Apple Daily: Mac Firmware Worm; Apple as Cellular Data Carrier; Siri Voicemail Transcription

The Mac is usually thought of as a bastion of safety and security in the virus-crowded landscape of modern personal computing, but a new worm may have just changed all that. In addition, Apple is toying with the idea of becoming its own cellular data provider, and the Cupertino company is also said to be developing a voicemail transcription service for Siri.

Apple Looking to Become Its Own Cellular Data Provider

Dissatisfied with your AT&T or Verizon service? What if you could choose Apple itself as a carrier? It might take a while — perhaps as much as five years — but according to a new report from Business Insider, the Cupertino company is already trying to become its own mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). The company is reportedly already trying out the service here in the United States, and it's apparently also in talks to try the service in Europe.

Source: Flickr/Jared Tarbell

The idea is about as straightforward as it sounds. Instead of paying someone like T-Mobile for calls, cellular data, or texts, you'll pay Apple instead. Apple itself apparently won't have to build its own network — it will simply lease network space from existing carriers and use the Apple SIM card (like those already available in the cellular data-capable versions of the iPad). If Apple's leasing plans work out, that means it would theoretically be able to pull the signal of the strongest carrier in an area as long as they have an agreement with Apple, thus allowing Apple's cellular plan to draw on all of the carriers' strengths and few of their weaknesses.

Talks regarding the service have reportedly been underway for quite some time and the report notes that, at this point, Apple's MVNO plans are an "open secret" among carriers.

White-Hat Hackers Create First Firmware Worm for Macs

The Mac, long praised for is resistance and near-immunity to the viruses that sometimes plague PC users, just got a lot less safe today. As Wired reports, a pair of well-meaning hackers created a new worm named "Thunderstrike 2" that affects Macs at the firmware level after it gets into the system through a infected e-mail or website. Once there, it can jump from Mac to Mac by hiding in devices such as external SSDs or Apple's own Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter. It's almost impossible to remove, as getting rid of it requires tinkering with the Mac at the hardware level. You can see how it works in the video below.

The worm is the work of Trammell Hudson, who first discovered the original "Thunderstrike" exploit back in January, and Xeno Kovah, who owns Legba Core, a firm specializing in firmware security. The duo claims that Apple hasn't done enough to protect itself from such attacks, unlike some PC rivals such as Dell and Lenovo.

"We use our research to help raise awareness of firmware attacks, and show customers that they need to hold their vendors accountable for better firmware security," said Kovah.

Kovah and Hudson note that they've already contacted Apple about the problem, but they say that the Cupertino giant has only fixed one of the five related security flaws and created a partial fix for another. (Even this amount of attention kind of bucks the trend, though, as these stories usually end with the white-hat hackers claiming that they haven't heard from Apple at all.)

Apple Working on Voicemail-to-Text Service for Siri

Apple is reportedly working on a new feature for Siri that will allow the voice assistant to answer missed calls and transcribe the recordings so you can read them in the form of a text readout in a manner similar to services found on other devices (via Business Insider). Since the messages would be sent through iCloud, you wouldn't even have to listen to the message itself (provided, that is, that Siri accurately transcribed the message).

The report calls the service "iCloud voicemail," and should you wish, you can use it to tell calls where you are and why you couldn't pick up the phone. Apple is said to already be testing the service internally with "multiple Apple employees," and it's currently thought that we could see it as early as next year with the release of iOS 10.

The report also notes that the service will allow Siri to overcome a gap between two generations — older users still like to leave voicemails, while younger users would prefer to receive a text. As for how it works:

"Apple sends voice data to company servers, where Siri converts the words spoken into text," the report says. "iCloud Voicemail will presumably function in the same way, sending the raw voicemails to Apple, and Siri will then transcribe them and make them available on your iPhone."

Follow this article's writer, Leif Johnson, on Twitter.