I'm a biomedical researcher specializing in chronobiology and circadian time-series analysis. I'm developing cosinor-based algorithms for circadian phenotyping and chronotherapy optimization at the individual level, and I'm at the point where population-scale data would meaningfully improve model calibration. Apple Health's longitudinal passive sensor streams — particularly HRV, sleep staging, resting heart rate, and activity cadence — are well-suited to this kind of work. My question is whether Apple has an established pathway for academic researchers to access aggregate or privacy-preserving representations of Health data (e.g., via differential privacy or federated computation), and if so, what the eligibility and process look like.

As of 2025-05-03, when a macOS user enables iCloud Drive synchronization for Desktop & Documents in US region, does iCloud filter xattrs upon upload or later when downloading back to another macOS host? Or is it the case that iCloud has no filtering of third-party xattrs? Where can I find the technical document outlining exactly what iCloud does with xattrs set on macOS host files and folders synchronized with iCloud Drive?

ISSUE Upgrading a macOS Ventura host to Sequoia results in the attached three issues visible in either of the two screen shot: Whether or not "Block all incoming connections" is enabled, a small subset of connections are hard-wired to "Allow incoming connections"; It is not possible to remove the hard-wired "Allow incoming connections" (e.g., selecting the row, the "-" button at bottom left is not available"; and After the upgrade to Sequoia, SidecarRelay was set to "Block incoming connections". QUESTIONs a) What terminal level commands should be used to remove the hard-wired "Allow incoming connections"? b) What other integrity checks should I run on the firewall configuration to see if other aspects of its operations are now botched? FB15074003 tracks the issues noted above.

Tuesday morning at 3am, a burglar broke into my house and stole my VisionPro (s/n MWFYJ49L0V) that was running VisionOS 2.0 Beta. Apple Support advised me to keep the device on my account to stop the crooks from activating it. Is keeping the VisionPro (running a 2.0 beta) active on my personal iCloud account indefinitely like this okay, or a risk to my private data and ID?

The following is targeted to experts on Time Machine backups and Spotlight searches: What would be the likely root cause of failure to explain the following? On a APFS formatted macOS 13.x and 14.x with Time Machine backing up via Thunderbolt to an external SSD, within a few hours of the well-known dialog "time machine disk not ejected properly" alert, Finder.app searches for documents using "contains word" eventually reported no matches -- even while viewing PDFs opened in Preview.app where Preview's search function matched the very same word that Finder.app could not find. However, File and Finder searches did return expected results on iOS, iPadOS and other macOS hosts where Time Machine was not enabled. Ultimately, it was determined for any user on a macOS 13.x or 14.x machine with TimeMachine backing up to an external thunderbolt SSD, after the timestamp associated with the first Time Machine backup marked by Disk Utility as needing repairs, Finder.app searches returned no results until the following work-around was applied: In System -> Energy Saver, disable "Put Hard Disks to Sleep"; Force Spotlight to rebuild its index on the macOS host Forget all external SSD Time Machine backup targets, erase and reformat them. Add those erased and reformatted external SSD Time Machine backups back as Time Machine destinations