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One UI 7 was designed to showcase Samsung's AI ambitions, but a bug now appears to be getting in the way of momentum.

Apple Intelligence has not had the best year so far, but if you think Apple is giving up, you're wrong. It has big plans and is moving forward with new model training strategies that could vastly improve its AI performance. However, the changes do involve a closer look at your data – if you opt-in.

In a new technical paper from Apple's Machine Learning Research, "Understanding Aggregate Trends for Apple Intelligence Using Differential Privacy," Apple outlined new plans for combining data analytics with user data and synthetic data generation to better train the models behind many of Apple Intelligence features.

Some real data

Up to now, Apple's been training its models on purely synthetic data, which tries to mimic what real data might be like, but there are limitations. In Genmoji's, for instance, Apple's use of synthetic data doesn't always point to how real users engage with the system. From the paper:

"For example, understanding how our models perform when a user requests Genmoji that contain multiple entities (like “dinosaur in a cowboy hat”) helps us improve the responses to those kinds of requests."

Essentially, if users opt-in, the system can poll the device to see if it has seen a data segment. However, your phone doesn't respond with the data; instead, it sends back a noisy and anonymized signal, which is apparently enough for Apple's model to learn.

The process is somewhat different for models that work with longer texts like Writing tools and Summarizations. In this case, Apple uses synthetic models, and then they send a representation of these synthetic models to users who have opted into data analytics.

On the device, the system then performs a comparison that seems to compare these representations against samples of recent emails.

"These most-frequently selected synthetic embeddings can then be used to generate training or testing data, or we can run additional curation steps to further refine the dataset."

A better result

It's complicated stuff. The key, though, is that Apple applies differential privacy to all the user data, which is the process of adding noise that makes it impossible to connect that data to a real user.

Still, none of this works if you don't opt into Apple's Data Analytics, which usually happens when you first set up your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook.

Doing so does not put your data or privacy at risk, but that training should lead to better models and, hopefully, a better Apple Intelligence experience on your iPhone and other Apple devices.

It might also mean smarter and more sensible rewrites and summaries.

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• GenAI can hallucinate open source package names, experts warn
• It doesn't always hallucinate a different name
• Cybercriminals can use the names to register malware

Security researchers have warned of a new method by which Generative AI (GenAI) can be abused in cybercrime, known as 'slopsquatting'.

It starts with the fact that different GenAI tools, such as Chat-GPT, Copilot, and others, hallucinate. In the context of AI, “hallucination” is when the AI simply makes things up. It can make up a quote that a person never said, an event that never happened, or - in software development - an open-source software package that was never created.

Now, according to Sarah Gooding from Socket, many software developers rely heavily on GenAI when writing code. The tool could write the lines itself, or it could suggest the developer different packages to download and include in the product.

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Hallucinating malware

The report adds the AI doesn’t always hallucinate a different name or a different package - some things repeat.

“When re-running the same hallucination-triggering prompt ten times, 43% of hallucinated packages were repeated every time, while 39% never reappeared at all,” it says.

“Overall, 58% of hallucinated packages were repeated more than once across ten runs, indicating that a majority of hallucinations are not just random noise, but repeatable artifacts of how the models respond to certain prompts.”

This is purely theoretical at this point, but apparently, cybercriminals could map out the different packages AI is hallucinating and - register them on open-source platforms.

Therefore, when a developer gets a suggestion and visits GitHub, PyPI, or similar - they will find the package and happily install it, without knowing that it’s malicious.

Luckily enough, there are no confirmed cases of slopsquatting in the wild at press time, but it’s safe to say it is only a matter of time. Given that the hallucinated names can be mapped out, we can assume security researchers will discover them eventually.

The best way to protect against these attacks is to be careful when accepting suggestions from anyone, living or otherwise.

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Monday's WNBA Draft is expected to be the latest jewel in the crown of Bueckers, the 6-foot guard who barely a week ago led her UConn Huskies to their first national championship in a decade.

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The government announced it is freezing more than $2.2 billion, hours after the university refused to make changes it said would "dictate what private universities can teach."

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The university refused to make changes it said would "dictate what private universities can teach" and "whom they can admit and hire," among other things.

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The Trump administration is undertaking shifts in U.S. foreign policy and that has meant big shifts at the State Department, which is in charge of that policy. The changes have veteran diplomats worried.

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• Change Healthcare suffered a huge cyberattack in 2024
• Disruptions from that attack cost organizations millions
• The firm is now chasing repayment of loans to cover losses from these disruptions

UnitedHealth Group is “aggressively” going after small healthcare organizations that borrowed money following a huge cyberattack on its subsidy Change Healthcare.

The attack is said to have affected almost 190 million Americans, and was the largest US healthcare data breach ever, and was incredibly disruptive, with systems only fully restored 9 months later, costing over $2 billion to recover from.

After the attack, interest-free loans were offered by Change to help medical practices with short-term cash flow needs. The firm is now demanding these funds be “immediately” repaid, with some organizations asked to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few days.

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Lost revenue

Optum, UnitedHealth’s financial arm, has now confirmed it will withhold separate funds until these loans are repaid.

Doctors with their own private practices used these loans to cover losses from the disruption following the cyber incident, which cost some hundreds of thousands - and some reportedly used personal savings to keep practices afloat.

It’s worth noting UnitedHealth has a net worth of over $470 billion (at the time of writing), and CEO Andrew Witty made over $23 million in compensation in 2023.

Optum has collected over $4.5 billion of the $9 billion debt, but since many practices lost so much in downtime thanks to the disruption, many will struggle to repay the money owed in the just 5 day timeframe Optum have imposed, with one doctor describing it as a “shakedown.”

UnitedHealth paid the ransomware attackers $22 million in cryptocurrency to recover its data - but the operation was still shut down in its entirety, and Change never got its data back. Medical data is, of course, extremely sensitive, and put anyone exposed at risk of identity theft or fraud.

Via CNBC

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With AI agents becoming an increasingly common sight in businesses everywhere, Google Cloud has become the latest major company to ramp up its efforts in the space.

At its Google Cloud Next 25 event, the company unveiled several upgrades to its Agentspace platform to make agent discovery and adoption easier.

Just to give things an extra boost, Google Cloud also announced a new partnership with Nvidia designed at making its offerings even more intuitive.

Google Agentspace expansion

Following the initial launch of Google Agentspace in December 2024, the updates were mainly aimed at making creating and deploying AI agents easier

This includes giving employees access to Agentspace search and analysis tools directly from the search box in Google Chrome. The multimodal search capabilities can help track down exactly the data needed within your business, or give customers access to the answers they need.

The search results can cover content from the web, or from your business' most commonly-used apps and software, including the likes of Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and apps like Jira, Salesforce, or ServiceNow.

(Image credit: Google Cloud)

Elsewhere, workers can also use a new Agent Gallery to find and deploy new agents quickly as well as creating their own agents with the new no-code Agent Designer platform - or launch some of Google's latest own-brand offerings, Idea Generation agent and Deep Research agent.

In order to make sure all these new agents co-exist effectively, Google Cloud has also launched a new interoperability protocol called Agent2Agent, which it says, "will allow AI agents to communicate with each other, securely exchange information, and coordinate actions on top of various enterprise platforms or applications."

Built on existing standards to allow easier integration, the company has already signed up more than 50 partners for the launch, including enterprise heavyweights such as Salesforce, PayPal, Box, Atlassian and more.

Finally, to harness the power of some of the most powerful computing hardware around today, Google Cloud and Nvidia have signed a collaboration bring the former's AI models to Nvidia Blackwell HGX and DGX platforms, as well as Nvidia Confidential Computing.

“By bringing our Gemini models on premises with Nvidia Blackwell’s breakthrough performance and confidential computing capabilities, we’re enabling enterprises to unlock the full potential of agentic AI,” said Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager of infrastructure and solutions at Google Cloud.

“This collaboration helps ensure customers can innovate securely without compromising on performance or operational ease.”

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Even though we live in a world festooned with smart stuff, from slick ways to monitor your activity to generative AI and other such opinion-dividing tools, sometimes it’s the simple things that really feel special. And for me, it’s the iPhone’s Passwords app.

Introduced with iOS 18, the Passwords app effectively builds out on Apple’s iCloud Keychain system, which allows passwords and login credentials to be saved in the cloud and automatically fill in said credentials once a security check via the likes of Face ID has been carried out.

What the Passwords app does is build in a slicker interface on this functionality to facilitate easier password management. There's also support for third-party browsers, the ability to share passwords with trusted groups of people and get alerts of potential security issues.

Naturally, there are third-party password management services that do all this too, but if you forget your master password – something I may have done in the past – you can be a little screwed. So having a native password manager baked into iOS is neat.

And it’s a rather slick app; one that despite getting shown off at WWDC 2024, I sort of forgot about. So going by that, the app may have slipped your mind too, given how easily it integrates with daily iPhone life.

But more recently, I’ve been finding out how handy it is.

A most helpful app

(Image credit: Apple)

The biggest benefit of the app is for when a freeloading family member requests the password to one of the most popular streaming series that rhymes with 'transfix', and I can’t remember it off by heart or have the patience to dig it out of the reams of nonsense that make up the family’s WhatApp chat.

Instead, I simply head over to the Passwords app, let Face ID do its thing, then navigate to one of the services or accounts I use, then tap on the passwords field to reveal the collection of numbers and letters I’ve used to secure the account.

From there it’s easy to copy the password and send it to the requesting party, either in a separate message, via AirDrop or set up a ‘Shared Group’ in which select passwords can be shared with select people.

It’s so easy to use but also feels secure too, arguably more so than the Google password manager function in Chrome.

On top of this easy password access, the app will also note which passwords may have been compromised via a leak. It then lets you trigger the process of changing them; though really that function just pushes you towards the service’s website to login and change your password there.

So while Apple Intelligence tools might grab the headlines, and the Photos app has more interesting functions in iOS 18, it’s this simple Passwords app that’s grabbed my attention lately.

The best Android phones have similar functionality, but in my experience it feels like the iOS 18 Passwords app… well… just works; yes, I hate myself for saying that, but that’s just how I feel.

To use the app, simply search ‘Passwords’ in the drop-down menu in iOS 18. And do make sure your iCloud Keychain is synced with your iPhone to get the most out of the app.

It's also worth noting the Passwords app is on macOS too, which is handy if you want to dive into your saved passwords, and discover accounts you may have forgotten about, on a larger display.

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