The European Union makes up one fifth of the world’s economy. Part of its success is that EU citizens see themselves as better off economically within the bloc than outside.

But that perception is being challenged.

At this week’s EU summit in Brussels – more than 60 years after the EU’s foundation – reform was tabled as a necessary adjustment to meet the challenges of our time.

On the financial side, reform is largely driven by French President Emmanuel Macron who says now is a golden opportunity to make changes to ensure the future success of the bloc. He is pushing for a more financially flexible EU.

But divisions have been growing as well over the bloc’s policy on refugees. On the opening day a breakthrough of sorts was achieved: the bloc will boost funding to address the issue which has threatened the very solidarity of the bloc. The leaders agreed to increase funding for Turkey and freed up 500 million euros ($581m) in funding for North Africa.

They agreed that “controlled centres” should be set up in member states on a voluntary basis for “rapid and secure” processing to distinguish between irregular migrants and refugees eligible for asylum. 

“If it’s being framed as a solution to the migration crisis, it’s the biggest exaggeration you could possibly imagine,” reports Al Jazeera’s Laurence Lee from Brussels. “It’s a sort of political fix to stop the bloc from falling apart … It’s all about keeping people out.”

John Springford, the deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, says “bringing in more people definitely helps” EU countries economically.

“What’s really important is that those people are quickly integrated into the labour market, into society, so that they find jobs quickly and they start being productive helpful members of society.”

Asked about tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and their impact on the EU, Springford says “if the trade war escalates, and the US imposes tariffs on cars … the EU is quite vulnerable to that. It’s difficult to say how the EU should respond. On the one hand if they say ‘Trump just imposed tariffs on us and we are not going to respond’, it may well embolden Trump to go further and particularly the trade balance between US and EU does not improve. 

“But on the other hand, if they do escalate the trade war, then it might become a kind of fight to the death and we might see some severe restrictions on transatlantic trade which won’t help anyone … I think the EU has no easy options.”

Also on this episode of Counting the Cost:

Harley Davidson vs Trump: The US president’s trade spat with the EU has forced Harley Davidson to shift gear overseas. New EU tariffs will raise the average cost per bike by about $2,000, so it’s shifting some production outside the US. And with that move, it just became the poster child for the breakdown in US trade relations with the EU.

Illegal logging: Activists accuse timber companies of endangering the world’s second largest rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jules Caron, a campaigner at Global Witness, talks to Counting the Cost.

Mexico’s digital divide: One of the main issues in Mexico’s presidential campaign has been its underperforming economy. Mexico is traditionally seen as a commodities and manufacturing giant. It has the largest proven silver reserves in the world, and the 10th largest oil reserves. But according to Bloomberg, some 40 percent of the population still face entrenched poverty and more than half of the population is not connected online. Carlos Cardenas from HIS Markit discusses Mexico’s digital divide.

Bahrain’s economic woes: Kuwait, UAE and Saudi Arabia are teaming up to offer financial aid to neighbouring Bahrain. 

Source: Al Jazeera News

Popular iOS photography app Darkroom received a major update today, introducing a long list of app-wide improvements, a new Frames tool, a premium filter pack, and more.

The new Frames tool, which marks Darkroom’s first top-level tool addition in three years, offers up content-aware frame colors. Content-aware color allows the frames tool to analyze the colors in your photograph and generate a set of frame colors that will match your image.

The color of the frame itself is hugely impactful to how the viewer’s eye perceives colors in your photos. That’s why we added content-aware colors which automatically analyze the photo and pick a curated set of colors that perfectly match your photo. This ensures you always have frame colors to pick from with just a tap, that will fit the mood of your photo seamlessly.

Support has also been added for the 9:16 aspect ratio for Snapchat and Instagram stories, as well as 4:5 for Instagram portrait photos. 2:1 has also been included, and all of the frame aspects can be used when exporting a single image or multiple images.

Also included in today’s update is a new premium filter pack, Duotone Filters. Darkroom says these filters are designed to be “extremely graphical and punchy,” to make photos “feel like they popped right out of a magazine.”

New privacy tools have been added to allow users to enable or disable embedded location information when exporting photos. The option will let location be included on your phone for captured photos, but it gives users the ability to strip it out when publicly sharing photos.

In addition to these new features, the new version of Darkroom includes app-wide refinements that make the Darkroom editing experience on iOS better. Specifically, “drastic improvements” have been made to how Darkroom handles photos that were previously edited in other apps, with the ability to “gracefully overwrite them.”

A full list of changes and updates in Darkroom can be found on the Darkroom website. The Darkroom app can be downloaded from the App Store for free, but unlocking full functionality requires a $7.99 in-app purchase. [Direct Link]

macOS Mojave, the newest version of the software that runs on the Mac, includes a long-awaited Dark Mode option that works across the entire system, from the dock and menu bar to all of your apps.

Here’s how to enable it:

1. Click on the Apple logo on the menu bar.
2. Choose System Preferences.
3. Select General.
4. In the “Appearance” section at the top of the window, click the “Dark” option.

Those are the only steps required to enable Dark Mode. If you want to turn it off again, follow the same steps but this time choose the “Light” option.

While in Dark mode, the dock, menu bar, and all of your Apple apps, including Safari, Mail, Calendar, Notes, the Mac App Store, Messages, and more will feature darker colors and themes. Dark Mode will need to be built into third-party Mac apps that don’t already offer a dark option when macOS Mojave is released.

Washington, DC – Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to march in protests across the US on Saturday, calling for an end to Trump’s “inhumane” immigration policies and the reunification of children and parents who were separated at the border.

Under the banner “Families Belong Together”, numerous civil rights and advocacy groups united to organise what are expected to be the biggest protests the country has seen yet over US President Donald Trump‘s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy introduced last April.

More than 700 events are planned nationwide.

The protests come as more than 2,000 children remain separated from their families, according to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) fact sheet released on June 20. 

Government-released videos showed children housed in metal cages and using large foil sheets as blankets. Additionally, leaked videos showing children in tears and wailing for their parents have caused widespread outrage over the policy. 

Bowing to pressure last week, Trump signed an executive order that ends the most controversial part of his harsh policy: separating children from their parents and relatives at the border.

Protests have continued, however, as questions remain over when and how families will be reunited.

A federal judge on Tuesday gave federal officials less than a month to reunite families with their children. Children under the age of five need to be reunited with families within two weeks.

The executive order is seen by many as a way for Trump to only shift his policy so that families can remain in detention for long periods of time.

Last week, the Department of Justice asked a court in California to modify a federal court ruling that said migrant and refugee children can only be kept in detention for up to 20 days.

After recent visits to detention centres, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal said families were “gratified that hundreds of thousands of people were going out on the streets” in their name.

“They are heartbroken, they are angry, they will do anything to get their children back,” she told Al Jazeera. “They are told they can get their children back if they drop their asylum claims. That is a huge problem. It’s illegal, and they might not get their children back even then.”

Katharina Obser, senior policy adviser with Migrant Rights and Justice, said the inhumane policies and separations were “not only traumatising to family members, but also severely inhibits access to asylum in the US”.

“All that is on people’s mind is what happened to their children,” she said. “Concerns have been fear of not knowing when they will see their children.”

ICE is a ‘rogue agency’

Over the past few weeks a number of protests have broken out across the country.

Protesters in several US cities have set up camp outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) buildings, calling for the abolishment of the agency.

On Thursday, more than 500 women were arrested during an all-women sit-in at the atrium of a Senate office building. Protesters called for an end to detention camps and the end of ICE.

Congresswoman Jayapal, who has long called for the abolishment of ICE, was among those arrested.

“It’s a rogue agency,” she said. ” They have no accountability. They are acting as a mass deportation force and terrorising families across the country.”

[ICE] is a rogue agency. They have no accountability. They are acting as a mass deportation force and terrorising families across the country.

Pramila Jayapal, US Representative, Washington’s 7th district

Jayapal had doubts federal officials know how to bring families back together.

“I don’t think they kept good track which children belong to which parents,” she said. “Particularly children that are preverbal that cannot say parents’ names or who they belong to.”

At a federal prison she said a woman showed her a state-issued slip supposedly with the name of her two children, along with her own name and ID.

“She came to me with the slip and said these are not my children,” Pramila said. “This is a huge tragedy.”

If your mobile carrier offers LTE, also known as the 4G network, you need to beware as your network communication can be hijacked remotely.

A team of researchers has discovered some critical weaknesses in the ubiquitous LTE mobile device standard that could allow sophisticated hackers to spy on users’ cellular networks, modify the contents of their communications, and even can re-route them to malicious or phishing websites.

LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is the latest mobile telephony standard used by billions of people designed to bring many security improvements over the predecessor standard known as Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications.

However, multiple security flaws have been discovered over the past few years, allowing attackers to intercept user’s communications, spy on user phone calls and text messages, send fake emergency alerts, spoof location of the device and knock devices entirely offline.

4G LTE Network Vulnerabilities

Now, security researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and New York University Abu Dhabi have developed three novel attacks against LTE technology that allowed them to map users’ identity, fingerprint the websites they visit and redirect them to malicious websites by tampering with DNS lookups.

All three attacks, explained by researchers on a dedicated website, abuse the data link layer, also known as Layer Two, of the ubiquitous LTE network.

The data link layer lies on top of the physical channel, which maintains the wireless communication between the users and the network. It is responsible for organizing how multiple users access resources on the network, helping to correct transmission errors, and protecting data through encryption.

Out of three, identity mapping and website fingerprinting developed by the researchers are passive attacks, in which a spy listens to what data is passing between base stations and end users over the airwaves from the target’s phone.

However, the third, DNS spoofing attack, dubbed “aLTEr” by the team, is an active attack, which allows an attacker to perform man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept communications and redirect the victim to a malicious website using DNS spoofing attacks.

What is aLTEr Attack?

Since the data link layer of the LTE network is encrypted with AES-CTR but not integrity-protected, an attacker can modify the bits even within an encrypted data packet, which later decrypts to a related plaintext.

“The aLTEr attack exploits the fact that LTE user data is encrypted in counter mode (AES-CTR) but not integrity protected, which allows us to modify the message payload: the encryption algorithm is malleable, and an adversary can modify a ciphertext into another ciphertext which later decrypts to a related plaintext,” the researchers said in their paper.

In aLTEr attack, an attacker pretends to be a real cell tower to the victim, while at the same time also pretending to be the victim to the real network, and then intercepts the communications between the victim and the real network.

How aLTEr Attack Targets 4G LTE Networks?

As a proof-of-concept demonstration, the team showed how an active attacker could redirect DNS (domain name system) requests and then perform a DNS spoofing attack, causing the victim mobile device to use a malicious DNS server that eventually redirects the victim to a malicious site masquerading as Hotmail.

The researcher performed the aLTEr attack within a commercial network and commercial phone within their lab environment. To prevent unintended inference with the real network, the team used a shielding box to stabilize the radio layer.

Also, they set up two servers, their DNS server, and an HTTP server, to simulate how an attacker can redirect network connections. You can see the video demonstration to watch the aLTEr attack in action.

The attack is dangerous, but it is difficult to perform in real-world scenarios. It also requires equipment (USRP), about $4,000 worth, to operate—something similar to IMSI catchers, Stingray, or DRTbox—and usually works within a 1-mile radius of the attacker.

However, for an intelligence agency or well-resourced, skilled attacker, abusing the attack is not trivial.

LTE Vulnerabilities Also Impact Forthcoming 5G Standard

The above attacks are not restricted to only 4G.

Forthcoming 5G networks may also be vulnerable to these attacks, as the team said that although 5G supports authenticated encryption, the feature is not mandatory, which likely means most carriers do not intend to implement it, potentially making 5G vulnerable as well.

“The use of authenticated encryption would prevent the aLTEr attack, which can be achieved through the addition of message authentication codes to user plane packets,” the researchers said.

“However, the current 5G specification does not require this security feature as mandatory, but leaves it as an optional configuration parameter.”

What’s Worse? LTE Network Flaws Can’t be Patched Straightaway

Since the attacks work by abusing an inherent design flaw of the LTE network, it cannot be patched, as it would require overhauling the entire LTE protocol.

As part of its responsible disclosure, the team of four researchers—David Rupprecht, Katharina Kohls, Thorsten Holz, and Christina Pöpper—notified both the GSM Association and the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project, along with other telephone companies, before going public with their findings.

In response to the attacks, the 3GPP group, which develops standards for the telecommunications industry, said that an update to the 5G specification might be complicated because carriers like Verizon and AT&T have already started implementing the 5G protocol.

How Can You Protect Against LTE Network Attacks?

The simplest way to protect yourself from such LTE network attacks is to always look out for the secure HTTPS domain on your address bar.

The team suggests two exemplary countermeasures for all carriers:

1.) Update the specification: All carriers should band together to fix this issue by updating the specification to use an encryption protocol with authentication like AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305.

However, the researchers believe this is likely not feasible in practice, as the implementation of all devices must be changed to do this, which will lead to a high financial and organizational effort, and most carriers will not bother to do that.

2.) Correct HTTPS configuration: Another solution would be for all websites to adopt the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) policy, which would act as an additional layer of protection, helping prevent the redirection of users to a malicious website.

Besides the dedicated website, the team has also published a research paper [PDF] with all the technical details about the aLTEr attack. Full technical details of the attacks are due to be presented during the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy next May.

Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky, who has served on Snap’s board of directors since December 2012, is not expected to stand for re-election to Snap’s board of directors and will thus be stepping down, according to a report by The Information.

Early investors stepping down from the board of directors — or at least not seeking re-election — isn’t that uncommon as once-private companies grow into larger public ones. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton did not seek re-election for Twitter’s board of directors in April last year. As Snap continues to navigate its future, especially as it has declined precipitously since going public and now sits at a valuation of around $16.5 billion. Partners with an expertise in the early-stage and later-stage startup life cycle may end up seeing themselves more useful taking a back seat and focusing on other investments. The voting process for board member re-election happens during the company’s annual meeting, so we’ll get more information when an additional proxy filing comes out ahead of the meeting later this year.

Benchmark is, or at least was at the time of going public last year, one of Snap’s biggest shareholders. According to the company’s 424B filing prior to going public in March last year, Benchmark held ownership of 23.1% of Snap’s Class B common stock and 8.2% of Snap’s Class A common stock. Lasky has been with Benchmark since April 2007, and also serves on the boards of a number of gaming companies like Riot Games and thatgamecompany, the creators of PlayStation titles flower and Journey. At the time, Snap said in its filing that Lasky was “qualified to serve as a member of our board of directors due to his extensive experience with social media and technology companies, as well as his experience as a venture capitalist investing in technology companies.”

The timing could be totally coincidental, but an earlier Recode report suggested Lasky had been talking about stepping down in future funds for Benchmark. The firm only recently wrapped up a very public battle with Uber, which ended up with Benchmark selling a significant stake in the company and a new CEO coming in to replace co-founder Travis Kalanick. Benchmark hired its first female general partner, Sarah Tavel, earlier this year.

We’ve reached out to both Snap and a representative from Benchmark for comment and will update the story when we hear back.

Serne, Ukraine – A horse-drawn wagon heading a large procession delivers David Popp’s body to its final resting place, a graveyard beside a cornfield in a Roma settlement.

A framed photograph of the 23-year-old and a handful of flowers sit on his coffin.

During the service on Thursday, mourners, speaking in a mix of Hungarian, Russian and Ukrainian, raise their hands to the sky and ask painful questions.

One week ago, Popp was trying to eke out a living collecting plastic bottles and scrap metal.

“Why did you attack us?” cries out one man, against a backdrop of keening women.

Popp was killed by suspected far-right nationalist gang members on June 23, a murder that has raised renewed questions about extremism and impunity in Ukraine.

He was attacked in the night as he slept in a shantytown on the outskirts of Lviv, a regional centre, where he and other Roma from the western Ukrainian region of TransCarpathia had migrated, according to police documents and witness reports.

Raja Popp, a 19-year-old relative of David, a 30-year-old mother and her 10-year-old son, were also wounded, sources told Al Jazeera.

“He was always going back and forth to Lviv [for work],” Ivan Balog, a Roma pastor from the Transcarpathian city of Uzhgorod, tells Al Jazeera.

Describing Popp as a hard-working, community-minded, young man, he adds: “He always said he wanted to do something beneficial for his village. He wanted to bring in electricity.”

It had been Popp’s dream to save enough money to hook up houses in Serne, which were off-grid.

On the night of the attack, a group of masked men carrying knives and chains surrounded the shelters the Roma had built for themselves in a wooded area, ripped through the walls of the dwellings, and began assaulting the sleepers, according to sources.

Popp succumbed on the spot to stab wounds to the head and chest, according to Miroslav Horvat, a Roma activist and city councillor from Uzhgorod, who saw the corpse.

“There were big holes in his head,” he says.

Police arrested seven young men, aged 16 and 17, and later apprehended a presumed ringleader, aged 20, who had fled the scene.

They are acting on the hypothesis that the case may involve young people with a radicalised political ideology, Svetlana Dobrovoltsa, a spokeswoman with the Lviv Police Department, tells Al Jazeera.

‘This attack is by no means the first’

Hungarian-speaking Roma from TransCarpathia are among the most marginalised and impoverished segments of Ukrainian society. 

Stories of families moving to cities to collect recyclables and live in shantytowns are common. 

So too, especially recently, are stories of racist attacks.

When pressed for answers, Dobrovoltsa is emphatic that police are doing “everything in our power to protect the Roma”.

“The police reaction was instantaneous,” she says. “We arrived on time. The participants were arrested, and we brought the organiser to a police station in a few hours.”  

Rights groups have recognised the police’s quick response, on this occasion.

“The police in fact reacted speedily and effectively in this specific case,” Maria Guryeva, Amnesty International spokesperson, wrote in an email. “However, this attack is by no means the first, and in previous cases effective measures were not taken and no investigation was taken.

“Impunity is the principal reason for the growth in the number of [these] attacks.”

On June 14, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Amnesty International and Front Line Defenders released an open letter addressed to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, and General Prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko, condemning rising hate crimes in Ukraine and impunity.

A small and angry group of independent, non-Roma solidarity activists marched through central Lviv on Wednesday, three days after the murder, chanting, “Nazis are around, and the state is protecting them”, among other slogans.

In the two-month period before Popp was killed, at least four attacks on Roma shantytowns were carried out near Ukrainian cities, according to witness reports and accounts in local media – two in Kiev, one near Lviv, and one near Ternopil.

The Kiev attacks were claimed and documented on the websites of Ukrainian groups with far-right associations. 

On April 20, members of a group known as S14, which began as the youth wing of the Svoboda Party – which has seats in Ukraine’s Parliament, threw stones, deployed pepper spray, and set fire to shelters in a camp that housed 30 Roma. 

Later, on June 7, in an attack which was live-streamed on video, members of a uniformed militia group known as “Natsionalnyi Druzhiny” destroyed a partly evacuated Roma camp in another part of Kiev with mallets and axes.

S14 also participated in this second attack and distributed derogatory leaflets about Roma.

Despite the publicised nature of these attacks, and the fact that two police officers appear in the live-streamed video of the June 7 attack, Kiev police have made no arrests.

A local media report also shows that S14 was recently awarded a grant of 440,000 grivnyas ($16,600) from the Ukrainian government to run a summer camp.

When approached for an explanation, the Kiev police department did not answer Al Jazeera’s question by the time of publication.

We are not guilty; the government is guilty.

Ivan Balog, Roma pastor

Further muddying the politics of the reaction to Popp’s murder is the insinuation in a recent press conference by Avakov, the interior minister, that the killing may have been organised from Russia in an effort to discredit Ukraine.

Additionally, many Ukrainian far-right organisations, including S14 are viewed as patriots by some sections of Ukrainian society for their activities – real or exaggerated – during the Maidan Revolution against Ukraine’s former Russia-backed president. 

Back in Serne, the circumstances that prompted Popp and others to migrate to the cities are evident.

From a nearby village, the settlement is accessed by a battered and potholed two-kilometre stretch of road, most houses seem to consist of one or two rooms, and small-scale agriculture is the only form of work.

Popp’s father, 40-year-old Farko, had also left the country to find work. 

At his son’s graveside, he tells Al Jazeera through an interpreter that he had been working in Hungary at the time of the murder. 

David had always wanted to make money to build a house in Serne, he said.

As the casket is lowered into the ground to the sound of weeping, several speakers have their say. 

“Ukraine has been so oppressing that we have to go work in other countries,” says Balog, the pastor, his voice cresting. “Give us work so that we don’t have to run to Kiev, and go every which way.

“We are not guilty; the government is guilty.”

Microsoft is working on a pocket-sized dual-screen Surface device according to information sourced from Microsoft internal documents and shared by The Verge.

Called Andromeda, Microsoft’s dual-screen Surface project has been in development for at least two years and it’s designed to “blur the lines between mobile and stationary computing,” according to an internal document.

Andromeda rendering via David Breyer

“It’s a new pocketable Surface device form factor that brings together innovative new hardware and software experiences to create a truly personal and versatile computing experience,” is exactly how Microsoft describes the device internally.

Microsoft’s device will feature a wraparound display that bridges the gap of the hinge when it is fully opened, and according to The Verge, December renderings shared by David Breyer are “identical” to the current prototype versions of the upcoming Surface. The pocketable Surface can be folded in either direction or laid flat, as can be seen in the renderings.

Andromeda rendering via David Breyer

Microsoft is said to be experimenting with stylus input for the pocket Surface, with prototype devices equipped with styluses and notepad-like apps for note taking.

The Verge‘s sources warn that work on Andromeda could be ceased at anytime, but Microsoft is said to have tentative 2018 release date plans, which would mean development on the device is nearing completion.

Some nebulous rumors have suggested Apple too is exploring some similar concepts, working with LG to develop an iPhone with a foldable display. Apple explores many concepts and designs for its devices, so there is likely to be some truth to the rumor.

The folding display technology being developed by LG is still a few years off, so if Apple moves forward with some sort of design that’s similar to what Microsoft is working on, we won’t be seeing it for several years.

At the current time, Apple is focusing on edge-to-edge displays and making a transition to OLED technology. In fall 2018, Apple is expected to introduce a second-generation 5.8-inch OLED iPhone X, a 6.5-inch OLED device that can be thought of as an “iPhone X Plus,” and a 6.1-inch iPhone with an LCD display that will be available at a more affordable price point.

All three devices will feature edge-to-edge displays and no Home button, instead adopting Face ID and the TrueDepth camera system.

Apple in iOS 11 revamped the iPad’s interface and changed the way we interact with the tablet through a new Dock, a revamped App Switcher, and Drag and Drop, and with iOS 12, further iPad changes have been implemented.

There are new gestures to learn for accessing the Home screen, App Switcher, and the Control Center, along with a new status bar and some new multitasking capabilities, which we’ve outlined below.

Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.

The new iPad gestures are identical to the gestures on the iPhone X, with Apple preparing us for the elimination of the Home button in future iPad models. Rumors suggest upcoming iPad Pro models will feature a TrueDepth camera system and Face ID rather than a traditional Touch ID Home button.

If you use an iPhone X, the new iPad gestures will be familiar to you, but if you don’t, it could take a bit of time to get used to.

Dock Changes: Getting to the Home Screen and App Switcher

In iOS 11, when you wanted to access the Home screen from within an app, you would press the Touch ID Home button. That’s still true, but you can also now get to the Home screen when you swipe up from the bottom of the display, as demoed in the video above.

When in an app, swiping up from the bottom of the screen takes you right to the Home screen rather than just bringing up the iPad Dock within an app.

The iPad’s Home screen. Get here with one quick swipe on the Dock.

To get to the Dock to open more than one app for multitasking purposes, you need to do a swipe and a slight hold hold rather than just a swipe at the bottom inch of the screen while you have an app open already.

The iPad Dock in an app. A quick swipe brings you to the Home screen, but a swipe and a hold brings up the Dock in an app.

If you swipe and hold a bit higher on the screen, you can access the App Switcher on the iPad for quickly swapping between apps or closing apps, which is done with a swipe upwards on an app card. This gesture works both within apps and at the Home screen.

The iOS 12 iPad App Switcher, accessible with a longer swipe and hold on the Dock, either at the Home screen or within an app.

Getting to Control Center

Control Center in iOS 11 was paired with the App Switcher and was accessible by swiping up on the Dock, but that gesture now opens the App Switcher alone without providing access to Control Center.

Getting to Control Center is now done by swiping downwards from the right portion of the status bar, where it displays your battery life and Wi-Fi/Cellular connection.

All other gestures on the iPad remain the same, such as a swipe downwards from the top middle of the display to bring up your notifications and a swipe to the right to get to the Today section for widget access, but there are other iPad improvements worth noting in iOS 12.

iPad Status Bar

The iPad’s status bar has been redesigned in iOS 12, and it now resembles the status bar of the iPhone X. The date and time are listed on the left hand side of the status bar, while battery life and Wi-Fi/Cellular signal and connection are displayed on the right hand side.

The middle of the display, where the date was previously shown, is left open, perhaps for a future notch. Prior to iOS 12, the iPad’s status bar did not show the date, so that’s also a new addition.

Spacebar Trackpad

When typing on the iPad, if you press and hold with one finger on the space bar, it turns the keyboard into a trackpad to make it easier to navigate through a document and move the cursor.

This is a feature that has been available on iPhones with 3D Touch and on the iPad with two fingers, but in iOS 12, it’s simpler to use. Two fingers also continues to work.

Multitasking

On newer iPads with 2GB+ RAM, multitasking has been tweaked somewhat. While in iOS 11 you could have a maximum of two apps working simultaneously, on iOS 12, you can have three.

To use three apps at once, pair two apps in Split View with a Slide Over window. In this mode, all three apps are active, and while it’s true that the Slide Over window is going to block most of the second Split View window, you can still scroll through and use all three apps.

Multitasking in iOS 12. Note that all three windows are active.

That is not true of iOS 11, where opening up a Slide Over window in Split View would deactivate the two Split View apps until the Slide Over window was dismissed.

iOS 11 multitasking. Note that the Slide Over window deactivates the two Split View apps.

Multitasking gestures in iOS 12 have not changed. Pull an app up from the dock and to the left or the right of the display to enter Split View mode, or pull an app over an existing app to enter Slide Over mode.

More Info

iOS 12 will be released to the public in the fall alongside new iPhones, but it is available in a beta capacity to developers and anyone who wants to become a public beta tester. iOS 12 should not be installed on a primary device because betas can introduce serious bugs, and make sure to create a backup before updating to the new software.

For more information on the new features that are coming in iOS 12, make sure to check out our iOS 12 roundup.

Amazon is addressing one of the larger issues with its Echo Dot Kids Edition — support for Spotify’s streaming music service, with the option to filter out explicit lyrics. The news was announced on Friday alongside new content from Disney for the Kids Edition device. However, Amazon says the Spotify support would not be available until next week.

Lack of access to one of the most popular streaming services was one of my personal critiques with the Kids Edition. As a Spotify household, it was hard to use the device here because of its limited support for music services outside Amazon and iHeartRadio Family. Our favorite playlists and music was not available, because we don’t pay for Amazon’s on-demand music service. This will be a welcome change.

When Spotify is enabled, Amazon says the explicit filter will also be turned on by default — but parents can turn it off on their FreeTime dashboard.

Along with the support on the Kids Edition device, the update will also now allow Spotify customers who don’t subscribe to FreeTime the option to turn off explicit lyrics, as they already can do with Amazon Music and Pandora.

In addition, Amazon says the Echo Dot Kids Edition is gaining a host of new content from Disney this week and next.

It has already added a new kids skill called Disney Dailies that includes jokes and sketches taking place in the “Zootopia” world, which are updated every day.

Next week, there also will be new character alarms featuring characters from Pixar’s “Coco,” Disney’s “Moana” and others. And Disney has updated its Daily Stories with stories from “Incredibles 2,” “Doc McStuffins,” “Wall-E,” “Moana” and more.

The Kids Edition is a combo package of an Echo Dot with a protective case and a year of FreeTime Unlimited, which includes exclusive Alexa skills for Kids Edition owners, as well as other content, like games, apps, books and videos. It’s $79.99 on Amazon.

Earlier today we revealed that Apple was re-building maps from the ground up. These are some questions from readers that came up when we went live. You can ask more questions here and I’ll try to add them.

What part of Maps will be new?

The actual map. Apple is building them from scratch, with its own data rather than relying on external partners.

What does that mean in terms of what I’ll see?

New foliage markers, showing you where ground cover like grass and trees exists more accurately. Pools, parking lots, exact building shapes, sports areas like baseball diamonds, tennis and basketball courts and pedestrian pathways that are commonly walked but previously unmapped. There are also some new features like the ability to determine where the entrances are to buildings based on maps data.

Will it look visually different?

Only with regards to additional detail. Maps is not getting a visual “overhaul” yet (it was implied that it will eventually) but you’ll notice differences immediately. Here’s an example:

Does it use information from iPhones?

Yes. It uses segments of trips you take that have been anonymized called probe data to determine things like “is this a valid route?” or to glean traffic congestion information.

Can I be identified by this data — does Apple know it’s me making the trips?

No. The only device that knows about your entire trip is your personal device. When information and/or requests are sent to Apple, a rotating random identifier is assigned to chunks of data, which are segmented for additional safety before transmission. Basically, all Apple will ever see is a random slice of any person’s trip without beginning or end connected directly, which it uses to update its maps and traffic info. Not only can it not tell who it came from, Apple says it cannot even reconstruct a trip based on this data — no matter who asks for it.

Can I opt out?

Yes. It will not happen if you do not turn on location services, and it can be toggled off in the Privacy settings for Maps. It’s not a new setting, it’s just the existing maps setting.

Will it use more data or battery?

Apple says no. It’s saying that the amount of both resources used are so negligible as to be swallowed up in normal efficiency gains.

When is it coming to the rest of the world?

Bay Area in beta next week and Northern California this fall were as much as I got; however, Apple SVP Eddy Cue did say that Apple’s overall maps team was global.

We’ve got a dedicated team — we started this four years ago — across a variety of fields from ML, to map design, to you name it. There’s thousands of people working on this all around the globe from here in the Bay Area, to Seattle, Austin, New York. We have people in other countries, in cities like Berlin, Paris, Singapore, Beijing, Malmö, Hyderabad.

This team’s dispersed around the globe. It’s important to have that when you’re trying to create and do this. We’re trying to look at how people use our devices all around the world. Our focus is to build these maps for people on the go.

Does this mean street view mode is coming?

Maybe; Apple did not announce anything related to a street-level view. With the data that it is gathering from the cars, it could absolutely accomplish this, but no news yet.

What about businesses?

The computer vision system Apple is using can absolutely recognize storefronts and business names so I’d expect that to improve.

Will building shapes improve in 3D?

Yes. Apple has tools specifically to allow its maps editors to measure building heights in the 3D views and to tweak the shapes of the buildings to make them as accurate as possible. The measuring tools also serve to nail down how many floors a building might have for internal navigation.

A team of security researchers has discovered a new set of techniques that could allow hackers to bypass all kind of present mitigations put in place to prevent DMA-based Rowhammer attacks against Android devices.

Dubbed RAMpage, the new technique (CVE-2018-9442) could re-enable an unprivileged Android app running on the victim’s device to take advantage from the previously disclosed Drammer attack, a variant of DRAM Rowhammer hardware vulnerability for Android devices, in an attempt to gain root privileges on the target device.

You might have already read a few articles about RAMpage on the Internet or even the research paper, but if you are still unable to understand—what the heck is RAMpage—we have briefed the research in language everyone can understand.

Before jumping directly on the details of RAMpage, it is important for you to understand what is RowHammer vulnerability, how it can be exploited using Drammer attack to hack Android devices and what mitigations Google introduced to prevent Drammer.

What is DRAM Rowhammer Vulnerability?

Known since 2012, Rowhammer bug is a hardware reliability issue with new generation DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips in which repeatedly and rapidly accessing (hammering) a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows, i.e., changing their bit values from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0.

In 2015, security researchers from Google Project Zero successfully demonstrated ways to deterministically exploit this hardware issue to achieve privilege escalation on the vulnerable computers (Windows and Linux).

Besides this Google researchers also introduced double-sided Rowhammer attack that increases the chance of getting bit flips in a row by hammering both of its neighbors.

Triggering the Rowhammer bug is simple, but its successful exploitation is difficult, as most bits in the memory are irrelevant for an attacker and flipping them could result in memory corruption.

Hammering, i.e., aggressively reading/writing data from/to the DRAM, at random memory locations is not sufficient to bit flip a targeted memory page (likely used by a high privileged or system application).

For successful exploitation of Rowhammer, an attacker must be able to trick the system in a way that it lands the targeted memory page into the row (vulnerable to Rowhammer) adjacent to the attacker-owned row in the physical memory of DRAM.

In our previous articles, we have also covered other Rowhammer attacks, which includes:

• GLitch: This technique leverages embedded graphics processing units (GPUs) to carry out Rowhammer attacks against Android devices.
• Throwhammer: The first network-based remote Rowhammer attack that involves the exploitation of a known vulnerability in DRAM through network cards using remote direct memory access (RDMA) channels.
• Nethammer: Another network-based remote Rowhammer technique that can be used to attack systems using uncached memory or flush instruction while processing the network requests.

What is Drammer Attack?

Discovered two years ago, Drammer was the first practical Rowhammer-based attack that targets DRAM chips on the Android devices, which could be exploited by a malicious app without requiring any permission or software vulnerability.

Drammer attack relies on DMA (direct memory access) buffers, which are provided by Android’s main memory manager called ION.

Since DMA allows apps to directly access the memory without going through any CPU cache, it makes repeated access (hammering) to a specific row of memory more efficient.

ION organizes its memory pools in several in-kernel heaps, one of which, kmalloc heap, was designed to allocate physically contiguous memory, which enabled attackers to easily determine how virtual addresses were mapped to physical addresses.

These two properties of ION memory manager—direct access and contiguous memory allocations—were the key behind the success of Drammer attack.

How Google Mitigated the Drammer-like DMA based Rowhammer Attacks?

In 2016, after the details of the Drammer attack went public, Google pushed an update for Android devices that disabled one of the ION’s component (kmalloc heap) responsible for contiguous memory allocations, in an attempt to mitigate the risk of ‘deterministic’ exploitation of the Rowhammer vulnerability.

After disabling the contiguous heap, now the apps and system processes running on your Android devices rely on other in-kernel heaps left available in the ION memory manager, such as the system heap, which are designed to allocate memory at random physical locations on the DRAM.

Besides non-contiguous memory allocations, the system heap also separates kernel memory and user memory by allocating them to lowmem and highmem zones, respectively, for further security.

What is RAMpage Attack and How It Could Let Attackers Bypass Rowhammer Mitigations?

The above-explained mitigation technique introduced by Google effectively disabled an attacker from performing the double-sided Rowhammer attack.

However, a team of security researchers has now claimed to discover four new rowhammer attack variants that could allow a malicious application installed on the targeted device to gain root access and steal sensitive data from other apps while bypassing all current mitigations in place.

In its research paper [PDF], the group explains that their first RAMpage variant (r0) is “a reliable Drammer implementation that shows how disabling contiguous memory allocations does not prevent Rowhammer-based privilege escalation attacks.”

Researchers explain three following steps to achieve Drammer-like exploitation using RAMpage r0 variant:

1.) Exhausting the system heap—Researchers found that if an application intentionally drains all ION’s internal pools, the buddy allocator, another memory allocation algorithm, takes charge of the allocation process as a fallback.

Since the primary purpose of buddy allocator is to minimize memory fragmentation, it eventually offers contiguous page allocations.

To increase the possibility of the exploitation, an attacker can further also bypass the zone separation mechanism used by the system heap. To forcefully land its memory page into lowmem allocations, where pages of kernel reside, the attacker continually allocates memory until no highmem is left.

“Once this is the case, the kernel serves subsequent requests from lowmem, allowing us to find bit flips in physical memory that may later hold a page table.” researchers said.

2.) Shrinking the cache pool—Further, using Flip Feng Shui exploitation vector, attackers can trick the kernel into storing a page table in the vulnerable page.

“This step is to release physical memory of the system heap pools back to the kernel,” which “indirectly forces the ION subsystem to release its preallocated cached memory, including the row with the vulnerable page,” the researchers explained.

3.) Rooting a mobile device—Implementing above two steps, tricks the operating system into landing targeted memory page very adjacent to the attacker-owned page, and then all the attacker needs to do is implementing the remaining steps of DMA-based rowhammer attack to find exploitable chunks and develop a root exploit.

“We were successful in mounting our proof of concept against an LG G4 running the latest version of Android (7.1.1. at the time of our experiments),” researchers said.

“If your system is affected, our proof-of-concept exploit can take full control over your device and access anything on it. This may include passwords and sensitive data stored on the system.”

The other three variants of RAMpage attack, listed below, also allows attackers to bypass defense solutions that only protect specific parts of system memory, but they are less practical and more research requires to develop a working exploit for them.

• ION-to-ION (Varint r1)
• CMA-to-CMA attack (Varint r2)
• CMA-to-system attack (Varint r3)

GuardION—A Solution to Mitigate All DMA-based Rowhammer Attacks

In their paper, researchers have discussed all current mitigation techniques that are ineffective in preventing against the RAMpage variants of DMA-based rowhammer attacks and has also introduced a new solution, called GuardION, along with its code in the open source.

GuardION is a software-based defense that prevents rowhammer attacks by isolating the DMA buffers with guard rows.

GuardION code needs to be installed as a patch for the Android operating system that modifies ION memory manager in a way that it isolates such sensitive buffers by injecting blank rows (as a guard), one in the left and one in the right, making it physically more than one row away from the aggressor rows.

“GuardION provides an isolation primitive that makes it impossible for attackers to use uncached DMA allocations to flip bits in memory that is in use by the kernel or any userland app,” researchers said. 

“GuardION protects all known Rowhammer attack vectors, and, to the best of our knowledge, no existing technique can bypass it.”

It should be noted that installing the GuardION patch could slightly impact the performance of your device, as the process of creating guard rows consumes memory of your device’ DRAM.

According to researchers, all Android-based devices shipped since 2012 may be affected by rampage attack.

Answering the question, “Has rampage been abused in the wild?” the researcher said, “We don’t know.” and when asked, “Can I detect if someone has exploited rampage against me?”, they answered “Probably not. The exploitation does not leave any traces in traditional log files.”

In my opinion, if you install apps only from the trust sources, you should not be worried about the RAMpage attacks.

Since researchers have already shared their findings with Google, I believe the company would not allow such malicious apps on its Google Play Store.

I am not sure if you’re aware, but the launch of Apple Maps went poorly. After a rough first impression, an apology from the CEO, several years of patching holes with data partnerships and some glimmers of light with long-awaited transit directions and improvements in business, parking and place data, Apple Maps is still not where it needs to be to be considered a world class service.

Maps needs fixing.

Apple, it turns out, is aware of this, so It’s re-building the maps part of Maps.

It’s doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 Beta and will cover Northern California by fall.

Every version of iOS will get the updated maps eventually and they will be more responsive to changes in roadways and construction, more visually rich depending on the specific context they’re viewed in and feature more detailed ground cover, foliage, pools, pedestrian pathways and more.

This is nothing less than a full re-set of Maps and it’s been 4 years in the making, which is when Apple began to develop its new data gathering systems. Eventually, Apple will no longer rely on third-party data to provide the basis for its maps, which has been one of its major pitfalls from the beginning.

“Since we introduced this six years ago — we won’t rehash all the issues we’ve had when we introduced it — we’ve done a huge investment in getting the map up to par,” says Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who now owns Maps in an interview last week.  “When we launched, a lot of it was all about directions and getting to a certain place. Finding the place and getting directions to that place. We’ve done a huge investment of making millions of changes, adding millions of locations, updating the map and changing the map more frequently. All of those things over the past six years.”

But, Cue says, Apple has room to improve on the quality of Maps, something that most users would agree on, even with recent advancements.

“We wanted to take this to the next level,” says Cue. “We have been working on trying to create what we hope is going to be the best map app in the world, taking it to the next step. That is building all of our own map data from the ground up.”

In addition to Cue, I spoke to Apple VP Patrice Gautier and over a dozen Apple Maps team members at its mapping headquarters in California this week about its efforts to re-build Maps, and to do it in a way that aligned with Apple’s very public stance on user privacy.

If, like me, you’re wondering whether Apple thought of building its own maps from scratch before it launched Maps, the answer is yes. At the time, there was a choice to be made about whether or not it wanted to be in the business of Maps at all. Given that the future of mobile devices was becoming very clear, it knew that mapping would be at the core of nearly every aspect of its devices from photos to directions to location services provided to apps. Decision made, Apple plowed ahead, building a product that relied on a patchwork of data from partners like TomTom, OpenStreetMap and other geo data brokers. The result was underwhelming.

Almost immediately after Apple launched Maps, it realized that it was going to need help and it signed on a bunch of additional data providers to fill the gaps in location, base map, point-of-interest and business data.

It wasn’t enough.

“We decided to do this just over four years ago. We said, “Where do we want to take Maps? What are the things that we want to do in Maps? We realized that, given what we wanted to do and where we wanted to take it, we needed to do this ourselves,” says Cue.

Because Maps are so core to so many functions, success wasn’t tied to just one function. Maps needed to be great at transit, driving and walking — but also as a utility used by apps for location services and other functions.

Cue says that Apple needed to own all of the data that goes into making a map, and to control it from a quality as well as a privacy perspective.

There’s also the matter of corrections, updates and changes entering a long loop of submission to validation to update when you’re dealing with external partners. The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways and other updating features in days or less, not months. Not to mention the potential competitive advantages it could gain from building and updating traffic data from hundreds of millions of iPhones, rather than relying on partner data.

Cue points to the proliferation of devices running iOS, now numbering in the hundreds of millions, as a deciding factor to shift its process.

“We felt like because the shift to devices had happened — building a map today in the way that we were traditionally doing it, the way that it was being done — we could improve things significantly, and improve them in different ways,” he says. “One is more accuracy. Two is being able to update the map faster based on the data and the things that we’re seeing, as opposed to driving again or getting the information where the customer’s proactively telling us. What if we could actually see it before all of those things?”

I query him on the rapidity of Maps updates, and whether this new map philosophy means faster changes for users.

“The truth is that Maps needs to be [updated more], and even are today,” says Cue. “We’ll be doing this even more with our new maps, [with] the ability to change the map real-time and often. We do that every day today. This is expanding us to allow us to do it across everything in the map. Today, there’s certain things that take longer to change.

“For example, a road network is something that takes a much longer time to change currently. In the new map infrastructure, we can change that relatively quickly. If a new road opens up, immediately we can see that and make that change very, very quickly around it. It’s much, much more rapid to do changes in the new map environment.”

So a new effort was created to begin generating its own base maps, the very lowest building block of any really good mapping system. After that, Apple would begin layering on living location data, high resolution satellite imagery and brand new intensely high resolution image data gathered from its ground cars until it had what it felt was a ‘best in class’ mapping product.

There is only really one big company on earth who owns an entire map stack from the ground up: Google.

Apple knew it needed to be the other one. Enter the vans.

Apple vans spotted

Though the overall project started earlier, the first glimpse most folks had of Apple’s renewed efforts to build the best Maps product was the vans that started appearing on the roads in 2015 with ‘Apple Maps’ signs on the side. Capped with sensors and cameras, these vans popped up in various cities and sparked rampant discussion and speculation.

The new Apple Maps will be the first time the data collected by these vans is actually used to construct and inform its maps. This is their coming out party.

Some people have commented that Apple’s rigs look more robust than the simple GPS + Camera arrangements on other mapping vehicles — going so far as to say they look more along the lines of something that could be used in autonomous vehicle training.

Apple isn’t commenting on autonomous vehicles, but there’s a reason the arrays look more advanced: they are.

Earlier this week I took a ride in one of the vans as it ran a sample route to gather the kind of data that would go into building the new maps. Here’s what’s inside.

In addition to a beefed up GPS rig on the roof, four LiDAR arrays mounted at the corners and 8 cameras shooting overlapping high-resolution images – there’s also the standard physical measuring tool attached to a rear wheel that allows for precise tracking of distance and image capture. In the rear there is a surprising lack of bulky equipment. Instead, it’s a straightforward Mac Pro bolted to the floor, attached to an array of solid state drives for storage. A single USB cable routes up to the dashboard where the actual mapping capture software runs on an iPad.

While mapping, a driver…drives, while an operator takes care of the route, ensuring that a coverage area that has been assigned is fully driven and monitoring image capture. Each drive captures thousands of images as well as a full point cloud (a 3D map of space defined by dots that represent surfaces) and GPS data. I later got to view the raw data presented in 3D and it absolutely looks like the quality of data you would need to begin training autonomous vehicles.

More on why Apple needs this level of data detail later.

When the images and data are captured, they are then encrypted on the fly immediately and recorded on to the SSDs. Once full, the SSDs are pulled out, replaced and packed into a case which is delivered to Apple’s data center where a suite of software eliminates private information like faces, license plates and other info from the images. From the moment of capture to the moment they’re sanitized, they are encrypted with one key in the van and the other key in the data center. Technicians and software that are part of its mapping efforts down the pipeline from there never see unsanitized data.

This is just one element of Apple’s focus on the privacy of the data it is utilizing in New Maps.

Probe data and Privacy

Throughout every conversation I have with any member of the team throughout the day, privacy is brought up, emphasized. This is obviously by design as it wants to impress upon me as a journalist that it’s taking this very seriously indeed, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s evidently built in from the ground up and I could not find a false note in any of the technical claims or the conversations I had.

Indeed, from the data security folks to the people whose job it is to actually make the maps work well, the constant refrain is that Apple does not feel that it is being held back in any way by not hoovering every piece of customer-rich data it can, storing and parsing it.

The consistent message is that the team feels it can deliver a high quality navigation, location and mapping product without the directly personal data used by other platforms.

“We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it —in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything [to collect more]. We’re not losing any features or capabilities by doing this.”

The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the ‘ground truth’ data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this ‘probe data’ sent back from iPhones.

Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent and that data is completely anonymized, there is never a way to tell if any trip was ever a single individual. The local system signs the IDs and only it knows who that ID refers to. Apple is working very hard here to not know anything about its users. This kind of privacy can’t be added on at the end, it has to be woven in at the ground level.

Because Apple’s business model does not rely on it serving, say, an ad for a Chevron on your route to you, it doesn’t need to even tie advertising identifiers to users.

Any personalization or Siri requests are all handled on-board by the iOS device’s processor. So if you get a drive notification that tells you it’s time to leave for your commute, that’s learned, remembered and delivered locally, not from Apple’s servers.

That’s not new, but it’s important to note given the new thing to take away here: Apple is flipping on the power of having millions of iPhones passively and actively improving their mapping data in real time.

In short: traffic, real-time road conditions, road systems, new construction and changes in pedestrian walkways are about to get a lot better in Apple Maps.

The secret sauce here is what Apple calls probe data. Essentially little slices of vector data that represent direction and speed transmitted back to Apple completely anonymized with no way to tie it to a specific user or even any given trip. It’s reaching in and sipping a tiny amount of data from millions of users instead, giving it a holistic, real-time picture without compromising user privacy.

If you’re driving, walking or cycling, your iPhone can already tell this. Now if it knows you’re driving it can also send relevant traffic and routing data in these anonymous slivers to improve the entire service. This only happens if your maps app has been active, say you check the map, look for directions etc. If you’re actively using your GPS for walking or driving, then the updates are more precise and can help with walking improvements like charting new pedestrian paths through parks — building out the map’s overall quality.

All of this, of course, is governed by whether you opted into location services and can be toggled off using the maps location toggle in the Privacy section of settings.

Apple says that this will have a near zero effect on battery life or data usage, because you’re already using the ‘maps’ features when any probe data is shared and it’s a fraction of what power is being drawn by those activities.

From the point cloud on up

But maps cannot live on ground truth and mobile data alone. Apple is also gathering new high resolution satellite data to combine with its ground truth data for a solid base map. It’s then layering satellite imagery on top of that to better determine foliage, pathways, sports facilities, building shapes and pathways.

After the downstream data has been cleaned up of license plates and faces, it gets run through a bunch of computer vision programming to pull out addresses, street signs and other points of interest. These are cross referenced to publicly available data like addresses held by the city and new construction of neighborhoods or roadways that comes from city planning departments.

But one of the special sauce bits that Apple is adding to the mix of mapping tools is a full on point cloud that maps the world around the mapping van in 3D. This allows them all kinds of opportunities to better understand what items are street signs (retro-reflective rectangular object about 15 feet off the ground? Probably a street sign) or stop signs or speed limit signs.

It seems like it could also enable positioning of navigation arrows in 3D space for AR navigation, but Apple declined to comment on ‘any future plans’ for such things.

Apple also uses semantic segmentation and Deep Lambertian Networks to analyze the point cloud coupled with the image data captured by the car and from high-resolution satellites in sync. This allows 3D identification of objects, signs, lanes of traffic and buildings and separation into categories that can be highlighted for easy discovery.

The coupling of high resolution image data from car and satellite, plus a 3D point cloud results in Apple now being able to produce full orthogonal reconstructions of city streets with textures in place. This is massively higher resolution and easier to see, visually. And it’s synchronized with the ‘panoramic’ images from the car, the satellite view and the raw data. These techniques are used in self driving applications because they provide a really holistic view of what’s going on around the car. But the ortho view can do even more for human viewers of the data by allowing them to ‘see’ through brush or tree cover that would normally obscure roads, buildings and addresses.

This is hugely important when it comes to the next step in Apple’s battle for supremely accurate and useful Maps: human editors.

Apple has had a team of tool builders working specifically on a toolkit that can be used by human editors to vet and parse data, street by street. The editor’s suite includes tools that allow human editors to assign specific geometries to flyover buildings (think Salesforce tower’s unique ridged dome) that allow them to be instantly recognizable. It lets editors look at real images of street signs shot by the car right next to 3D reconstructions of the scene and computer vision detection of the same signs, instantly recognizing them as accurate or not.

Another tool corrects addresses, letting an editor quickly move an address to the center of a building, determine whether they’re misplaced and shift them around. It also allows for access points to be set, making Apple Maps smarter about the ‘last 50 feet’ of your journey. You’ve made it to the building, but what street is the entrance actually on? And how do you get into the driveway? With a couple of clicks, an editor can make that permanently visible.

“When we take you to a business and that business exists, we think the precision of where we’re taking you to, from being in the right building,” says Cue. “When you look at places like San Francisco or big cities from that standpoint, you have addresses where the address name is a certain street, but really, the entrance in the building is on another street. They’ve done that because they want the better street name. Those are the kinds of things that our new Maps really is going to shine on. We’re going to make sure that we’re taking you to exactly the right place, not a place that might be really close by.”

Water, swimming pools (new to Maps entirely), sporting areas and vegetation are now more prominent and fleshed out thanks to new computer vision and satellite imagery applications. So Apple had to build editing tools for those as well.

Many hundreds of editors will be using these tools, in addition to the thousands of employees Apple already has working on maps, but the tools had to be built first, now that Apple is no longer relying on third parties to vet and correct issues.

And the team also had to build computer vision and machine learning tools that allow it to determine whether there are issues to be found at all.

Anonymous probe data from iPhones, visualized, looks like thousands of dots, ebbing and flowing across a web of streets and walkways, like a luminescent web of color. At first, chaos. Then, patterns emerge. A street opens for business, and nearby vessels pump orange blood into the new artery. A flag is triggered and an editor looks to see if a new road needs a name assigned.

A new intersection is added to the web and an editor is flagged to make sure that the left turn lanes connect correctly across the overlapping layers of directional traffic. This has the added benefit of massively improved lane guidance in the new Apple Maps.

Apple is counting on this combination of human and AI flagging to allow editors to first craft base maps and then also maintain them as the ever changing biomass wreaks havoc on roadways, addresses and the occasional park.

Here there be Helvetica

Apple’s new Maps, like many other digital maps, display vastly differently depending on scale. If you’re zoomed out, you get less detail. If you zoom in, you get more. But Apple has a team of cartographers on staff that work on more cultural, regional and artistic levels to ensure that its Maps are readable, recognizable and useful.

These teams have goals that are at once concrete and a bit out there — in the best traditions of Apple pursuits that intersect the technical with the artistic.

The maps need to be usable, but they also need to fulfill cognitive goals on cultural levels that go beyond what any given user might know they need. For instance, in the US, it is very common to have maps that have a relatively low level of detail even at a medium zoom. In Japan, however, the maps are absolutely packed with details at the same zoom, because that increased information density is what is expected by users.

This is the department of details. They’ve reconstructed replicas of hundreds of actual road signs to make sure that the shield on your navigation screen matches the one you’re seeing on the highway road sign. When it comes to public transport, Apple licensed all of the type faces that you see on your favorite subway systems, like Helvetica for NYC. And the line numbers are in the exact same order that you’re going to see them on the platform signs.

It’s all about reducing the cognitive load that it takes to translate the physical world you have to navigate through into the digital world represented by Maps.

Bottom line

The new version of Apple Maps will be in preview next week with just the Bay Area of California going live. It will be stitched seamlessly into the ‘current’ version of Maps, but the difference in quality level should be immediately visible based on what I’ve seen so far.

Better road networks, more pedestrian information, sports areas like baseball diamonds and basketball courts, more land cover including grass and trees represented on the map as well as buildings, building shapes and sizes that are more accurate. A map that feels more like the real world you’re actually traveling through.

Search is also being revamped to make sure that you get more relevant results (on the correct continents) than ever before. Navigation, especially pedestrian guidance, also gets a big boost. Parking areas and building details to get you the last few feet to your destination are included as well.

What you won’t see, for now, is a full visual redesign.

“You’re not going to see huge design changes on the maps,” says Cue. “We don’t want to combine those two things at the same time because it would cause a lot of confusion.”

Apple Maps is getting the long awaited attention it really deserves. By taking ownership of the project fully, Apple is committing itself to actually creating the map that users expected of it from the beginning. It’s been a lingering shadow on iPhones, especially, where alternatives like Google Maps have offered more robust feature sets that are so easy to compare against the native app but impossible to access at the deep system level.

The argument has been made ad nauseam, but it’s worth saying again that if Apple thinks that mapping is important enough to own, it should own it. And that’s what it’s trying to do now.

“We don’t think there’s anybody doing this level of work that we’re doing,” adds Cue. “We haven’t announced this. We haven’t told anybody about this. It’s one of those things that we’ve been able to keep pretty much a secret. Nobody really knows about it. We’re excited to get it out there. Over the next year, we’ll be rolling it out, section by section in the US.”