The UK's Attempt to Ban End-to-End Encryption and Its Impact on Apple Users

The UK government's recent proposal to ban end-to-end encryption, which would require tech companies like Apple to surrender their right to encrypt data, has sparked widespread concern among users. The move is seen as a way for the government to gain access to encrypted messages and data, but critics argue that it would compromise user security and freedoms.

If the proposed ban comes into effect, Apple may decide to block iMessage and FaceTime services in the UK, making them unavailable to users. This would have significant implications for WhatsApp and other messaging apps that also offer end-to-end encryption. The impact on these services would be felt as soon as they realize that their competitors are still being allowed to operate with full access to encryption.

The proposed ban has been met with skepticism by Apple, with some speculating that the company may simply remove the UK from iMessage and FaceTime altogether. This could set a precedent for other messaging apps that offer end-to-end encryption, forcing them to reevaluate their own security measures in response.

In contrast to the UK's efforts to restrict encryption, Apple has been pushing out regular security updates for its devices, including iOS and macOS. These updates often introduce new features and improvements to existing ones, such as advanced biometric authentication and enhanced data protection.

The latest examples of Apple's commitment to security come from two recent auctions that took place, both of which saw high-profile items sell for staggering amounts of money. The first auction featured a check signed by Steve Jobs in 1976, which was estimated to fetch over $5,000 but ultimately sold for a whopping $135,000.

The check, which was made out to a PCB maker for $116, is considered one of the rarest and most valuable Apple memorabilia items. Its sale price far exceeded expectations, reflecting its immense rarity and historical significance. The check's provenance and authenticity were confirmed by experts, making it an even more desirable collector's item.

The second auction featured a handwritten draft advertisement for the Apple 1 computer, signed by Steve Jobs himself. What made this particular draft stand out was that it included two original Polaroid photos of the working prototype taken at the Bite Shop. These photographs provided a unique glimpse into the development process of one of the most influential computers of all time.

The draft advertisement and accompanying Polaroids were estimated to fetch over $100,000 but ultimately sold for an impressive $175,000. This sale not only underscores the value placed on Apple memorabilia but also highlights the significance of these early artifacts in understanding the company's history and development.

In unrelated news, a man's wild goose chase at the airport has been making headlines after he discovered that his luggage had gone missing due to a mix-up between United Airlines and Air Canada. The situation began when the man's flight from Chicago to Toronto was diverted to Washington DC due to weather. When he arrived in DC, his luggage was nowhere to be found, despite United claiming it was still en route to Toronto.

The man suspected that something was amiss after receiving a message on his iPhone 14 with Precision tracking, which revealed that the bag had been left behind at the airport. He took matters into his own hands and tracked down Air Canada staff member who assisted him in locating the missing luggage. Despite efforts by the airlines to deliver it to his home, the bag was found sitting stationary at the Toronto Airport for an additional 24 hours before being retrieved.

The incident serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of using tracking devices like air tags when traveling, especially in situations where luggage is misplaced or lost. It highlights the need for clear communication between airlines and passengers to ensure that such mix-ups can be avoided in the future.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys my name is Brandon and welcome back to Apple weekly in this episode we're going to discuss even more iOS 17 features and changes why the UK is trying to ban iOS security updates a $175,000 Apple auction a crazy air tag story and much more and as always if you want to stay updated with all things Apple make sure to hit that subscribe button down below and also be sure to check out the Apple Den newsletter for your weekly fix of Apple news all right so let's start with even more iOS 17 features and changes more specifically changes found in the latest beta 7 so the first thing I want to talk about is the airdrop icon being changed for the Mac so if we go into one of our photos here and tap on airdrop you will notice that the glyph icon now reflects the Mac OS Sonoma wallpaper we also have a change in the maps application related to offline maps so it looks like now when you have weak cell connectivity or weak Wi-Fi connectivity it prompts you to download offline maps so you don't have issues with navigation loading slowly there's also a change with the airpods Pro 2 in the conversation awareness feature if you go down here we have our conversation awareness toggle and the first time this actually invokes on your airpods like when you have your airpods in and conversation awareness actually kicks in it detects that you will get a voiceover kind of a prompt in your airpods telling you about the feature and that it's actually working the exact phrase that is said is just so you know airpods Pro lowered volume and switched listening modes because you started speaking so that's pretty useful because I guarantee you that most people when they install iOS 17 are going to have no clue what that feature actually does or how it works so it's good that they change that now you'll also notice on the lock screen that we now have two new widgets for Shazam so we have this long one right here that shows our last Shazam and also a button where we can press on the lock screen to activate Shazam itself so if I go ahead and tap on this you will see that we get the animation right here and it actually plays inside of the application now I wish this was just in the dynamic Island I wish I didn't actually open up the application but this update is from the app itself it's not an iOS 17 specific feature but I just wanted to mention it because it could be pretty useful if you use Shazam and then I did want to mention once again in case you missed my what's new video on beta 7 that when you flip your switch to mute like if you're in ring mode and you flip your switch to mute and you have vibrations and haptic feedback turned on you will know Noti a new pattern in that haptic feedback it's a little bit more prominent and it's also just a different pattern it has like three back toback to back little vibrations that you feel and that is the first time I believe ever that we've had a change to the vibration pattern for muting our device so that is interesting and again this probably hints at the action button actually coming in the iPhone 15 pros and then we do also have some minor changes in the code in beta 7 but nothing really significant so anyway I want to talk about about the performance and the battery life here in beta 7 so I've not had a single bug in this update you know knock on one that I'm not going to have anything in the next beta but I've not had any issues with beta 7 so far everything has been smooth no crashes nothing like that and that's kind of expected I mean we are on an a build we do have an a at the end of the build number which does indicate we're nearing the end of the beta cycle so in general they are usually the more stable releases but it's been excellent so far and if we take a look I actually ran a fresh geekbench score uh or geekbench test and we got a 2668 on the single core and a 6893 on the multicore and if you go back to my video you can see before we got a 2635 and a 6755 so higher on both ends now after a fresh run of the geekbench test not right after installing the update this is kind of a more accurate look at the performance in terms of geekbench scores and you can see how this compares to the previous beta this is what we had in beta 6 we had a 2645 2668 now 6801 6893 now so this is also a fresh run on the previous beta on beta 6 so you can see how those compare were consistently going up in our geekbench scores and then as far as the battery life goes I am going to grab my main device over here battery life in general has been about the same as beta 6 to me which I did anticipate I did mention that in my Beta 7 what's new video that battery life is probably going to remain about the same it could get a little bit better but I've noticed that battery life has been pretty much in line with what I experienced with beta 6 which is good we had a nice increase going from beta 3 to 4 and then from 4 to 5 and then a minor jump from 5 to 6 and now in beta 7 I think it's about the same as we saw in beta 6 so my last 24 hours nothing special here I have been using my phone quite a bit but the battery life has been great and then my last 10 days you can see have been using my phone a little bit more but again the battery life seems pretty much in line with what we saw over the previous betas cycle beta 6 so no complaints with battery life or performance at this point I think it's good enough for pretty much anybody's daily driver at this point okay so now let's talk about if we're going to see a beta 8 next or if we're going to see an RC next because since we have an a at the end of the build number that indicates usually that we're going to go to an RC after that however Apple has done a build multiple times in a row I think they've done it like three times in a row before RC at one point in the past so I would not rule out a beta 8 from coming next week but it's kind of a 50/50% chance at this point that we see a beta 8 so we could see a beta 8 next week or like I mentioned in my Woods new video we could skip the next two weeks so we may not get a beta on the 28th or the week of the 4th we might just go straight to an RC on the Apple event day so the week of the 11th is when we're expecting to be having that Apple event and apple usually releases the RC build for their big iOS version after that event so if we do have the event on the 12th that's when I would expect to see the r regardless of whether or not we get a beta 8 and then after that we should see the final release right there on the 18th or the week of the 18th okay so now let's talk about some more iOS related news before the main News section of this episode and the first one I have to get on my main phone again for this one is that the Tesla application now has shortcut actions a lot of new shortcut actions it looks like over 20 shortcut actions for different things you can do in the Tesla application we have things like close all windows you can lock and unlock your car via a shortcut like you can include these in automations and everything you can flash the lights you can honk you can open the trunk open the frun you can set the climate you can do all of this straight from shortcuts now which is awesome I need to build out some automations surrounding the Tesla actions in here so if you have a Tesla check these out the threads application finally got a desktop version so I don't know if you're still using threads or not at this point with X paying creators I don't really see the point in posting on threads it looks like Google Chrome is copying Safari and iOS by moving their address bar to the bottom just like apple did a couple of years ago so this is now in testing on the IOS app and me personally I've gotten used to the address bar being at the bottom now I prefer it over being at the top but of course this is always going to be a controversial change WhatsApp now allows for HD video so last week we talked about how you can now send full resolution photos and now that has been expanded into videos you can now send uncompressed videos via WhatsApp tap to pay has now gone live in the Netherlands it's pretty limited right now but a lot of other payment services have confirmed that they will be supporting tap to pay soon okay so now let's talk about the latest Apple news and I'm going to be talking about the iPhone 15 Pro leaks in a separate video so if you want to see that the link is up in the cards up in the top right of this video and also down in the description below there's a lot to cover so I didn't want to cover it in this video because it'd be 30 minutes long but anyways now let's talk about the UK government situation and how they could actually be banning iOS software updates more specifically security updates and this just boggles my mind I don't think it makes any sense but here's the lowdown so the United Kingdom government has unveiled plans to revise the IPA Act of 2016 and in this revised plan they stated that tech companies would need to notify the British government before rolling out a security fix and if a security fix blocks a vulnerability that's being exploited by Security Services it could be refused permission to be pushed out to Consumers so basic basically they're saying that if the government is using this exploit to be able to you know hack into people's phones get into people's phones Apple's not able to push out an update to patch that because you know Secret Service or whoever in the government is using that exploit that's insane that is like extreme versions of insanity the specific quote which is from just security says this device manufacturers would likely also have to notify the government before making available important security updates that fix known vulnerabilities and keep devices is secure accordingly the Secretary of State upon receiving such an advanced notice could now request operators to for instance abstain from patching security gaps to allow the government to maintain access for surveillance purposes I mean I can't say I'm too surprised because keep in mind this is the same government who back in 2017 maybe even earlier was against endtoend encryption and this is who Apple kind of just earlier this year said you know before we end into an encryption before we take that out of our services we'll just remove FaceTime and iMessage from the UK it just won't be available in the UK If you're going to ban in to-end encryption and I think that the UK government thinks that apple and these other big companies are just bluffing but I can honestly see if this goes through and all this goes through that Apple just simply removes you know the UK from iMessage and FaceTime like those applications will just simply not work in the UK and I think once that happens that's going to set the example for WhatsApp and you know all these other messaging applications that have end to end encryption but anyway the whole moral of the story is about the security updates and how just insane it is that the UK is really trying to essentially ban certain security updates from going out based on if the government is actually using them to basically spy on other people just insane what do you think about this now let's talk about two different Apple auctions that just ended this past week and the numbers that these pieces went for is insane so the first one is a check from 1976 but this is no ordinary check this one was signed by both Steve Jobs and Steve wnc and it is the second check to ever be written by the Apple computer company and it was made out to PCB maker for $116 and this check was estimated to go for more than $5,000 and boy did it surpass that estimate because it just sold for $135,000 so that is an insane amount of money for a piece of memorabilia obviously it's very limited very rare so it's probably worth it for with the collector but what's even crazier is that another auction ended that same day and it went for $175,000 and this auction that went for $175,000 was a Steve Jobs handwritten advertisement draft for the Apple 1 computer but what makes it even cooler and honestly the reason I probably went for so much is because it also included two Polaroids two original polaroid pictures of the working prototype photographed at the bite shop and annotated by Steve jobs so that is super cool and it's really crazy to see how much these memorabilia pieces are going for these days it's insane and honestly like I've said before I could see them just increasing in value over the long term and then finally just as tradition let's talk about another crazy air tag story this time it's about a man who went on an Everly increasing wild goose chase while trying to get his luggage back from the airport so this man was flying from Chicago to Toronto but due to weather his flight got cancelled and he was diverted to Washington DC and and while both he and his luggage arrived in DC by the time he made it back to Toronto in the middle of the night his bags were nowhere to be found so naturally he contacted United Airlines and they told him that his luggage was in Toronto but they would still deliver it to his home since he couldn't find it but the man determined that that statement was a lie because he thankfully had an air tag in his bag and was able to see that the bag was actually left behind in Washington it was not in Toronto like they said so United finally put the bag on an Air Canada flight back to Toronto but that's where even more confusion began because the airlines apparently were not communicating since the bag was just put on a carousel at baggage claim instead of actually being delivered to his house so it was then that it was left at the baggage Hall unattended for the next 24 hours and when he noticed this in his find my application he contacted United again to tell them he never received his bag and that's when they said that the bag was still in Washington DC even though his air tag said it was in Toronto and of course the airlines assured him that someone would get his bag to him ASAP but it never happened he watched it sit stationary in that same airport for another 24 hours so after that the next day he decided to go to the Toronto Airport himself and he found an Air Canada staff member who was actually helpful and they allowed him to be escorted into the secured baggage Hall and when he was in there he used his iPhone 14 and most likely Precision tracking to locate his bag and he finally got that sorted out but he had to do it himself so just crazy in another instance another reminder that if you're traveling anywhere an air tag in your bag is an absolute necessity it is a must but anyways guys I hope you enjoyed this episode it was a little bit shorter because a lot of the news this week was surrounding the iPhone 15 and that's why I made a separate video on that again up in the cards down in the description below but nonetheless I hope you enjoyed this video if you did I would appreciate if you give it a thumbs up also make sure to subscribe for more videos just like this one but anyways guys thanks again for watching and I'll see you soonwhat's up guys my name is Brandon and welcome back to Apple weekly in this episode we're going to discuss even more iOS 17 features and changes why the UK is trying to ban iOS security updates a $175,000 Apple auction a crazy air tag story and much more and as always if you want to stay updated with all things Apple make sure to hit that subscribe button down below and also be sure to check out the Apple Den newsletter for your weekly fix of Apple news all right so let's start with even more iOS 17 features and changes more specifically changes found in the latest beta 7 so the first thing I want to talk about is the airdrop icon being changed for the Mac so if we go into one of our photos here and tap on airdrop you will notice that the glyph icon now reflects the Mac OS Sonoma wallpaper we also have a change in the maps application related to offline maps so it looks like now when you have weak cell connectivity or weak Wi-Fi connectivity it prompts you to download offline maps so you don't have issues with navigation loading slowly there's also a change with the airpods Pro 2 in the conversation awareness feature if you go down here we have our conversation awareness toggle and the first time this actually invokes on your airpods like when you have your airpods in and conversation awareness actually kicks in it detects that you will get a voiceover kind of a prompt in your airpods telling you about the feature and that it's actually working the exact phrase that is said is just so you know airpods Pro lowered volume and switched listening modes because you started speaking so that's pretty useful because I guarantee you that most people when they install iOS 17 are going to have no clue what that feature actually does or how it works so it's good that they change that now you'll also notice on the lock screen that we now have two new widgets for Shazam so we have this long one right here that shows our last Shazam and also a button where we can press on the lock screen to activate Shazam itself so if I go ahead and tap on this you will see that we get the animation right here and it actually plays inside of the application now I wish this was just in the dynamic Island I wish I didn't actually open up the application but this update is from the app itself it's not an iOS 17 specific feature but I just wanted to mention it because it could be pretty useful if you use Shazam and then I did want to mention once again in case you missed my what's new video on beta 7 that when you flip your switch to mute like if you're in ring mode and you flip your switch to mute and you have vibrations and haptic feedback turned on you will know Noti a new pattern in that haptic feedback it's a little bit more prominent and it's also just a different pattern it has like three back toback to back little vibrations that you feel and that is the first time I believe ever that we've had a change to the vibration pattern for muting our device so that is interesting and again this probably hints at the action button actually coming in the iPhone 15 pros and then we do also have some minor changes in the code in beta 7 but nothing really significant so anyway I want to talk about about the performance and the battery life here in beta 7 so I've not had a single bug in this update you know knock on one that I'm not going to have anything in the next beta but I've not had any issues with beta 7 so far everything has been smooth no crashes nothing like that and that's kind of expected I mean we are on an a build we do have an a at the end of the build number which does indicate we're nearing the end of the beta cycle so in general they are usually the more stable releases but it's been excellent so far and if we take a look I actually ran a fresh geekbench score uh or geekbench test and we got a 2668 on the single core and a 6893 on the multicore and if you go back to my video you can see before we got a 2635 and a 6755 so higher on both ends now after a fresh run of the geekbench test not right after installing the update this is kind of a more accurate look at the performance in terms of geekbench scores and you can see how this compares to the previous beta this is what we had in beta 6 we had a 2645 2668 now 6801 6893 now so this is also a fresh run on the previous beta on beta 6 so you can see how those compare were consistently going up in our geekbench scores and then as far as the battery life goes I am going to grab my main device over here battery life in general has been about the same as beta 6 to me which I did anticipate I did mention that in my Beta 7 what's new video that battery life is probably going to remain about the same it could get a little bit better but I've noticed that battery life has been pretty much in line with what I experienced with beta 6 which is good we had a nice increase going from beta 3 to 4 and then from 4 to 5 and then a minor jump from 5 to 6 and now in beta 7 I think it's about the same as we saw in beta 6 so my last 24 hours nothing special here I have been using my phone quite a bit but the battery life has been great and then my last 10 days you can see have been using my phone a little bit more but again the battery life seems pretty much in line with what we saw over the previous betas cycle beta 6 so no complaints with battery life or performance at this point I think it's good enough for pretty much anybody's daily driver at this point okay so now let's talk about if we're going to see a beta 8 next or if we're going to see an RC next because since we have an a at the end of the build number that indicates usually that we're going to go to an RC after that however Apple has done a build multiple times in a row I think they've done it like three times in a row before RC at one point in the past so I would not rule out a beta 8 from coming next week but it's kind of a 50/50% chance at this point that we see a beta 8 so we could see a beta 8 next week or like I mentioned in my Woods new video we could skip the next two weeks so we may not get a beta on the 28th or the week of the 4th we might just go straight to an RC on the Apple event day so the week of the 11th is when we're expecting to be having that Apple event and apple usually releases the RC build for their big iOS version after that event so if we do have the event on the 12th that's when I would expect to see the r regardless of whether or not we get a beta 8 and then after that we should see the final release right there on the 18th or the week of the 18th okay so now let's talk about some more iOS related news before the main News section of this episode and the first one I have to get on my main phone again for this one is that the Tesla application now has shortcut actions a lot of new shortcut actions it looks like over 20 shortcut actions for different things you can do in the Tesla application we have things like close all windows you can lock and unlock your car via a shortcut like you can include these in automations and everything you can flash the lights you can honk you can open the trunk open the frun you can set the climate you can do all of this straight from shortcuts now which is awesome I need to build out some automations surrounding the Tesla actions in here so if you have a Tesla check these out the threads application finally got a desktop version so I don't know if you're still using threads or not at this point with X paying creators I don't really see the point in posting on threads it looks like Google Chrome is copying Safari and iOS by moving their address bar to the bottom just like apple did a couple of years ago so this is now in testing on the IOS app and me personally I've gotten used to the address bar being at the bottom now I prefer it over being at the top but of course this is always going to be a controversial change WhatsApp now allows for HD video so last week we talked about how you can now send full resolution photos and now that has been expanded into videos you can now send uncompressed videos via WhatsApp tap to pay has now gone live in the Netherlands it's pretty limited right now but a lot of other payment services have confirmed that they will be supporting tap to pay soon okay so now let's talk about the latest Apple news and I'm going to be talking about the iPhone 15 Pro leaks in a separate video so if you want to see that the link is up in the cards up in the top right of this video and also down in the description below there's a lot to cover so I didn't want to cover it in this video because it'd be 30 minutes long but anyways now let's talk about the UK government situation and how they could actually be banning iOS software updates more specifically security updates and this just boggles my mind I don't think it makes any sense but here's the lowdown so the United Kingdom government has unveiled plans to revise the IPA Act of 2016 and in this revised plan they stated that tech companies would need to notify the British government before rolling out a security fix and if a security fix blocks a vulnerability that's being exploited by Security Services it could be refused permission to be pushed out to Consumers so basic basically they're saying that if the government is using this exploit to be able to you know hack into people's phones get into people's phones Apple's not able to push out an update to patch that because you know Secret Service or whoever in the government is using that exploit that's insane that is like extreme versions of insanity the specific quote which is from just security says this device manufacturers would likely also have to notify the government before making available important security updates that fix known vulnerabilities and keep devices is secure accordingly the Secretary of State upon receiving such an advanced notice could now request operators to for instance abstain from patching security gaps to allow the government to maintain access for surveillance purposes I mean I can't say I'm too surprised because keep in mind this is the same government who back in 2017 maybe even earlier was against endtoend encryption and this is who Apple kind of just earlier this year said you know before we end into an encryption before we take that out of our services we'll just remove FaceTime and iMessage from the UK it just won't be available in the UK If you're going to ban in to-end encryption and I think that the UK government thinks that apple and these other big companies are just bluffing but I can honestly see if this goes through and all this goes through that Apple just simply removes you know the UK from iMessage and FaceTime like those applications will just simply not work in the UK and I think once that happens that's going to set the example for WhatsApp and you know all these other messaging applications that have end to end encryption but anyway the whole moral of the story is about the security updates and how just insane it is that the UK is really trying to essentially ban certain security updates from going out based on if the government is actually using them to basically spy on other people just insane what do you think about this now let's talk about two different Apple auctions that just ended this past week and the numbers that these pieces went for is insane so the first one is a check from 1976 but this is no ordinary check this one was signed by both Steve Jobs and Steve wnc and it is the second check to ever be written by the Apple computer company and it was made out to PCB maker for $116 and this check was estimated to go for more than $5,000 and boy did it surpass that estimate because it just sold for $135,000 so that is an insane amount of money for a piece of memorabilia obviously it's very limited very rare so it's probably worth it for with the collector but what's even crazier is that another auction ended that same day and it went for $175,000 and this auction that went for $175,000 was a Steve Jobs handwritten advertisement draft for the Apple 1 computer but what makes it even cooler and honestly the reason I probably went for so much is because it also included two Polaroids two original polaroid pictures of the working prototype photographed at the bite shop and annotated by Steve jobs so that is super cool and it's really crazy to see how much these memorabilia pieces are going for these days it's insane and honestly like I've said before I could see them just increasing in value over the long term and then finally just as tradition let's talk about another crazy air tag story this time it's about a man who went on an Everly increasing wild goose chase while trying to get his luggage back from the airport so this man was flying from Chicago to Toronto but due to weather his flight got cancelled and he was diverted to Washington DC and and while both he and his luggage arrived in DC by the time he made it back to Toronto in the middle of the night his bags were nowhere to be found so naturally he contacted United Airlines and they told him that his luggage was in Toronto but they would still deliver it to his home since he couldn't find it but the man determined that that statement was a lie because he thankfully had an air tag in his bag and was able to see that the bag was actually left behind in Washington it was not in Toronto like they said so United finally put the bag on an Air Canada flight back to Toronto but that's where even more confusion began because the airlines apparently were not communicating since the bag was just put on a carousel at baggage claim instead of actually being delivered to his house so it was then that it was left at the baggage Hall unattended for the next 24 hours and when he noticed this in his find my application he contacted United again to tell them he never received his bag and that's when they said that the bag was still in Washington DC even though his air tag said it was in Toronto and of course the airlines assured him that someone would get his bag to him ASAP but it never happened he watched it sit stationary in that same airport for another 24 hours so after that the next day he decided to go to the Toronto Airport himself and he found an Air Canada staff member who was actually helpful and they allowed him to be escorted into the secured baggage Hall and when he was in there he used his iPhone 14 and most likely Precision tracking to locate his bag and he finally got that sorted out but he had to do it himself so just crazy in another instance another reminder that if you're traveling anywhere an air tag in your bag is an absolute necessity it is a must but anyways guys I hope you enjoyed this episode it was a little bit shorter because a lot of the news this week was surrounding the iPhone 15 and that's why I made a separate video on that again up in the cards down in the description below but nonetheless I hope you enjoyed this video if you did I would appreciate if you give it a thumbs up also make sure to subscribe for more videos just like this one but anyways guys thanks again for watching and I'll see you soon\n"