Month: June 2021

Enlarge / The 2021, 24-inch iMac with Apple's M1. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Much has been written about people embracing nostalgia for comfort during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the new 24-inch iMac's bright colors and simplistic design, Apple seems to be indulging in the pangs of nostalgia, too.

But the new iMac's nostalgia is only skin deep. Inside, it has arguably the most advanced CPU currently sold in consumer devices: the M1. This chip is equally at home in an iPad and a Mac, yet the M1 delivers performance that rivals or beats some of the best desktop chips available in some cases.

Even though the M1 offers enough performance to attract power users, this new iMac isn't really for them. Rather, the 24-inch iMac is first and foremost about simplicity. It's a computer that promises users they won't have to think about how to configure or maintain a system. It's a computer that's more concerned about fitting into the room than it is about taking you somewhere else.

Enlarge (credit: Scott Kublin)

On a blustery October afternoon at the Wolfcrow Bison Ranch in southern Alberta, Canada, Dan Fox and his ranch hand, Man Blackplume, tried to wrestle fence panels into place despite a 60 mph wind. The next day was weaning day—and the fence needed to be rock solid so the bison calves could be separated from their mothers.

The two members of the Kainai First Nation, also known as the Blood Tribe, braced their bodies against the 12-foot-high fence panels so they could nail them to the posts, but the panels flapped in the wind like giant wooden flags. Across the pasture, 30 bison stood huddled together in the corner, unfazed by the commotion. They were part of the first bison herd to grace the Blood Reserve in 150 years, Fox says. The Kainai First Nation is one of four tribal groups within the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes the Blackfeet Tribe in Montana.

Fox, 63, believes the animals may have helped extend his life. He experienced a cancer scare more than 20 years ago, and at the suggestion of a Blackfoot healer and naturopath, he changed his diet, replacing processed food with bison meat and other ancestral foods. His health improved, and today he says he feels better than ever. He is convinced that his family and his community will benefit, as he did, by having the buffalo back on the land and in their lives. (Bison bison is the scientific name for the animal, but buffalo is the word that most Indigenous people use.)

Enlarge (credit: Frank Lindecke / Flickr)

Cybersecurity truisms have long been described in simple terms of trust: Beware email attachments from unfamiliar sources, and don't hand over credentials to a fraudulent website. But increasingly, sophisticated hackers are undermining that basic sense of trust and raising a paranoia-inducing question: What if the legitimate hardware and software that makes up your network has been compromised at the source?

That insidious and increasingly common form of hacking is known as a "supply chain attack," a technique in which an adversary slips malicious code or even a malicious component into a trusted piece of software or hardware. By compromising a single supplier, spies or saboteurs can hijack its distribution systems to turn any application they sell, any software update they push out, even the physical equipment they ship to customers, into Trojan horses. With one well-placed intrusion, they can create a springboard to the networks of a supplier's customers—sometimes numbering hundreds or even thousands of victims.

"Supply chain attacks are scary because they're really hard to deal with, and because they make it clear you're trusting a whole ecology," says Nick Weaver, a security researcher at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. "You're trusting every vendor whose code is on your machine, and you're trusting every vendor's vendor.”