A lot of rumors have been out for months about the iPhone 15 series about to be revealed, but not as much on the Watch has been floating around. Now, 9to5mac.com reports that there may be a couple new colors. For Watch Series 9, there may be a new ‘pink’ option…we should dub that the Barbie Watch perhaps! The Apple Watch Ultra 2 will allegedly be available in a new black titanium color. These rumors came from ShrimpApplePro on Twitter (now X). Shrimp has leaked accurate info before. We do know the Watch will finally get a new, better processor. That comes from Bloomberg. The Watch hasn’t had processor upgrade since version 6, so by version 9, it is more than due for one.

Russian hackers apparently posed as tech support for Microsoft Teams and were able to compromise dozens of global organizations…including government agencies! According to TechCrunch,com, Microsoft security researchers said on Wednesday that the “highly targeted” social engineering campaign was carried out by a Russian state-sponsored hacking group tracked by Microsoft as “Midnight Blizzard,” but more commonly known as APT29 or Cozy Bear. The group, which was linked to the infamous SolarWinds attack in 2020, is part of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, according to U.S. and U.K. law enforcement agencies. The attacks started in late May. They sent message requests trying to get users to grant approval for multi-factor authentication, to gain access to user accounts. Microsoft says it has mitigated the damage, but is still investigating. 

YouTube is test driving a tool that will automatically generate video summaries using AI. Mashable.com notes that the summaries “do not replace video descriptions (which are written by creators!)”. What the short descriptions are intended for is to make it easier for you to read a quick summary about a video and decide if it’s something you want to commit to watching. YouTube also just announced testing of feature that lets mobile users create Shorts featuring comments posted on videos…can you say imitating TikTok? 

Crawling their way into this century, the IRS, which has notoriously old and creaky computer systems…probably some still running Cobol or Fortran…says it will allow taxpayers to go 100% paperless for the upcoming 2024 filing season. Not only that, but Arstechnica.com reports that by 2025, the feds will still accept paper documents but will immediately digitize them, which they say will “cut processing times in half” and “expedite refunds by several weeks.” The IRS still receives some 76 million paper returns and 125 million pieces of correspondence, notice responses, and non-tax forms a year, so digitizing will accelerate things for taxpayers considerably. The digitizing should also help the feds to audit wealthy tax evaders….it will be something if they can get those folks to pay their fair share.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.