, it can just connect to it, because the phone basically sees it as oh well, this is like a low slice of network that I already understand. So, instead of needing, say, an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone I can't remember 14 Pro maybe was the first one that introduced this Instead of needing something that has specific hardware, as long as you have something, T-Mobile says something in the last four years so I think that's like the iPhone 13 and later then it should be able to work with the service without you needing, like a specific model, specific hardware, because it's basically just tapping into cellular technology. At that point. It just happens to be much higher up.

0:30:04 - Mikah Sargent
One of my favorite parts of this is you talking about meeting a couple from a rural area with poor cell coverage. Sort of broadly speaking, how do you think this technology kind of bridges the gap from being a neat feature that a hiker uses to being an essential service for people in remote communities?

0:30:22 - Jeff Carlson
Yeah, I could not have planned this interaction if I had wanted to, could not have planned this interaction if I had wanted to. These people literally just came up and that you know because of course I'm standing there juggling phones, looking very, you know, confused or techie or whatever. And it turned out they live in like a small town, northern Idaho, right near the Canadian border, and they explained that you know they just have no cellular coverage or it's very patchy. And also, when it comes to other internet access, you can get some landlines and terrestrial internet access, but when the power goes out you're just cut off. So having something like this A, I mean, top of mind, is in case of emergencies, and actually T-Mobile turned on T-Satellite early for people who were affected by the floods in Texas, so that's like a good real-world example.

If you can't get to the regular infrastructure, this is one way that you could get emergency messages out also, not necessarily like calling for first responders, but to send a text to say your family in California and saying look, the storm just came through, we don't have power or internet, but we're all safe.

I think, just in terms of general communication, even in areas that we're not talking about emergencies, just real rural areas. This would allow people to make some of those essential communications, even if it's just you know, you're planning to meet up with someone, you're scheduling a delivery of farm equipment or like all of these sort of normal interactions that we take for granted when we're under this cellular umbrella, sort of normal interactions that we take for granted when we're under this cellular umbrella. This opens that up and you don't have to think, oh, I need to communicate something to somebody, and now I need to drive 20, 30 minutes in order to be able to do that, or even to drive 40 minutes until I do have cell coverage. So it can, I think, make a big impact. It's not going to give you, you know, full blazing speed internet access that's probably something that will come later on down the line but it just it gives you that connection that is either, you know, strictly for communication's sake or for more essential needs.

0:32:47 - Mikah Sargent
And my final question for you, kind of looking ahead, you say it's easy to see a future where we don't I mean you're kind of talking about there where you don't have to think about how the data is delivered, that it just it gets there and that's all there is to it. Based on this test, how close do you think we are to that future and what do you think are the next steps for this technology to actually get there?

0:33:08 - Jeff Carlson
That, and what do you think are the next steps for this technology to actually get there? That is a good question. I think we are still in the first steps, Maybe, I guess more technically, maybe like the third steps, right, Because you know Apple and I think, Verizon, Samsung, like setting up the ability to connect to a satellite the way we've been doing it. That was kind of the first step, Like, hey, this is possible and you don't need a big, honking satellite phone. Right Now you can do it just with the phone that you have. And so now this takes us one more step which makes it a little bit easier, removes some friction, makes it more ubiquitous, so that you are making an easy connection and not having to really think about it. So I can see this getting easier and I'm sure that you know, say, five, six, seven, eight steps down the line. Then we're going to have better bandwidth, better, hopefully improved latency, hopefully improved latency.

I know AT&T is talking about putting satellites up that will deliver dramatically more bandwidth, and right now what's actually up there is still really limited, Because I think up until now this has not been a need and now suddenly they're demonstrating well, this is a need, this is a market. This is something that actually T-Mobile is charging for. Apple said that they weren't going to charge for a couple of years, so we don't know what their pricing is, but this is something that becomes more viable and is also more important to again first responders and those sorts of situations, Absolutely.

0:34:49 - Mikah Sargent
Well, Jeff Carlson, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. If folks would like to keep up to date with what you're doing, where's a good place for them to go to do that?

0:35:00 - Jeff Carlson
Go to jeffcarlson.com or go to cnet.com Awesome.

0:35:05 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you so much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. All righty folks, we have Dan Moren, but hey, can I tell you about Club Twit? twit.tv/clubtwit. That's where you go to sign up for our club. We've got monthly and yearly plans available.

When you join the club, you gain access to some pretty awesome stuff. First and foremost, you gain access to ad-free versions of all of our shows. You also gain access to our Twit+ feeds that include behind the scenes, before the show, after the show, those kinds of clips. We also have our club shows that are published there, and we also have our news events that end up there too. You know that the Made by Google event is just around the corner.

Leo Laporte and I will be providing live commentary for that, and I am currently in the early planning stages of a D&D actual play in the club. So if Dungeons Dragons is your thing, now might be a time to head into the club and join up so you can watch hosts and contributors and perhaps even a Club Twit member or two take on some sort of adventure. All of that in the CLub. twit.tv/clubtwit. Head there. Check it out. Thank you.

We are back from the break and I am excited to say we are joined today by Dan Moren of Six Colors who, in the second half of the show, will be joining us for Stories of the Week. Hello Dan.

0:36:35 - Dan Moren
Hello Mikah. I'm here for the stories of the week. I'm here for all the stories.

0:36:39 - Mikah Sargent
All the great stories, uh, that are fit to spit because is that the? Saying I didn't want to say print because we're not printing, okay, um so, dan hello, uh, you, of course, are the six East Bureau Chief and I'd love to hear about your first of could it be two potential stories of the week?

0:37:18 - Dan Moren
subscription revenue. Oh, I'm sorry, that's near and dear to Apple's heart. No, near and dear to everybody's heart is you. We've all had it right. We've broken one of our Apple devices. Maybe we dropped our phone, maybe our laptop got stuck in the washing machine. I don't know where I'm going with this. Anyways, maybe you've broken something a laptop, a phone, a watch, et cetera and you thought to yourself if only I had AppleCare. And maybe you have AppleCare, maybe you don't. Maybe you had to make some hard decisions, right Like, maybe you're like, I can afford to pay for my AppleCare for my phone, but not for my Apple Watch.

Well, apple is attempting to simplify matters somewhat by adding a new subscription program called AppleCare, one which is entitled to basically be I'm sorry, intended to be a program by which you can cover multiple devices with one flat fee. So, for $19.99 per month, you can cover up to three devices of any kind. You can pay for additional devices at $5.99 per month if you've got a fourth device, fifth device, et cetera. This comes with the benefits of AppleCare+, which includes a variety of things, including replacements for accidental breakage, some theft and loss replacements. You know all that sort of stuff that you can kind of you know, the extended warranty style thing that we might have dealt with in the past. And yeah, I mean it's. It's. The benefit is it's very streamlined, right. It's one fee for the most part and you're just paying to cover your various devices. The other additional benefits to it are you can actually add it onto older devices. In the past the way it's generally worked is you have a 60-day window after you purchase a product to sign up for AppleCare. Otherwise you're basically out of luck. But with AppleCare 1, they're accepting products that are up to four years old, though in some cases they said it may require like a diagnostic check just to make sure it's in good working order already.

Now the question is, because this is sort of a one-size-fits-all approach, is it cost-effective, right? That is a big question for a lot of people and I found that, looking at the math and looking at the way that these plans are kind of structured right now, it does kind of depend If you have cheaper devices, your base level iPad or Apple Watch SE, an iPhone 16E it's very possible that paying for individual AppleCare Plus plans will actually be cheaper in some cases because the costs are pretty low, for example, if you've got yourself a base level Apple Watch, the cost for that is $2 a year or, sorry, $2 a month, $20 a year. So basically what that means is, like you know, if you're dealing with those smaller you know or less expensive devices, you may be able to cover them sort of a la carte, for cheaper. But if you've got a more expensive device, say, for example, an Apple Vision Pro or a Mac Pro, something of that ilk, you actually probably will save money with AppleCare, with AppleCare One, because, for example, to cover the Vision Pro it's $25 a month and AppleCare One, out of the box, is 20. So you're already, if you just have, like you know, a Vision Pro or a particularly expensive laptop or something like that, if you have just two devices, you may save money. So it really does depend, you know, on your circumstances and what devices you're looking to cover.

Now, what you do get with AppleCareOne is flexibility. You know we mentioned already the ability to sign up for devices that are older and have those covered. But one of the other things that's nice about AppleCareOne is that you can change it on the fly. So if you get a new device and you're like, oh, but that's my three device limit. You can take one of your other devices off the plan and swap your new device in whenever you want. It's all flexible, so you don't have to sign up for a commitment in the same way that you might do with a standard AppleCare plan, and so that adds a lot of benefits. You know, it certainly makes it a lot easier when you're upgrading devices to sort of be able to budget that, because if you know, like hey, I've always got my $20 per month spent on this, and as I change my device lineup, I can ensure that I'm still covered for the stuff that I want to be covered, or the most expensive stuff, without having to worry about I've got to cancel these plans or what have you. So there are a lot of benefits as far as that goes.

There are some asterisks, as always. A lot of benefits as far as that goes. There are some asterisks, as always. A lot of these things. It's an insurance plan, right? So even if you are paying this monthly fee, let's call it a premium, as it were.

If you run into a circumstance where you need to have your device repaired or replaced, there's still going to be a cost for that, right? This doesn't necessarily cover, like hey, I can replace my device whenever I want. There is still a fee generally, but it's a generally a flat fee, you know, like a service fee of some kind, and there are some things that are covered with no cost, for example like Mac battery. Replacements is one example Like if you go in and you're like Mac battery health is below 80% of the original capacity, they'll just replace you for free as part of this plan and you get benefits like sort of you know, quicker access to repairs. You know, possibly even like people who are sending you know they send a tech to you or have somebody pick up your Mac, for example, rather than you having to schlep it to the store. So it does have some benefits along with it. But you know it's always worthwhile to read the fine print and make sure you know all the details of what you're signing up for.

0:42:41 - Mikah Sargent
What if I have, if we know what, if I have a device that I have been paying for AppleCare up to this point for as long as I've had it for as long as I've had it and four years goes by, so it's older than four years, but I have kept the AppleCare monthly subscription on it. Would I be able to add it to this, or is it just a flat out four years? You can put it on there.

0:43:11 - Dan Moren
Yeah, that's a good question. I think in some of these cases that are kind of more like edge cases, you may need to contact, you know, Apple support directly to sort of figure that out. I ran into this question with the. I was curious about the iPhone upgrade program because that is in and of itself includes Apple care plus as part of the subscription fee, yeah, and I was told that it is possible to get that. But you need to basically contact Apple support and unbundle the coverage before you can upgrade to AppleCare 1.

0:43:45 - Mikah Sargent
Interesting.

0:43:45 - Dan Moren
So there are some circumstances where you may need to have stuff you know kind of dealt with on a case by case basis, rather than just being able to click a few buttons and sign up for things. But if it's something you're considering because, say you, you know, oh, this makes a lot of sense for me, but I also want to get this older device covered, you may want to reach out directly to Apple to see what kind of avenues are available.

0:44:08 - Mikah Sargent
That makes sense. Yeah, so there, there might be some edge cases that pop up With this. You you point out out, like with Apple Vision Pro, you're saving money and in some cases this is going to save you money, but you alluded to it sort of at the beginning. What is the what's in it for Apple in this situation? When it comes to AppleCare One, as far as you see, whenever it comes, to this thing?

0:44:40 - Dan Moren
Sure, yeah, yeah, that's a great question, and it's always one that's worth asking whenever you're signing up for one of these services. It's not out of the goodness of their heart that they're doing this? And the answer is, I think, a few things. One it is recurring subscription revenue, which falls under their services division. Services revenue is something that they have been talking more and more about increasing, so obviously the ability to have a very easy subscription program can potentially entice new subscribers for them. That looks good, both from just number of subscribers as well as, of course, incoming revenue. The other benefits with it are, you know, in a lot of cases.

Let's think about it this way. We don't necessarily privy to all the details. Apple certainly knows how many devices get broken, how much people take advantage of AppleCare, how much they pay like, how much the repairs cost to Apple, right, all of these things are things they're taking into account. They're doing math on all of this to figure out. Does it pencil out for us? Are the amounts that people are paying as those premiums and those fees? Are they more than what we are paying out to get those devices repaired?

When people do take advantage of the coverage and that is like any insurance program, right? Like, obviously, at the end of the day, it's got to benefit the company providing the insurance, or they would not do. It would not do it. So you know, this is good for them in the sense that they are surely looking at the numbers and saying, like, look, if a thousand people are paying $20 per month, but only 250 of them end up needing repairs, the rest of that is pure profit for us. So we're looking at the odds and saying, how often do people actually get their devices repaired and how much does it cost us to, say, fix their screens or just give them a new phone, right? So all of that is surely factored into Apple's analysis in terms of what this is looking like for them at the bottom of the page there.

0:46:29 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. I love everyone should go read the Six Colors piece where you have broken down the monthly and annual plans that are available as things stand for AppleCare, how it compares to AppleCare One and I find it interesting, just as an aside, the One branding and where that kind of plays into things.

0:46:50 - Dan Moren
Well, not included in, apple does have, of course, its Apple One bundle, yeah, and this has, as far as I can tell, no relation to that whatsoever.

0:47:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, Very interesting that part of it. I think that was but one of the two stories that I wanted to talk to you today, talk with you about today, because, as we were gearing up for this show, Because as we were gearing up for this show, you messaged me and told me breaking news.

0:47:22 - Dan Moren
I did exactly that, just in that. I did the noise, I did everything.

0:47:27 - Mikah Sargent
He typed it out. It was really weird. I thought there was a cat on your keyboard. So tell me what else is happening in Apple land.

0:47:35 - Dan Moren
Yeah, so, depending on how tuned into this you are, you may be aware that Apple, of course, announced its new operating systems back in June at its Worldwide Developer Conference, which is what they're calling the 26 updates. They've renumbered everything iOS 26, mac OS 26, et cetera. There has been a developer beta since that point, as they sort of are going through that process. But as of today, the public beta is available, and that is available publicly to everyone, to anyone who's interested in trying out the new version of Apple's operating systems. You can go check it out right now by just downloading it and installing it on your devices. Now, of course, the caveat with that is it's still a beta. It's still something that is in progress.

Apple is working on rolling, you know, developing this, probably for release in the fall.

Usually it arrives around the same time as new iPhones, which will probably be in September at some point, but you can take a look at it now and see if there are features that you want to take advantage of. You know and this is true across basically, I think, ipad, ios, mac, watchos and, I believe also Apple TV. I'm not sure about that, but I think they added that I don't remember if HomePod's in the mix? Yet I don't think it is, and so this is the opportunity for this sort of to go wider, and, especially if you're somebody who feels strongly about these kinds of things and wants to provide feedback, this is also a great opportunity to be able to have your voice heard If you feel like, hey, I'm going to use this for the next few weeks and I don't like the way this works or this is broken. You know this is the time that those changes often do get made, so it's the best opportunity you have to sort of, you know, put in your two cents.

0:49:26 - Mikah Sargent
When you think about the public beta and people's use of the public beta and perhaps like the amount of feedback that is sent into Apple, if you had to sort of crystal ball the situation or I don't know more like psychic read the situation, do you feel that the public beta is more about sending automated crash metadata than it is about feedback? Or do you think that the feedback that comes in during the public beta period, that is more, you know, suggestion-based about changes that should be made? Do you think that? Yeah, how much of an impact do you think that has?

0:50:12 - Dan Moren
versus the developer beta.

Yeah, I mean the developer beta because it's aimed at developers. You know, I feel a lot of times it gets into the nitty gritty of some stuff, right, like we. Publicly, you might see people talk a lot about, you know, user facing features, but a lot of times what they're there to look at is, hey, I am updating my app to work with these new systems and this under the hood system is not working correctly. And that's really the opportunity they have there is to make sure that the apps that people are using can be updated to be compatible with the new system. When it comes to the public beta, it's a little different, right, because it's more user facing. You're going to end up with much more feedback from the just average user of these devices, although even there, I will asterisk that to say that the average user who installs the public beta is probably a bit more tech savvy than even your just run-of-the-mill user of these devices. Yeah, so as far as things like suggestions go, I imagine those don't carry as much weight during the public beta because we are further down the line, we're closer to them shipping. Therefore, there's not as much time to make really significant changes.

I imagine what they're looking for much more is like hey. We have a much larger pool now of people using these platforms. Can it help us identify things like you said, like automated crashes and stuff like that? Can it help us find edge cases or things that we might not have known about otherwise? That are pretty big deals, like hey. If this only affects 5% of users, you might not notice very quickly on a developer beta, but on public beta you may and that might be beneficial, because by the time you release this to the public, we're talking tens of millions of iPhones, right, and then 5% goes from being kind of a like okay, it's a meaningful amount to a lot of people who are affected by a particular bug. So it really is an opportunity for them to broaden the audience a bit and make sure that everything's in good working order, and I think you're more likely to see changes related to that than things related to direct feedback. But it depends on the magnitude, it depends on what it is. It's highly variable.

0:52:17 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. Yeah, Thank you. That's something I'm always thinking about and I am always curious to hear other people's perspective on that part of it in particular, Because when I share that a public beta is out, I'm typically saying this is your opportunity to do this and that and the other, but it is interesting to think about how much of an impact that makes. But it is also fun when someone does suggest something and enough people are suggesting a thing and then you see it change and you go ooh, I had an impact on that.

0:52:52 - Dan Moren
That's what's fun, and that does happen. I mean, even during this beta process there have certainly been. During the course of the first three or four developer betas, there have been changes and stuff is getting tweaked, so it's not as though it's like hey, this is great, we're putting it out here just so you can like tell us how great we are, Right, it's it's a circumstance where they're actually looking at what's going on and what software they're making available and how the features work and how people like them, how they're received.

So yeah, I mean probably you've got another about another, probably less than a month at tops, to sort of make your feelings known, because at that point they really do start getting ready to ship this on those phones that are going to arrive in September.

0:53:30 - Mikah Sargent
All righty, we have one more story my story of the week coming up next. All right, it is time for my story of the week coming up next. All right, it is time for my story of the week. For decades, researchers have been working toward a simple, I think, but ambitious goal controlling computers directly through our body's natural signals, without needing a keyboard or a mouse, or even touchscreens. Meta's Reality Labs has now achieved a significant milestone in this quest with a wrist-worn device that reads electrical signals from muscle contractions and translates them into digital commands. But you might go hey, I know people have been that. Yeah, that's been happening. People do that, everybody do that. What makes this breakthrough particularly noteworthy is that it works across different people without individual calibration. This is a challenge that has long plagued the field. Published in Nature, this peer-researched article and the research represents what the authors call the first high-bandwidth neuromotor interface with performant, out-of-the-box generalization across people. All of that means what I said before you can use it and you don't have to calibrate it to an individual person. The technology opens new possibilities for accessibility, virtual reality interaction and fundamentally different ways of engaging with our digital devices. So let's kind of first talk by breaking down the tech itself.

The device called an SEMG-RD, which is a surface electromyography research device, works by detecting surface electromyography signals that's the SEMG part which are little bits of electrical activity that your muscles produce when they contract. As Thomas Reardon, meta's Director of Neuromotor Interfaces, explains, what we're trying to do with neural interfaces is to let you control the machine directly using the output of the peripheral nervous system, specifically the nerves outside the brain that animate your hand and finger muscles. This is crucially not akin to mind reading. It's not mind reading. You're going to have to think of it like this you take many photos and you choose to share only some of them. Similarly, you have many thoughts and you choose to act on only some of them. When that happens, your brain sends signals to your hands and fingers telling them to move in specific ways. This is about decoding those signals at the wrist the actions you've already decided to perform and translating them into digital commands. It's good to do it this way too, not just because there's a whole kind of fear about mind reading we talked about that last week on Tech News Weekly but also because there are fewer signals to have to deal with, and that's the big thing. When you're looking at the brain, you have to filter for signals a lot more than you do if you're looking at these peripheral nerves and just waiting for specific signals to make their way through.

And the wristband itself is kind of I thought it was, it's a little bit fancy 48 gold plated electrodes, yes, arranged in 16 sensing channels around your wrist and there are different sizes to fit different wrist circumferences. It's wireless, it's battery powered and you can just take it on. You can put it on and take it off in just a few seconds, which is kind of impressive to see in early stages, because it tends to be that this stuff is, you know, wired to six different computers and hefty as can be, and they work on miniaturizing it later on. They've done that process before it was published in the journal. What makes the research kind of remarkable? Again, it's not the technology but something kind of wild the scale of the data collection. Because a lot of times with this research you're working with as big a population as you can and you go and you look at a research piece and you see, oh, they worked on 500 or 1,000 people or something like that. No, over 11,000 participants across three main tasks wrist movements, discrete gestures like finger pinches and thumb swipes and handwriting. For the handwriting task alone, they gathered data from 6,627 participants, creating what might actually be the largest neuromotor interface dataset that we've ever seen assembled. The massive scale is, then, what allowed them to create models that work across different people without an individual collaboration, something that, of course, has been part of the struggle in the field for decades. Horse has been part of the struggle in the field for decades, and these participants ranged in age and gender and handedness and wrist circumference and physical abilities, so that the models could generalize broadly across the population.

Typically, when you start to generalize, then that filter gets a little bit more gauzy and blurred, if you will. But it can also mean gauzy and blurred, if you will, but it can also mean, as they tried to do, that that calibration is not necessarily necessary. So let's talk about what you can actually do with this thing. Well, here's what they demonstrated. Its current capabilities include cursor control.

Users achieved quote 0.66 target acquisitions per second in a continuous navigation task by controlling a cursor through wrist movements. So you kind of are trying to point at a target whenever it moves to a different place and you're just kind of flexing your wrists to get to that spot. It could do gesture recognition 0.88 gesture detections per second and so it recognized nine different gestures finger pinches, thumb taps, thumb swipes in four directions, which is pretty cool. You can imagine swiping up and down left and right, almost like your thumb itself is the joystick, and handwriting users could write text in the air at 20.9 words per minute just by mimicking handwriting motions with their hand. Of course, that's slower than a mobile phone, where people average about 36 words per minute. Yeah, you don't have to touch anything, you're just moving your little finger through the air. Very cool.

So this is really, I think, on its own pretty fascinating and something that's kind of neat. As we talked about no need for calibration, right. However, if you do calibrate it, it gets even better because it's built to get better with use. The team found that even a small amount of personalization based on limited individual data can improve handwriting recognition accuracy by up to 16%. Just 20 minutes of personalization data from a user could provide the same performance improvement as training the generic model on data from seven times more participants. So, as you can imagine, meta's Reality Labs team is looking at using this with its glasses and that kind of thing for input there. But I think this is super cool and they are working on publicly releasing a dataset containing more than 100 hours of SEMG recordings from more than 300 research participants across three distinct tasks, so that other researchers are able to build on their work.

So, yeah, I mean we've seen some of this stuff in the Apple Watch. In fact, that was one of the big latest features that the Apple Watch provided. That started as an accessibility feature but came later on, which is that pinch gesture. Yeah, but again, the no need for calibration and the sort of. What I love is that they're putting forth the fact and highlighting the fact that this is a diverse data set and that they're looking at how that impacts it, because I, as a left-handed person, am but a small subcategory of the many right-handed people in the world, and so the fact that handedness was considered as one thing and that limb differences is another, I think is great. But I really love the idea that my hand could just be down by my side and I'm just moving my little finger around to sort of navigate through a screen that's in front of me, even if it's not AR VR. Like what if I could control my Apple TV with my Apple Watch and my hand's just down by my side.

1:02:12 - Leo Laporte
That'd be super cool.

1:02:14 - Dan Moren
That would be cool. I mean, the interesting thing about this too, and it's worth considering versus the Apple Watch, is the Apple Watch is using a different technology, right, I mean, it's mainly what it's using is like an accelerometer or a gyroscope. It has to do with emotion, and what's intriguing about what MET is doing here is it's much more based on the electrical impulses, which mean, as they say. I mean, in the article where they interviewed Dr Reardon at the Times, the New York Times, he said in some cases you don't have to even move your hands, you have to just intend to move your hands because the neural impulses work that way and, like it can detect the neural impulses that are going, even if you just like sort of think about moving your hand, which is wild, so wild, right, I mean and this is very clever and think about that that in and of itself, from an accessibility point of view, is also huge, right, because it's one thing to say you can manipulate this device or use this device with limited mobility. It's another to say if you are able to think about moving your extremities or then calibrate it in such a way that it can detect when you're thinking about moving your extremities, that opens up a huge host of possibilities.

My questions about all these things and the research is always very cool, but my question about these things often regards how much of a product can you turn this into right? And this is very early stages. At this point. Right, obviously, they've done all the technology, but this seems a ways off from being a thing that's going to be a device that you buy, even a device that works with something else that you buy. In some of its demos, meta has shown this off using it with their AR glasses, the Orion prototype, but that was the thing. They have already admitted that they aren't going to ship, basically because it would take years and be really expensive. So what's it going to look like if we can actually adapt this into something that can be shipped and sold? It's probably several years away.

But at the same time, I take with this the same tack I take with the Apple Vision Pro, which is the technology in and of itself. Being that impressive is important, because if this is how good it is now, then five years from now, 10 years from now, think about where it will be. It will be smaller, it will be lighter, it will be better at what it does, and maybe you do get to a point where this is something that can be commoditized. So yeah, the one other thing that I thought about when reading about this, that I'm curious, is the one lack that this interface has. Is tactile response, right?

Like there's no feedback, at least as currently discussed Visual feedback Right.

So and again, having spent some time with the Apple Vision Pro, which is a very interesting device that has some similar ideas in parts of it similar ideas in parts of it One of the tricky things is like if you try to type on the keyboard in the Apple Vision Pro, it's a real mess, because at best you're doing like two finger hunt and peck typing, because it's just very hard to track where your fingers are and then to feel like you're actually hitting keys.

So I'm curious to see what kind of accommodations or developments they would make in order to provide haptic feedback, because it seems to me that such a thing would be possible in terms of being able to have little motors. You think about the motor that's in the Apple Watch and the responses it can give you, which are actually pretty varied and pretty complex, all the way up to something like Sony's ps5 uh dual controller, where it has these remarkably uh, you know good haptic engines in it and it's not hard to imagine something like that could be integrated to take this to the next level. So it's very exciting again, a thing that is not going to be in anybody's hands for quite some time, but it's cool to see how the trajectory of this technology is going.

1:05:57 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. Yeah, this is just the start and that is very cool to me. Um, I, this, this is. This is the stuff that I you know, like flying cars and and uh scooters that are uh skateboards that float above the road were the things that I thought about as a kid, and now this is the kind of thing that I still get to get excited about, even though a lot of the other tech, like this wristwatch that does all this stuff I drew one out with paper and put it on my wrist as a kid and thought I could walkie alkie into it. Now I get to be excited about this as something that is potentially in my future and that's neat, that's nifty. So good work to the team. Dan Moren, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. If folks would like to keep up to date with what you are doing, where should they go to do so?

1:06:54 - Dan Moren
Well, for all the stuff I write about tech, you can find me over at sixcolors.com. I should mention we've got our previews up of all the new public betas the iOS, iPadOS, macOS and watchOS public betas so if you want to read more about those, go check out sixcolors.com. You can also hear me every week talking tech on Clockwise, the podcast over at relay.fm with Mikah, as well as at the Rebound, and you can find links to those shows as well as my many science fiction novels and other writings over at dmoren.com.

1:07:24 - Mikah Sargent
Beautiful Thank you, dan, and we'll see you again soon.

1:07:27 - Dan Moren
Thanks, Mikah, always appreciate it.

1:07:29 - Mikah Sargent
Alrighty folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. The show publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That's where you go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. I mentioned Club Twit. twit.tv/clubtwit is where you go to sign up and, of course, if you would like to, you can follow me online at Mikah Sargent on many a social media network, or you can head to chihuahua.coffee C-H-I-H-U-A, h-u-acoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out my other shows that published today Hands on Apple and iOS Today and, of course, sundays, you can check out Hands-On Tech. Thank you for being here, thank you for being you, and we'll see you again next week. Bye-bye!

1:08:12 - Leo Laporte
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