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______________________ Vidity is the product of the Secure Content Storage Association (SCSA). This organization was founded by both movie studios, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment as well as storage companies SanDisk and Western Digital. It currently has over 50 member companies, most notably Intel, Qualcomm, Comcast, Samsung and Walmart. The goal of…

The story began with Lil Weezyana Fest, a benefit for Tha Carter Fund, a charity managed by the Greater New Orleans Foundation. The Fest was part of the memorial events organized around the 10th anniversary of the Katrina hurricane disaster. Tidal, a streaming music service owned by Hip Hop mogul Jay-Z and other big-name artists,…

Apple Music's boss leaves in surprise move Apple confirmed Mr. Rogers is leaving the company, but isn't offering up any details, according to the Financial Times. Unnamed sources said that instead of moving to another company in the music industry, he left for a company in an unrelated market. The resignation came as a surprise…

Good news from Apple's invitation. The key here is a technology issue. Apple has been using an Internet technology called HTTP live streaming or HLS. The Apple devices listed above support that, but Windows and IE never have. In Windows 10, Microsoft added HLS support to its Edge browser, and so that's why Apple's invitation…

In August of 2014, I reviewed, in healthy detail, the Amazon Fire Phone. Even though it was missing some key features, like Google Maps and hardware encryption, I found it to be a solid smartphone with good looks and a good looking GUI. What quickly doomed the Fire Phone was the creepy factor of a…

Amazon's Fire Phone lost its connection. Forever. Dozens of engineers have been laid off from Amazon's Lab126 center where the Fire Phone and other devices including the Kindle ebook reader were developed, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon jumped into the smartphone market in June 2014 with the Fire Phone. The phone shipped with…

Mac Geek Gab listener Andrew illustrated this advice with an example: while recently attending a busy sporting event, Andrew and others had difficultly accessing online services like Facebook and Twitter. Andrew's iPhone was successfully connected to his mobile carrier's 4G network with plenty of “dots” of signal strength, but the process of uploading or downloading…

There's just one more thing, according to Columbo Apple co-founder Steve Jobs occasionally said “one more thing” before unveiling surprise product announcements at media events, and it turned into a catch phrase people expected to hear at every Apple event. Current CEO Tim Cook has used the line, too, when announcing new products. The Columbo…

Spotify took it on the chin for privacy changes it didn't explain ahead of time Here's what Spotify wants to get at on your smartphone: Information stored on your mobile device. That can include contacts, photos, and media files. Location and sensor information such as GPS, Bluetooth, motion tracking. That sounds pretty ominous, like Spotify…

In several notable cases, Apple appears asleep at the wheel. Image credit: Shutterstock. Apple's executive team of senior vice presidents calls all the shots. While there may be many distinguished and capable (ordinary) vice presidents, sometimes a few get into trouble by believing they have more authority than they really do. The VP job is…

Your next iPhone could have a 12 megapixel camera. Is that a big deal? What's a Megapixel? A megapixel is a million pixels, and each pixel makes up a single point in your photographs. That means an 8 megapixel camera, like the one used in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus captures images with…

I'm very pleased to welcome – and thank! – Macphun to TMO as this week's sponsor.  Macphun has been creating software for the Mac and iOS for a long time and has earned “best-of App Store” honors for all of the last 3 years. Right now they're featuring their Creative Kit, a suite of 5…

HTC system flaw left user fingerprints open to hackers Researchers from FireEye Labs discovered the vulnerability (PDF) in HTC's One Max smartphone. “One example is HTC One Max—the fingerprint is saved as /data/dbgraw.bmp with 0666 permission (world-readable). Any unprivileged processes or apps can steal user's fingerprints by reading this file,” they said. They went on…

The move is essentially a restructuring of the company we know as “Google” today—Larry Page will be CEO of Alphabet, while Sergey Brin will be president, and Eric Schmidt will be executive chairman. Shares of GOOG and GOOGL will be turned into shares of Alphabet, with all the same rights (and lack of rights), and…

Verizon ditches old-school contracts and subsidized iPhone deals The little guy in this case is T-Mobile, the third largest U.S. cell service provider well behind Verizon and AT&T. T-Mobile started shaking up the smartphone market by offering no contract deals for its customers, along with monthly payment plans for new phones instead of the traditional…

ZeoBIT agrees to $2M settlement in MacKeeper lawsuit MacKeeper is billed as a utility for keeping your Mac running in tip-top shape, although enough people felt ZeoBIT overstated the its claims enough to warrant a lawsuit. The company ultimately agreed to the $2 million settlement, but won't have to admit to any wrongdoing. A third…

A question then arises. When Apple made this design and business decision, was it because Apple's executive team, led by Steve Jobs back then, believed in the importance of the customer experience or because Apple was trying to maximize revenue? After all, previous experience with the Macintosh showed that a closed system would probably suffer…

Where did the Online Apple Store go? In a word, away. Apple created a unified website where researching and buying products doesn't require jumping between the main site and a subdomain where the shopping part actually happens. Assuming Apple did a good job with the redesign, looking for and buying new iPhones, Macs, and other…

It might be a chance meeting between two people, like when Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak, or a decision, like when Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized they needed “adult supervision” in the form of Eric Schmidt, or an infinite array of other situations that can define or redefine someone's life or the direction of…

iOS 10 may turn your voicemails into text Insider sources speaking with Business Insider said Apple is already testing iCould Voicemail internally, and if it works as the company hopes, will launch next year most likely as a part of iOS 10. Voicemail transcription isn't a new idea, and compared to Google, this is another…

Yup, time to turn on the sprinklers (unless you're in drought-stricken California, of course). We head outside to tackle that task which we dread doing every year – setting the schedule on our sprinkler controllers (because for some reason, we have to do it every year). As we fiddle with the knobs and buttons of…

T-Mobile CEO John Legere iPhone 6 Swap The big news on Tuesday is the offer to let customers who buy a new iPhone 6 now swap it out for whatever Apple announces this fall (likely the iPhone 6s). Customers will pay nothing more and their monthly bills won't change. “Yeah, that's what I said,”Mr. Legere…

Nike FuelBand settlement value is in education, not money. In the Nike case, consumers complained about inaccurate fitness tracking data such as calorie counts were wrong, and that the FuelBand was marketed and sold as if the information it logged was correct. They sued Nike and Apple because both companies were marketing the device. Apple…

Sen. Franken thinks Apple has an unfair advantage in streaming music In his letter to the FTC, Senator Franken said, I am writing to encourage you to examine Apple's current dealing with app developers to determine whether the company is engaging in anticompetitive behavior in the music streaming market. As the digital music industry continues…