Are you unhackable?

Happy Thursday.

What a week it's been! AI is so good at cybercrime now that there have been more hacks than ever, and some people are dubbing this month Black October.

I'm starting this week's newsletter a bit differently with a security checkup checklist. Consider this your homework for the weekend!

I put together a full, comprehensive checklist at beunhackable.org, and below is a summary of what you need to do. (Below that, it's the week's big stories, as usual.)

When you've done it for yourself, go through this with less tech-savvy friends and relatives, who are more vulnerable to hacks and scams.

Again, full checklist at beunhackable.org

Hope that helps. Now on with the week's biggest stories in AI, marketing and tech.

🤖 AI: A better daily driver, worlds you can walk..

📣 Marketing: See which ad creative works, plus Apple Music and Prada show their workings.

📱 Social media: 90-minute Instagram videos, more Edits tools and smaller YouTube payouts.

🕹️ Other tech news: A touchscreen MacBook, the bitcoin challenge falls and Encarta returns.

🔗 Other stuff worth knowing about: 10 more stories, in a sentence each.

I had early access to GPT-6.1 Terra and found it a really good daily driver.

You’ll hit usage limits a lot less frequently, and I’d use it for 80% of what you do, saving the more powerful models for your best copywriting, creative and design work.

It’s available in ChatGPT Work and Codex, with better visual understanding and computer use. OpenAI says your allowance goes substantially further than with Sol or Astra. You don’t need the biggest model for every little job. OpenAI.

Genie 4 creates interactive worlds that you can move around in, then change by typing what you want to happen. It now generates the sound too, including characters who can respond and talk back. Think describing a scene, stepping into it, then changing the weather or introducing another person as you explore.

These worlds still run for a few minutes, and it’s a research preview, but you can see where this is heading for games, training and interactive experiences. The demos are well worth a look, here > > > Google DeepMind.

Meta’s Ads Manager now lets you break performance down by individual creative elements. If you’ve supplied several images, videos or bits of text, you can get a better idea of which ones are doing the work.

That should help when deciding what to make more of, rather than treating the whole ad as one mysterious success or failure. There are gaps in the reporting, and it isn’t a controlled A/B test, but this is useful information to have before spending another week making the wrong variations. Social Media Today.

Apple Music’s new visual identity involved playing music through a physical rig and filming what happened to liquid. The making-of story includes baby oil, sound waves and a lot of experimentation from TBWA/Media Arts Lab.

Get ready for a lot of brands creating high-effort marketing campaigns, followed up with behind-the-scenes footage to prove just how much work the campaign took to put together. Yes, all because of AI! Marketing Brew.

Prada’s holiday campaign mixes live action with traditional hand-drawn animation by John Pomeroy, putting its cast into illustrated winter scenes. The campaign is called ‘Drawing Prada: Animated by hand’, so the way it was made is (again!) very much part of the pitch.

Making the craft visible is the new big thing in advertising. It's almost like the burden of proof is on anyone producing media now to show up front that it wasn't made by AI. Marketing-Interactive.

Instagram is expanding its ‘Features’ test, which lets selected creators upload videos up to 90 minutes long. Yes, ninety minutes. There’s a dedicated viewing experience for these longer uploads, as Instagram tries to give people another reason to stay in the app.

An interesting update, given how IGTV never took off, and ultimately there won't be as much of this content for the simple reason that, even in the AI era, it's still much harder to produce.

However, remember that whenever a new feature lands in a social media platform, it tends to be given prominence in the feed. This is probably worth testing, particularly if you have current content you're uploading to YouTube as long vids. Social Media Today.

Instagram’s Edits app has added Halloween fonts, sounds and animations, but the more useful updates include bulk caption editing, beat syncing and automatic colour adjustments. Android users can also make carousels. Meta is testing a desktop version too, which would make longer editing sessions a lot less fiddly (I use CapCut desktop, as phone editing drives me crazy!).

Edits is steadily collecting the things creators otherwise need several apps for. If you tried it at launch and forgot about it, there may now be enough here to make it worth another look. Edits updates · Desktop test.

YouTube is testing a $20 payout threshold instead of the usual $100. That means participating creators can get their earnings out sooner, rather than watching a small balance sit there for months. It’s a limited test, and it doesn’t change how much each view earns.

Still, getting your first actual payment is a useful milestone when you’re building a channel. A lower threshold makes that a little less distant, particularly if your audience is small or you publish less often. Social Media Today.

Steve Jobs never would have signed this off. He even said at an Apple keynote that vertical touchscreen was unergonomic, hard to use, and tiring, and that he would never add it to an Apple laptop.

And yet, Apple’s redesigned MacBook Pro has a touch-enabled OLED screen, branded PROLED XDR. You can use gestures to move around pages, work on images and move things between apps. After years of the Mac and iPad having very definite boundaries, this is quite a change.

First the folding phone, now this. Being an Apple fanboy ain't easy these days, guys. Apple.

After last week’s critical PHP flaw, someone put a vulnerable website online and offered bitcoin to anyone who could retrieve a hidden key. A researcher did, after the server configuration changed.

Then came a twist: the hidden key belonged to the wrong wallet, so the reward had to be paid separately. Quite a way to run a security challenge.

Early failed attempts had been treated as evidence that the danger was overstated. Website owners should still get their host or developer to confirm the PHP fixes are installed. Challenge outcome · Payout details.

Someone has put Windows 95 and Encarta into a browser, so you can wander around Microsoft’s old multimedia encyclopaedia again. It’s the original software running in an emulator, complete with its very particular idea of what the future of learning looked like.

The information is, of course, from 1995. But as a little trip through an internet that hadn’t yet swallowed every other way of finding things out, it’s a wonderful time capsule. Open it when you have a few minutes to lose. Try Encarta 95 · Project coverage.