Andrew Orr's photo

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.

Get In Touch:

Articles by Andrew Orr

Link

The New York Times Invites Beta Testers for its Audio App

Andrew Orr ·

The New York Times is building an app for audio journalism and it’s inviting beta testers to try it out.

“New York Times Audio” will provide an accessible and authoritative way to understand the world, pulling from Times podcasts, Times articles, premier magazine publishers like New York magazine and Rolling Stone, new audio formats from The Times newsroom and more. The product will also feature the archive of “This American Life,” encompassing 25 years worth of episodes from the iconic show that pioneered a new form of audio narrative journalism.

Link

Apple ML Study Compares Supervised Versus Self-Supervised Learning

Andrew Orr ·

A research team at Apple published a study in October examining supervised and self-supervised algorithms. The title is “Do Self-Supervised and Supervised Methods Learn Similar Visual Representations?” From the abstract:

We find that the methods learn similar intermediate representations through dissimilar means, and that the representations diverge rapidly in the final few layers. We investigate this divergence, finding that it is caused by these layers strongly fitting to the distinct learning objectives. We also find that SimCLR’s objective implicitly fits the supervised objective in intermediate layers, but that the reverse is not true.

Bring Dark Mode to all Websites With ‘Noir’ Safari Extension
Cool Stuff Found

Bring Dark Mode to all Websites With 'Noir' Safari Extension

Andrew Orr ·

Noir is an iOS | iPadOS 15 extension that generates a custom dark style for each website you visit, based on the colors that are used on a page. You won’t even notice this happening in the background – that’s how fast it is – but you’ll certainly appreciate the end result: a beautiful dark mode tailored for each website, where contrast is preserved and highlights still pop. Noir works with any website you visit in Safari, automatically. By default, Noir is linked to your device’s Dark Mode, so websites will only go dark when you want them to. But you can easily customize this to your liking, even per website.

Link

Sneak Peek of Features Coming With Cryptomator 1.6.0 Update

Andrew Orr ·

Although we don’t have a definite release date, the developers of Cryptomator shared some features users will see in the upcoming 1.6.0 update.

A feature already wished in its earliest days will be present: Auto Lock – the automatic locking of a vault. For every vault you can set up an idle timer after which the vault is automatically locked. If any write or read happens during the time span, the timer is reset.

Link

Running Into The Woods Will No Longer Save You From Drones

Andrew Orr ·

Researchers at the University of Zurich have developed [PDF] an AI system that can help drones fly through complex environments at up to 40kmph.

An algorithm first piloted a computer-generated drone through a simulated environment that contained complex obstacles. This data was used to train the drone’s neural network to predict a flight path based on information from onboard sensors. The system was then tested in various real-world environments, such as forests, collapsed buildings, and derailed trains.

‘GRID Autosport’ Gets More Game Controls in New Update
Cool Stuff Found

'GRID Autosport' Gets More Game Controls in New Update

Andrew Orr ·

Feral Interactive has released a new update for GRID Autosport on iOS and Android, with a focus on further refining the game’s control options. Leading the pack is Arrow Touch Pro – a much-requested alternative layout for Arrow Touch steering that enables the use of manual acceleration. Following close behind is the brand new, fully-customisable Throttle Slider, allowing players to set their acceleration with pinpoint precision. This patch also adds full support for the latest DualSense and Xbox Series X|S wireless controllers, as well as language support for Traditional Chinese.

Link

iMessages are End-To-End Encrypted But iCloud Backups Are Not

Andrew Orr ·

For Lifehacker, Jake Peterson wrote a reminder that under certain circumstances, Apple can theoretically access your iMessages.

Here’s the tricky thing; Messages in iCloud is end-to-end encrypted, just as you’d expect—that’s why there’s no way to access your messages on the web, such as by logging in to icloud.com. There’s one big problem, though: your iCloud Backup isn’t end-to-end encrypted—and Apple stores the key to unlock your encrypted messages within that backup.

Messages in iCloud has been a thing for a few years now, but you can turn it off.