Bytes: What’s new in tech
Safeguarding your digital afterlife
Apple’s latest iPhone software update “includes a much overdue Legacy Contact setting,” said Joanna Stern in The Wall Street Journal. This allows you to designate “who can access your Apple account—your photos, notes, mail, and more—when you die.” It may sound grim, but the photos, videos, and messages on our phones are an increasingly vital “record of memories and life stories.” A chosen legacy contact will get an access key that is automatically “stored in an encrypted location on the device.” The key will only work after your death certificate is uploaded to an Apple website and reviewed by Apple staff. If it checks out, your legacy contact will get access to “the whole enchilada”—except your passcodes.
A digital dossier on parents
Parents in Scottsdale, Ariz., discovered that their school board president had been keeping files on them after seeing a Google Drive folder on his desktop, said Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker. Tension between parents and the Scottsdale Unified School District over mask mandates and remote learning had been high since the pandemic began. But it soared after the board president emailed a screenshot of his desktop that accidentally revealed a link to the folder. The folder included hundreds of files filled with screenshots of posts from a popular Facebook group, kids’ photos, and “addresses, traffic tickets, divorce records, and business filings” of parents and staff members. One parent discovered copies of “emails she had exchanged with her children’s teachers” and even “a background check from a private investigator.” The Drive folder was left public, so anyone with the internet link could view it.
Much easier than robbing a bank
Digital currency exchanges keep getting hacked, said Kevin Collier in NBCNews.com. The exchanges “work like traditional money exchanges, setting prices for various currencies and taking a small fee to let users trade.” Many of them keep bundles of cryptocurrencies in “hot wallets”—digital files connected to the internet—for easier transfers to investors. Hackers who gain access to their accounts can “pull off a major heist.” Just this year, such exchanges have been hit with “more than 20 hacks in which a digital robber stole at least $10 million in digital currencies,” including at least six thefts over $100 million. “By comparison, bank robberies netted perpetrators an average of less than $5,000 per heist last year.”