Latest news with #iOS18.3
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
Harris-Walz campaign may have been targeted by iPhone hackers, cybersecurity firm says
One of the few companies to specialize in iPhone cybersecurity said in a report Thursday that it has uncovered evidence in a handful of mobile phones of a potential hacking campaign targeting five high-profile Americans in media, artificial intelligence and politics, including former members of Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. The preliminary research, conducted by the cybersecurity firm iVerify, includes a 'significant amount of circumstantial evidence,' iVerify CEO Rocky Cole said. Apple, the maker of the iPhone, pushed back on the findings. But Cole said the report was worth publishing for use by the cybersecurity research community. Apple's reputation is sterling among security professionals, and if it is confirmed a hack occurred, it would be a significant development in the cybersecurity industry. IVerify has not identified who may be behind the potential hacking operation, but believes the targets and technical sophistication suggest a capable spy agency may have been involved. Two people familiar with the investigation told NBC News that former members of the Harris-Walz campaign were some of the people iVerify believes were targeted. It's not clear what initially set off the investigation. IVerify said that in addition to the Americans who were targeted, a European government official's iPhone had indications of remote tampering. It appears that last year, a hacker remotely and secretly installed a type of invasive, malicious program known as spyware to snoop on those users without their knowledge, iVerify said. Out of nearly 50,000 phones that iVerify analyzed, it found only six — all belonging to high-profile people who would be potential targets for an espionage campaign — that showed evidence of exploitation. Apple disputed iVerify's conclusion that its evidence is a strong indication that iPhones were hacked. 'We've thoroughly analyzed the information provided by iVerify, and strongly disagree with the claims of a targeted attack against our users. Based on field data from our devices, this report points to a conventional software bug that we identified and fixed in iOS 18.3,' Ivan Krstić, the head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture, said in an emailed statement. Apple is 'not currently aware of any credible indication that the bug points to an exploitation attempt or active attack,' Krstić said. Cole, iVerify's CEO, responded in a statement: 'In light of the recent public conversation around mobile security, there is ample evidence in the report worth sharing with the research community. We've never claimed there is a smoking gun here, only a significant amount of circumstantial evidence.' iVerify's report makes it clear it did not directly catch malicious software that took over phones. Instead, its researchers found evidence that it had been installed, then deleted. The phones suspected of being hacked displayed suspicious activity in crash logs, the records a computer or a smartphone automatically writes when the operating system encounters an error or a program fails. That indicates tampering, the company said. 'We identified exceedingly rare crash logs that appeared exclusively on devices belonging to high-risk individuals including government officials, political campaign staff, journalists, and tech executives,' the report says. 'At least one affected European Union government official received an Apple Threat Notification approximately thirty days after we observed this crash on their device, and forensic examination of another device revealed signs of successful exploitation.' Andrew Hoog, a co-founder of the mobile phone security company NowSecure, told NBC News that he found iVerify's 'analysis and conclusions credible and consistent with what we've observed over nearly a decade of mobile zero-click attacks.' If a spyware campaign has been taking over high-profile Americans' phones, it would be a major escalation in the back-and-forth between cyberspies and the security engineers who try to stop them. The iPhone's cybersecurity is widely revered, and cybersecurity experts largely view iPhones as some of the most secure devices that are commercially available. Apple routinely updates its operating system to fix flaws that hackers use to break in. But it has also designed the iPhone operating system to share very little information with cybersecurity researchers, far less than most other operating systems. iVerify's claim comes in the context of other allegations that cyberspies snooped on the 2024 presidential campaigns, including the United States' accusing China of listening to both parties' presidential campaigns' phone calls and Iran of hacking Trump campaign emails and sending stolen information to Biden campaign officials. Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department charged three Iranians in connection with the operation in September. Researchers have for years tracked governments' use of spyware to spy on journalists and activists in other countries. Politicians in France and Spain have been targeted by spyware, prompting national scandals. IVerify's report is the first major public claim of spyware's successfully breaking into iPhones tied to American phone numbers and high-profile Americans. There is precedent for cyberspies' targeting major political campaigns. Last year, Microsoft, Google and several federal agencies said Chinese intelligence had hacked several major telecommunications companies, including AT&T and Verizon, and used that access to specifically spy on both the Trump and Harris campaigns' conversations. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Trump campaign did not hire iVerify, so it does not have data from it to analyze. Sources who confirmed that members of the Harris-Walz campaign were among those whom iVerify has investigated as targets of the campaign did not identify those people. iVerify also discovered a potential way hackers could have gotten in: a vulnerability in iMessage, the chat app that comes preloaded in Apple phones, that appears to be a zero-click vulnerability, meaning a hacker could exploit it without the user's even knowing. Apple has since patched the vulnerability. Spyware can give remote hackers remarkable insight into their victims' personal messages and accounts. While confirmed instances are rare, it is the only proven tactic for hackers to reliably bypass the major privacy protections available for commercial phones, like the encrypted messaging app Signal. A hacker who successfully deploys spyware on politicians' phones, for instance, could read all their Signal chats, track their browsing histories, listen to their phone calls and even turn the phones into covert listening devices to spy on conversations while they are in the targets' pockets. By giving a hacker remote access to a phone, spyware goes beyond even the Salt Typhoon espionage campaign, in which the United States accused China last year of hacking AT&T and Verizon to intercept phone calls and text messages as they traveled from one person to another — including targeting the messages of both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns. The most commonly identified spyware in such cases is designed by the Israeli company NSO Group, which is sanctioned by the United States and has long claimed its products cannot be used to hack phones with American numbers. An NSO Group spokesperson told NBC News it was not involved in the incidents iVerify's research identified. American diplomats and embassy workers abroad have also been infected with NSO spyware, according to the Biden White House, but evidence that such technology had targeted a U.S. presidential campaign or other high-profile Americans in the United States has never been previously reported. 'I think it illustrates that mobile compromise is real, not academic or hypothetical, and it's happening here in the United States in a systematic way,' said Cole, iVerify's CEO. He declined to specify the identities of the five people whose phones exhibited signs of having been targeted with spyware, except to say that they are all Americans who work in politics, media and artificial intelligence and that all would be of interest to a foreign intelligence service. The fact that sophisticated phone spyware is becoming the most reliable way to read a person's otherwise secure messages makes it an obvious tactic for spy agencies, despite its technical difficulty, said Patrick Arvidson, a National Security Agency veteran who worked on mobile phone security at the agency, who viewed iVerify's report before it was published. 'I think that you're going to see in the coming year, two years, three years, more and more of these kinds of mass-scale incidents,' he said. This article was originally published on
NBC News
21 hours ago
- NBC News
High-profile Americans' iPhones may have been targeted in hacking campaign, says cybersecurity firm for Harris-Walz
One of the few companies to specialize in iPhone cybersecurity said in a report Thursday that it has uncovered evidence in a handful of mobile phones of a potentially groundbreaking hacking campaign targeting five high-profile Americans in media, artificial intelligence and politics, including former members of Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. The preliminary research, conducted by the cybersecurity firm iVerify, includes a significant amount of circumstantial evidence,' iVerify CEO Rocky Cole said. Apple, the maker of the iPhone, refuted the findings. But Cole stood by the report's significance for research purposes. Apple's reputation is sterling among security professionals, and if a hack occurred, it would be a significant development in the cybersecurity industry. IVerify has not identified who may be behind the potential hacking operation, but believes the targets and technical sophistication suggest a capable spy agency may have been involved. Two people familiar with the investigation told NBC News that former members of the Harris-Walz campaign were some of the people iVerify believes were targeted. It's not clear what initially set off the investigation. IVerify said that in addition to the Americans who were targeted, a European government official's iPhone had indications of remote tampering. It appears that last year, a hacker remotely and secretly installed a type of invasive, malicious program known as spyware to snoop on those users without their knowledge, iVerify said. Out of nearly 50,000 phones that iVerify analyzed, it found only six — all belonging to high-profile people who would be potential targets for an espionage campaign — that showed evidence of exploitation. Apple disputed iVerify's conclusion that its evidence is a strong indication that iPhones were hacked. 'We've thoroughly analyzed the information provided by iVerify, and strongly disagree with the claims of a targeted attack against our users. Based on field data from our devices, this report points to a conventional software bug that we identified and fixed in iOS 18.3,' Ivan Krstić, the head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture, said in an emailed statement. Apple is 'not currently aware of any credible indication that the bug points to an exploitation attempt or active attack,' Krstić said. IVerify CEO Rocky Cole responded in a statement: 'In light of the recent public conversation around mobile security, there is ample evidence in the report worth sharing with the research community. We've never claimed there is a smoking gun here, only a significant amount of circumstantial evidence.' iVerify's report makes it clear it did not directly catch malicious software that took over phones. Instead, its researchers found evidence that it had been installed, then deleted. The phones suspected of being hacked displayed suspicious activity in crash logs, the records a computer or a smartphone automatically writes when the operating system encounters an error or a program fails. That indicates tampering, the company said. 'We identified exceedingly rare crash logs that appeared exclusively on devices belonging to high-risk individuals including government officials, political campaign staff, journalists, and tech executives,' the report says. 'At least one affected European Union government official received an Apple Threat Notification approximately thirty days after we observed this crash on their device, and forensic examination of another device revealed signs of successful exploitation.' Andrew Hoog, a co-founder of the mobile phone security company NowSecure, told NBC News that he found iVerify's 'analysis and conclusions credible and consistent with what we've observed over nearly a decade of mobile zero-click attacks.' If a spyware campaign has been taking over high-profile Americans' phones, it would be a major escalation in the back-and-forth between cyberspies and the security engineers who try to stop them. The iPhone's cybersecurity is widely revered, and cybersecurity experts largely view iPhones as some of the most secure devices that are commercially available. Apple routinely updates its operating system to fix flaws that hackers use to break in. But it has also designed the iPhone operating system to share very little information with cybersecurity researchers, far less than most other operating systems. iVerify's claim comes in the context of other allegations that cyberspies snooped on the 2024 presidential campaigns, including the United States' accusing China of listening to both parties' presidential campaigns' phone calls and Iran of hacking Trump campaign emails and sending stolen information to Biden campaign officials. The Biden administration's Justice Department charged three Iranians in connection with the operation in September. Researchers have for years tracked governments' use of spyware to spy on journalists and activists in other countries. Politicians in France and Spain have been targeted by spyware, prompting national scandals. IVerify's report is the first major public claim of spyware's successfully breaking into iPhones tied to American phone numbers and high-profile Americans. There is precedent for cyberspies' targeting major political campaigns. Last year, Microsoft, Google and several federal agencies said Chinese intelligence had hacked several major telecommunications companies, including AT&T and Verizon, and used that access to specifically spy on both the Trump and Harris campaigns ' conversations. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Trump campaign did not hire iVerify, so it does not have data from it to analyze. Sources who confirmed that members of the Harris-Waltz campaign were among those whom iVerify has investigated as targets of the campaign did not identify those people. iVerify also discovered a potential way hackers could have gotten in: a vulnerability in iMessage, the chat app that comes preloaded in Apple phones, that appears to be a zero-click vulnerability, meaning a hacker could exploit it without the user's even knowing. Apple has since patched the vulnerability. Spyware can give remote hackers remarkable insight into their victims' personal messages and accounts. While confirmed instances are rare, it is the only proven tactic for hackers to reliably bypass the major privacy protections available for commercial phones, like the encrypted messaging app Signal. A hacker who successfully deploys spyware on politicians' phones, for instance, could read all their Signal chats, track their browsing histories, listen to their phone calls and even turn the phones into covert listening devices to spy on conversations while they are in the targets' pockets. By giving a hacker remote access to a phone, spyware goes beyond even the Salt Typhoon espionage campaign, in which the United States accused China last year of hacking AT&T and Verizon to intercept phone calls and text messages as they traveled from one person to another — including targeting the messages of both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns. The most commonly identified spyware in such cases is designed by the Israeli company NSO Group, which is sanctioned by the United States and has long claimed its products cannot be used to hack phones with American numbers. An NSO Group spokesperson told NBC News it was not involved in the incidents iVerify's research identified. American diplomats and embassy workers abroad have also been infected with NSO spyware, according to the Biden White House, but evidence that such technology had targeted a U.S. presidential campaign or other high-profile Americans in the United States has never been previously reported. 'I think it illustrates that mobile compromise is real, not academic or hypothetical, and it's happening here in the United States in a systematic way,' said Cole, iVerify's CEO. He declined to specify the identities of the five people whose phones exhibited signs of having been targeted with spyware, except to say that they are all Americans who work in politics, media and artificial intelligence and that all would be of interest to a foreign intelligence service. The fact that sophisticated phone spyware is becoming the most reliable way to read a person's otherwise secure messages makes it an obvious tactic for spy agencies, despite its technical difficulty, said Patrick Arvidson, a National Security Agency veteran who worked on mobile phone security at the agency, who viewed iVerify's report before it was published. 'I think that you're going to see in the coming year, two years, three years, more and more of these kinds of mass-scale incidents,' he said.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Yahoo
Give Your iPhone a Makeover by Changing These iOS 18.3 Settings
It's the perfect time to give your iPhone a spring makeover. Whether you've just unboxed a new iPhone 16E or want to get more from your current device, you'll find plenty of features in iOS 18.3 to personalize your experience. We'll show you how to customize your home screen, make your Control Center more useful and even (finally) choose which buttons appear on the lock screen. Don't forget that iOS 18 includes the first Apple Intelligence features, so be sure to check out the ones you will use most. Or if you have no interest in the AI features -- which are now enabled automatically -- learn how to turn off Apple Intelligence. For more on what's new in iOS 18, learn about improvements to the overhauled Calculator app and the Mail app. And don't forget to consult our iOS 18 upgrade checklist, which includes making sure you have a proper backup before upgrading. Stay safe: Make sure you install the latest iOS 18.3.1 update that fixes bugs related to an "extremely sophisticated attack." In real estate, location is everything, and the bottom corners of the iPhone lock screen are the prime spots, each an easy thumb press away when your device is still locked. Before iOS 18, those posts were held by the flashlight and camera buttons, with no way to change them. In iOS 18, you can finally replace them with other buttons -- or remove them entirely, a balm for folks who unknowingly activate the flashlight (believe me, there's a better way to turn it on). You can add buttons to recognize music via Shazam, enable Dark Mode, set an alarm/timer, enable Airplane Mode, open your Wallet, send money via Tap to Cash and more. Here's how: 1. On the iPhone's lock screen, touch and hold anywhere on the display until you see the Customize button. You'll need to unlock the phone using Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode. If it opens the home screen, swipe down from the center-top of the screen (not the right edge, which brings up Control Center. 2. Tap Customize and then choose Lock Screen. 3. Remove one of the buttons by tapping the – (minus) button on the icon. 4. To replace the button with another function, tap its space (now with a + icon) and then choose the one you want on the next screen. (You can also opt to leave that space empty with no button.) 5. Repeat those steps for the other button if you want to change it. 6. Tap Done when you're finished. 7. Tap the lock screen again to exit the customize mode. The Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16, iPhone 16E and iPhone 16 Pro replaced the dedicated mute switch found on every earlier iPhone model with a configurable control. By default it serves the same purpose -- hold it to turn Silent Mode on or off -- but you can configure it for other actions like opening the Camera app, performing multiple actions at once or even ordering coffee. (And if you're willing to live on the edge, the iOS 18.4 beta adds Visual Intelligence as an option for the Action button.) In iOS 18, the Action button gets new capabilities. You can bypass Control Center and choose a control of your choice, such as opening the Remote interface for navigating Apple TV or using Shazam to identify a song. To choose a different action for the Action button, go to Settings > Action Button. Swipe sideways to select and activate one of the available actions. For the Controls, Shortcut and Accessibility options, tap the Choose button to pick which specific action to run. You wouldn't think that putting icons where you want is a radical new feature, but that's because iOS has always had a locked arrangement. Apps get added from top to bottom, left to right. You could rearrange the order in which icons appear and move them to other screens, but that was about it. In iOS 18, apps can be positioned nearly anywhere. You no longer need to deal with a wallpaper image of your kids or pets being obscured by icons. They still adhere to a grid -- Apple isn't about to sanction anarchy -- but can be placed freely. Also, Dark mode finally applies to all of the iPhone's home screen, with options for coloring icons and affecting the brightness of the wallpaper image. Here's how to customize the looks. Arrange apps: Touch and hold the home screen to enter "jiggle mode," and then drag the icons to new positions. It will still slide them around to fill spaces, but with patience, you can move them into the spots you want. You can also quickly turn compatible apps into widgets that display more information. Maps, for instance, can be a map of your current location with shortcut buttons to search for places or bring up a list of nearby places (such as dinner spots). Touch and hold the app icon and look for a row of resize buttons in the menu that appears. Once expanded beyond the standard icon size, you can drag the handle in the bottom-right corner of the new icon. To get it back to its single icon size you need to touch and hold again and choose the single-icon button Set Dark mode: If you've ever subjected yourself to the retina blast of black text on a white background late at night in a darkened room, you will appreciate the new Dark mode option for the home and lock screens. iOS has previously included a Dark mode, where light backgrounds switch to black or dark gray, text switches to white or light gray and other interface elements are dimmed to coexist in a dark environment. That's never been applied to the home and lock screens in any significant way -- only the dock and some widgets -- until iOS 18. First, touch and hold the home screen to enter jiggle mode. Tap the Edit button in the top-left corner and choose Customize from the menu. At the bottom of the screen, choose a mode for the icons and background: Automatic, Dark or Light (I'll get to Tinted in a moment). In Dark mode, the icons gain black backgrounds, and folders and the Dock become dark gray. (Developers have the option of making Dark mode icons for their apps. In the meantime, apps not yet optimized get a generally darker appearance.) In Dark mode, the background image also changes. Apple's default iOS 18 wallpaper dynamically changes from light to dark as the day progresses, or you can choose colors that offer both a light and dark option. If you use a photo, its overall exposure is reduced to dim the light output. If you want dark icons but aren't a fan of the dimmed photo treatment, tap the sun icon in the corner of the options sheet at the bottom of the screen to toggle back to Light mode just for the background. Tinted icons: A new and different option is to tint all of the app icons so they share the same color. In the Customize options at the bottom of the screen, choose Tinted as the icon style. You can then adjust the Hue (the slider with the color spectrum) and Luminosity (the slider with the dark to light range) to choose the color tint you prefer. What if you want to match a color from a background image? Tap the eyedropper button and then drag the reticle to pinpoint the color you want -- the border indicates the selected color. The tint is applied not only to icons but to widgets as well. For a widget such as Photos, the images it displays show up as duotones to match the theme. Large icons: Do the labels below each app icon seem redundant to you? Now you can remove the labels and increase the size of the icons with one setting. Open the Customize options as described above and tap the Large button. After making any of these changes, tap anywhere on the screen to apply them and exit the Customize interface. Control Center was once a convenient place to quickly access controls such as playback volume and Airplane mode, but under iOS 18 it's a configurable playground. You can position controls where you want, resize many to reveal more information and add new controls on multiple screens. Swipe down from the top-right corner to reveal the Control Center (or swipe up from the bottom on the iPhone SE). To enter edit mode, touch and hold or press the + button at the top-left corner. Just as with moving apps, drag a control to another slot on the screen to reposition it. Many of the controls also include a bottom-right handle that can resize the control -- in most cases, it reveals the name of the control and its current status (such as Flashlight Off). Control Center also now spans multiple screens. Swipe up to view controls for media currently playing, Home controls for smart lights and appliances and a page dedicated to the communication options that appear when you long-press the Connectivity block containing Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Cellular and others. Look closely and you'll see that those screens are actually individual controls expanded to occupy the entire Control Center area. You can rearrange the order of those screens by moving their controls. Suppose you want Home controls to be the first swipe instead of Now Playing: In the editing mode, drag the large Home control up to the previous screen (Now Playing will shift to the right to make room). To remove controls, tap the – (minus) button that appears. You can also add other controls: Tap Add a Control and scroll through the available options ranging from starting a Screen Recording to a host of accessibility options. Read more: Best iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro cases Our phones carry some of our most sensitive data, and yet it's not uncommon to hand a phone to a friend to view photos or look up something online. That doesn't mean they're going to snoop, but it doesn't not mean they might be more curious than you're comfortable with. For data you want to ensure stays out of sight or to add a layer of protection in front of sensitive information, iOS 18 adds the ability to lock and hide apps. For example, let's say you keep an ongoing set of lists of gift ideas for family members in the Notes app. You can lock individual notes, but that requires a separate step. Maybe a few ideas were made as individual quick notes or drawings. Instead of micromanaging access, you can lock the entire Notes app by doing the following: Touch and hold the app icon you want to lock and choose Require Face ID or Require Touch ID (or Require Passcode if Face ID or Touch ID are not enabled) from the menu that appears. Confirm your choice by tapping Require Face ID (or similar) in the next dialog. To remove the authentication step, touch and hold the app and choose Don't Require Face ID (or similar). Nothing outwardly indicates that an app is locked -- you'll find out when you try to open it. There's one more level of app security available, which is to hide apps in a special locked folder. Touch and hold the app and choose Require Face ID and then tap Hide and Require Face ID in the dialog. Confirm the action by tapping Hide App on the next screen. The app disappears from the home screen and gets slotted into a Hidden folder at the bottom of the App Library (swipe left beyond your last home screen to view the App Library). To access apps there, tap the Hidden folder and authenticate with Face ID. iOS 18 imposes some limitations on hidden apps. Some, such as many of the built-in ones like Notes or Reminders, can only be locked and cannot be hidden at all. Also, the Hidden folder locks itself when you launch an app or swipe away from the App Library. Many apps have implemented a small but annoying (to me) feature, and now Photos under iOS 18.2 has it too: Videos automatically replay when you watch them until you tap the Pause button. That can be fun once or twice, or when viewing short clips. I'm not a fan of having to take action to make them stop each time. Now I can take action once. Go to Settings > Photos, scroll down until you see Loop Videos and turn the option off. A video will play on its own but then stop at the end as it should. If you'd rather the video didn't play at all until you tap the Play button, also turn off Auto-Play Motion in the same Settings screen. Big new features like locking and hiding apps are great additions but so are the tiny changes that you encounter every day. The Calendar app includes two new ways to view your schedule. In iOS 18, when you're in the Month view in portrait orientation, pinch with two fingers to view more or fewer details. As you "zoom in," individual events appear as colored bars and then as labeled events with times, all while keeping the monthly grid of days and weeks. The Day view, which breaks down your day hour by hour, now has a new Multi Day view that shows two consecutive days to give you context for what's coming without turning the phone into landscape orientation and viewing the Week view. Tap the View button at the top of the Single Day view and choose Multi Day from the popup menu. Trouble hearing dialogue in movies and television shows isn't a new problem -- for example, the Apple TV has had a feature for a while where you can ask Siri, "What did she say?" and it will automatically back up a few seconds, turn on subtitles and replay that section of the video. You can even buy soundbars that can overcome muffled TV speech. There are a lot of reasons it's harder to hear dialogue, but the TV app in iOS 18 includes a high-tech workaround to make dialog easier to discern. While you're watching a video in the TV app, tap the More (…) button and then expand the Audio heading in the menu that appears; if the phone is in horizontal orientation, tap the Audio Adjustments button. Tap Enhance Dialogue and choose Enhance or Boost. They each dampen background noise and raise the dialogue's audio. These are just a few new features and changes in iOS 18. Check out our broader coverage of Apple Intelligence, more impressions of the system after using it for months and how these all work together with the iPhone 16 models.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Yahoo
12 Hidden iOS 18.3 iPhone Features You Should Probably Know About
With each new point release of iOS 18 (like iOS 18.3), Apple always sprinkles in a new hidden feature or two for you to find on your iPhone. You know all about turning your sketches into highly detailed drawings, customizing your iPhone's home screen, creating your emoji, and all the new Apple Intelligence and Visual Intelligence features, but what's next to discover in iOS 18.3 that no one is talking about? Lucky for you, there's so much. Plenty of new Apple settings aren't publicized, so they stay under the radar, but that doesn't mean they're unimportant. I've chosen a few of my favorite hidden iOS 18.3 features you should know about. For more, here are eight iOS 18 settings you want to change right away, how to back up your iPhone the correct way and how to fix these three annoying iOS 18 settings. You don't have to press any physical buttons to restart your iPhone if you're running iOS 18. The redesigned control center features all the classic controls you're used to, like brightness, volume, orientation, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but there are several new controls, including one to restart your iPhone. All you need to do is swipe down from the top-right of your iPhone and press and hold down on the new power button in the top-right of the control center. You can't just tap it; you have to hold it down for a second or so, and then the slider to power off your iPhone will appear. To turn your iPhone back on, you'll still need to press and hold the physical side button. There are a few ways you can share a Wi-Fi network and password with people via your iPhone, and there's a new way to do it on iOS 18. Using a QR code fills in a few gaps for ways to quickly share your Wi-Fi information: Share with several people at once. Instead of individually sending out your Wi-Fi password, you can have everyone scan the QR code from your phone. Share with someone not saved as your contact. Nearby share for Wi-Fi doesn't work unless that person is in your contacts. Share with someone who has Android. Nearby share and AirDrop don't work with Android devices. So if you meet any of those scenarios and you don't want to text the Wi-Fi password to them, you can use the QR code. Go to the new Passwords app, go to the Wi-Fi section, tap on the network you want to share and then hit Show Network QR Code. If the other person scans the QR code with their camera, they'll be connected to the Wi-Fi network. The flashlight on the iPhone is getting a big upgrade. You've long been able to change the intensity of the flashlight, but on iOS 18 you can now also adjust the beam width of the light, as long as you have a compatible model. You can go wide, to cover more area with less light, or go narrow, to use more intense light over less area, and everywhere in between. It's a fun feature to play around with for lighting people for photos. To use the new feature, turn on your flashlight (use the lock screen or control center), and a new user interface will appear on the dynamic island. You can change the light intensity by swiping up and down, but to change the beam width, you'll need to swipe left and right. If you tap anywhere in the dynamic island, you can turn the flashlight off and on. Note: This feature only works on iPhone models with the dynamic island, including the iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14 Pro Max, iPhone 15 series and iPhone 16 series. In iOS 18.1, Apple introduced notification summaries -- Apple Intelligence-powered notifications that summarize your notifications from a single app. If you have multiple unread notifications from an app like Gmail or Amazon, you'll see an italicized summary appear on your lock screen, condensing them all into a few sentences you can quickly digest. Unfortunately, notification summaries don't always work very well, especially for text messages and news apps. In fact, as of iOS 18.3, notification summaries are disabled for all news apps across your device, like the Apple News and CNET app. But if you want to disable the feature for other apps, you can easily do so without even unlocking your phone. From your lock screen, find a notification summary for an app you want the feature disabled for and swipe left on the notification. Tap on Options and then hit "Turn Off "" Summaries to stop notification summaries for that app. You'll continue to receive notifications, they'll just be individual, like you're used to. An AirTag allows you to easily track your luggage when you're traveling or your keys when they're lost, but sometimes you might want other people to also be able to track your AirTag, especially if you're on a family vacation or weekend getaway with your partner. With iOS 18, you can now share any AirTag you have with up to six people. Don't miss: 5 Clever Hiding Spots for Your Apple AirTags To do this, go into the Find My app and find the AirTag you want to share. Go into the AirTag, hit Add Person under Share AirTag and choose a contact, or several. Finally tap Share in the top-right and that person will then have to accept your invitation. Once they do, they'll be able to track your AirTag from their Apple device. Your iPhone already has a feature that's designed to improve your battery's lifespan. Optimized Battery Charging learns your daily charging routine to reduce the time your phone is fully charged, delaying charging past 80% while you sleep and then charging to 100% only when you need it. However, if you want to prolong your iPhone's battery lifespan even more, you can manually change your charging option to anywhere from 80% to 100%, so that your iPhone never fully charges. Go to Settings > Battery > Charging and choose an option. If you choose anything lower than 100%, that's the highest percentage your battery will charge to. The benefit of that is that lithium-ion batteries, like the one in your iPhone, degrade faster when consistently charged to 100%, so keeping the charge lower reduces stress on the battery. The Voice Memos app is incredibly convenient for capturing ideas or song snippets, but they've always been obfuscated. You can give them a descriptive title, but that doesn't help when you want to find that one memo you recorded that contains the word "porcupine." In iOS 18, the app can create transcriptions of your voice memos and search for words that were previously available only as audio waveforms. In the Voice Memos app, tap one of your memos to reveal its controls and then tap the Edit Recording button, which looks like a waveform. Or, tap the three-dots button to the right of a memo and choose Edit Recording. Next, tap the Transcribe button to create the transcription (or view the text if it's already been transcribed). Tap Done. Now, when you use the Search field, the app looks through the transcripts in addition to the titles for results. The text is also available throughout iOS. When you perform a search from the home screen, you'll see Voice Memos as a category with the memos that include the search term (you may need to tap Show More Results to reveal it). Is your home screen feeling a little too cluttered? If so, this new feature could help. Now with iOS 18, you can get rid of app labels or the names of the apps that you see underneath each app icon on your home screen. If you can recognize an app from just the icon, who needs the label? On your home screen, press and hold down on any blank space, until you enter jiggle mode, and then hit Edit > Customize. A menu will appear at the bottom of the screen; choose the Large option, which will make your app icons slightly larger and remove the app labels. Not every iOS app has a widget for your home screen, but if it does, you don't need to dig through the widget edit page to find it. If you're running iOS 18, and there's an app that you want to turn into a widget, you can do so very quickly right from your home screen. On a supported app, press and hold down on the icon on your home screen to bring up the quick actions menu. If the app has a widget, you'll see an app icon next to a variety of widget icons (up to three). Tap on any of the widget icons to change the app to a widget. If you want to go back from the widget to the app, go to the quick action menu and hit the app icon on the left. No lie, it's satisfying when someone asks, "What song is this?" to be able to activate Music Recognition on the iPhone and get an answer quickly. To get the answer means very noticeably asking Siri to run Shazam or activate Music Recognition in the control center. Wouldn't it be fun to let your friends think you've been blessed with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music? In iOS 18, you can come close using the Action Button. Go to Settings > Action Button and swipe through the options until Recognize Music is selected. To make it work, just press and hold the Action Button for a couple of seconds. Shazam appears on the dynamic island to listen to what's playing and identify the song. If you're sneaky about activating Shazam and peeking at your phone, no one needs to know you got some help from a supercomputer in the cloud. A lot is changing in the Photos app in iOS 18, from the way things are organized to the ability to use generative AI to remove objects in images. Apple has also tucked a few surprises into the app to help you sort through your library. Scroll down past the main library itself to view categories such as People and Pets and Memories until you reach Utilities. Tap it to view the full list -- but note that a new feature of this interface is the ability to swipe left to view additional panels. Prior to iOS 18, Utilities included options to view hidden, recently deleted and duplicate photos. Now, it includes many more options. Tap Handwriting to view images with handwriting in them. Looking for images that are illustrations and not photographs? Tap Illustrations (although in our testing this seems to grab a lot of screenshots too). Did the hosts of your favorite podcast say something especially funny or thoughtful that you want to share with someone? In the Podcasts app in iOS 18, you can send an episode to a friend with the playback advanced to that moment -- but the capability isn't easy to find. Tap the Now Playing bar in the app at the bottom of the screen to view the playback controls and pause the episode. Use the progress bar to go back to the start of the section you want to share. Next, tap the More (…) button and choose Share Episode. In the sharing options that appear, tap From Start below the episode title, and then select From [the current time]. Tap Done. Lastly, choose the method of sharing, such as via Messages or Mail. When the recipient receives the shared episode and opens it in the Podcasts app, they'll see the option to Play from [the time].
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Yahoo
What to Know and Where to Find Apple Intelligence Summaries on iPhone
Apple released iOS 18.3 in January, and the update brought a few bug fixes to all iPhones. But when Apple released iOS 18.1 in October, it gave people with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max or a device from the iPhone 16 lineup access to some Apple Intelligence features, like AI-generated summaries across the device. Read more: Your iOS 18 Cheat Sheet With Apple Intelligence and a compatible iPhone, your device can provide you with a summary of a lengthy email, a webpage, Message notifications and more. It can also show you a summary of what you have written in Notes and other messages. Here's what you need to know about summaries with Apple Intelligence on your iPhone. Note that before you use Apple Intelligence, you have to request it for your iPhone. To do so, go to Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri and tap Get Apple Intelligence. Parsing through emails and email chains for information can be tedious, especially if you get a lot of work emails sent to your device. Thankfully, Apple Intelligence can summarize emails for you so you aren't reading a lot of preamble and want to just get right to the heart of the message. To view email summaries, open Mail, choose the email you want to read, and then pull your screen down to reveal a new Summarize button. Tap this and you'll see some lines of summary. You can change how many lines of summary you see by going to Settings > Apps > Mail > Preview and choosing anything from no lines of summary to five. It's also important to note that if you're using Mail Categories, you can only see AI summaries for emails in your Primary category. Emails in other categories won't give you summaries. If you're using List View in Mail all your emails will have a summary available. Read more: What You Need to Know About Mail Categories in iOS 18.2 With Apple Intelligence, some of your apps can give you summaries of notifications on your Lock Screen, and this feature is on by default in most cases. This feature can summarize your notifications in a few words, but be careful while reading these. According to the BBC, one of the publication's headlines was summarized inaccurately. If you don't want to risk reading a bad summary, you can turn this feature off. Go to Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications and tap the toggles next to the apps you no longer want to receive notification summaries from. You can also tap the toggle next to Summarize Notifications at the top of the menu to turn the feature off for all apps. Read more: Apple's Notification Summaries Can Be Absurdly Wrong Apple Intelligence can also summarize certain webpages in Safari. To view these summaries, open Safari and go to a webpage, then look on the left side of the address bar. You should see a rectangle with a few dashes beneath it and sparkles. Tap this symbol and it pulls up a menu showing the summary of the webpage. Be aware that this feature isn't available on all webpages. On webpages this feature isn't working yet, the symbol on the left side of the address bar won't have any sparkles. Writing Tools is an Apple Intelligence menu that lets you proofread, edit or alter something you're writing. It also lets you summarize your message or notes. To view these summaries, highlight what you want to summarize, tap Writing Tools in the pop-up menu -- you might have to scroll through the options in this menu -- and then tap Summary. Writing Tools will show you a summary of what you have highlighted, and it will let you Copy, Replace and Share that summary. These summaries could help you prepare for a presentation, let you quickly read over anything in Notes or trim your own messages down to just the key points. Read more: Proofread, Edit and More With Apple Intelligence Writing Tools For more on iOS 18, here's what you need to know about iOS 18.3.1 and iOS 18.3. You can also check out our iOS 18 cheat sheet.
