Charlotte Henry

Apple highlighted a number of third-party health apps that have been updated to work with Siri Shortcuts Thursday. AppleInsider reported that the updated apps included QardioArm smart blood pressure, skiing-app Snoww as well as Streaks, WaterMinder, and Yazio. It also noted Apples suggestion that users could create personalized routines with these new Siri Shortcuts.

The apps Apple has selected offer a wide variety of functions to promote a healthy and active lifestyle, in a number of new ways. Following an announcement from Thursday about new additions to the Siri Shortcuts roster, the new batch of third-party health services cover both apps and hardware that can communicate with iPhones and other items in the Apple ecosystem.

SpaceX will move a step closer to putting human’s into space this weekend. Early Saturday morning, it will launch an upgraded version of its Dragon capsule craft, called Crew Dragon. The craft will contain supplies for International Space Station. Wired reported on how Elon Musk’s company hopes to prove that this type of craft can keep a human crew safe if it had to make an emergency landing.

SpaceX has always intended for its Dragon capsules to ferry humans, but Every SpaceX Dragon capsule launched so far has only shuttled cargo to and from the ISS. The upgraded version, debuting on DM-1, will feature new crew life-support systems, seats, control panels, and a propulsion system that can be used to keep the crew safe during a launch emergency. But it won’t carry people; before astronauts can climb aboard, SpaceX has to prove Dragon is ready.

LONDON- Apple’s Beats and Japanese fashion brand, Sacai are coming together to create BeatsX. The specially designed headphones are going to initially go on sale in a pop-up store in Paris on March 4th, AppleInsider reported. They come in three different colours, and they are not going to be cheap.

To buy a pair, at least initially, people will have to turn to a pop-up store launching in Paris on March 4. The product will also cost about $200 — a premium of more than $100 over normal BeatsX models. Apple is no stranger to treating Beats products as fashion accessories, often focusing more on their style than sound quality or features. The company regularly pays to insert Beats products into music videos or sports sponsorships to lure in a young audience.

MWC in Barcelona is drawing to a close. We’ve seen foldable phones and a lot of talk about 5G. Another of the hot topics was Huawei, and the U.S. governments ongoing bid to claims that the company spies on behalf of the Chinese state. The New York Times has a rundown of what happened at conference.

American officials were left to hold a hastily called news conference on Tuesday at a booth operated by the Spanish government. They didn’t present any new evidence against Huawei. The conference previewed many of the hottest mobile trends, particularly the capabilities of new hyperfast 5G networks. For years, the technology has had more promise than actual uses. Executives said the faster networks would debut this year, with wider adoption coming in 2020 and beyond.

There has been much discussion in recent times about what social media companies and online platforms are doing to monitor content. For example, Facebook has moved to moderate Anti-Vaxxer content on its platform. Apple News is, of course, curated by editors. We often hear from the heads of companies about moderation, but not from the people who actually do it. Medium’s s Head of Trust and Safety spoke to people who have been on the frontline of this at a variety of tech companies. The conversation sheds a light on how decisions about content get made.

This is where the trust and safety team comes in. Most companies operating an online platform have one. It sometimes goes by other names — “content policy” or “moderation” — and comes in other flavors, like “community operations.” Whatever the name, this is the team that encourages social norms. They make platform rules and enforce them. They are at once the judges and janitors of the internet. This is not the job of a few dozen techie randos, but tens of thousands of workers, both full-time employees and contractors.

A Facebook clear-history tool is going to be with users by the end of 2019. That’s according to its CFO David Wehner, who spoke Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2019 in San Francisco, CNBC reported. CEO Mark Zuckerberg originally announced the features in 2018. Mr. Zuckerberg promised in a post that the tool, when it arrived, would be “a simple control to clear your browsing history.”

The feature will allow users to see information about apps and web sites they’ve interacted with and delete this information from their Facebook accounts. Wehner said the feature will make it harder for Facebook to use data collected by third parties to target ads to users. “Broadly, [clear history is] going to give us some headwinds in terms of being able to target as effectively as before,” Wehner said.

We seem to be living in a golden age of television thanks to streaming services, and The writers behind some of our favourite shows are getting well rewarded for it. Fast Company looked at how Netflix kickstarted “a $1 billion arms race” for TV writing talent. With Apple stepping into the field, and spending serious cash on the likes of Oprah, the fees look like they are only going to go one way.

In the last 18 months there have been so many jaw-dropping deals with the people who dream up TV shows–and the numbers for those deals so staggeringly high–that reports of another TV writer getting piles of cash thrown at him or her by a network, studio, or streaming company has become almost numbingly de rigueur. The starting gun that set off this phenomenon can be traced back to Netflix’s announcement in the summer of 2017 that it was poaching Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes from her longtime home at ABC in a deal worth $150 million.

The promotion of Deirdre O’Brien to Senior Vice President of Retail and People following the announcement of Angela Ahrendts’ impending departure surprised a lot of people. Surely running Apple HR was a big enough job? How could anyone take on doing that and running retail too? A blog post from Dr. Drang from earlier in February, which has just come to my attention courtesy of Daring Fireball, explained it really well. Firstly, lots of people work in Apple retail, and secondly, SVPs at Apple have often had rather lose roles.

But if you look at Apple’s most recent Equal Employment Opportunity filing, you’ll see that Sales Workers make up 31% of Apple’s employee base. Only Professionals, a hair higher at 32%, beats it out, and no other employee category is even close. So a lot of Apple HR is already devoted to Retail. The duties of Apple’s top people have often been broad and seemingly unfocused.

14 members of Congress wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook and his Google counterpart Sunder Pinchai, demanding their firms remove the Absher app. Insider published an investigation into the government-run app, reported on by TMO, earlier in February. It found that Absher has access to a database of women in the country. Men can use it to monitor the whereabouts of female relatives and even stop them leaving Saudi Arabia. The 14 representatives included Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Katherine Clark, and Jackie Speicer. Following the initial report, both Apple and Google said they would investigate Absher, but have since failed to comment.

In Thursday’s letter, the signatories said Google and Apple need to remove Absher as it “serves as [a] tracking device” used to “prevent the free movement of Saudi women.” They said: “Twenty-first-century innovations should not perpetuate sixteenth-century tyranny. “Keeping this application in your stores allows your companies and your American employees to be accomplices in the oppression of Saudi Arabian women and migrant workers,” the letter said.