Technologies

Need a Stronger Password? Generate Secure Options on Your iPhone in Moments With These Tricks

Your iPhone has two ways to quickly and easily generate strong passwords. Here’s how they work.

While passkeys are gaining popularity and leading us to a future with fewer passwords, they aren’t truly widespread yet. In the meantime, you’ll still need a secure password to protect your accounts. Instead of racking your brain, your iPhone can generate a strong password in just a few taps. Even better, there are two different ways to generate your new password without stressing about it.

Last year, iOS 18 brought the new Passwords app with it, which makes saving and creating passwords a breeze, not to mention killing the need of a third-party password manager for a ton of iPhone users. The Passwords app is easy to use and fairly robust in features, but what if you’re holding onto an older iPhone that isn’t compatible with iOS 18? Don’t worry, you still have options to work with.

Below, we’ll show you how to make strong passwords on the fly, no matter what version of iOS you’re on.

For more, check out the best iOS 18.5 features you should know about.

How to generate a password with Apple’s Passwords app

If you have iOS or iPadOS 18 installed and just want a no-frills, easy way to generate a secure password on the fly, the Passwords app may be all you need. Here’s how to do it.

Open the Passwords app
Tap the + symbol at the bottom right of the screen
Ignoring the Website or Label and User Name sections, tap on the Password field, as if you’re going to type one in — not the Password label.
A small «Strong Password Suggestion» will appear right above your keyboard. You can tap on the password suggestion to add it to the password section and copy it for use wherever you want.

You can add a website/label and username, as well as any notes, if you want to save these credentials and not just generate a password. If you want another password suggestion, just tap on any other text input field, like User or Notes, and then tap the password field again to get another suggestion.

That’s it. If that’s all you want out of your password generator, it really doesn’t get easier than this. However, if you want to be able to access your password from multiple locations, then maybe you should read on for the next option.

How to generate secure passwords with a Siri Shortcut

Using the link below, download the Generate Password shortcut onto your iPhone. This will automatically redirect you to the Shortcuts app — tap Add Shortcut to download the shortcut on to your phone. The Generate Password shortcut will then appear in your library of shortcuts.

Download: Generate Password (iCloud link)

Your on-demand iPhone password generator in action

Once the shortcut is installed, you can use Generate Password to quickly create Apple-style passwords, which are 20 characters long and include two hyphens, a capitalized letter and a number («fevNaq-1zumki-gorfoc» is an example).

There are several ways to use Generate Password:

Siri: Say, «Hey Siri, Generate Password.»
Share Sheet: Tap the share sheet in Safari or anywhere else, scroll down and tap Generate Password.
Shortcuts: Tap the Generate Password shortcut directly in the Shortcuts app.
Back Tap: Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and choose the Generate Password shortcut. You can then tap the back of your iPhone to run the shortcut.

The first time you run Generate Password, you’ll be asked to give the shortcut access to your clipboard. Hit Allow to do so. From then on, anytime you run Generate Password, a password will be created and automatically copied to your clipboard. You’ll also see a notification showing you the password. Hit Done when you’re finished.

The password will expire from your clipboard in 10 minutes, so make sure to use it relatively quickly or else you’ll need to generate a new password. You can press down in any text field and hit Paste to enter the password from your clipboard.

Need more? Don’t miss how iOS 26 basically turns your iPad into a Mac.

Technologies

Wikipedia Says It’s Losing Traffic Due to AI Summaries, Social Media Videos

The popular online encyclopedia saw an 8% drop in pageviews over the last few months.

Wikipedia has seen a decline in users this year due to artificial intelligence summaries in search engine results and the growing popularity of social media, according to a blog post Friday from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees the free online encyclopedia.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

In the post, Miller describes an 8% drop in human pageviews over the last few months compared with the numbers Wikipedia saw in the same months in 2024.

«We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,» Miller wrote.

Blame the bots

AI-generated summaries that pop up on search engines like Bing and Google often use bots called web crawlers to gather much of the information that users read at the top of the search results.

Websites do their best to restrict how these bots handle their data, but web crawlers have become pretty skilled at going undetected.

«Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated and trying to appear human,» Miller wrote.

After reclassifying Wikipedia traffic data from earlier this year, Miller says the site «found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots built to evade detection.»

The Wikipedia blog post also noted that younger generations are turning to social-video platforms for their information rather than the open web and such sites as Wikipedia.

When people search with AI, they’re less likely to click through

There is now promising research on the impact of generative AI on the internet, especially concerning online publishers with business models that rely on users visiting their webpages.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

In July, Pew Research examined browsing data from 900 US adults and found that the AI-generated summaries at the top of Google’s search results affected web traffic. When the summary appeared in a search, users were less likely to click on links compared to when the search results didn’t include the summaries.

Google search is especially important, because Google.com is the world’s most visited website — it’s how most of us find what we’re looking for on the internet.

«LLMs, AI chatbots, search engines and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow sustainably,» Miller wrote. «With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.»

Last year, CNET published an extensive report on how changes in Google’s search algorithm decimated web traffic for online publishers.

Technologies

OpenAI Says It’s Working With Actors to Crack Down on Celebrity Deepfakes in Sora

Bryan Cranston alerted SAG-AFTRA, the actors union, when he saw AI-generated videos of himself made with the AI video app.

OpenAI said Monday it would do more to stop users of its AI video generation app Sora from creating clips with the likenesses of actors and other celebrities after actor Bryan Cranston and the union representing film and TV actors raised concerns that deepfake videos were being made without the performers’ consent.

Actor Bryan Cranston, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and several talent agencies said they struck a deal with the ChatGPT maker over the use of celebrities’ likenesses in Sora. The joint statement highlights the intense conflict between AI companies and rights holders like celebrities’ estates, movie studios and talent agencies — and how generative AI tech continues to erode reality for all of us.

Sora, a new sister app to ChatGPT, lets users create and share AI-generated videos. It launched to much fanfare three weeks ago, with AI enthusiasts searching for invite codes. But Sora is unique among AI video generators and social media apps; it lets you use other people’s recorded likenesses to place them in nearly any AI video. It has been, at best, weird and funny, and at worst, a never-ending scroll of deepfakes that are nearly indistinguishable from reality.

Cranston noticed his likeness was being used by Sora users when the app launched, and the Breaking Bad actor alerted his union. The new agreement with the actors’ union and talent agencies reiterates that celebrities will have to opt in to having their likenesses available to be placed into AI-generated video. OpenAI said in the statement that it has «strengthened the guardrails around replication of voice and likeness» and «expressed regret for these unintentional generations.»

OpenAI does have guardrails in place to prevent the creation of videos of well-known people: It rejected my prompt asking for a video of Taylor Swift on stage, for example. But these guardrails aren’t perfect, as we’ve saw last week with a growing trend of people creating videos featuring Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They ranged from weird deepfakes of the civil rights leader rapping and wrestling in the WWE to overtly racist content.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

The flood of «disrespectful depictions,» as OpenAI called them in a statement on Friday, is part of why the company paused the ability to create videos featuring King.

Statement from OpenAI and King Estate, Inc.
The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. (King, Inc.) and OpenAI have worked together to address how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness is represented in Sora generations. Some users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr.…

— OpenAI Newsroom (@OpenAINewsroom) October 17, 2025

Bernice A. King, his daughter, last week publicly asked people to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her father. She was echoing comedian Robin Williams’ daughter, Zelda, who called these sorts of AI videos «gross.»

I concur concerning my father.
Please stop. #RobinWilliams #MLK #AI https://t.co/SImVIP30iN

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) October 7, 2025

OpenAI said it «believes public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used» and that «authorized representatives» of public figures and their estates can request that their likeness not be included in Sora. In this case, King’s estate is the entity responsible for choosing how his likeness is used.

This isn’t the first time OpenAI has leaned on others to make those calls. Before Sora’s launch, the company reportedly told a number of Hollywood-adjacent talent agencies that they would have to opt out of having their intellectual property included in Sora. But that initial approach didn’t square with decades of copyright law — usually, companies need to license protected content before using it — and OpenAI reversed its stance a few days later. It’s one example of how AI companies and creators are clashing over copyright, including through high-profile lawsuits.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for Oct. 21, #863

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Oct. 21, #863.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle has a diverse mix of topics. Remember when you see a word like «does» that it could have multiple meanings. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Deal me in.

Green group hint: I can get that.

Blue group hint: Hoops.

Purple group hint: The clicker.