> Copy/paste across iPhone and Mac is very useful.

I don't use a Mac or an iPhone, but I applaud this sort of device harmony.

That said, I am worried that it would unnecessarily leverage the cloud. My guess is that instead of the two devices directly communicating with one another—that is, instead of leveraging the fact that they are probably on the same local network and should just work in concert—the clipboard data will be sent via a cloud intermediary. That is, it will be exfiltrated from the local network, sent through Apple, and then back into the local network.

If I am wrong about that, I am happy to hear it.

Yes, the Hand-off mechanism works without iCloud involvement or even using your active internet connection. I just tried by disabling Wifi on my Mac and opening up message to continue on a semi written message from my iPhone.

Now, there could always be a iCloud fallback that says if there is internet, just use it. Perks of using non-free software is that it will almost always non-verifiable.

> I just tried by disabling Wifi on my Mac and opening up message to continue on a semi written message from my iPhone.

How is this possible? Bluetooth? USB? Or are we talking about a previously synced draft that's still there when you turn your internet off? Sounds like a basic iCloud cache to me.

The original Continuity used bluetooth, p2p wifi (which is also what AirDrop uses), regular wifi and iCloud, some features would depend on a specific substrate but for others it could use several at the same time or switch between them.

Continuity/Handoff works over Bluetooth 4/LE.

In the presentation they said that it used Handoff, which is direct device to device communication.

This enables an interesting new kind of attack.

1. Attach an attack device to someone’s account.

2. ‘Poll’ the clipboard by pasting every ~5 seconds.

3. If the contents of the clipboard appear to be ‘secure’ (looks like shellcode, bitcoin address, url, etc), quickly replace the contents with an attack string with same datatype.

If you have an untrusted device attached to your Apple account, your local clipboard can no longer be trusted.

Indeed, WHATWG is currently considering [1] a related scenario where rogue websites with access to the clipboard will inject formats with dodgy payload to exploit flaws in some app if the user pastes.

[1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1244

It's unrelated to "apple account" it works over Bluetooth LE.

To my knowledge, existing continuity features already do one better and communicate directly between devices, not even requiring them to be on the same network. (AirDrop is a good example.) But obviously we have no way of knowing if this will be the case here, or if there is a cloud-based fallback.

P2P connections is a place that's generally terrible for mobile. You have to keep connections open to more devices, which is generally bad for battery.

You could imagine a copy/paste that waits for a message from the cloud (because Apple push notifications are pretty solid), then opens the new connection to the local device, so the data never leaves your network. At least to me, that sounds needless complex when the typical use case could just send the entire payload with the "go look for this device" message.

This sort of thing is exactly what Bluetooth Low Energy is for.

> I really don't want to be that guy talking to my Mac at work

What about your disabled colleague?

Now, I'm all for making Siri better as an "Accessibility feature". I was just referring to myself talking to my Mac for doing my basic activities. It might be annoying at best to my co-worker so would he be to me when he does talk to his Mac all the time.

I think clipboard permissions for applications is going to become an issue with features like this. I may be incorrect but I'm pretty sure that clipboard access is unrestricted on both OS X (ugh, macOS) and iOS.

I think I'm gonna stick with calling it OS X, marketers be d*ed.

Frankly, I much preferred when they called it Mac OS X. The change to OS X just seemed stupid to me—with a name like 'Operating System Ten', it was as if it didn’t even have a name anymore!

…which is why (in my opinion) macOS ('Mac Operating System') is far better than what it’s replacing.

It was called Mac OS for years (1)

I also remember when it was just called "System"

(1) Yeah yeah I know all about NeXT, but OS X isn't NeXT as anyone who used Rhapsody will remember

Sometimes I copy my private keys to the clipboard.

cat privatekey > pbcopy

Scary if it ends up on my mobile device clipboard.

I use iOS and a password manager, and maybe 5-10% of apps I use have an integration for it (and I place the blame on Apple for this, imo if they actually care about user security as much as they want everyone to believe they do, they should have an app store review policy that forbids having a password field without using the password manager extension).

Anyway, the effect is that almost every time I sign into an iOS app, I'm copy & pasting my password into the password field. So now my passwords will all be synced via bluetooth and/or to icloud whenever I sign into an app.

At this point, is using a password manager actually less secure than just re-using the same password everywhere like everyone else does?

Your alternative is simply copy-pasting without using the system clipboard (old-fashioned style). I imagine there's a lot less attack vectors by doing it that way, at a small time cost.

Is there no option for a "local only" clipboard with this?

We at CopyCopy (a cross-platform cloud clipboard) solve this problem by only universally copying stuff that you copy twice.

So:

copy once -> not sent to cloud/devices

copy twice (or click floating button) -> sent to all your devices and cloud account

Spotlight is already incredibly useful, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's getting some of these improvements. We should know soon since Developer Preview of Sierra should be available today.

The definitely said it wont be available today.

The developer previews will be available today, already have iOS 10 running on one device.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/06/13/ios-10-watchos-3-m...

For registered developers yes, the public beta is July though.

Well that's what I said:

> Developer Preview of Sierra should be available today.

Which you disagreed with. So, you were factually wrong.

>I really don't want to be that guy talking to my Mac at work.

If Siri might bring an end to shared offices, I am all for it! But joking aside, yes, there are surroundings, where you don't want to talk to your device - in which I also prefer text messages to phone conversations.

But well-done voice integration can vastly improve usability. Just think of not having to grab your mouse and look for that music/video player control just to mute/stop things, but being able to do it with a short voice command without leaving your editor.

As someone who uses KDE Connect for copy/paste between my Android phone and my Linux desktop I can say that this feature is _amazing_.

I loved that I could hear the audience audibly gasp when the presenter brought that up and that the presenter was caught off-guard.