Charlotte Henry

Starting this week, businesses in Ohio will be able to pay their taxes using Bitcoin. Engadget reported that the service could eventually be expanded to accept payment of personal taxes. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Ohio businesses will be able to go to the website OhioCrypto.com and register to pay everything from cigarette sales taxes to employee withholding taxes with Bitcoin.”  Ohio is the first state to allow taxes to be paid via Bitcoin. The change was pushed forward by Ohio state Treasurer Josh Mandel.

This doesn’t eliminate the regulatory concerns around cryptocurrency, and it’s doubtful that more than a handful of businesses will use it. It’s happening in Ohio precisely because state Treasurer Josh Mandel says he can do it without requiring help from the legislature or the governor. It could be considerably more difficult to implement this by passing a bill.

LONDON – The UK Parliament has exercised its legal powers and seized a number of internal Facebook documents. The cache of papers is alleged to contain revelations surrounding the data and privacy controls that resulted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Furthermore, The Observer reported that, “they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with [Mark] Zuckerberg.” Damian Collins, Conservative MP and chair of the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, sent a parliamentary official to the London hotel where Ted Kramer, the founder of Six4Three, a software company that is suing Facebook, was staying. Mr. Kramer was eventually compelled to hand over the documents. Facebook has denied all the allegations made and demanded the return of the papers. The Observer has the full details:

The documents seized were obtained during a legal discovery process by Six4Three. It took action against the social media giant after investing $250,000 in an app. Six4Three alleges the cache shows Facebook was not only aware of the implications of its privacy policy, but actively exploited them, intentionally creating and effectively flagging up the loophole that Cambridge Analytica used to collect data. That raised the interest of Collins and his committee.

Pilots have a lot of paperwork to do. To try and help, Singapore Airlines arm theirs with an iPad loaded with two specialized apps. These apps organize the roster, track flying hours and deliver key information such as routing, weather and fuel load. It is all secured using TouchID. Crucially, Singapore Airlines has to maintain these processes in a way that pilots, who are creatures of habit, are comfortable with. CNet went into the cockpit and found that using iPads has led to a number of improvements for Singapore Airlines’s pilots.

The airline started looking into this back in 2015, before rolling out iPads loaded with two essential custom apps, FlyNow and Roster. These iPads are secured with Apple’s TouchID, letting them ditch the previously used two-factor authentication dongles pilots had to carry around. That’s on top of the other apps that give pilots detailed weather information and flight charting information.

Following last month’s ‘There’s More in the Making Event’, there was a lot of speculation about the future of Apple’s Mac product line. In particular, people have focussed on the new iPad Pro and whether or not it can be a true laptop replacement.  Now some time has passed, MacWorld’s Jason Snell highlights another issue – the new MacBook Air only comes with one processor option. Consumers can expand a new Macbook’s Air’s storage capacity to 1.5TB and its memory to 16GB. However, you still get the 1.6GHz dual-core Core i5 processor. Mr. Snell argues that this move might signal the end of configurable Macs.

This feels like the future of the Mac, certainly on the consumer end of the product line. With the new MacBook Air, Apple has picked a processor and stuck with it. Would any of us be surprised if it did the same with a future update to the MacBook? Or low-end iMacs? Looking a bit further into the future, if Apple starts building Macs with ARM processors, is it going to want to offer different classes of processors within those models? On iOS, Apple has steadfastly refused to do this. Every model-year of a given model is generally powered by the same processor across the board.

A new patent, reported by AppleInsider, reveals that the Apple Watch might be able to help protect users from sun damage in the future. The patent details a device with a number of sensors. These could be used to record how much sun the user is getting. Alerts could be triggered when the level of sun exposure gets too high. This news ties in with recent developments in which Apple is trying to turn the Apple Watch into an all-in-one wellness device.

Granted on Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the patent for “UV dosimetry and exposure alert” effectively describes a system where UV light sensors detect sunlight and tracks exposure over time. The system can then provide the user with alerts about their exposure, including guidance on preventative measures if the levels are excessive.

The Sydney Morning Herald has taken an in-depth look at how Apple News is developing.  Australia is one of only three countries in which the service is available, the others being the US and UK. The piece outlines the radically different approach Apple has taken to news compared to other tech giants. Its focus is on using human journalists, not algorithms, to curate news, not algorithms, in a bid to improve accuracy. That approach was summed up in a quote from Apple News Editor-in-Chief Lauren Kern:

“Misinformation can come out so quickly and spread so rapidly and that’s something that we take pride in not allowing to happen”  says Lauren Kern, the platform’s editor in chief, who is a former executive editor of New York magazine. “Our mantra is that it’s better to be accurate than first.”

Behaviourism, the psychology theory that the behaviour of human beings is best understood as responding incentives and rewards, has been around since the 1930s. It was overtaken in scholarly thought in the 1950s, but it’s a big deal in Silicon Valley today. Behaviourism helps us understand why games are so addictive. Why Apple is obsessed with making the unboxing experience as pleasurable as possible. A fascinating feature in 1843 Magazine gives an in-depth explanation of how it all works and who the scientists are that make it all happen.

The more immediate and intense a rush of emotion a person feels the first time they use something, the more likely they are to make it an automatic choice. It’s why airlines bring you a glass of champagne the moment you sink into a business-class seat, and why Apple takes enormous care to ensure that a customer’s first encounter with a new phone feels magical.

Apple has received an A+ rating by the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families organization for its efforts to reduce its use of toxic chemicals. AppleInsider reported that despite being found to have some room for improvement, Apple was the only firm given the top rating this year. It builds on last year when it received an A rating from the same organization.  Retailer Target was the only firm to receive an A rating this year. Best Buy and Amazon were only awarded a C rating.

Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families is a body comprised of 450 businesses which has been issuing annual report cards called Mind the Store for three years. Each report awards a point score as well as an overall grade and this year Apple earned 106.25 out of a possible 135 points. Part of that point score was 15 out of 15 for what Mind the Store calls continuous improvement in a steadily expanding safer chemicals policy. It also scored 9 out of 15 for public disclosure and transparency. Other scores included 7.5/7.5 for establishing management responsibilities and 10/10 for supply chain accountability.

LastPass has revealed it’s Christmas naughty and nice list, with Apple top of the pile.  They took the top retail sites and saw who was best at protecting personal information…and who was not. In particular, they looked at “key password requirements and other account security features to develop a ranking of the five most and least secure retail sites, based on whether and how well they met a set of criteria”. Apple was deemed the most secure e-retailer, followed by Best Buy and Home Depot. Wayfair was left propping up the naughty list.

Apple is “aggressively” recruiting engineers to develop chip components in San Diego, according to Bloomberg. The move indicates that Apple may be adding San Diego to the locations in which it designs chips. A number of job listings have appeared for the city, which just happens to be the home of chipmaker Qualcomm. Here’s a snippet:

This month, Apple published 10 job listings on its website for chip design-related positions located in the city, marking the first time the Cupertino, California-based technology giant has publicly recruited for such roles in the Southern California hotbed for chip design. Apple is advertising for engineers to work on multiple types of chip components, including engineers to work on the company’s Neural Engine artificial intelligence processor and wireless chips.