ADAM ENGST 19 March 2026
I’ve been thinking a lot more about physical iPhone security recently. For a long time, we’ve encouraged biometric authentication over manually entering iPhone passcodes because of the very real threat of someone seeing you enter your passcode, stealing your iPhone, and using the passcode to reset your Apple Account password, locking you out of your digital life and enabling both financial and identity theft (see our “iPhone Passcode Thefts” series).
To block that, Apple introduced Stolen Device Protection, which leans more heavily on biometric authentication and adds an hour-long delay to certain actions, optionally only when you’re not in one of your regular locations (see “Turn On Stolen Device Protection in iOS 17.3,” 25 January 2024). Delay-triggering actions include changing your Apple Account password or signing out of your Apple Account, adding or removing a Face ID or Touch ID enrollment, changing your passcode, turning off Find My or Stolen Device Protection, and attempting to use Reset All Settings.
I’ve encountered the delay only once, when I considered changing my passcode so a friend could use my iPhone to time a race. The delay helped me remember that I’d already come up with a much better solution (see “Guided Access Turns Your iPhone or iPad into a Sharable Single-App Tool,” 11 October 2024).
Nonetheless, I generally recommend Stolen Device Protection. Apple appears poised to encourage its use more heavily. According to MacRumors, iOS 26.4 will add Stolen Device Protection to the setup assistant. That is not the same as making it the default—you can always tap Not Now to sidestep the suggestion—but it does make it far more likely that users will turn the feature on.
As much as I like and use Face ID, my faith in the security of biometric authentication has been shaken recently, not because of technical limitations, but legal ones. Although law enforcement cannot force someone to reveal a passcode or password, officers can compel a person to use Face ID or Touch ID to unlock a device. That distinction made national news earlier this year, and in a way that struck a nerve.
When the FBI raided Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, their warrant explicitly gave agents permission to force her to unlock her devices with biometrics. Although Natanson claimed biometrics were not enabled on any of her devices, agents forced her to place her finger on her Washington Post-issued MacBook Pro’s Touch ID sensor, and it unlocked.
It’s unclear why the FBI didn’t try to make Natanson unlock her iPhone. She had put it into Lockdown Mode (an extreme security feature intended for people facing sophisticated threats), and the agents may not have realized that Face ID remains active in Lockdown Mode. Or perhaps she really had disabled Face ID on the iPhone. Regardless, Ars Technica noted that the government said in subsequent filings it was unable to retrieve any data from the iPhone due to Lockdown Mode’s protections. It’s nice to have public confirmation of Lockdown Mode’s security.
My brand of tech journalism is far from the beats Natanson covers and the sources she maintains, but it’s still chilling to read about the FBI raiding the home of a journalist as part of a leak investigation.
It goes beyond my profession. In the past, it felt like only special people had to think about the connection between the physical and digital security of their iPhones. But now, with protesters being arrested and international tourists being detained at the US border, concerns over digital security have spread to a wider swath of the population.
Until recently, I’ve never even considered turning off Face ID while traveling or out in public, but it seems more relevant today. I’ve attended some protests in Ithaca, many of my running friends are from other countries, ICE recently arrested people in a nearby town, and I’m planning to attend the ACES Conference in Minneapolis in May. Despite my generally privileged status as an older white guy, additional caution seems warranted.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Consumer Reports have published guides for protecting your security and privacy in sensitive situations such as protests or when crossing borders. My expanded and annotated version of that advice includes the following items, all of which should be done before you leave home to avoid Stolen Device Protection delays and other problems. (Of course, you could also turn your iPhone off, but that prevents you from taking photos or videos.) I also strongly encourage you to practice using your iPhone with all these options off ahead of time, so you aren’t surprised by the many limitations. To increase security and privacy:
If you’re stopped at a protest or detained at a border, you may be asked to unlock your iPhone. You can decline to provide your passcode, but declining may prolong your detention, and border agents have broader authority than domestic law enforcement; they can seize your device and hold it for examination. For additional advice, refer to the ACLU’s excellent Know Your Rights collection of documents about your rights at the border, at protests, when filming or recording in public, and if you’re stopped by police. The EFF publishes an even more detailed guide to your rights at the border.
Once you’re in a safe location, you’ll want to reverse most of these changes. Re-enable Face ID, turn Location Services back on, re-enable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, turn off Airplane mode if you enabled it, and disable Lockdown Mode if you don’t normally use it.
I realize that some of this may sound as though it’s verging on paranoia, and I would have thought so in the past as well. Today, if you choose to put yourself in certain situations, it just feels prudent.
Andrew Orr
Mon Mar 30 2026, 09:53 AM EDT · 2 minute read
macOS Terminal
Malicious ads are pushing fake Homebrew installers to Mac users, and the attack relies on trusting the first Google search result.
Attackers are buying Google ads to place a fake Homebrew site above the real one, then trick users into running a malicious Terminal command. The tactic is effective because it leans on routine behavior instead of technical exploits.
Developers and everyday Mac users rely on Homebrew to install software, which makes it a high-value target. The real installation process already involves pasting a command into Terminal, so the fake version doesn't immediately stand out.
Users expect to copy and paste setup commands, and that expectation lowers their guard at exactly the wrong moment. Attackers take advantage of that trust by presenting a nearly identical workflow with a hidden payload.
Attackers start the flow with a sponsored Google result that appears before the official Homebrew site. A fake page mirrors the real one, but swaps the legitimate install command for an obfuscated script that runs malware.
According to a Reddit post, the command is encoded in Base64, which hides its intent behind harmless-looking text. Once pasted into Terminal, the payload decodes and installs an information stealer.
This technique isn't new, but it works because it fits into normal setup behavior. Users expect to copy and paste commands, and the encoding masks obvious red flags.
Researchers have tied the payload to AMOS, or Atomic macOS Stealer, which targets browser data, credentials, and crypto wallets. Similar tools have spread widely through fake installers and cloned sites.
Attackers now use platforms like search ads and hosted content to distribute these payloads at scale. The shift moves away from exploits and toward user-driven compromise, where people end up running the code themselves.
Trust becomes the weak point when people search for familiar tools and expect the top result to be legitimate. An official-looking page paired with familiar setup steps lowers suspicion at exactly the wrong moment.
Sponsored results blur the line between ads and real links. Paid placements can sit above organic results, and attackers can rotate domains quickly, which makes enforcement inconsistent.
Spotting the fake website. Image credit: u/Maxdme124
Base64 encoding adds another layer of deception without being malicious on its own. In this context, it hides intent and makes dangerous commands harder to recognize before execution.
Going straight to brew.sh avoids the risk of landing on a spoofed site through search results. Typing the URL directly or saving a bookmark removes the chance of clicking a malicious ad that looks legitimate.
Treat any request to paste a command into Terminal with skepticism, especially when it's obfuscated or comes from an unfamiliar site. Real installation commands are readable, so encoded scripts, odd redirects, or rushed instructions should raise immediate concern.
Use an ad blocker to strip out sponsored results entirely, which cuts off one of the main delivery paths for attacks like this. Fewer ads means fewer chances for attackers to insert themselves ahead of legitimate results.
Assume compromise if a suspicious command has already been run, then act quickly to limit damage. Change passwords, enable two-factor authentication, and check for persistence mechanisms commonly used by macOS malware to survive reboots.
I had an interesting conversation with my son Tristan the other day. Because he’s so engrossed in his PhD research in machine learning at Simon Fraser University, I often try to steer our discussions away from the nitty-gritty of his experiments and toward more general tech topics I can grasp without graduate-level math and computer science. We were chatting while I was eating lunch, usually a time when I read a magazine or newspaper, and something he said made me wonder out loud, “Why do I read?”
That’s an existential question, since I read constantly throughout the day. For some types of reading, the answer is easy. I read the local alt-weekly newspapers because of their real-world connections to the people, institutions, and environment in which I live. Before bed, I read fiction for enjoyment and to shift my mind away from the thoughts of the day to help me get to sleep. And I keep up with tech news because it’s my profession—I need to know what’s going on even when it likely won’t affect what I write in TidBITS directly.
Harder to explain are The New Yorker, Science News, and other magazines my mother enjoys giving to me after she’s done, evergreen articles in old copies of The New York Times that a friend of my parents saves for me to start twice-daily fires in our kachelofen woodstove, and RSS-retrieved blog posts on a variety of topics (see “Comparing Blogtrottr, Feedrabbit, and Follow.it for Receiving RSS Feeds in Email,” 22 August 2024).
In the past, I’ve thought of reading as a form of database import. The more information I consumed and added to my internal database, the more I would know, the better my writing would become, and the more scintillating a conversationalist I’d be. And somehow fame and fortune would follow. I’m apparently not very good at long-term goals.
But “know” is a loaded word—even though I have an objectively decent memory (for facts, if not events and emotions, perhaps related to my aphantasia), I’m sure that I forget nearly everything I read. Just because I’ve read an article doesn’t mean I could tell you much about it a week, a month, or a year later. Arguably, if I went back to an article I read a year ago, I might not even remember having read it before. Heck, I don’t even necessarily remember what I’ve written a few years later—that’s what the TidBITS search engine is for.
I’m well aware of the ephemeral nature of memory, so I periodically investigate apps or services that let me save bits of text that seem particularly insightful or important while I’m reading and that I’m certain that I’ll want to refer back to at some future point in time. The latest one is Sublime, but, as with all its predecessors, I started clipping text to it, got busy with something else, and stopped using it before I ever came up with a reason to search through my snippets. I never go back to these apps or the information I thought was so important in the past.
The one database I do maintain is my email archive. I save nearly all my email in Gmail, and I regularly search for old conversations, largely by person, to revisit the topics. However, I seldom use it to return to articles, blog posts, and newsletters. I have to mark messages containing general information unread if I want to refer to them in the near future. Once a message has been marked as read, I’m unlikely ever to remember it or see it again, no matter how important I initially thought it was. Ironically, I’ve accumulated so many unread messages that I’ve forgotten why most of them seemed worth saving.
The realization from my conversation with Tristan is that what reading really does is adjust the weights in my internal large language model. Let me explain.
Briefly, large language models are trained by feeding them enormous amounts of text and asking them to predict what word comes next in a known sequence. When the model’s guess doesn’t match the actual training data, its internal “weights”—the billions of numeric values that map the links between concepts—are nudged slightly to make the correct answer more likely next time. After billions of these adjustments, the weights encode useful patterns: how ideas relate to each other, what concepts cluster together, what kinds of responses make sense in different contexts.
There’s a recursive irony here. We have long tried to understand—or at least talk about—the brain by comparing it to prominent technologies of the era: telephone switchboards, filing cabinets, databases. Now I’m comparing my mind to an LLM, but neural networks were themselves loosely inspired by how we think biological neurons work. The metaphor loops back on itself, which perhaps suggests it’s less of a metaphor than it first appears.
As a dedicated reader, I’ve consumed vast quantities of text—perhaps several thousand books, more than a hundred thousand articles, and over a million email messages, though I shudder to do the math. While my consumption of text pales in comparison to even a toy LLM, the analogy feels more apt than a database. I’m not adding records to a mental database; I’m subtly adjusting the likelihood that certain ideas, phrasings, and connections will surface when I think, speak, or write.
Reading a debunking of data centers in space doesn’t mean I’ll remember (or even understand) the equations behind why the idea is flawed, but it will probably update my training data from high school physics to nudge me more in the direction of skepticism the next time someone proposes solving an Earth-bound problem by launching it into orbit. Reading widely—even material I’ll mostly forget—keeps reweighting my internal model, shaping what I reach for without my conscious awareness.
This analogy even maps pretty well to how we learn. As children, we essentially pre-train our models on general data and build foundational weights—our connections between core concepts. Since they’re based on relatively little training data, those weights have less substance and are more easily affected by new information. Reading a single book or taking an influential class can radically change our views on the world.
During formal education and professional training, reading to master a subject works more like fine-tuning a large language model. With fine-tuning, the model is further trained on a smaller, specialized dataset. People learning new fields benefit from repetition, active recall, and deliberate engagement precisely because they’re trying to create strong new weights where few existed before.
Later in life, most of those weights are sufficiently mature that the flow of general reading can adjust them only slightly. An older person is likely to adopt a previously unthinkable position only if they have a life-changing experience or go down the rabbit hole for a particular topic.
Flipping my internal analogy from database to large language model is surprisingly freeing. No longer do I have to decide whether something I’m reading is important enough to bookmark, file away in a snippet keeper, or mark in my email app. Beyond the desire to keep items near the surface when I want to write about them in the near future, I can let what I read go in one eye and out the other, adjusting my mental model’s weights along the way.
To draw on my background as a Classics major at Cornell (a few strong weights from my Ancient Philosophy classes!), the analogy is almost Heraclitean in its elegance. Heraclitus is often paraphrased as saying, “No man can step in the same river twice,” calling attention to the fact that neither the river nor the man (at least in later interpretations) remains the same on any subsequent immersion. Information is a stream through my consciousness, and every particular bit reshapes my consciousness ever so slightly in passing by.
Will I be able to pull out an accurate retelling of what I’ve read at what’s called “inference”—when a model generates output in response to a prompt? Maybe, maybe not. Human memory is fallible in much the same ways that AIs hallucinate, though we usually call our hallucinations “anecdotes.” But if something tickles enough of my neurons that I can trigger a search to inform what I’m writing or make a devastatingly apropos comment in a cocktail party conversation, I’m happy.
If you, like me, have ever felt guilty about remembering little of what you read, perhaps it’s worth reframing: you’re not failing to build a database—you’re tuning your personal LLM.
SUMAN CHAKRABARTI 27 February 2026
I have a 2017 Brother HL-L8360CDW laser printer that I hadn’t used in years but wanted to re-enable for a new Mac Studio. After I connected it to my Wi-Fi network, AirPrint made it available for my Mac Studio, and I was able to print to it. Case closed.
But like so many of us, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. The printer was displaying a message on its LCD screen indicating that it had found a new firmware update. Who doesn’t like a good firmware update? Particularly one that may fix bugs and security issues, which is an essential part of responsibly managing devices exposed to the Internet.
Such good intentions of responsible ownership triggered the onset of trouble. Attempting to install the firmware update via the onscreen menu of the printer’s control panel did nothing—I ended up back at the Found New Firmware message. I wasn’t entirely surprised, since the printer was almost a decade old, and it’s easy to imagine a hardcoded update system failing over that period. It’s even conceivable that a previous firmware update that I’d missed would have fixed the problem. The printer’s engineers may not have anticipated it being left inactive for so long.
Unfortunately, attempting to install the firmware update from the printer’s control panel caused the printer to go offline, so the Mac could no longer see it. Nor could I get it to print a test page.
Perturbed that I had seemingly broken a functional printer by trying to update the firmware, I decided my best bet was to see if I could install the firmware update another way. I visited the printer’s support page, which revealed that the latest firmware update was from October 2025, and there were 28 previous updates, most of which promised “Improvement to help with the performance of the machine.” (In retrospect, I wonder if the seeming loop when updating the firmware from the printer’s control panel was a result of it downloading each subsequent update in turn, rather than jumping straight to the latest version.)
First, I tried using the Brother Firmware Update Tool over Wi-Fi, but since the Mac couldn’t see the printer at all, I wasn’t surprised when it failed. I was a bit more annoyed when an old Ethernet cable failed.
A quick trip to Glenn Fleishman’s Take Control of Untangling Connections reminded me that when the Brother HL-L8360CDW was released in 2017, USB 2.0 was the lowest common denominator communication method for laser printers—even USB 2.0’s 480 Mbps throughput was more than enough for print jobs.
Indeed, once I connected a standard USB Type-A to USB-B cable, the Brother Firmware Update Tool could suddenly see my printer. A click of a button and a few minutes of updating later, and the printer was running the latest firmware. Even better, it appeared on Wi-Fi again, and I was able to print. Problem solved!
I share this not because flashing the firmware of an ancient Brother laser printer is something that many people will want to do, but because TidBITS readers are often asked for help in reactivating older hardware. Schools, non-profits, and charities working with razor-thin budgets frequently receive and want to repurpose donated legacy devices.
The moral of the story is that when you’re trying to work with older hardware, your best bet is often the simplest connection type available when the device was new. Prefer cables over wireless, and don’t be dismissive of protocols like USB 2.0 that are now laughably slow but may have been state-of-the-art at the time.
ADAM ENGST 23 March 2026
Security researchers at Google, iVerify, and Lookout have jointly revealed the discovery of a sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit called DarkSword, which multiple threat actors are using to compromise devices running iOS 18. Unlike highly targeted spyware attacks of the past, DarkSword has been deployed via compromised legitimate websites, raising the risk that everyday iPhone users could fall victim.
The proliferation of DarkSword suggests a market where exploit brokers sell such tools to multiple buyers. Even worse, a group of Russian hackers left the complete, unobfuscated DarkSword code—including helpful comments explaining each component—available on the compromised sites, where it could have been copied and reused.
DarkSword is a full exploit chain—a sequence of vulnerabilities chained together to bypass iOS’s multiple security layers—built entirely in JavaScript that can silently compromise an iPhone when a user simply visits an infected website using Safari. No additional clicks, downloads, or interaction beyond visiting the page are required. The attack works against iOS versions 18.4 through 18.6.2, with some variants also targeting iOS 18.7.
Once a device is compromised, researchers say DarkSword can rapidly harvest alarming amounts of data, including:
Rather than installing persistent spyware, DarkSword takes a smash-and-grab approach: it collects and exfiltrates data quickly, then disengages. Researchers say the DarkSword chain lacks a persistence mechanism, but by that point, the data may already have been stolen.
Not you, if you’ve installed iOS updates as they’ve been made available. Apple addressed the vulnerabilities that DarkSword exploits starting in the iOS 18.7.2 and 18.7.3 security updates late last year. What about iOS 26? Researchers say they have no evidence that DarkSword has been used against iOS 26 devices, but they note that some of the underlying vulnerabilities were not fully patched until iOS 26.3. None of the security reports even mentions the iPad, but the vulnerabilities are almost certainly the same.
To see what version of iOS you’re running, navigate to Settings > General > About and look next to iOS Version. If it’s between—or includes—iOS 18.4 and iOS 18.7.2, your device is vulnerable to DarkSword. If you’re running iOS 18.7.3 or later, you’re fine.
According to Apple’s App Store adoption rate numbers, 24% of all iPhones are still running iOS 18 today, though they don’t break out iOS 18 sub-versions. Although that could amount to hundreds of millions of iPhones, it seems likely that many fewer people stopped updating during the vulnerable window.
Regardless of the overall population, all that really matters is the version you and the people you support are using. Check now, I’ll wait.
Despite the sophistication of the DarkSword exploit chain, protecting vulnerable devices from it is simple. You have two choices:
As much as I appreciate the trepidation many people have about Liquid Glass on the iPhone, much of the negative press—including mine—is aimed at pushing Apple to address relatively subtle problems because Liquid Glass is here to stay. I’ve been using Liquid Glass on my iPhone since the iOS 26 betas, and while I prefer the iOS 18 interface, Liquid Glass hasn’t prevented me from doing anything or slowed me down much, especially after changing a few key settings (see “How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface,” 9 October 2025). Sure, I’d prefer a traditional Done button to Liquid Glass’s inscrutable blue checkmark, but iOS 26 also offers legitimate improvements that make life easier, such as how the Phone app’s new Unified view prevents accidental calls (see “Comparing the Classic and Unified Views in iOS 26’s Phone App,” 10 November 2025).
If you’re concerned about DarkSword, upgrading to iOS 26 is a better option than living in Lockdown Mode in iOS 18.
The appearance of two sophisticated iOS exploit chains—DarkSword and Coruna (see “Older iPhones and iPads Receive Critical Security Updates for Coruna Exploits,” 13 March 2026)—within weeks of each other signals a troubling shift. We have long thought of exploits like these as rare tools used only for highly targeted attacks against specific individuals, but they’re now being deployed more broadly against anyone who visits a compromised website.
As Lookout’s Justin Albrecht told Wired: “People assumed that it was just going to be journalists or activists or maybe an opposition politician that was targeted, and that this wasn’t a concern for a normal citizen. Now that we see iOS exploits being delivered through an unscrupulous broker, there’s a whole market here for this to get to cybercriminals.”
Of course, the proliferation of these tools doesn’t mean everyone will suddenly suffer data theft. DarkSword has to be installed on a website you visit, which means attackers have to compromise a site no one would expect to host malware. That’s not going to happen regularly or broadly, and Google has added known DarkSword delivery domains to Safe Browsing, so Safari may warn users before they visit compromised sites.
But the mere fact that such compromises do occur—remember the 2016 malvertising campaign that impacted high-profile sites like The New York Times?—means you need to take responsibility for your own protection.
So please—install those security updates when we write about them.
