ON CALL Fronting up to work on Friday morning can feel like a mistake, but The Register tries to make it worthwhile by bringing you a new installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lee" who told us about his time as sysadmin at the headquarters of a retail company. "It was about the year 2000 and I was a newly minted Certified NetWare Engineer administering Novell servers," Lee reminisced. Before long, Lee was running the teams that managed email servers and provided desktop support for over a thousand users. "I got to know just about everybody in the HQ and became known as the go-to guy for all things technical," he proudly told On Call. One Friday afternoon, a vice president called to complain he couldn't access any files from his PC because someone else was using them. Lee found this a little odd, so he asked if the veep was seeing a "file in use" dialog in Word or Excel. The veep replied that he was indeed seeing an error that read "General failure is reading Drive C" – but that was obviously someone using the handle "General Failure" to mask their identity. Lee's next question was very precise. "I asked if the error message read 'General failure is reading Drive C:'" he told On Call. The VP re-read the dialog and corrected himself, telling Lee the exact text was "General failure reading Drive C:" At this point, Lee had good news and bad news. The bad news was that the error meant the VP's disk had died. The good news was that nobody was using the handle "General Failure," so the company didn't have a miscreant rummaging around on the network. Lee arranged a support call and advised the veep that he would be getting a new disk and might even be in line for a whole new PC. Have your users misinterpreted an error message? If so, click here to send On Call an email. We can't be clearer than that – or more sincere in our desire to share your story with your fellow Reg readers. ®

Apple says that its next-gen operating system will allow users to update their weak and compromised passwords with a single tap. Upgrades coming to iOS 27, announced at Tim Cook’s last Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this week, introduce a significant change to the way users manage their passwords. “Building on its ability to alert users about weak and compromised passwords, Passwords can now automatically fix these for users with just a tap,” Apple said on Monday. “Using Apple Intelligence and Safari to agentically take action on a user’s behalf, Passwords securely navigates through websites to sign in and upgrade their accounts to strong passwords.” The iGadget-maker’s existing password manager already flags passwords that are known to be included in prior data breaches, checking whether they appear in known data leaks. However, current Passwords still requires users to update affected accounts themselves and does not offer a way to change multiple compromised credentials at once. Selecting one of those alerts typically takes users to the relevant account page, where they must complete the password change manually. The new update is designed to remove much of that legwork, with iOS 27 automatically navigating supported websites and updating eligible accounts to stronger passwords after user approval. Of course, in the very brief section of the video in which the new capability was announced, the feature worked flawlessly. In practice, however, it remains to be seen how effective Passwords is at agentically navigating different websites’ login processes on behalf of users, especially if MFA is also set up on the account. And for those of you who remember a story The Register covered earlier this year about the (in)security of AI-generated passwords, fret not. Apple’s Passwords app generates solid passwords by default – strings that, according to NordPass’ online password checker, are “strong” and would take centuries to crack. Security company Irregular’s research from February looked at scenarios where users were querying LLM chatbots for password ideas, rather than looking at those generated by purpose-built password managers. Siri state of affairs As predicted by many, this year’s WWDC put Siri, now known as Siri AI, front and center as Apple looks to deliver on its promises made two years ago. It announced Apple Intelligence in 2024, but the offering has underdelivered on pretty much every count. Analysts who spoke to The Register after the event on Monday were optimistic about what they saw on the AI front, but described Apple’s ability to deliver value for developers and users on its second roll of the dice as a credibility test. The company announced a wide range of small AI-enabled upgrades coming soon to iOS 27, powered by Apple's Foundation Models, developed in collaboration with Google and its Gemini technology, in addition to the agentic password-fixing tease. Individually, these features, such as enabling users to create shortcuts or Safari extensions by prompting Apple Intelligence using natural language, and Safari’s Notify Me, which allows users to monitor specific web pages for updates, are not revolutionary. They’re also not the type of features that are poised to set the AI industry alight. But for some, winning the AI race is less about being first to market with the biggest, baddest model; it’s about using AI in the most useful way. "Rebuilt from the ground up, Apple is trying to make AI feel native, useful, and invisible across the devices people already use every day," said Francisco Jeronimo, IDC VP of client devices. "This matters because the winning AI experience for consumers will not be the loudest or most technically complex. It will be the one that understands context, respects privacy, works reliably across apps, and reduces friction without forcing users to change behaviour." Apple’s iOS 27 will launch to the wider public in the fall, while devs can get their hands on the beta version now. This won’t come with the new dedicated Siri AI app, though. You’ll have to join a waiting list for that one. ®