Bolt 0.1.160
Screening protects you without being switched on first. The layer that
masks sensitive information before it reaches an AI assistant shipped
inactive: it waited on a setting only an administrator could apply, and
the only way to apply it was a console command. A protection nobody
turns on is a protection nobody has. On the assistants people actually
use it is now active from the start, and it tells you each time it has
acted.
New features
Screening is on by default on the major assistants. What you type,
paste, drop or attach is checked before it leaves the browser, with
nothing to enable first. If you would rather it stood down on a
particular site you can decline, and that choice is remembered for
that site.
Every masked send says so. When something is covered, a small marker
appears in the corner naming how many items were caught, with a way to
see what they were. It clears when you dismiss it, or on its own after
a minute. Masking that happens silently asks you to take our word for
it. This is the receipt.
A file that cannot be screened no longer breaks the page. When
sensitive content was found in a file but no masked version could be
produced, the upload was cancelled outright and the site was left
waiting on a request that never answered. The file is now replaced
with a short note saying what happened, the conversation carries on,
and the original file stays on your machine.
Screening follows the content, not the shape of the request.
Assistants send in several different ways, and the check used to
depend on recognising one of them. What matters is whether you typed,
pasted, dropped or attached something, so background and streamed
sends are covered on the same terms. Ordinary diagnostics are left
alone.
Administrators can set policy for each category of information rather
than one setting covering everything, can release a single flagged
item without lowering the bar for the rest, and can offer a way to
request approval instead of leaving someone at a dead end. A check
that cannot run no longer reports that content is safe.
A local model can be chosen as your primary model for chat, and is
remembered as your selection rather than treated as a fallback.
Improvements
The colour loupe on the ruler paints only the pixel it actually has.
It follows the unit you have selected, copying puts the colour on the
clipboard, and a reading that fails is now reported rather than
disappearing.
The launcher no longer lets a bare word like settings take over the
results list, holds back expensive work when the answer is already on
screen, and stops searches that are still running once you have
chosen one. The arrangement of the side rail survives between
sessions.
Signing out closes the gate that allows a request through during
startup. That gate exists for the moment before a session has been
established, and it was never closed on the way out, so the next
person to sign in on a shared machine inherited it standing open.
FileVault reads as on or off rather than granted. It is a property of
the Mac, not something Bolt asked you for, and sharing the wording of
a permission request implied otherwise.
Permissions are read from one place across Settings, the launcher and
the ruler, so the three cannot disagree about the same grant.
Fixes
A masked replacement could fail to arrive, sending the original
instead. The replacement was handed between two parts of the browser
in a form the receiving side could not open, so it fell back to the
untouched text every time.
The network filter panel reports what macOS actually answers rather
than what was last requested, and a policy pushed to a machine reopens
the question instead of silently overriding it. The guidance for
administrators no longer suggests a management profile can install the
filter on someone's behalf, because it cannot. Only the application
can, with the person present.
Security
Screening being inactive unless an administrator turned it on was
itself the exposure, and it is the change this release leads with.
Anyone running Bolt on a personal machine was sending to assistants
unscreened, whatever the policy said, because the layer that would
have caught it was never active.
Every build in this release was produced from a single fixed point,
and each platform was measured against the same recorded source
before it was signed. The macOS applications are signed and notarised
by Apple, for both Apple Silicon and Intel. The Windows installers are
signed with an extended validation certificate issued to Sparcle Inc.