MacworldTheres a new USB-C AirPods Max model out, but the older Lightning model is just as good, if not betterespecially when you can get a killer deal on them. And today weve got one: We found the AirPods Max for $399 at Walmart or Best Buy for delivery in time to wrap and put under the Christmas tree. Thats $150 off and only a couple of dollars off its all-time Black Friday low, a fantastic deal for a killer pair of headphones.The AirPods Max are some of the most comfortable headphones you can get and they deliver fantastic audio. We gave them a four-star rating when we reviewed them and stressed how pleasing the sound quality was, how great the active noise canceling is, and how awesome the build is. We werent thrilled about the price, but when you get to save $150 on them, thats not really an issue anymore.The level of noise cancelation achieved by Apple with these headphones is pretty awesome, allowing you to block out the world around you, whether thats a busy office or your upstairs neighbors remodeling their home. For all those moments when extra vigilance is required, the Transparency Mode will help you keep an ear on your surroundings without taking off your headphones.This model has a Lightning port but otherwise is identical to the newer USB-C model other than some different colors. Theres actually one advantage to the Lightning model: you can connect a Lightning-to-3.5mm audio jack for wired listening, which isnt available with USB-C.So, if you or someone you love has been wanting a pair of AirPods Max, you can grab a pair for a great price at Walmart or Best Buy and still get them in time to rock out on Christmas morning.Save $150 on the AirPods MaxBuy now at Walmart

MacworldTo many of us, backing up a Mac means setting up Time Machine to make incremental backups and signing up to various iCloud services so that we can keep copies of photos, music, files and more in the cloud.But, while Time Machine and iCloud are great resources, they arent perfect, and relying on them alone to keep your data safe is a mistake that could have disastrous consequences. An ideal strategy consists of at least two separate backup schedules, one backing up your Mac to a hard drive onsite, and one backing up to a drive thats stored offsite or in the cloud. At the very least, if you use Time Machine to back up to an external hard drive or network device, you should also have another tool running regular backups to a different drive just in case one fails. PROMOTIONMac backup software | EaseUS Todo BackupAs an ideal alternative to Time Machine and iCloud, EaseUS Todo Backup does backup tasks on Mac more simply and faster, by backup archive, disk cloning features, and file or folder sync. It can set up an automated backup schedule in stealth mode to create safe copies and protect your data proactively. Also, all backups will be compressed to save disk space and encrypted to protect privacy. Now 25% OFF by using code: MACWORLD25.Free TrialBuy and Save 25%In this article, we look at the best on-site backup solutions to use with your Mac. We look separately at cloud backup solutions that work with Macs including Backblaze, Carbonite, IDrive and others including options that offer the ability to combine local backups with backup to the cloud, such as Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office.Best backup software for MacOf the apps and services we look at here, Time Machine from Apple is by far the simplest option. Its also completely free and available to everyone with a Mac, so you might be wondering why you would want to consider another backup option for your Mac. Time Machine is good, but it is limited compared to some of the options out there. Read on to find out how options such as Get Backup Pro, ChronoSync, Carbon Copy Cloner, and SuperDuper might meet your needs. Apple Time MachineProsReliable, easy to set up, and good at working behind the scenes to create backup archivesEasy to migrate Time Machine data over to new Macs as neededGood level of encryption-based security for backup dataConsAlmost exclusively local backups rather than cloud-based backupsLimited backup scheduling optionsRestore interface can be confusingBest Prices Today: RetailerPriceFreeView DealPrice comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwideProductPricePrice comparison from BackmarketFree at AppleWe are starting with Apples Time Machine software because it is included with every Mac. But that doesnt necessarily mean it will be the best option for you. Time Machine is a reliable tool for local backups of Macs, providing a full-sized initial backup of every file on the Mac and incremental backups throughout the day as long as the Mac is attached to a designated Time Machine external drive. That drive can be disconnected and used as an external drive for other computers or paired with multiple Macs for backups.The first backup takes the longest while every file on the Mac is rolled into the Time Machine backup, but it gets quicker from there. Time Machines Restore function allows users to open and scroll through past backups to locate and restore files, which is useful if something was accidentally deleted or you made changes to a file and need to go back to an earlier version.When paired with Apples Migration Assistant, porting data and user profiles from an old Mac to a new one is simple. When importing a Time Machine backup to a new Mac, Time Machine inherits previous backups as well.For security, users can designate a password to encrypt their Time Machine backups and there are reminders about the number of days since the last backup that encourage you to keep it plugged in.However, Time Machine is more geared towards external hard drives, which can be lost, damaged, or stolen. It is best to have both a local and secure off-site copy of your data, and the online backup market has grown over the past few years with services like iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Box.Despite its limitations, Time Machine is an excellent solution for local backups of Macs. While it requires an external hard drive connected to the Mac for consistent functionality, it offers excellent protection built into the operating system.Carbon Copy ClonerProsExcellent performanceGreat level of configuration, including scheduling, and task scriptingFrequent updatesConsCreating a bootable drive is hit or miss on M-series MacsHigh $49.99 price point for the initial Personal and Household licenseCurrently unable to clone to Windows file formats or over to Web and cloud-based platformsPrice When Reviewed:48,15Best Prices Today: RetailerPriceBombich Software48,00 View DealPrice comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwideProductPricePrice comparison from Backmarket48,00 at Bombich SoftwareBombich Softwares Carbon Copy Cloner has been a popular utility for cloning data on Macs since it launched in 2002. It supports HFS+ and APFS drive formats, local volumes, and NAS-enabled networks. However, it cannot back up Windows file formats, optical media, web-based platforms, or Apples Time Machine platforms.Carbon Copy Cloner has a comprehensive user interface, and customizable filters and grants access to configuration options like disk encryption, task notes, and bandwidth configuration for NAS backups. Other tools, such as scheduling, can be performed without issue. The task manager allows users to save and configure multiple backup tasks. A scripting feature allows custom scripts to be loaded and activated as needed.The SafetyNet feature allows for drive formatting or stopping processes before overwriting data on a volume. However, there are some weak points, including Apples lack of openness and the need for bootable external volumes. Creating a bootable external volume in Carbon Copy Cloner is currently a hit-or-miss proposition, with attempts at creating a bootable external volume failing due to Apples protocols. Other utilities face the same issues.Carbon Copy Cloner pairs well with utilities like Time Machine, Apples Migration Assistant, and SuperDuper!. The companys customer support is friendly and speedy, and the software offers quick access to help guides. A supportive community and frequent developer updates are another bonus. If Carbon Copy Cloner is not in your arsenal of handy utilities, you should download it and give it a try.A Personal and Household license is $49.99/40.10. Theres a full-featured 30-day trial.Read our full Carbon Copy Cloner review IDrive ProsGood control over scheduling and backup elements ConsCramped interfacelDrive is a backup utility that handles both local and web/cloud-based backups (similar to Backblaze and Carbonite). It allows you to continually backup your entire drive to the cloud, while also letting you drag and drop files to the cloud to access remotely. lDrive also allows you to back up external hard drives.lDrives user interface is very straightforward. Your Desktop, Documents, Music and Pictures folders are automatically selected for backup, along with the contents of ~/Library/Mail.Features like Rewind and Snapshots allow you to restore from earlier versions of files or snapshots of the complete data set. To add other folders, click Change at the bottom of the window thats not exactly intuitive. You can add videos to the backup, but locating them in lDrives interface can be complicated.Both scheduling and restoring are straightforward, however. As is choosing a local drive as the destination for a backup in place of lDrives servers.All data is encrypted, with the option to set your own private encryption key.You have the choice of restoring by having data physically shipped to you. This is free for the first restore each year, but if you are based outside the US youll have to pay for shipping.The subscription-based tier system offers a free Basic account with 10GB of online disk space for free with no credit or debit card required. That 10GB free tier allows for local backups and is pretty generous, but the real steal is the $2.95 (2.32) per year IDrive Mini plan. Thats not a typo, either; for less than 3 bucks a year you can get access to 100GB of storage. That can be expanded to 500GB for $9.95 (7.84) per year. lDrives free tier and the ability to spread your data allocation in the paid tiers across multiple computers makes it attractive. Overall, though, its expensive for a single machine.Read our full IDrive review SuperDuper! ProsEasy installation, great user interfaceScripting and customization capabilitiesReliable updatesConsNo network volume supportNo FAT, exFAT, or NTFS supportPrice When Reviewed:31,54 EuroBest Prices Today: RetailerPriceShirt Pocket31,54 View DealPrice comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwideProductPricePrice comparison from Backmarket31,54 at Shirt PocketSuperDuper! (version 3.8 at the time of this review) is a popular Mac cloning and restoration app that is easy to install. It supports APFS and HFS+ file formats and can be customized to fit individual needs. In addition to cloning, the app supports scheduling and allows users to specify files to be copied over, including Unix-specific elements like user folders, shared users, shared users and applications, and backup files.SuperDuper! easily restores data from one volume to another, which is simpler than using Apples restoration options in macOSs Disk Utility. The user interface displays the number of files copied, copy speed, data evaluated, time elapsed, and amount of data moved from the source volume to the target volume. Users can edit provided scripts or write their own, choose between methods such as Total Backup and Smart Backup, and set up events like permission repairs before a copy begins, scripts to execute after a copy has completed, and for the Mac to eject the target volume, shut down, go to sleep, or quit SuperDuper! once the copy is done.However, SuperDuper! has room for improvement. For example, it cant back up to network volumes and it doesnt support FAT, exFAT, or NTFS for Windows and Linux volumes. We hope that the network backup comes with a further update.SuperDuper! retails for a one-time payment of $27.95/26.95 (you can use it for free, but you need to pay to unlock scheduling, smart updates, and some other features).Over the years, Shirt Pocket has consistently provided solid updates, pinned down bugs, supported new protocols introduced by Apple, and communicated well through its tech support and marketing. Overall, SuperDuper! is a reliable local cloning and restoration app for the Mac that can be readily customized and scripted, and is excellent value.Read our full Superduper review Get Backup Pro ProsFlexibility Can back up to network volumesGet Backup Proby BeLight Software is easy to download, install into the Applications folder, and run (although we did encounter a few problems assigning full disk access).The user interface keeps things simple, scheduling full backups, cloning, and incremental backups worked like a charm, and a slate of customization options allows for specific files and folders to be chosen and app data to be added to the backup/clone process.The impressive level of customization makes it easy to set tasks up, while an excellent restoration system installed data where it needed to be without fail. Get Backup Pro to be very capable, running flawlessly under macOS Sequoia.The software is priced well at $29.99 (23.59) for a single license, $49.99 (39.38) for a family license that covers up to five Macs. Get Backup Pro 3 is also available at a 30% academic discount for education. The software is also available through MacPaws SetApp subscription service, which retails between $9.99 and $14.99 a month depending on the subscription tier chosen. The option of a 30-day demo gives you time to play around with it, and the licensing is flexible.Get Backup Pro presents a nice array of options beyond what Apples free Time Machine utility offer and is excellent for the casual user and the home market.Read our full Get Backup Pro review Backblaze ProsFlexibility Can back up to network volumesBackblaze is an online, offsite backup service that allows you to back up your Mac to its servers automatically or according to a schedule you set.Backblaze backs up the contents of your Documents, Pictures, Movies and Music folders, but excludes your Applications folder. Backblaze also excludes some file types from being backed up, such as .dmg disk images that restriction can be switched off, however.Backups are kept for 30 days, so you can restore from any that ran during that time. As you would expect, backups are incremental so only files that have changed since it last ran are copied. Data is encrypted and you can optionally add a six-digit passcode to provide an additional layer of security.When it comes to restoring your data, you have three options: you can restore via Backblazes web interface or you can have files sent to you on a USB stick or hard drive for an additional fee. And theres a 100% refund if you return the USB stick or hard drive within 30 days, though youll have to pay shipping and taxes.You can view individual files and choose which ones to download. And you can view and share backed up files on an iPhone or iPad with the Backblaze mobile app.The Locate your Computer service tracks your Macs location to help you find it if its stolen similar to Find My. If a lost Mac is still running backups your Mac can tell you its current IP address and show you recently backed-up data.Backblazes user interface comprises a menu bar item and a System Preferences pane. However, that pane is more like a fully fledged application, with options to exclude files, add folders and disks to the backup, and throttle bandwidth. Its simple and very Mac-like.If you only need to back up one Mac, and particularly if you want to back up external disks, Backblazes simplicity and price give it the edge over Carbonite and IDrive.With Backblaze you can back up your Mac for $9 (approx 7) a month or $99/year (approx 78), data is stored in secure data centres and two-factor authentication adds an extra level of security.Read our full Backblaze review ChronoSyncProsSupports backing up to Google Cloud and Amazon S3 storage as well as local hard driveConsComplexDont be fooled by its name. While ChronoSync has its roots in file synchronization and still focuses on that, its a robust, feature-filled, and highly configurable backup tool too.As youd expect, you can manually run backups or schedule them and you can back up to a local hard drive or NAS box. ChronoSync also supports backing up to Google Cloud and Amazon S3 storage.You can use it to back up one remote location to another using SFTP and even set the location to be an iPhone or iPad using the optional InterConneX app. If you want to back up files and folders to another Mac, you can do that too.Backups are incremental, but ChronoSync doesnt just check the contents of a file for changes. If metadata has altered since the last backup, that will be reflected too. And backed-up files are copied to a temporary file and checked for integrity before the file on the destination volume is replaced with the new version.ChronoSync can create two types of bootable clones: standard and mirrored. The former creates a bootable system on the destination volume, leaving other files on the volume intact. Mirror replaces the entire contents of the destination volume with files from the source.ChronoSyncs interface is chock-full of options and that in itself may be enough to put you off if all you want it is a simple backup tool: Get Backup Pro or Acronis True Image are more straightforward options. However, if you need both synchronization across multiple Macs and backup, its worth persevering.ChronoSync costs $49.99 (approx 38). There is a 15-day fully functional trial or you could buy ChronoSync Express for $29.99 (approx 23), a cut-price version of the complete ChronoSync software, which allows you to sync and backup files locally but doesnt support cloud backup or cloning your Macs boot drive. You can download ChronoSync Express from the Mac App Store here.Read our full ChronoSync review MacBackup GuruProsGood control over scheduling and backup elements ConsCramped interfaceMac Backup Gurus prime function is to create bootable clones of your Macs startup disk. However, it can also synchronize backed-up versions of your disk, or even of just a folder, with the current version. And it can create snapshots, just like Time Machine does. So, for example, if you set it to take a snapshot on a regular schedule, you can then revert to whichever snapshot you choose.You can also choose which folders to back up and to where rather than having to backup a whole disk to your Time Machines disk and then designate folders to exclude. Theres more control over scheduling that Time Machine offers, and, of course, Apples utility doesnt offer the ability to synchronize folders or create bootable clones.While the snapshots feature is similar to Time Machine, Mac Backup Guru offers more control. You can, for example, browse snapshots in the Finder, rather than having to use the Time Machine utility to restore files.Mac Backup Gurus interface is simple and will be familiar if youve used some of the other tools listed here. However, some of the menu buttons, notably those for choosing source and destination, seemed small and cramped to us. Wed have liked those menus and the options contained within them to have been a little bigger to make them easier to select from.Once youve chosen a source, which can be a whole volume or a specific folder, and a destination, you can elect to exclude folders within that from being backed up. You can also schedule automatic backups. The scheduling is fairly basic, but that means its also easy to configure. Just click the days on which you want the backup to run and the time you want it to run. Its worth noting that while you can run the backup on whichever day you choose, you have to run it at the same time each day. You can also run ad-hoc backups by pressing the Backup button on the main window.The final option is to choose how many snapshots to keep. Once you reach the specified number, Mac Backup Guru will start deleting the oldest snapshot every time a new one is created.Mac Backup Guru is an easy-to-use backup tool that keeps options and settings to a minimum while offering several useful features. Its also good value at the time of writing it was on offer for less than $9/7.16, a significant discount on its usual $29/23.05 price.

MacworldWeve looked in depth at CleanMyMac as a great solution for reclaiming space and optimizing you Mac and its one of our top choices in our round up of the Best Mac Cleaning Software. Among its many tools is a Protection tool that can scan for malware on your Mac and remove it. In this article we are looking specifically at this feature to see if it can compete on the same level as the big guns in our round up of the Best Antivirus solutions for Mac. CleanMyMacRead our reviewPrice When Reviewed:39,99 Best Prices Today:39.99 at MacPawOur big concern here is that sometimes a company can be lead by its marketing department who make promises the engineering team cant deliver. We felt this was the case when we first looked at the antivirus aspect of CleanMyMacs arsenal earlier in 2024, but its been updated since, so we wanted to take another look. Like previous versions, the version of CleanMyMac we are testing (CleanMyMac 5.0.4) comes out swinging the first time you launch it, its opening animations offering tutorial elements to learn from. CleanMyMac installs cleanly, but doesnt ask for Full Disk Access, which has to be assigned manually in the Privacy & Security settings, which proved a bit disconcerting. Still, the software offers a good level of customization, and its easy to choose between the three scan modes (Quick Scan, Balanced Scan, and Deep Scan), each of them offering quick performance as CleanMyMac scans your hard drive and external drives. Its easy to configure scan behaviors, such as whether or not to include external drives in your scans or target .DMG files, and whitelists can also be created to exclude specific volumes and folders from the scans.CleanMyMac homes in on the XLoader malware, offering to quarantine and remove it.FoundryTesting with CleanMyMac proved a mixed bag, and while the software teams up well with macOS GateKeeper feature, the two bringing down the hammer on questionable software that hasnt been signed as safe/compatible by Apple and preventing installation or the running of questionable scripts and functions, its still possible to get a fair amount of malware past these systems and into your Mac. Once installed, the Quick Scan feature found only three threats in the form of two elements from CrossRat and a threat in the form of the infamous AdWind malware. The Balanced Scan function was able to root out most of the Elite Keylogger malware, while the Deep Scan feature found the remnants of the AdWind malware, which had to be dug out with a third-party utility.To its credit, CleanMyMac was able to catch some elements of malware as they were being opened for the first time, but there were questionable chunks of software that remained even after theyd purportedly been removed and the Mac had been rebooted. Case in point, the Elite Keylogger software had to be manually located and removed from the Login Items. FoundryIn addition to this, CleanMyMac offers no tangible warning against visiting questionable websites, and essentially waved me on through without any kind of warning to every questionable link to be found in my Gmails Spam folder, in one case allowing full access to a mock utility that pretended to scan my hard drive for infections and located dozens of samples with the intention of having me install malware to remove the purported infections. None of this is encouraging, and in the midst of MacPaw and CleanMyMacs claims that the utility is a catch-all for just about everything on your Mac, this feels like a missing feature that could be capitalized on if executed well.Its not all bad news for CleanMyMac. To my surprise, the application was able to catch and remove no less than 216 malware samples that Id copied on an external hard drive, hunting them down after theyd been decompressed from their .zip archives and taking them out effectively. This was an excellent find, but these malware samples seemed to have been largely ignored when they were on my local hard drive awaiting installation, and CleanMyMac weirdly wraps external hard drives into its larger scans without offering a targeted scanning feature that can be used with an external drive such as a thumb drive on the fly.Its a strange mix of zippy speed that can perform a Deep Scan on an SSD with more than 800 gigabytes of data on it in five to ten minutes, but also allows prominent chunks of adware and malware that remain installed unless you specifically locate the files and remove them or use a third-party utility to hunt down what CleanMyMac missed. CleanMyMac was able to find and remove 216 instances of malware from an external drive.FoundryYes, there are some good features to be had with the new version of CleanMyMac, the interface is excellent, and MacPaw makes good use of its potentially great MoonLock antiviral engine and its real-time malware monitor, but theres too much that can be forced through that just ends up not being cleanly removed, and this is a problem.CleanMyMac 5.0.4 caught a fair amount of viral activity, but still left adware and malware such as AdWind in place, which needed to be cleaned out with another utility.CleanMyMac retails for $39.95/30.95 for one Mac for a one year subscription, or a one time purchase of $119.95/101.95 for one Mac (at the time of writing there is an additional 20% off those prices). It is available for a week-long free trial provided you give MacPaw your credit or debit card information to bill against.

Slack is adding a new way to access AI agents created on parent company Salesforces Agentforce platform, with a library of options available in the collaboration app.Agentforce, which launched in October, is a tool to build AI agents that answer questions and automate tasks for users. Slack has already begun tointegrate these Agentforce agents into its appas chatbots available in Slack channels, alongside a range of third-party agents from the likes of Adobe Express, Box, Perplexity and others.On Tuesday, the company announced that a new Agentforce hub is coming to Slack workspaces to help users find the relevant agent to assist with a task. Accessed as a tab on the left-hand sidebar, it provides a list of available and recommended agents that users can browse.From there, you can activate your chosen agent and begin a conversation, the Slack team said in a blog post.Agents are tailored to a variety of use cases; deal assistance, IT help, onboarding, and marketing strategy are some examples Slack detailed. As well as pre-built agents, customers will be able to host their own customized agents in the Agentforce hub.Slack also announced the general availability of Slack actions that can be added to agent workflows created in the Agentforce Agent Builder tool. This means agents can be prepped to perform tasks such as creating and updating Slack canvas documents, generating Slack lists, and sending direct messages to colleagues.Actions in Agent Builder allow Slack users to customize AI agents.SlackAgentforce agents will also be able to search for information across Slack conversations and connected applications, helping the agent chatbots provide more accurate answers.The three sets of features will be generally available in January to customers with both an Agentforce license and a paid Slack license. Details on the consumption-based pricing model for Agentforce agents in Slack is coming soon, a spokesperson said.AI agents have become a major focus for software vendors in recent months, including Asana, Atlassian, Microsoft, and others. Last week, Google announced a variety of agent-related tools, including a newAgentspace applicationand arevamped NotebookLM AI assistantfor customers of its Workspace app suite.The agent concept is used in different ways by different companies; it generally refers to software systems that can take actions on behalf of a user, with varying degrees of autonomy.IDC analysts predict that at least 40% of Global 2000 businesses will use AI agents and agentic workflows to automate knowledge work, doubling productivity in the process at least in cases where the technology is successfully implemented.

Microsofts genAI-based Copilot app for Windows doesnt work with Microsofts identity and access management platform Entra, prompting the company to advise organizations to uninstall the app and reconfigure the Copilot keyboard key to open the Microsoft 365 app instead.The Copilot key was originally intended to launch Copilot on Windows, Microsofts Reanne Wong said in ablog post. This has changed, as weve evolved Microsoft Copilot on Windows to better accommodate feedback and needs.As weve previously shared, Copilot on Windows has been removed, and the Microsoft Copilot app is now only available to consumer users who authenticate with a Microsoft account, Wong said. It will not work for commercial users authenticating with a Microsoft Entra account.Microsoft says the change is designed to strengthen data security and privacy and simplify the user experience for those signed in with a Microsoft Entra work or school account. Organizations are also advised to use AppLocker to prevent employees from reinstalling Copilot.

Apple has updated an essential enterprise product itsIT training courses,which have now been updated for the latest iterations of its operating systems, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. The company first introduced these courses in their current format in 2022 and has updated them with each OS iteration ever since.The company offers four courses:Apple Device Support (14 hours and 15 minutes of coursework, and an exam).Apple Deployment and Management (11 hours and 45 minutes of coursework, and an exam).Mac Security Compliance (5 hours).Apple Business Essentials.Who are these courses for?Apple recognizes there is a growing need for Apple skills to feed enterprise deployments. Asever more enterprises deploy Apples kitacross their business, the need for trained staff has grown to the extent that demand for these skills is expected to grow faster than for most other occupations. Enterprises need Apple professionals to help manage their systems.More people than ever are using Mac, iPad, and iPhone to do their best work, and the demand for Apple-certified IT professionals has never been greater, Susan Prescott, Apples vice president of enterprise and education marketing, said whenApple first introduced these courses.Apple Professional Training helps anyone with an interest in technology whether they are changing careers or upping their skill set pursue high-paying IT jobs with certifications that will stand out to potential employers. We believe deeply in inclusion in technology, so the new courses are self-paced and freely available, and we are working to ensure ability to pay isnt a barrier to earning Apple certification,she said at the time.The training is delivered in an online, self-paced format. Users can demonstrate their competency with two new exams and earn certifications from Apple. Here are more details about the courses:Apple Device SupportThis is an extensive course that looks at every aspect of managing devices in enterprise environments. It focuses on mobile device management (MDM), Apple Accounts, iCloud, Passkeys, security, and app, network, and security management. Essentially, the course should equip IT staffers with the insights they need to prepare devices for management, and to manage them after that. Hardware insights include use of Configurator for setting up network management and how to use diagnostics to figure out device problems. You can follow the course for free, but the exam costs $149. A pass gives you Apple Certified IT Professional status. More information concerning the course isavailable here.Apple Deployment and ManagementThis core course provides the knowledge, skills, tools, and services required to manage large numbers of Apple devices. Its an extensive and wide-ranging set of tutorials supported by a certified examination. Once again, you can follow the course for free, but as with Apple Device Support, the exam costs $149; passing it gives you Apple Certified IT Professional status, which is a marketable skill in its own right. Topics covered include MDM planning and preparation, device management, enrollment, and redeployment. By the time you finish the course you should understand how MDM works on Apple devices and have enough insight to help you set up an appropriate MDM system in your enterprise.More info here.Mac Security ComplianceThe Mac Security Compliance course has seen some significant improvements, including access to the macOS Security Compliance Project (mSCP), an open source attempt to provide a programmatic approach to achieving security best practices. Its a joint project of federal operational IT Security staff and volunteers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the US State Department, Leidos and the Center for Internet Security (CIS).The five-hour course guides admins through good practice approaches to developing, implementing, and managing security compliance strategy, including reporting and documentation. More information pertaining to the Mac Security Compliance courseis available here.Apple Business EssentialsThis course will help admins get to grips with how device management works on Apples systems. It explains the systems, hardware, and software required to bring devices into management with Apple Business Essentials and guide IT through setup, deployment, enrolment, configuration and security for managed devices. The course also explains how to use AppleCare+ with Apple Business Essentials, which is made available within some plans. More information on this courseis available here.Registration for new Apple exams based on the new operating systems is open now. The exam and exam preparation guides are available in English and will appear in Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, and Spanish by spring 2025.One thing that is certain, however, is that demand to join these courses will increase in direct response to the companys growing enterprise market share.You can follow me on social media! Join me onBlueSky, LinkedIn,Mastodon, andMeWe.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.AI is changing how we study bird migrationIn a warming world, migratory birds face many existential threats. Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their migrations, but each has shortcomings. And theres another problem: Most birds migrate at night, when its more difficult to identify them visually and while most birders are in bed.For over a century, acoustic monitoring has hovered tantalizingly out of reach as a method that would solve ornithologists woes. Now, finally, machine-learning tools are unlocking a treasure trove of acoustic data for ecologists. Read the full story.Christian ElliotThis story is from the forthcoming magazine edition of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on January 6its all about the exciting breakthroughs happening in the world right now. If you dont already, subscribe to receive a copy.A woman in the US is the third person to receive a gene-edited pig kidneyTowana Looney, a 53-year-old woman from Alabama, has become the third living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig.Looney, who donated one of her kidneys to her mother back in 1999, developed kidney failure several years later following a pregnancy complication that caused high blood pressure. She started dialysis treatment in December of 2016 and was put on a waiting list for a kidney transplant soon after.But it was difficult to find a match. So Looneys doctors recommended the experimental pig organ as an alternative. After eight years on the waiting list, Looney was authorized to receive the kidney. Read the full story.Jessica HamzelouRoundtables: The Worst Technology Failures of 2024Each year, MIT Technology Review publishes a list of the worst technologies of the past 12 months.Antonio Regalado, our senior editor for biomedicine, sat down to discuss 2024s worst failures with our executive editor Niall Firth in a subscriber-exclusive online Roundtable event yesterday. Watch their conversation about what made the cut here, and to make sure you dont miss out in the future, subscribe!MIT Technology Review Narrated: Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraines drone defenseDespite it being over 100 years old, radio technology is still critical in almost all aspects of modern warfareincluding in the drones that have come to dominate the Russia-Ukraine war.Serhii Flash Beskrestnov, who has been obsessed with radios since childhood, has become an unlikely hero of the conflict, sharing advice and intel. His work may determine the future of Ukraine, and wars far beyond it.This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, whichwere publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as its released.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Conspiracy theories are still circulating about those mysterious dronesWhat are they? And where have they come from? (NY Mag $)+ Authorities are attempting to quell public hysteria, but theories abound. (WP $)+ Realistically, theyre probably just standard drones out for a night-time flight. (AP News)2 AI poses a major threat to the power gridThats according to the US industry watchdog, which is feeling the pressure. (FT $)+ AIs emissions are about to skyrocket even further. (MIT Technology Review)3 SpaceX and Elon Musk are under investigationUS federal agencies are probing their repeated failures to comply with reporting rules. (NYT $)4 Nvidia has unveiled a tiny, affordable AI supercomputerWhich is handy for roboticists looking to bypass connecting to remote data centers. (Gizmodo)+ While its not the companys most powerful device, its pretty speedy. (WSJ $)+ Microsoft is gobbling up more of Nvidias chips than anyone else. (FT $)+ Blacklisted Chinese AI chip firms gained access to cutting-edge UK tech. (The Guardian)5 Bitcoins value is rocketing even higherThe industry continues to boom in the wake of Trumps election victory. (Bloomberg $)+ So much so, luxury brands are weighing up accepting crypto payments. (Reuters)6 Hepatitis B is an extremely treatable diseaseSo why are so many people still dying from it? (New Yorker $)+ Were starting to understand the mysterious surge of hepatitis in children. (MIT Technology Review)7 Earthbrieflyhad an extra second moonAnd scientists believe it originated from the actual moon we know and love. (New Scientist $)8 The future of deep-sea miningA set of rules governing how we should do it is highly contentiousand up for debate.(Hakai Magazine)+ These deep-sea potatoes could be the future of mining for renewable energy. (MIT Technology Review)9 Resist the temptation to outsource your Christmas shopping to a botYou never know what youll end up with. (Insider $)+ Its probably quicker to browse the web yourself. (WP $)10 Our snacks could soon be designed by AI Confectionary giant Mondelez is using the tech to tweak recipes and test new ones. (WSJ $)+ Forget cookiesthis creamy vegan cheese was made with AI. (MIT Technology Review)Quote of the dayIt takes a lot for an uber-wealthy, creative-type CEO, many of whom lean left, to suck it up and deal with Trump. But what choice do they have?A Washington lobbyist explains to the Financial Times why the steady stream of tech executives paying their respects to US President-elect Donald Trump shows no sign of slowing.The big storyWhat does GPT-3 know about me?August 2022One of the biggest stories in tech is the rise of large language models that produce text that reads like a human might have written it.These models power comes from being trained on troves of publicly available human-created text hoovered up from the internet. If youve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the worlds most popular LLMs.Melissa Heikkil, MIT Technology Reviews AI reporter, wondered what data these models might have on herand how it could be misused. So she put OpenAIs GPT-3 to the test. Read about what she found.We can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ 2024 was a seriously weird year, as evidenced by this completely bonkers list.+ Who knew Seal was such a grunge head?+ These Charli xcx Christmas mashups will haunt my dreams forever, and not in a good way.+ Next summer I feel the need to level up my sandcastle game.

AI is all about data. Reams and reams of data are needed to train algorithms to do what we want, and what goes into the AI models determines what comes out. But heres the problem: AI developers and researchers dont really know much about the sources of the data they are using. AIs data collection practices are immature compared with the sophistication of AI model development. Massive data sets often lack clear information about what is in them and where it came from.The Data Provenance Initiative, a group of over 50 researchers from both academia and industry, wanted to fix that. They wanted to know, very simply: Where does the data to build AI come from? They audited nearly 4,000 public data sets spanning over 600 languages, 67 countries, and three decades. The data came from 800 unique sources and nearly 700 organizations.Their findings, shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review, show a worrying trend: AIs data practices risk concentrating power overwhelmingly in the hands of a few dominant technology companies.In the early 2010s, data sets came from a variety of sources, says Shayne Longpre, a researcher at MIT who is part of the project.It came not just from encyclopedias and the web, but also from sources such as parliamentary transcripts, earning calls, and weather reports. Back then, AI data sets were specifically curated and collected from different sources to suit individual tasks, Longpre says.Then transformers, the architecture underpinning language models, were invented in 2017, and the AI sector started seeing performance get better the bigger the models and data sets were. Today, most AI data sets are built by indiscriminately hoovering material from the internet. Since 2018, the web has been the dominant source for data sets used in all media, such as audio, images, and video, and a gap between scraped data and more curated data sets has emerged and widened.In foundation model development, nothing seems to matter more for the capabilities than the scale and heterogeneity of the data and the web, says Longpre. The need for scale has also boosted the use of synthetic data massively.The past few years have also seen the rise of multimodal generative AI models, which can generate videos and images. Like large language models, they need as much data as possible, and the best source for that has become YouTube.For video models, as you can see in this chart, over 70% of data for both speech and image data sets comes from one source.This could be a boon for Alphabet, Googles parent company, which owns YouTube. Whereas text is distributed across the web and controlled by many different websites and platforms, video data is extremely concentrated in one platform.It gives a huge concentration of power over a lot of the most important data on the web to one company, says Longpre.And because Google is also developing its own AI models, its massive advantage also raises questions about how the company will make this data available for competitors, says Sarah Myers West, the coexecutive director at the AI Now Institute.Its important to think about data not as though its sort of this naturally occurring resource, but its something that is created through particular processes, says Myers West.If the data sets on which most of the AI that were interacting with reflect the intentions and the design of big, profit-motivated corporationsthats reshaping the infrastructures of our world in ways that reflect the interests of those big corporations, she says.This monoculture also raises questions about how accurately the human experience is portrayed in the data set and what kinds of models we are building, says Sara Hooker, the vice president of research at the technology company Cohere, who is also part of the Data Provenance Initiative.People upload videos to YouTube with a particular audience in mind, and the way people act in those videos is often intended for very specific effect. Does [the data] capture all the nuances of humanity and all the ways that we exist? says Hooker.Hidden restrictionsAI companies dont usually share what data they used to train their models. One reason is that they want to protect their competitive edge. The other is that because of the complicated and opaque way data sets are bundled, packaged, and distributed, they likely dont even know where all the data came from.They also probably dont have complete information about any constraints on how that data is supposed to be used or shared. The researchers at the Data Provenance Initiative found that data sets often have restrictive licenses or terms attached to them, which should limit their use for commercial purposes, for example.This lack of consistency across the data lineage makes it very hard for developers to make the right choice about what data to use, says Hooker.It also makes it almost impossible to be completely certain you havent trained your model on copyrighted data, adds Longpre.More recently, companies such as OpenAI and Google have struck exclusive data-sharing deals with publishers, major forums such as Reddit, and social media platforms on the web. But this becomes another way for them to concentrate their power.These exclusive contracts can partition the internet into various zones of who can get access to it and who cant, says Longpre.The trend benefits the biggest AI players, who can afford such deals, at the expense of researchers, nonprofits, and smaller companies, who will struggle to get access. The largest companies also have the best resources for crawling data sets.This is a new wave of asymmetric access that we havent seen to this extent on the open web, Longpre says.The West vs. the restThe data that is used to train AI models is also heavily skewed to the Western world. Over 90% of the data sets that the researchers analyzed came from Europe and North America, and fewer than 4% came from Africa.These data sets are reflecting one part of our world and our culture, but completely omitting others, says Hooker.The dominance of the English language in training data is partly explained by the fact that the internet is still over 90% in English, and there are still a lot of places on Earth where theres really poor internet connection or none at all, says Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at Hugging Face, who was not part of the research team. But another reason is convenience, she adds: Putting together data sets in other languages and taking other cultures into account requires conscious intention and a lot of work.The Western focus of these data sets becomes particularly clear with multimodal models. When an AI model is prompted for the sights and sounds of a wedding, for example, it might only be able to represent Western weddings, because thats all that it has been trained on, Hooker says.This reinforces biases and could lead to AI models that push a certain US-centric worldview, erasing other languages and cultures.We are using these models all over the world, and theres a massive discrepancy between the world were seeing and whats invisible to these models, Hooker says.

A small songbird soars above Ithaca, New York, on a September night. He is one of 4 billion birds, a great annual river of feathered migration across North America. Midair, he lets out what ornithologists call a nocturnal flight call to communicate with his flock. Its the briefest of signals, barely 50 milliseconds long, emitted in the woods in the middle of the night. But humans have caught it nevertheless, with a microphone topped by a focusing funnel. Moments later, software called BirdVoxDetect, the result of a collaboration between New York University, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and cole Centrale de Nantes, identifies the bird and classifies it to the species level.Biologists like Cornells Andrew Farnsworth had long dreamed of snooping on birds this way. In a warming world increasingly full of human infrastructure that can be deadly to them, like glass skyscrapers and power lines, migratory birds are facing many existential threats. Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their migrations, but each has shortcomings. Doppler radar, with the weather filtered out, can detect the total biomass of birds in the air, but it cant break that total down by species. GPS tags on individual birds and careful observations by citizen-scientist birders help fill in that gap, but tagging birds at scale is an expensive and invasive proposition. And theres another key problem: Most birds migrate at night, when its more difficult to identify them visually and while most birders are in bed. For over a century, acoustic monitoring has hovered tantalizingly out of reach as a method that would solve ornithologists woes.In the late 1800s, scientists realized that migratory birds made species-specific nocturnal flight callsacoustic fingerprints. When microphones became commercially available in the 1950s, scientists began recording birds at night. Farnsworth led some of this acoustic ecology research in the 1990s. But even then it was challenging to spot the short calls, some of which are at the edge of the frequency range humans can hear. Scientists ended up with thousands of tapes they had to scour in real time while looking at spectrograms that visualize audio. Though digital technology made recording easier, the perpetual problem, Farnsworth says, was that it became increasingly easy to collect an enormous amount of audio data, but increasingly difficult to analyze even some of it.Then Farnsworth met Juan Pablo Bello, director of NYUs Music and Audio Research Lab. Fresh off a project using machine learning to identify sources of urban noise pollution in New York City, Bello agreed to take on the problem of nocturnal flight calls. He put together a team including the French machine-listening expert Vincent Lostanlen, and in 2015, the BirdVox project was born to automate the process. Everyone was like, Eventually, when this nut is cracked, this is going to be a super-rich source of information, Farnsworth says. But in the beginning, Lostanlen recalls, there was not even a hint that this was doable. It seemed unimaginable that machine learning could approach the listening abilities of experts like Farnsworth.Andrew is our hero, says Bello. The whole thing that we want to imitate with computers is Andrew.They started by training BirdVoxDetect, a neural network, to ignore faults like low buzzes caused by rainwater damage to microphones. Then they trained the system to detect flight calls, which differ between (and even within) species and can easily be confused with the chirp of a car alarm or a spring peeper. The challenge, Lostanlen says, was similar to the one a smart speaker faces when listening for its unique wake word, except in this case the distance from the target noise to the microphone is far greater (which means much more background noise to compensate for). And, of course, the scientists couldnt choose a unique sound like Alexa or Hey Google for their trigger. For birds, we dont really make that choice. Charles Darwin made that choice for us, he jokes. Luckily, they had a lot of training data to work withFarnsworths team had hand-annotated thousands of hours of recordings collected by the microphones in Ithaca.With BirdVoxDetect trained to detect flight calls, another difficult task lay ahead: teaching it to classify the detected calls by species, which few expert birders can do by ear. To deal with uncertainty, and because there is not training data for every species, they decided on a hierarchical system. For example, for a given call, BirdVoxDetect might be able to identify the birds order and family, even if its not sure about the speciesjust as a birder might at least identify a call as that of a warbler, whether yellow-rumped or chestnut-sided. In training, the neural network was penalized less when it mixed up birds that were closer on the taxonomical tree. Last August, capping off eight years of research, the team published a paper detailing BirdVoxDetects machine-learning algorithms. They also released the software as a free, open-source product for ornithologists to use and adapt. In a test on a full season of migration recordings totaling 6,671 hours, the neural network detected 233,124 flight calls. In a 2022 study in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the team that tested BirdVoxDetect found acoustic data as effective as radar for estimating total biomass.BirdVoxDetect works on a subset of North American migratory songbirds. But through few-shot learning, it can be trained to detect other, similar birds with just a few training examples. Its like learning a language similar to one you already speak, Bello says. With cheap microphones, the system could be expanded to places around the world without birders or Doppler radar, even in vastly different recording conditions. If you go to a bioacoustics conference and you talk to a number of people, they all have different use cases, says Lostanlen. The next step for bioacoustics, he says, is to create a foundation model, like the ones scientists are working on for natural-language processing and image and video analysis, that would be reconfigurable for any specieseven beyond birds. That way, scientists wont have to build a new BirdVoxDetect for every animal they want to study.The BirdVox project is now complete, but scientists are already building on its algorithms and approach. Benjamin Van Doren, a migration biologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who worked on BirdVox, is using Nighthawk, a new user-friendly neural network based on both BirdVoxDetect and the popular birdsong ID app Merlin, to study birds migrating over Chicago and elsewhere in North and South America. And Dan Mennill, who runs a bioacoustics lab at the University of Windsor, says hes excited to try Nighthawk on flight calls his team currently hand-annotates after theyre recorded by microphones on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes. One weakness of acoustic monitoring is that unlike radar, a single microphone cant detect the altitude of a bird overhead or the direction in which it is moving. Mennills lab is experimenting with an array of eight microphones that can triangulate to solve that problem. Sifting through recordings has been slow. But with Nighthawk, the analysis will speed dramatically.With birds and other migratory animals under threat, Mennill says, BirdVoxDetect came at just the right time. Knowing exactly which birds are flying over in real time can help scientists keep tabs on how species are doing and where theyre going. That can inform practical conservation efforts like Lights Out initiatives that encourage skyscrapers to go dark at night to prevent bird collisions. Bioacoustics is the future of migration research, and were really just getting to the stage where we have the right tools, he says. This ushers us into a new era.Christian Elliott is a science and environmental reporter based in Illinois.

Apple has published a white paper that backs the European Union's policy of interoperability between rival technology firms, but says the law is open to risky interpretation.EU asks Apple to open up iPhone to competitorsIn a similar move to its March 2024 raising of security concerns about the Digital Markets Act, Apple has published a white paper about the EU's interoperability laws. Interoperability is the requirement that Apple share its technology with rivals, so that they can provide users with features such as recording audio through an iPhone's microphone.It follows the EU's publication of a document asking Apple to change its proprietary technology to be accessible by competitors. Apple's white paper, called "It's getting personal", argues that "abuse of the DMA's interoperability mandate could expose your private information." Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums