TMO Link

China is exporting its Great Firewall tech to other authoritarian countries, like Russia and Uganda, so they can censor their citizens better.

A new report from Freedom House — a US government-funded NGO — supports this. During 2018, the authors found, “internet freedom declined for the eighth consecutive year.”

“A cohort of countries is moving toward digital authoritarianism by embracing the Chinese model of extensive censorship and automated surveillance systems,” Freedom House said.

Book publishers want to breathe new life into the industry by making tiny books the size of a smartphone.

This month, Dutton, which is part of Penguin Random House, began releasing its first batch of mini books, with four reissued novels by the best-selling young-adult novelist John Green. The tiny editions are the size of a cellphone and no thicker than your thumb, with paper as thin as onion skin. They can be read with one hand — the text flows horizontally, and you can flip the pages upward, like swiping a smartphone.

I know this is a moot point but I already have smartphone-sized books inside my smartphone. Still though, I’m sure these will be popular among commuters and travelers.

The U.K. government wants Apple to open up the NFC chip so citizens can scan their passports. It will help EU citizens apply for residency after Brexit.

Home secretary Sajid Javid visited Apple in Cupertino to discuss the matter. Apple is said to be resistant and has not promised yet that it will change its NFC policy. The report says the government is “continuing to engage with Apple at the highest level”.

The Dutch government is also pressuring Apple to adapt its NFC policy, as it also wants to offer apps for its citizens with integrated passport scanning.

I think Apple will eventually add this capability as things slowly start to shift digitally. Imagine keeping not only your credit cards and boarding passes in the Wallet app, but your passport and driver’s license as well.

Kids apps have a lot more ads than you might think, and they could contain inappropriate advertising.

A stunning 95 percent of commonly downloaded apps that are marketed to or played by children age five and under contain at least one type of advertising…Often the ads are intrusive, spread across in a banner or even interrupting play…One app geared to young children had a popup that linked to a political game showing a cartoon version of Trump trying not to push the red button that will send nukes…

Women Who Code is an organization that boasts over 137,000 members. It supports women in tech and encourages them to stick with the field.

A recent study by the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) revealed that women held 57% of all professional occupations, yet they held only 25% of all computing occupations. And the numbers are even lower when considering women of color; for example, Latinas and black women hold only 1% and 3% of these jobs, respectively.

Supporting women in tech is important, and The Mac Observer‘s Kelly Guimont does something similar with her volunteer work at App Camp for Girls.

Daniel Dilger wrote an interesting article about AirPods and audio AR. While we didn’t see new AirPods at today’s event, they could be a key component of Apple’s AR ambitions.

The best AR implementations exist in various forms that remain captivating for long periods of time, works virtually anywhere and across an installed base of nearly a billion iOS devices, has immediacy practical applications in the enterprise, and which a broad swath of people will actually pay something to use.

I could’ve sworn I once read a quote from Tim Cook saying that he didn’t see AirPods as AR wearables per se, but I can’t find it. In any case though, I’ve been thinking along similar lines as Mr. Dilger. AirPods, Apple Watch, and the rumored Apple Glasses would all work together to form a more intimate mobile experience.

It seems that people don’t upgrade phones as often as they used to. More expensive phones, fewer carrier subsidies, and the death of two-year contracts may have led to this.

Carriers in recent years have offered less-generous promotions and separated the cost of a phone from a customer’s monthly service fees, leading to the demise of the two-year ritual of upgrading devices and service contracts simultaneously.

iPhones are now more expensive than ever. At the same time, Apple also has great support for older iPhones, so there’s not much incentive to upgrade every year anymore.

Amatas reports that an iOS 12.0.1 bug lets anyone obtain access to your photos by doing a special bypass at the lock screen.

People believe that this smartphone brand is extremely secure, but it is now emerging that all iPhone users are vulnerable to a distrustful partner, a curious colleague, an outrageous boss, because absolutely anyone can access your iPhone’s photo album, look through the photos and can send them to whom he wishes.

Poorly written article aside, this smartphone brand is extremely secure, but no system can be 100% secure. iOS 12.1 is reported to launch tomorrow, and it’s possible it will include a bug fix for this.

Rich people are banning screens in classrooms, in a surprising turn in the digital divide debate.

It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide…But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.

At one point when I was growing up, my dad got rid of the television because us kids were glued to it. I didn’t like it then, but looking back I think it was a good decision. And I’ve already written about how kids are being raised by YouTube.

In a new decision, the Librarian of Congress and U.S. Copyright Office proposed new rules that make it legal to hack DRM to fix your electronic devices.

The move is a landmark win for the “right to repair” movement; essentially, the federal government has ruled that consumers and repair professionals have the right to legally hack the firmware of “lawfully acquired” devices for the “maintenance” and “repair” of that device. Previously, it was legal to hack tractor firmware for the purposes of repair; it is now legal to hack many consumer electronics.

This is a great decision, and although Apple opposes the right to repair, it’s a pro-consumer choice.

When Google’s AlphaGo system beat Chinese players at the game twice, this set off a sort of AI cold war between China and the United States.

On October 18, 2017, China’s president, Xi Jinping, stood in front of 2,300 of his fellow party members, flanked by enormous red drapes and a giant gold hammer and sickle. As Xi laid out his plans for the party’s future over nearly three and a half hours, he named artificial intelligence, big data, and the internet as core technologies that would help transform China into an advanced industrial economy in the coming decades. It was the first time many of these technologies had explicitly come up in a president’s speech at the Communist Party Congress, a once-in-five-years event.

Sean Captain writes about a report that shows how the government is increasingly outsourcing surveillance to Silicon Valley companies.

While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel’s Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens.

“There is a transfer of discretion and power from the public sector to the private sector in the form of these contracted technological services,” says Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU in Washington State, which was not involved in the report.

The future sounds more dystopian every day.

U.S. intelligence agencies discovered that Russia and China are spying on conversations President Trump has on his insecure iPhone.

Mr. Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

Inflamed by Russian bots, an issue during the 2016 election was Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, because there was a possibility it could be compromised. Now we find that Trump’s iPhone has confirmed to be compromised.

Google will start showing privacy controls on its search page, instead of forcing users to navigate their My Activity page.

Google calls the new feature Your Data, and has experimented with offering information about data privacy in different formats like video, illustrations, and text. The idea, Miraglia says, is to help as many users as possible understand what data a service collects, why, and what controls are available.

I think it’s a good move by Google, but like Douglas Schmidt said in the article: “It never hurts for people to be reminded that their online activities are being monitored, but I’m not sure it would make anybody feel better about what’s being done with it.”

Researchers have had a fiber optic breakthrough, and it could significantly speed up existing networks and boost efficiency. The secret is twisted light.

Fibre optic cables use pulses of light to transmit information, but currently information can only be stored through the colour of the light, and whether the wave is horizontal or vertical.

By twisting light into a spiral, engineers effectively create a third dimension for light to carry information: the level of orbital angular momentum, or spin. “It’s like DNA, if you look at the double helix spiral,” said Min Gu from RMIT University. “The more you can use angular momentum the more information you can carry.”

I wonder how much current ISPs would throttle this 100X faster internet?