Everything we know about Apple's next big iPhone update, iOS 9

Next week, Apple will tell us about its next big update for the iPhone and iPad.

Every year at its Worldwide Developer Conference, the company reveals all of the new features its planning to bring to iOS in the fall.

Although Apple hasn't confirmed anything just yet, 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman has spoken to several people familiar with the company's plans for iOS 9. Here are the biggest additions we're expecting to see based on his reports. 

Click through to learn about what iOS 9 will be like »

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Obama just made a Big move to restore Americans' Trust in the Government

Yesterday the Senate passed and President Obama signed into law the USA Freedom Act, a piece of legislation meant to curb the government’s ability to conduct widespread surveillance.

Now that the dust has settled, both privacy advocates and tech insiders alike are breathing a sigh of relief.

The Freedom Act was built as an answer to the sunsetting clauses of the Patriot Act, which was signed into law right after 9/11, giving US authorities the seeming unfettered ability to surveil US civilians. The USA Freedom Act significantly reigns in the federal government's ability to spy on citizens, an issue that has been widely debated in the wake of the leaked documents revealed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Overall, the Freedom Act’s passing was met with praise from those in tech and beyond.  

The American Library Association’s executive director Emily Sheketoff wrote in a statement to Business Insider that the bill’s passage was "a milestone," going on to explain that it’s the "first meaningful reform of our surveillance law in almost 15 years.”

Similarly, the Mozilla Corporation’s senior vice president of business and legal affairs Denelle Dixon-Thayer described it as "a significant first step to restore trust online, and a foundation for further needed reform."

The general consensus is: This is good, but just the beginning. While celebration appears to be widespread, it’s still an imperfect bill. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post yesterday:

 In the wake of the damning evidence of surveillance abuses disclosed by Edward Snowden, Congress had an opportunity to champion comprehensive surveillance reform and undertake a thorough investigation, like it did with the Church Committee. Congress could have tried to completely end mass surveillance and taken numerous other steps to rein in the NSA and FBI. This bill was the result of compromise and strong leadership by Sens. Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee and Reps. Robert Goodlatte, Jim Sensenbrenner, and John Conyers.

Despite this, the ardent coalition of privacy defenders concluded that this was a moment of celebration. "We fought hard to get to this moment in history," they wrote in the blog post.

Mozilla, in a conversation with Business Insider, confirmed these sentiments. "[The USA Freedom Act] is certainly not perfect," Chris Riley, Mozilla’s head of public policy told Business Insider a few weeks ago. "It’s not comprehensive… [but] it’s a very significant positive step going forward."

Players like Mozilla and the EFF have been working fervently to pass bills defending digital civil liberties for years now. Both have gone to Washington to lobby support for bills like the Freedom Act. And both have been working to end the government's huge surveillance program that came to light thanks to the Edward Snowden leaks.

Even though the Freedom Act fixes some of these issues but not all of them, tech and privacy advocates alike see this then as a trepidatious day of victory. In many ways, it marks a moment when politicians and citizens have woken up to the huge issue that is digital privacy.

President Obama, too, sees this as a pivotal moment in legislative history:

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A new cybercriminal ransomware tool makes it easy for anyone to hijack other people's devices

Would-be cybercriminals who lack the technological prowess to actually hack into their targets computers themselves can now overcome that hurdle, thanks to a new “ransomware-as-a-service” tool discovered on the darknet by researchers at McAfee.

Branded as “Tox”, the tool lets anyone, regardless of technical ability, automatically create ransomware: software which encrypts a victim’s hard drive and demands payment before decrypting it.

The most notorious example of ransomware, named Cryptolocker, ran wild in the first half of 2014. It demanded a ransom paid in the cryptocurrency bitcoin, rising as high as 2 bitcoin ($2000 at the time), or the victim’s documents were lost forever. In November 2013, a US police force fell prey to the scam and ended up having to pay a ransom equal to £832 at the day’s exchange rates.

But Cryptolocker was disrupted in a simultaneous US-EU raid in June 2014, seizing the command and control network which had been used to run the software remotely. After the raids, which also took out a related piece of malware called Gameover Zeus, reports of new infections have died off.

Tox threatens to revive the problem. But unlike Cryptolocker, which had the hallmarks of a co-ordinated criminal operation, Tox lets would-be criminals roll their own ransomware. Any user can register on the darknet site and choose to create their own cryptolocker-style software. They get the option to set the ransom amount, in US dollars, as well as add a personal note.

The site then automatically generates a downloadable virus, which can be downloaded and then shared however the attacker desires. And the whole thing is funded by Tox taking a 20% cut of any ransom paid.

“We don’t expect Tox to be the last malware to embrace this model. We also anticipate more skilled development and variations in encryption and evasion techniques,” writes McAfee’s Jim Walter.

Tox shows how the hidden side of the tech industry follows the same trends as the surface side. The trend of “software-as-a-service” – charging on a regular basis for programmes, rather than one fee upfront – has grown to the point that Microsoft’s next version of Windows – Windows 10 – will be sold in that way.

Popular enterprise software such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite have been sold as services for some time now. What other trends from the enterprise will virus writers follow in the future?

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk