The City of Roseville employee’s retirement fund is suing Apple over alleged securities fraud. Tim Cook and Luca Maestri are listed as defendants.
Specifically, the lawsuit claims that Apple was not initially forthcoming about a drop in demand for the iPhone due to poor sales in China and the 2018 battery replacement program, both of which contributed to lower than expected iPhone sales in the first fiscal quarter of 2019.
Free Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA) S/MIME certificates, which is a standard used to encrypt emails, are now limited to one month instead of twelve.
On renewing this month, have found that the new issued Certificate only has a 1 month duration instead of 12 months, and if you want 12 months, you now need to pay. (US$48 per year, multi-year discounts available). Note: Sectigo’s Sales Team all ensure me that they still offer 12 months free, despite evidence otherwise.
If you use one of these certificates for email encryption on macOS and iOS, be warned you may have to look for another solution, like OpenPGP.
In the latest news of anticompetitive corporate behavior, a former Mozilla executive said Google sabotaged Firefox for years.
“When Chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you might expect. They had a competing product now, but they didn’t cut ties, break our search deal – nothing like that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, ‘We’re on the same side. We want the same things’,” the former Mozilla exec said.
I encourage everyone to read the Twitter thread.
Apple TV+ is on its way, but should the company actually be buying Roku? Tim Beyers on Motley Fool thinks it should. He said it should remake its streaming service as the Roku Channel. It’s certainly an idea…
Now imagine Apple acquiring Roku and making Apple TV+ with its original content a featured channel and selling access as part of the hardware bundle. (“Buy an Apple Roku player and get both Apple TV+ and the Roku Channel, free,” they might say.) Netflix, which has long been available through Roku, could remain on the platform without streaming its data through Apple servers. Everyone wins. Even better, Apple would be putting its service out in the wild — i.e., unbundling the service from the device — just as Roku is getting traction for being the most widely used TV operating system.
Diversity, or lack thereof, is a big issue in the tech industry. The problem has particularly serious ramifications in AI. The Verge looked at a new report on the topic, and what the industry can do about it.
Diversity, while a hurdle across the tech industry, presents specific dangers in AI, where potentially biased technology, like facial recognition, can disproportionately affect historically marginalized groups. Tools like a program that scans faces to determine sexuality, introduced in 2017, echo injustices of the past, the researchers write. Rigorous testing is needed. But more than that, the makers of AI tools have to be willing to not build the riskiest projects. “We need to know that these systems are safe as well as fair,” AI Now Institute co-director Kate Crawford says.
Leander Kahney’s biography of Tim Cook hit stores Tuesday. In a piece for Wired, the author explained why he believes Mr. Cook is a better CEO of Apple than Steve Jobs. The proof, he said, is in the numbers.
Apple is the world’s first trillion-dollar company, a milestone reached under Cook’s watch. Apple reached this landmark valuation on August 2, 2018, when Apple’s stock hit $207.05. By comparison, when Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011, Apple’s stock was $50.53 (split adjusted), which valued the company at about two-thirds less: $300 billion. During his tenure, Cook has almost tripled Apple’s revenue. In 2018 Apple earned $265.6 billion, the highest annual revenue in the company’s history.
FastCompany writes:
Facebook has just been awarded a patent for technology that could let the social network scan through your photos, see what products you like, and then send that data to advertisers in the hopes of selling you more of the product.
So every photo a user posts to Facebook may, someday, be used to manipulate that user. But it’s just a patent award, right?
LONDON – Apple could be on its way to one of the most prestigious parts of London. The London Evening Standard reported that a new Apple Store will open in the Knightsbridge area, which is best known for Harrods. If it comes to fruition, the new location will be the firm’s 6th retail outlet in the UK’s capital.
Property sources said the iPhones maker has agreed to open a 20,000 square feet Knightsbridge store between high-end department stores Harrods and Harvey Nichols. It is understood to have signed a deal with Chelsfield, the property asset manager overseeing the makeover of The Knightsbridge Estate on behalf of its owner, Saudi Arabia’s Olayan Group. Agents CWM and CBRE are retail letting agents on the building.
In May 2018, I reported for TMO on a popular new quiz app. HQ Trivia raked in users and soared up the App Store chart. Since then, tragedy has struck. CEO Colin Kroll was found dead, aged just 34. Techcrunch reported that current CEO, Mr. Kroll’s co-founder Rus Yusupov, is battling plummeting ratings and a staff mutiny.
By February 2019, HQ’s staff was fed up. Two sources confirm that 20 of the roughly 35 employees signed a letter asking the board to remove Yusupov and establish a new CEO. With HQ’s download rate continuing to sink, they feared he’d run the startup into the ground. One source suggested Yusupov might rather have seen the whole startup come crashing down with the blame placed on the product than have it come to light that he played a large hand in the fall. The tone of the letter, which was never formally delivered but sources believe the board knew of, wasn’t accusatory but a plea for transparency about the company’s future and the staff’s job security.
macOS 10.15 will have a new feature allowing users to send a window to an external display. That display could be an iPad, as well as a standard external display, reported 9to5Mac. The reported feature, nicknamed ‘Sidecar’, seems to be Apple’s version of Luna Display. The new version of macOS is expected to be unveiled at WWDC in June.
According to people familiar with the development of macOS 10.15 – the next major version of Apple’s desktop OS – the new system will have a feature that allows users to send any window of any app to an external display. The external display can be an actual external display connected to the Mac or even an iPad. The new feature – called “Sidecar” internally – can be accessed via a simple menu. This new menu will be opened by hovering over the green “maximize” button in a Mac app window for a split second.
Leaked Facebook documents that include emails, chats, presentations, spreadsheets, and meeting summaries show how Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s board and management team played dirty.
Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook’s trove of user data — including information about friends, relationships and photos — as leverage over companies it partnered with.
In some cases, Facebook would reward favored companies by giving them access to the data of its users. In other cases, it would deny user-data access to rival companies or apps.
Basically, everything Facebook has said in public, they are doing the exact opposite in private.
Tim Cook tweeted that Apple will be donating to the rebuilding efforts of Notre Dame after its horrific fire.
We are heartbroken for the French people and those around the world for whom Notre Dame is a symbol of hope. Relieved that everyone is safe. Apple will be donating to the rebuilding efforts to help restore Notre Dame’s precious heritage for future generations.
It’s great to see Apple donate, and I hope other companies do the same.
The Verge writes:
[It’s a] move that will now give Disney (which already had gained a controlling interest in Hulu through its Fox purchase) even more control going forward….
Disney gaining even more control over Hulu could also mean a radical shift in what Hulu even is.
Now, Disney owns 66 percent of Hulu. The remaining stakeholder is Comcast which, as a result, now owns 33 percent. Comcast owns NBCUniversal, and it might only be a matter of time before Comcast pulls its Hulu content back to its own streaming service. Soon, it appears, each and every studio will have its very own exclusive subscription service.
Digiday reached out to five publishers participating in Apple News+, and so far it sounds like there is a lot of confusion. Plus there’s the reality that the service seems to favor big publishers over smaller ones.
All participating publishers were given an email address where they were encouraged to send pitches, and sources said that by and large, Apple’s representatives were responsive to their outreach.
But a smaller, select group of publishers were invited to join a private Slack channel where they could connect with Apple more directly, a move that exasperated several sources when they were informed of the channel’s existence.
So far that’s the way Apple News has been, and this isn’t a News+ specific problem. Hopefully the service will improve over time.
Design agency AKQA gave data on 400 existing sports to a neural network, and one of the games it created is called Speedgate.
While the sport was created as an exercise for Design Week, it might just become a serious sport. AKQA is talking to the Oregon Sports Authority about Speedgate, and there might be an intramural league in the summer. The company is encouraging others to start their own leagues.
This sounds (and looks) like a cool game and I’d be interested to try it out. Additionally an informative guide to Speedgate can be found here.
Google has a database called Sensorvault. It contains location data of users and shares it with law enforcement—if they have a warrant, of course. Apple honors lawful requests as well. But Jennifer Valentino-DeVries wonders whether the database is too broad.
Google would not provide details on Sensorvault, but Aaron Edens, an intelligence analyst with the sheriff’s office in San Mateo County, Calif., who has examined data from hundreds of phones, said most Android devices and some iPhones he had seen had this data available from Google…
“It shows the whole pattern of life,” said Mark Bruley, the deputy police chief in Brooklyn Park, Minn., where investigators have been using the technique since this fall. “That’s the game changer for law enforcement.”
The EU Parliament voted to approve controversial copyright reforms Monday. The reforms included provisions known as ‘Article 13. That section makes firms responsible for copyright material on their platform. Article 11, which says aggregators must license content that is more than a “short extract”, was also approved. AppleInsider reported that the changes will be implemented within 2 years.
Known as Article 13, the most controversial element makes firms put more efforts into policing the content on their services, including properly licensing copyrighted material, or be held liable for illegally shared content. The rules not only apply to firms based in the European Union, as it also will impact practically every company that has an online presence accessible within the EU, including those on other continents. The full rules apply to larger firms, but smaller companies and startups have relatively fewer requirements.
Ian Mcewan does not like science fiction. However, for his latest work, he imagined a dystopian time in which humans live alongside AI-powered robots. He also brought the acclaimed computer scientist Alan Turing back to life and had him solve one of the major unsolved problems in the field. He told Wired why.
In Machines Like Me, he imagines that the mathematician and codebreaker didn’t die by suicide at age 41 but lived on to crack P versus NP, a major computer science problem that in reality remains unsolved. In the world of the novel, this opens a path toward artificial minds that can learn, think – and fall in love.
There is no federal law that requires stores to accept cash, which was something that surprised me. So some stores are going cashless, but some argue this discriminates against poor people who don’t have a bank account and/or a fancy smartphone.
Advocates for cashless bans worry technology is moving too fast for the 6.5% of American households — 8.4 million — that do not have a bank account, according to figures from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Cashless is hard enough, but imagine if you walked into a store only to find out that it only accepts Google Pay. That might bring the reality a bit closer to home.
A biography of Tim Cook will be released Tuesday. Author Leander Kahney spoke to AppleInsider and told them about the Apple CEO’s core values, his transition to being the main man, and the key differences between him and Steve Jobs. We’ll have a review of the book on TMO in the coming days.
Cook is more collaborative. Remember when they fired Forstall? They put out that press release, and it was kind of like, “We’re make some changes here at Apple, we’re making everything more collaborative. Jony Ive’s got more responsibilities.” They mentioned all this stuff and said, “Oh, by the way we fired Scott Forstall.” Looking back on that, I think it was kind of like Tim Cook’s sort of “Think Different” moment.
Stanley Milgram’s most famous experiment involved taking random people and telling them to electrocute someone who they thought got wrong answers on a quiz. Now there’s a virtual reality version, and the results prove insightful.
During the experiment, participants quizzed a virtual character. A correct answer meant they could move on, while an incorrect answer meant the human participant had to administer a virtual electrical jolt. The scientists noticed that participants sometimes tried to feed the virtual avatar the correct answer by pronouncing it louder — in hopes that they wouldn’t be told to shock them.
iPad keyboards don’t tend to have an escape key, but OSXDaily tells you how to type it.
Depending on what keyboard is in use with the iPad Pro, iPad, iPad mini, or iPad Air, you have several different options for typing the Escape key. Some of these keyboard shortcut options may work in some apps but not others, and some may work with some keyboards but not others, so try each option out on your own.
I can’t think of a reason why you would need to type the escape key on iOS, but here you go.
Newly published Apple patents revealed that Face ID could be coming to Macs. The documents, reported on by 9to5 Mac, also suggested the Touch Bar could be coming to the Magic Keyboard.
The patent application spotted today by Patently Apple is actually for Face ID using a retina scan rather than a 3D map of the face. This is a type of technology used in some high-end security systems. Apple notes in patent claim #86 that devices with the Touch Bar may also use a biometric sensor that is “a facial detection sensor.” In patent claim #87 Apple notes “wherein the biometric sensor is a retina scanner.” This may be a genuine interest on the part of Apple to switch to a new technology for Face ID, or it may simply be the company covering all the bases – as it usually does in patent applications.
In a fascinating interview with Bloomberg TV, Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger discussed the new Disney+ streaming service. In the course of the conversation, he revealed that the service will be available via Apple TV. He also confirmed he will be staying on Apple’s board. That is despite the fact the two firms are going to be competing directly against each other in streaming.
The new Disney+ app will “in all likelihood be available through traditional app distributors, Apple being one of them,” Disney chief Bob Iger said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang. While the studio behind “Star Wars” and Marvel movies said during an earlier presentation that consumers will be able to subscribe on Roku and PlayStation, it held back from naming others. Disney didn’t make announcements about other platforms because they “haven’t made deals with all of them yet,” Iger said. He also suggested that he isn’t planning to step down from the Apple board despite the companies going head-to-head in streaming
