Industry
Apple tightens App Store rules to ban nudify AI apps
Updated App Store rules explicitly require developers to prevent nonconsensual sexualised AI images, after months of criticism over Grok and nudify apps.
Still
Crunchy.
YESTERDAY, STILL WORTH KNOWING
Saturday's briefs trace a common thread: companies deciding who gets access, whether that means AI agents, nudify apps, old Windows logins or NHS patient data.
Apple and the websites shutting out AI agents
Apple has rewritten its App Store rules to ban nudify apps outright, the AI tools that fabricate intimate images of people without consent. Developers must now actively prevent and remove such images, and those who fail can be removed. The change follows months of pressure: senators were told Apple had threatened to pull Grok after X users made abusive deepfakes, protesters raised it at WWDC, and San Francisco's city attorney ordered 13 nudify apps removed in July. The rules also close the bait-and-switch loophole, where approved apps later gain nudification features.
Meanwhile the open web is pushing back against AI agents. Yelp, Delta, JPMorgan Chase and Schwab block them, and sites such as Cars.com and Amtrak appear to have quietly followed. Amazon has fought Perplexity in court and now objects to Meta's Muse too. Anti-bot systems catch agents as collateral damage, and even partner Walmart has checkout hiccups. The friendlier route is deals: Muse works with Walmart, Gap, Sephora and Best Buy, and Shopify has opened its storefronts. As EquiStamp's Chris Canal notes, every block shrinks what agents can actually do, and with it their perceived value.
Old secrets and older logins
Anthropic's Claude cracked a 25-year-old cryptography puzzle in under half an hour, working out that the NSA's mysterious elliptic-curve seeds from 2000 came from a humble C random number generator seeded with a Unix timestamp, not a deliberate backdoor. The $36,864 bounty goes to the Internet Security Research Group.
Less happily nostalgic is the October Windows update, which now blocks deprecated NTLMv1 sign-ins by default rather than merely logging them. Wi-Fi, VPN and Ethernet connections may break for organisations that never finished migrating off a protocol dating to 1993. Audit mode offers a temporary reprieve, but Microsoft's end goal remains eliminating NTLM entirely.
Wearables and NHS wariness
Amazon launched two Bee wearables that listen to conversations and produce summaries, to-dos and Alexa-linked shopping suggestions, with audio processed in real time and transcripts encrypted. Elsewhere, freedom of information responses show many English NHS trusts rejecting Palantir's £330m patient data platform as duplicative or no better than existing systems, though some praise its waiting list tools.