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Andrew Orr

Since 2015 Andrew has been writing about Apple, privacy, security, and at one point even Android. You can find him most places online under the username @andrewornot.

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Articles by Andrew Orr

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Twitter Leapfrogs Over Facebook and Bans Political Ads

Andrew Orr ·

I’m actually impressed with Twitter’s move. A corporation is willingly giving up the money it would make from political ads (Although it’s easy for them since these ads were a “small fraction of Twitter’s revenue). Still, kudos.

[Twitter CEO Jack] Dorsey touched on the conflict between hosting paid political ads and trying to fight the spread of misinformation.

“For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: ‘We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well…they can say whatever they want!'” Dorsey tweeted.

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AvengerCon: The Return of a Hack Convention for the Military

Andrew Orr ·

AvengerCon is a hacking convention for members of the US Cyber Command and government cyber operations community at the US CYBERCOM DreamPort facility.

AvengerCon is an event that is attracting the very best talent both from our DoD participants and also from some of the folks that are working with us outside of the DoD,” Luber said. “When you bring those very best cyber experts together, they get to learn, test out new ideas, and work in an environment that is hosted by and for DoD cyber operations community experts.

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The AI 'AlphaStar' Becomes a Grandmaster in StarCraft II

Andrew Orr ·

DeepMind’s AlphaStar AI has recently become a Grandmaster in the game StarCraft II.

StarCraft requires players to gather resources, build dozens of military units, and use them to try to destroy their opponents. StarCraft is particularly challenging for an AI because players must carry out long-term plans over several minutes of gameplay, tweaking them on the fly in the face of enemy counterattacks. DeepMind says that prior to its own effort, no one had come close to designing a StarCraft AI as good as the best human players.

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Apple Previews Upcoming 'See' Series on YouTube

Andrew Orr ·

Apple has uploading a two-minute featurette of See, a series in which everyone in the world has lost the ability to see.

Jason Momoa stars as Baba Voss, the father of twins born centuries later with the mythic ability to see—who must protect his tribe against a powerful yet desperate queen who believes it’s witchcraft and wants them destroyed. Alfre Woodard also stars as Paris, Baba Voss’ spiritual leader.

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The iPhone 11 Camera is Completely New

Andrew Orr ·

In Part 1 of a multi-part series, Sebastiaan de With wrote an article about the iPhone 11 camera and how it’s completely new.

It’s true: The great advances in camera quality for these new iPhones are mostly to blame on advanced (and improved) software processing.

I’ve taken some time to analyze the iPhone 11’s new image capture pipeline, and it looks like one of the greatest changes in iPhone cameras yet.

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Want to Help Train AI? Send This Company Pictures of Your Poop

Andrew Orr ·

A company called Seed wants to build a database of 100,000 poop photos so an AI can learn to tell the difference between healthy and unhealthy poop.

Ara Katz, co-founder and co-CEO of Seed, hopes that the poop project is just one of the company’s many future contributions to our understanding of health. “It’s projects like this [that] allow people who are not scientists to participate in citizen science. By crowdsourcing data, we can help researchers and technologies like auggi in order to help people identify different conditions.”

Take a poop pic and submit it at seed.com/poop.

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Corellium Strikes Back Saying it Makes iPhones Safer

Andrew Orr ·

Apple filed a lawsuit against a company called Corellium. This company runs virtualization software that lets it emulate iOS. It responded to Apple’s lawsuit on Monday and said it makes iPhones safer. Oh, and it claims Apple owes it US$300,000.

Corellium’s key argument lies on the assumption that Corellium’s customers are looking for bugs with the intention of alerting Apple of their existence…For now, however, that is only an assumption…When Motherboard asked today whether they ever reported a bug in iOS found using Corellium, Mark Dowd, the founder of Azimuth, said: “no.”

That “no” is a pretty damning answer. If you claim that your software helps fix iOS bugs, you should probably also report those iOS bugs to Apple. At least if you also claim to make iPhones safer, because selling those bugs on the black market doesn’t do that.

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Apple TV+ Execs Talk About the Service in Interview

Andrew Orr ·

Apple TV+ executives talk about the service in an interview. Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg, former Sony employees, talk shop.

One of the first things they had to wrap their heads around was that they were no longer working for a Hollywood studio. The traditional factors that had defined their options as studio chiefs for so long — budget deficits, international sales, syndication potential, et al. — no longer applied. Now, the guiding principle was to build a service worthy of the Apple brand that also harnessed the power of digital media. The result is a collaboration between many departments.

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Is Dark Mode Technically Better? No, But That's Not The Point

Andrew Orr ·

Since Apple introduced Dark Mode in iOS 13 we’ve had a wave of people arguing that dark mode isn’t better for legibility, it could made reading worse on your eyes, et cetera et cetera. But I think they’re missing the point. I’m sure it’s subjective but staring into a searing white screen is worse than staring into a dark screen at night, and I don’t care how many “experts” pull a “well, ackshually.” Speaking of searing white screens, using as much white space as possible in web design has been popular for the last several years and it’s probably a reason why everyone wanted dark mode in the first place. Some web designers tend to prize aesthetics over readability. I’m looking at you Jony Ive.

So yes, you can have the Wednesday Adams aesthetic on your phone interface too. But at this point, it seems to be just that—about the looks.

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Spotify Reaches 113 Million Paid Subscribers

Andrew Orr ·

Spotify announced that it reached 113 million paid subscribers around the world, and it’s growing twice as fast as Apple Music.

We continue to feel very good about our competitive position in the market. Relative to Apple, the publicly available data shows that we are adding roughly twice as many subscribers per month as they are. Additionally, we believe that our monthly engagement is roughly 2x as high and our churn is at half the rate.

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Australia, Please Don't Scan My Face When I Download Porn

Andrew Orr ·

The U.K. recently canceled its plans for an age filter on porn websites, but now Australia has taken up the mantle. It wants internet users to verify their identity using facial recognition before viewing pornography.

Writing in a submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs’ inquiry, launched in September, Home Affairs said it could provide a “suite of identity-matching services”.

One example highlighted by the department was the use of the Face Verification Service to prevent a child using their parent’s driver licence to get around any age verification.

At this point, me writing about porn is a running joke now. But stuff like this raises awareness on important privacy issues.

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That Apple Bluetooth Tile Product to be Named 'AirTag'

Andrew Orr ·

There’s a 99% probability that Apple’s new Bluetooth product will be named AirTag, according to assets found in iOS 13.2 which was just released today.

A folder within the filesystem for the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system possibly confirms the name “AirTag” for the new device, which will be paired with a user’s iPhone just like AirPods and will allow users to track any item using the Find My app.

I currently have a bet going that AirTag will be released tomorrow.

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Arguing That Platforms Can't Moderate Content is a Cop Out

Andrew Orr ·

Mike Masnick writes about Elizabeth Warren’s Facebook feud over its advertising policy that leaves room for fake information. He also says it’s “impossible” to moderate content at scale. I disagree. Facebook and the rest of Big Tech have billions of dollars. They absolutely can moderate content. They either choose not to, or put in place petty measures that don’t do anything. Perhaps the new motto for corporations should be, “If you can’t do it ethically, don’t do it at all.” Online platforms should follow the same/similar rules that broadcasters do.

And this is the point that lots of us have been trying to make regarding Facebook and content moderation. If you’re screaming about all the wrong choices you think it makes to leave stuff up, recognize that you’re also going to pretty pissed off when the company also decides to take stuff down that you think should be left up.

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5 New Apple Arcade Games Include Fallen Knight, Yaga, Lifelike, Hogwash, and Tales of Memo

Andrew Orr ·

Today Apple has added five new games to its Arcade gaming service, which you can find in the App Store.

Apple Arcade has added five more games to its new $4.99 monthly subscription service on Friday. Players can now check out Fallen Knight, Yaga, Lifelike, Hogwash and Tales of Memo as part of Apple Arcade’s growing catalog of games. The games are available on iPad, iPhone and Apple TV to start, with content slowly coming to Mac as well.