🔧 iPhone 15's Promise

📱 iPhone 15 and More to Debut on September 12

Apple fans, get ready for some juicy news.

Apple has officially sent out invites for its next iPhone event, happening on September 12 at the Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino.

The star of the show is expected to be the iPhone 15, with whispers of some major upgrades to the line. In other exciting news, Apple has recently supported a right-to-repair bill in California, which could mean that the new phone will be easier to fix if you happen to drop it in the toilet.

The Apple Watch Series 9 is also expected to make an appearance, with rumors of an A15 Bionic chip and a new pink color. The public versions of the latest iOS, macOS, and watchOS are also expected to be released at the same time.

This will also be Apple’s second chance to show off Vision Pro before its launch early next year.

📚 Google's New All-in-One Solution for Data Analytics and AI Workloads

Google just introduced BigQuery Studio, a new service within BigQuery that provides a single experience for editing programming languages like SQL, Python, and Spark to run analytics and machine learning workloads at the “petabyte scale”.

According to Gerrit Kazmaier, VP and GM of data and analytics at Google, BigQuery Studio is “a new experience that really puts people who are working on data on the one side and people working on AI on the other side in a common environment.” It’s designed to simplify the user experience by providing access to all the services that data and AI professionals need to work.

With BigQuery Studio, users can discover, explore, analyze, and predict data. They can start in a programming notebook to validate and prep data, then open that notebook in other services like Vertex AI (Google’s managed machine learning platform) to continue their work with more specialized AI infrastructure and tooling.

So if you’re a data or AI professional, be sure to check out BigQuery Studio. It’s available in preview as of this week!

🕵️‍♂️ FBI Tricks Qakbot Malware into Deleting Itself

The FBI has successfully dismantled the infrastructure of the notorious Qakbot malware, which caused “hundreds of millions” of dollars of damage worldwide.

To take down the botnet, the FBI gained lawful access to Qakbot’s infrastructure and redirected its traffic to FBI-controlled servers.

These servers instructed infected computers to download an uninstaller file created by law enforcement to untether the victims’ computers from the Qakbot botnet and prevent further installation of malware through Qakbot.

During the operation, the FBI recovered the stolen credentials (including email addresses and passwords) of more than 6.5 million victims, while its international partners identified “millions more”.

The FBI also seized 52 servers, which it said would “permanently dismantle” the botnet.

⚡ 3 Cool Tools

🫵 Your Wish is My Command

Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

— Tay

p.s. if you want to sign up for the Rapid Rundown newsletter or share it with a friend or colleague, you can find us here.