Apple is soft-launching direct, person-to-person payments in an iMessage today with the Apple Pay Cash beta. The feature, which was announced earlier this year, allows you to send and receive cash inside the Messages app on iPhones. The program is launching in public beta today on iOS 11.2 beta 2, and you can opt in using the iOS Public Beta program here. 

Once you’ve updated, you’ll see an Apple Pay button in the apps section of Messages that allows you to initiate a payment. Payments can also be triggered by simply asking for money in a message or tapping on a message sent by someone else asking for money. 

Appleby, a major law firm based in Bermuda, has said the financial details of super-rich clients may be leaked after it suffered a major data breach last year. The offshore firm said it suffered a "data security incident" in 2016 that "involved some of our data being compromised".

The firm is currently warning clients, including some of the wealthiest people in the UK, that their sensitive information may be leaked after it was approached by the media group behind the reporting of the Panama Papers. In 2015, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released the so-called Panama Papers, a cache of 11.5 million leaked financial documents from Panama City-based Mossack Fonseca. 

A bug that has been confirmed on both iOS 11 and iOS 11.1 beta allows hackers to bypass the passcode of an iPhone and access the photos stored in the gallery by simply dialing your phone number.

Discovered by YouTube iDeviceHelp, this bug can be exploited by dialing the phone number of the locked iPhone. To gain unauthorized access, the exploit also involves invoking Siri, so if the digital assistant is disabled on your device, you’re on the safe side. As you can see for yourselves in the video at the end of the article, the method is quite complex and even though it’s hard to believe that someone would discover it by mistake.

A new video of what would appear to be one of Apple’s “Project Titan” self-driving cars was posted to Twitter last night, and it looks much different than it did the last time we saw it. The car appears to be outfitted with standard third-party sensors and hardware, including (count ‘em) six Velodyne-made LIDAR sensors, several radar units, and a number of cameras — all encased in Apple-esque white plastic.

The video was captured by someone who knows his stuff about autonomous vehicles: MacCallister Higgins, co-founder of self-driving startup Voyage (that just launched its own pilot ride-hailing project in a San Jose retirement community). 

This month the iPhone changed in some big ways. Probably the most obvious is the missing “Home” button. That’s right: Apple’s newest flagship smartphone, the iPhone X, has no fingerprint scanner. It’s been replaced by something called Face ID.

Those who watched Apple’s presentation will already be somewhat familiar with Face ID, but we’ll shed some light on this technology, and then turn to the area that’s always on our minds: security. In brief, Apple’s Face ID is a technology used to recognize a user’s face and unlock the new iPhone as well as confirm payments by comparing its view of their face with a picture stored in the iPhone’s memory. 

One of iOS' rougher edges are the popups it produces on a regular but seemingly random basis. These popups require users to enter their Apple ID before they can install or update an app or complete some other mundane task.

The prompts have grown so common most people don't think twice about them. Mobile app developer Felix Krause makes a compelling case that these popups represent a potential security hole through which attackers can steal user credentials. In a blog post published Tuesday, he showed side-by-side comparisons, pictured above, of an official popup produced by iOS and a proof-of-concept phishing popup.

For the past year, Apple has touted a mathematical tool that it describes as a solution to a paradoxical problem: mining user data while simultaneously protecting user privacy.

That secret weapon is "differential privacy," a novel field of data science that focuses on carefully adding random noise to an individual user's information before it's uploaded to the cloud. That way, a company such as Apple's total dataset reveals meaningful results without any one person's secrets being spilled. But differential privacy isn't a simple toggle switch between total privacy and no-holds-barred invasiveness. 

The new top-of-the-range iPhone does away with the home button and its built-in fingerprint reader in favor of a new biometric — called Face ID — which uses a 3D scan of the user’s face for authenticating and unlocking their device. It also replaces Touch ID for Apple Pay too.

Apple suggests this is an advancement over a fingerprint reader because it’s an easier and more natural action for the user to perform — you just look at the phone and it unlocks; no need to worry if you have wet fingers and so on. However offering to gate the smorgasbord of personal content that lives on a smartphone behind a face biometric inevitably raises lots of security questions. 

Security researchers have discovered an old version of Mac malware that has reappeared in the wild and managed to hijack Mac machines to generate profit for attackers.

The attack, dubbed Mughthesec, appears to be a modified strain of a known adware attack known as OperatorMac. However the new version presents an evolved threat for Mac users, as the adware has found a way to appear as a legitimate application and bypass Apple’s built in security systems. Mughthesec masquerades as an Adobe Flash installer and installs itself on a victim’s device if they agree to install the illegitimate Flash update.

Apple Inc. is working on a feature that will let you unlock your iPhone using your face instead of a fingerprint. For its redesigned iPhone, set to go on sale later this year, Apple is testing an improved security system that allows users to log in, authenticate payments, and launch secure apps by scanning their face, according to people familiar with the product.

This is powered by a new 3-D sensor, added the people, who asked not to be identified discussing technology that’s still in development. The company is also testing eye scanning to augment the system, one of the people said. The sensor’s speed and accuracy are focal points of the feature.