This is Mac OSKIN.

Stronger Data Protections from Apple, Surprising News out of China, and a slew of

OS release candidates.

It is Thursday the 8th of December 2022. I'm Ken Ray and

this is news from Maco-S-Can brought to you by yours truly and supported by people like you

patrons through Patreon find out more and that your support at patreon.com slash mecko-Sken.

Big security announcements from Apple on Wednesday some for select groups one for just about the quietly. We'll start with the press release. Under the headline, Apple advances

user security with powerful new data protections. The Cupertino company said

it was introducing three advanced security features focused on protecting against threats to user data in the cloud.

Those are iMessage contact key verification, security keys for Apple ID, and advanced data protection for

iCloud. Those first two are for those select groups I mentioned.

On iMessage contact key verification, Apple points out that iMessage and

FaceTime have been end-to-end encrypted for a while so messages and

conversations can only be read by the sender and recipients keeping conversations

private and secure. But there are ways third parties could sort of slip into the

stream, catching and spying on communications in transit.

Now to be clear, those ways are not easy, sort of the domain of state-sponsored attackers.

With iMessage contact Keats. to the domain of state-sponsored attackers.

With iMessage contact key verification, Apple says users who face extraordinary digital threats,

such as journalists, human rights activists, and members of government can choose to further

verify that they are messaging only with the people they intend.

And for even higher security, says Apple, I- Message Contact Key Verification users can compare a contact

...