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MacworldWhen Apple decides to open a new flagship Apple Store, it selects prominent locations and has visions of unique architectural concepts. Such was the case in 2017, when Apple announced its intentions for a new store in Federation Square, or Fed Square as the locals of Melbourne, Australia, put it. Fed Square is located in Melbournes Art Precinct, known locally as the artistic heart of the city.Sounds like an ideal place to put a flagship Apple Store, doesnt it? Well, not long after Apple announced its most significant store in the Southern Hemisphere, the community voiced its objections, fearing that Apples building would harm the locations cultural relevance. Eventually, Heritage Victoria, a government regulator that monitors historic sites, rejected an application for the demolition of the Yarra Building to make way for the Apple Store. That rejection killed the Federation Square Apple Store project.However, that Apple Store does livevirtually, at least, thanks to Filip Chudzinski, a Germany-based designer. Chudzinki created an Apple Federation Store gallery that displays renderings of his ideas of what that store would be like. Chudzinkis images are based on a limited selection of reports, images, and plans from the public preview of the projects second proposal.Chudzinskis images feature a two-story mostly glass building that simultaneously stands out and blends in with its environment. A metal mesh screen on one of the sides of the building can retract to allow more sunlight in. The lower floor would be the traditional retail space, while the upper level would be for Today at Apple sessions and customer support. The building would overlook the Yarra River.Below is a selection of our favorite images but there are many more. Be sure to check out Chudzinskis full gallery, which includes an animation of the retracting mesh screens, spatial photos for Apple Vision Pro users, and downloadable wallpapers for your Mac.Filip ChudzinskiFilip ChudzinskiFilip ChudzinskiFilip ChudzinskiFilip Chudzinski

MacworldiOS 18.4, Apples latest iPhone software update, appears to contain yet another major bug, or group of related bugs. Multiple users driving multiple brands of car say iOS 18.4 has caused serious problems with CarPlay, in some cases rendering it completely unusable.At the milder end, users complain that post-update CarPlay no longer shows Now Playing information in the instrument panel.Before, the music being played on CarPlay would appear on my dash as well, says the author of a busy Reddit thread. Since I updated to 18.4 today it no longer does it and is just blank now.Others report issues with Siri through CarPlay, either not being able to read out texts or losing audio capabilities entirely. And at the most extreme end CarPlay simply refuses to launch until users reconnect their devices, sometimes as many as five times.The bug is not specific to any one brand or model of car, so we can rule out an issue at that level. Autoevolution, which broke the story, says its aware of the problem affecting the 2025 Honda Civic Hybrid, the 2025 Mazda CX-30, 2024 Hondas, multiple Volkswagen models, the 2023 Audi S3, and the 2023 Nissan Frontier, and I also spotted the Ford Territory and Fiesta, the 2020 Subaru Forester, and an unspecified Jeep in the thread.This is an embarrassing development for Apple, after iOS 18.4 was also reported to have caused issues with lossless audio on the AirPods Max (although thats since been fixed) and unwanted apps to appear unexpectedly on users iPhones. To some extent such bugs are understandable because 18.4 is a major update with numerous tweaks and new features: before these bugs began to appear we optimistically listed 15 reasons to install it right away.If CarPlay is a major part of your iPhone usage, we would now advise caution; it may be worth waiting until Apple acknowledges the bug and rolls out a fix before updating. If youve already installed iOS 18.4, keep an eye out for another update (likely 18.4.1 or similar) which could contain a fix. Open the Settings app and go to General > Software Update to see the latest version available.

Two of the biggest names in artificial intelligence are independently developing new AI tools that encourage learning, at a time when the technology has been criticized for dumbing down smart users in the enterprise and discouraging critical thinking. While the new initiatives from OpenAI and Anthropic are aimed at transforming how AI is used in higher education, the opportunities they open up extend beyond universities.The approach taken by the two AI firms, emphasizing learning, retention, and critical thinking, has implications for enterprises that are increasingly integrating AI into their workflows.Such education-focused initiatives arrive at a crucial moment, as research increasingly shows that improper use of AI in workplaces leads to what experts call cognitive atrophy a decline in employees ability to think critically when AI handles too many cognitive tasks.

Like it or not, those who use Windows Update to obtain and install updates, patches, and fixes will occasionally encounter issues. Sometimes, a specific update may not download. At other times, an update may fail to install. Every now and then, Windows Update (a.k.a. WU) may refuse to interact with the Windows servers from which updates come.Thats where these steps come into play. Try these troubleshooting techniques in the order outlined below to get WU operational again.Although Ive illustrated the WU troubleshooting steps in Windows 11 here, the same techniques also work with Windows 10, with only minor variations. This story covers both Windows OSes quite nicely.1. If at first you dont succeedtry againThough the most basic of all troubleshooting techniques for Windows Update doesnt always work, it can help sometimes. That is, if WU fails to work as expected, the first thing to try is running the Windows Update request again.For best results, restart the target PC before trying again. Its not absolutely necessary, but it may clear some pending or transitory conditions (such as an already-downloaded update that needs to be applied, or some other pending system action) that will put Windows Update back to rights.Heres what to do (see Figures 1 and 2):1. Click Start, then the power button icon (far right), then Restart from its pop-up menu.Figure 1: After saving all work, click the power button in the Start menu (lower right), and then click Restart in the menu.Ed Tittel / Foundry2. When the desktop reappears, click Start > Settings > Windows Update, then click the Check for updates button.Figure 2: Click Start > Settings > Windows Update. Then click Check for updates. It may work!Ed Tittel / FoundryIn my own experience, this works one-quarter to one-half of the time when a WU problem manifests. The upload and install simply succeeds on a second try. Could it have been a download hiccup, or perhaps cosmic rays? Whatever: getting it on that next try is a good thing!But if restarting the PC provides no relief, move onto the next section.2. Try the Windows Update troubleshooter (or Get Help app)As the trite software saying goes, Theres an app for that. For common Windows issues which definitely include WU its equally valid to observe, Theres a troubleshooter for that.Troubleshooters are built-in Windows mini-apps meant to diagnose and fix specific Windows problems.In Windows 11, troubleshooters are being deprecated in favor of a new universal Get Help app, but for now, at least, the Windows Update troubleshooter remains the go-to for WU problems in both Windows 10 and Windows 11. Indeed, if you enter troubleshoot Windows Update errors into the Get Help app, it takes you to this very same troubleshooter.At some as-yet-unknown point in the future, that troubleshooter may be replaced with another tool available via Get Help. In the meantime, heres how to fire up the WU troubleshooter directly:1. Click Start > Settings.2. Insider the Settings app, type trouble into search. Youll see something like the list shown in Figure 3 appear. Click Troubleshoot Other problems.Figure 3: The WU troubleshooter falls under Troubleshoot Other problems.Ed Tittel / Foundry3. In the Other troubleshooters pane, Windows Update appears in position 4 (from top) under the Most frequent heading, as shown in Figure 4. Click the Run button at the right-hand side of that entry.Figure 4: Click the Run button to the right of Windows Update to launch that troubleshooter.Ed Tittel / Foundry4. The Windows Update troubleshooter runs in its own window. Youll pick one of two options: I cant download, install, or uninstall an update or I installed an update, but that update has caused a problem. Pick the one that matches your situation. (For this story, I picked I cant download) The troubleshooter asks permission to run an automated diagnostic. Choose Yes, and it runs be patient, this can take a minute or two.When it finishes, youll see a final report window like the one in Figure 5.Figure 5: When the error check completes, the troubleshooter asks if its fix worked. How can you tell?Ed Tittel / FoundryThe troubleshooter asks if its fix solved the problem, but its difficult to tell that without running another update check in WU. I usually answer Yes to the question shown in Figure 5, restart the PC, and run Windows Update again. Only then is the real Yes/No answer clear.In my experience, the WU troubleshooter actually fixes whats wrong one-third to one-half of the time. If it doesnt, advance to the next section, please.3. Completely reset WUIf the WU troubleshooter doesnt address your issue, there is heavier artillery you can bring to bear. Its fully described in the excellent Windows 11 Forum tutorial entitled Reset Windows Update in Windows 11. This tutorial includes a download link to a special batch file that turns off all WU related services, resets all Windows Update components and policies, then restarts all the services it turns off. (Theres a similar tutorial for resetting WU in Windows 10 on Windows 10 Forums, complete with its own batch file.)The download ends in a ZIP extension, so youll need to unzip it after you download. This will reveal the batch file named Reset_Reregister_Windows_Update_Components_for_Windows11.bat.Next, youll need to open an administrative command prompt or PowerShell session. (Type either cmdorpowershellin the Windows search box, right-clickCommand PromptorWindows PowerShellin the list of results, selectRun as administrator, and enter the password if prompted.)Next, navigate to the folder where the aforenamed batch file resides. (Its so handy, I keep it on the desktop on my Windows 10 and 11 PCs, as shown in Figure 6.)Figure 6: The filename is so long you need to open Properties to see it on the desktop.Ed Tittel / FoundryCut and paste the filename into the command line, and then hit theEnterkey to run it. Thats all there is to it.This batch file takes a while to run and involves checking and stopping WU services (bits, wuauserv, and cryptsvc). It then flushes the DNS cache, clears pending update requests, deletes temporary files and folders related to WU downloads, and resets Windows Update policies in the Windows Registry. Then it restarts the services it stopped, and finally ends by offering a Restart button. Use it, because the PC must restart for all these changes to take effect.Ive used this batch file on most of my Windows 10 and 11 PCs (and 7, 8, and 8.1 PCs before that), and its worked in every case except two to put WU back in action. On the machines where it failed, it turned out I had a hardware problem (a failing SSD) on one of them. On the other, Microsofts update was later documented to pose problems for certain PCs.IMO, the reset-reregister batch file is something of a silver bullet for WU problems. Thus, if you dont mind waiting the time it can take to work through its processes (under 2 minutes on my 8th-gen i7 Lenovo X12 hybrid tablet), its always worth a try.After I ran it on my first test PC, it cleared the error condition the troubleshooter found but couldnt fix, and successfully downloaded and installed a pending Cumulative Update (CU).If the silver bullet doesnt work, then what?On one of the two occasions when the batch file didnt fix WU, I had to take my affected PC to the shop, where they were able to detect and diagnose a failing drive (SSD) that I did not catch on my own. Once that component was replaced, the system returned to normal working order.On the other machine, I learned from the chatter around KB5053390 on Windows 11 Forum that others were having similar problems. After I used DISM to install that package manually, WU resumed working correctly. Thus, online research can also help prevent unnecessary flailing about when WU problems present.Before you take a PC that gets to this stage to the shop, Id recommend trying an in-place repair install. And if that fails, try a clean OS install next. Only then should a trip to the shop be needed. Hopefully, youll never get that far!Additional reading on WU issues and errorsThe Microsoft Learn collection called Windows deployment documentation covers the ins and outs of Windows deployment, including WU and updates. It includes a Troubleshoot section broken into two parts namely, Resolve Windows upgrade errors and Windows Update issues troubleshooting. Both dispense lots of useful advice and techniques, plus discussions of (and references to) Windows Update error codes. For those who want to learn and do more about WU and its workings, these are must-reads.This article was originally published in November 2022 and updated in April 2025.

Agents are the talk of the AI industrytheyre capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks like scheduling meetings, ordering groceries, or even taking over your computer to change settings on your behalf. But the same sophisticated abilities that make agents helpful assistants could also make them powerful tools for conducting cyberattacks. They could readily be used to identify vulnerable targets, hijack their systems, and steal valuable data from unsuspecting victims.At present, cybercriminals are not deploying AI agents to hack at scale. But researchers have demonstrated that agents are capable of executing complex attacks (Anthropic, for example, observed its Claude LLM successfully replicating an attack designed to steal sensitive information), and cybersecurity experts warn that we should expect to start seeing these types of attacks spilling over into the real world.I think ultimately were going to live in a world where the majority of cyberattacks are carried out by agents, says Mark Stockley, a security expert at the cybersecurity company Malwarebytes. Its really only a question of how quickly we get there.While we have a good sense of the kinds of threats AI agents could present to cybersecurity, whats less clear is how to detect them in the real world. The AI research organization Palisade Research has built a system called LLM Agent Honeypot in the hopes of doing exactly this. It has set up vulnerable servers that masquerade as sites for valuable government and military information to attract and try to catch AI agents attempting to hack in.The team behind it hopes that by tracking these attempts in the real world, the project will act as an early warning system and help experts develop effective defenses against AI threat actors by the time they become a serious issue.Our intention was to try and ground the theoretical concerns people have, says Dmitrii Volkov, research lead at Palisade. Were looking out for a sharp uptick, and when that happens, well know that the security landscape has changed. In the next few years, I expect to see autonomous hacking agents being told: This is your target. Go and hack it.AI agents represent an attractive prospect to cybercriminals. Theyre much cheaper than hiring the services of professional hackers and could orchestrate attacks more quickly and at a far larger scale than humans could. While cybersecurity experts believe that ransomware attacksthe most lucrative kindare relatively rare because they require considerable human expertise, those attacks could be outsourced to agents in the future, says Stockley. If you can delegate the work of target selection to an agent, then suddenly you can scale ransomware in a way that just isnt possible at the moment, he says. If I can reproduce it once, then its just a matter of money for me to reproduce it 100 times.Agents are also significantly smarter than the kinds of bots that are typically used to hack into systems. Bots are simple automated programs that run through scripts, so they struggle to adapt to unexpected scenarios. Agents, on the other hand, are able not only to adapt the way they engage with a hacking target but also to avoid detectionboth of which are beyond the capabilities of limited, scripted programs, says Volkov. They can look at a target and guess the best ways to penetrate it, he says. That kind of thing is out of reach of, like, dumb scripted bots.Since LLM Agent Honeypot went live in October of last year, it has logged more than 11 million attempts to access itthe vast majority of which were from curious humans and bots. But among these, the researchers have detected eight potential AI agents, two of which they have confirmed are agents that appear to originate from Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively.We would guess that these confirmed agents were experiments directly launched by humans with the agenda of something like Go out into the internet and try and hack something interesting for me, says Volkov. The team plans to expand its honeypot into social media platforms, websites, and databases to attract and capture a broader range of attackers, including spam bots and phishing agents, to analyze future threats.To determine which visitors to the vulnerable servers were LLM-powered agents, the researchers embedded prompt-injection techniques into the honeypot. These attacks are designed to change the behavior of AI agents by issuing them new instructions and asking questions that require humanlike intelligence. This approach wouldnt work on standard bots.For example, one of the injected prompts asked the visitor to return the command cat8193 to gain access. If the visitor correctly complied with the instruction, the researchers checked how long it took to do so, assuming that LLMs are able to respond in much less time than it takes a human to read the request and type out an answertypically in under 1.5 seconds. While the two confirmed AI agents passed both tests, the six others only entered the command but didnt meet the response time that would identify them as AI agents.Experts are still unsure when agent-orchestrated attacks will become more widespread. Stockley, whose company Malwarebytes named agentic AI as a notable new cybersecurity threat in its 2025 State of Malware report, thinks we could be living in a world of agentic attackers as soon as this year.And although regular agentic AI is still at a very early stageand criminal or malicious use of agentic AI even more soits even more of a Wild West than the LLM field was two years ago, says Vincenzo Ciancaglini, a senior threat researcher at the security company Trend Micro.Palisade Researchs approach is brilliant: basically hacking the AI agents that try to hack you first, he says. While in this case were witnessing AI agents trying to do reconnaissance, were not sure when agents will be able to carry out a full attack chain autonomously. Thats what were trying to keep an eye on.And while its possible that malicious agents will be used for intelligence gathering before graduating to simple attacks and eventually complex attacks as the agentic systems themselves become more complex and reliable, its equally possible there will be an unexpected overnight explosion in criminal usage, he says: Thats the weird thing about AI development right now.Those trying to defend against agentic cyberattacks should keep in mind that AI is currently more of an accelerant to existing attack techniques than something that fundamentally changes the nature of attacks, says Chris Betz, chief information security officer at Amazon Web Services. Certain attacks may be simpler to conduct and therefore more numerous; however, the foundation of how to detect and respond to these events remains the same, he says.Agents could also be deployed to detect vulnerabilities and protect against intruders, says Edoardo Debenedetti, a PhD student at ETH Zrich in Switzerland, pointing out that if a friendly agent cannot find any vulnerabilities in a system, its unlikely that a similarly capable agent used by a malicious party is going to be able to find any either.While we know that AIs potential to autonomously conduct cyberattacks is a growing risk and that AI agents are already scanning the internet, one useful next step is to evaluate how good agents are at finding and exploiting these real-world vulnerabilities. Daniel Kang, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his team have built a benchmark to evaluate this; they have found that current AI agents successfully exploited up to 13% of vulnerabilities for which they had no prior knowledge. Providing the agents with a brief description of the vulnerability pushed the success rate up to 25%, demonstrating how AI systems are able to identify and exploit weaknesses even without training. Basic bots would presumably do much worse.The benchmark provides a standardized way to assess these risks, and Kang hopes it can guide the development of safer AI systems. Im hoping that people start to be more proactive about the potential risks of AI and cybersecurity before it has a ChatGPT moment, he says. Im afraid people wont realize this until it punches them in the face.

CarPlay in the newly updated iOS 18.4 is causing problems for an unknown number of users, who report it disconnecting and reconnecting.Apple's CarPlayAppleInsider readers have long reported that CarPlay has various disconnection problems before, but this new update appears to have brought a series of issues. The main problem appears to be specifically that wireless CarPlay will disconnect and reconnect, but some users are no longer seeing the "Now Playing" information on their car screen.Really unhappy with iOS 18.4.. #Carplay is driving me crazy. Think I will upgrade to the betas. So annoying that were on .4 and the quality is still bunk :/ #apple #ios184 #ios185 ceadd (@ceaddl) April 2, 2025 Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Five years after it gave up on its iBooks Author app, Apple is now removing the ability for Pages to send books straight to the Apple Books store.Pages for Mac still has the menu option for publishing to Apple Books, but now it just means export to ePubInitially, Apple made a big deal of its original iBooks Author app in 2012, and how it let users create richly formatted books they could then immediately sell on its then iBooks Store. Only, iBooks Author had bugs, and Apple retired it in June 2020, when it also subsumed the app's publishing features into Pages.As ever with the Book Store or publishing apps, there then followed silence from Apple, until Thursday. Apple emailed publishers with the news that Pages would no longer support publishing to the Apple Book Store. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums