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Simeon:

I’ve just been made aware (by @AvimanyuRoy3) that it is trivially easy to steal highly sensitive & personal information from an iPhone via Shortcuts

Just browsing through the malicious Shortcut is mind blowing

You’ll be unsettled what your phone has on you

From highly personal contacts, names you’ve typed into iMessage, addresses, browsing history, app usage, file contents

I’d even loaded the entire text of Dickens’ David Copperfield into Codea recently to test editing performance. Names and places from the story were indexed

This was from a Shortcut that was disguised to look like a memory cleaner. But it really zipped the above data, uploaded it, then sent the link via iMessage to an attacker. The details were obfuscated in the shortcut through base64 encoding

You couldn’t expect a reasonable user to know what they were agreeing to run when receiving an Apple-hosted link to this shortcut

With automatic scheduling of shortcuts you could possibly trick someone into running a key logger

I’ve disclosed all the details to Apple and hope that they fix it, but the more Shortcuts becomes mainstream, the more people need to be aware of how they can be powerfully misused

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After researching wiper blades for more than 60 hours, scouring user reviews, talking to auto-service shops in such weather-challenged regions as Chicago, Illinois and Portland, Oregon, and testing top competitors on a handful of cars, our findings show that the Bosch Icon is a good bet for most drivers, as long as it fits your car. Bosch wiper blades are recommended by the shops we interviewed more than any other brand, and the Icon is consistently among the highest-rated models by users on websites that sell a wide range of wipers. It’s also earned among the highest ratings of any top-selling blade on Amazon with relatively few complaints.

Bloomberg and iFixit have teamed up to take apart every iPhone and compare them side by side. I love it.

Adobe Flash Player played a pivotal role in the adoption of video, gaming and animation on the Web. Today, sites typically use technologies like HTML5, giving you improved security, reduced power consumption and faster page load times. Going forward, Chrome will de-emphasize Flash in favor of HTML5. Here’s what that means for you.

Today, more than 90% of the Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. HTML5 is much lighter and faster, and publishers are switching over to speed up page loading and save you more battery life. You’ll see an improvement in responsiveness and efficiency for many sites.

This is similar to a change we made last September, when some Flash content became click-to-play with Chrome 42. This had an immediate, positive impact for our users by improving page load times and saving battery power.

In December, Chrome 55 will make HTML5 the default experience, except for sites which only support Flash. For those, you’ll be prompted to enable Flash when you first visit the site. Aside from that, the only change you’ll notice is a safer and more power-efficient browsing experience.

Flash helped make the Web a rich, dynamic experience, and shaped the modern set of web standards. We continue to work closely with Adobe to ensure that your web experience is as fast and secure as possible and to help the Web transition to HTML5.

Posted by Anthony LaForge, curator of Flash in Chrome.