Transcript
Jason Kebler (0:00)
A super intelligent AI built a time machine, came back in time, used its powers to make a super vague X account and tweeted the name of this person and nothing else.
Sam (0:15)
Hello and welcome to the four four Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. Four4Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to Four4Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the best comments. Gain access to that content at 404 Media co. I'm your host, Sam and with me are 44 Media co founders Jason Kebler.
Jason Kebler (0:40)
Hello.
Sam (0:41)
And Emmanuel Myberg.
Emmanuel Myberg (0:43)
Hello.
Sam (0:43)
Joe's gonna come in. Joe's gonna appear as a ghost in this next clip that we're about to play. Um, he has an announcement, he has
Jason Kebler (0:51)
a special special message. He couldn't show up, but he has a special message.
Sam (0:55)
Joe got. Joe got some really good impact in. So he's going to tell you about that in the next for the next one and a half minutes. I've not heard this yet, so we'll hear it for the first time right now.
Joe (1:06)
Hi, I can't be there today on the podcast because I'm traveling for some work related stuff, but I wanted to give you a quick update on a story we covered a couple of weeks ago. At this point, the headline of that one was FBI extracts suspects deleted signal messages saved in iPhone notification database. And the issue was that even when people seemingly set signal messages to delete or in the case of this specific story, even deleted the signal app, copies of incoming signal messages were still stored inside the iPhone notification database. So even though the FBI was not able to forensically extract messages from signal itself, they were sort of captured in this relay point in the notification database. Obviously we thought this was very, very important. We covered it after that. Actually a few people sent me different cases where this has come up as well. So it's clearly a tactic that third parties and authorities are turning to to obtain signal messages in and of themselves, but also ones that are supposed to be deleted. Well then just last week or around about that time, Apple said it has now fixed this follows Signal asking Apple to look into it following our reporting. I'll just read a little bit of signal's statement here. We are very happy that today Apple issued a patch and a security advisory. This comes following 404 Media reporting that the FBI accessed signal message notification content via iOS despite the app being deleted. There's a link to the security advisory on Apple's website, Signal then adds, note that no action is needed for this fix to protect Signal users on iOS, once you install the patch, all inadvertently preserved notifications will be deleted and no forthcoming notifications will be preserved for deleted applications. And that's the key part, right, because there was this very important question of, okay, well, I could turn off notifications for Signal or I could change it so only the sender appears or not the message content or something like that. But we really had no idea for how long these notifications had been stored, how long they were going to be stored for in the future, and all of that sort of thing. And in an email to me, Apple also added much the same. It said, this is actually going to purge all of the notifications that have been collected inadvertently, the ones which have been marked for deletion. Now, Apple describes it as a bug, as in this was not intended behavior. They say it was. It's always their policy to delete notifications that are supposed to be removed, but clearly, obviously that was not happening here. So I just wanted to give you that quick update that this is the sort of reporting that 404 Media subscribers are helping bring about, you know, and now Signal users, and to be clear, other app users as well probably that have, you know, deleted messages, but they're still saved notifications. Have to worry about that now. Anyway, I'll give it back to the rest of 404 Media. Thank you so much.
