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Apple VR Headset Could have Motorized Headband

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple’s much speculated upon VR headset looks evermore likely thanks to a couple of recent patents. Whatismore, it could come with a motorized headband. Cult of Mac noticed that Apple has applied for a patent for a motorized adjustment system. It also filed a patent for a “Thermal Regulation for Head-Mounted Display.”

The description is written in the stilted language of such things. It says, in part, “the adjustment mechanism includes a variable volume structure that changes fit of the headband relative to the head of the user by volumetric expansion or volumetric contraction.” It gets a bit more eyebrow-raising when the filing mentions “an electric motor that changes fit of the headband relative to a head of the user by constricting or expanding a length of the headband.”

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Iranian Hackers Target Hundreds of Firms Including Microsoft

Charlotte Henry ·

Iranian hackers attacked hundreds of global firms over the last two years. Those targeted included Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft traced the attack against it to a group called Holmium. It had been tracking the group for 4 years. At the time of this writing, it had not been reported that Apple was a target.

The campaign, the scope of which hadn’t previously been reported, stole corporate secrets and wiped data from computers. It caused damages estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity and affected oil-and-gas companies, heavy-machinery manufacturers and international conglomerates in more than a half-dozen countries including Saudi Arabia, Germany, the U.K., India and the U.S., according to researchers at Microsoft, which deployed incident-response teams to some of the affected companies.

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Ira Flatow Says Apple Watch 'Saved' his Brother

Charlotte Henry ·

Science Friday host Ira Flatow revealed Thursday that the Apple Watch had “saved” his brother. The device alerted Mr. Flatow’s sibling that he had a very high resting heartbeat. It told him to go to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed tachycardia, AppleInsider reported.

Posting to Twitter, host of radio show Science Friday Ira Flatow revealed his brother was “saved by his Apple Watch,” alerting him to a higher than normal heartbeat. According to the personality, the heart beat was in excess of 200 beats per minute, prompting the sibling to take a trip to the hospital. Doctors issued a diagnosis of tachycardia, a condition when the heart rate exceeds the normal resting rate, which for most adults would be a resting heart rate of over 100 beats per minute.

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U.S. Government Tracks Journalists in Database

Andrew Orr ·

A startling investigation by NBC 7 journalists reveals how the U.S. government tracks journalists through use of a database.

Documents obtained by NBC 7 Investigates show the U.S. government created a secret database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers tied to the migrant caravan and in some cases, placed alerts on their passports.

In fact, their own government had listed their names in a secret database of targets, where agents collected information on them. Some had alerts placed on their passports, keeping at least two photojournalists and an attorney from entering Mexico to work.

This is why private services like end-to-end encrypted messaging apps are so important. It’s bad enough if a foreign government is surveilling you. We don’t need our own government to do the same.

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No, Apple Doesn't Keep a Location List to Track You

Andrew Orr ·

Paige Leskin’s article about location tracking is a bit misleading. She mentions that Apple keeps a detailed location list of every place you’ve visited. Which is false, because Apple doesn’t know anything about your location. Your iPhone does though, but that data doesn’t get sent to Apple unless you specifically opt in to send analytics to Apple. This is more than semantics, because your data staying on your iPhone is the foundation of Apple’s privacy stance. If you go to Settings > General > Privacy > Location Services, you can tap on the blue text at the top that says “About Location Services & Privacy.” This section clearly states “This data is encrypted and stored only on your device and will not be shared without your consent.” And if you did consent to share it with Apple, you’re probably not worried.

Apple tracks and stores where you’ve been and how often (and when) you visit. But it gets even more detailed than that: Your iPhone compiles locations specific to a single address and tracks when you leave there and even how long it took to get there and by which mode of transportation.

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That Ominous Figure in the Corner of Your Digital Living Room is Mark Zuckerberg

Andrew Orr ·

Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be your “digital living room” where you can privately share your thoughts, messages, and photos of your kids that the company will use for advertising purposes. Which was a topic left out of his essay on his new “privacy-focused vision.”

I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform — because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing. But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.

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Guy Kawasaki: 'Customers can't tell you how to create a revolution'

John Martellaro ·

Over at Forbes, Alejandro Cremades provides an updated thumbnail of Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple star evangelist. Included are three counter-intuitive principles Kawasaki learned from Steve Jobs, Guy’s list of the only three true visionaries in the history of American business, and info on Guy’s new book: Wise Guy. Want to get in touch with Kawasaki? That’s also included.

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National Security Agency Releases Ghidra

Andrew Orr ·

The NSA has released its tool called Ghidra at the RSA Security Conference. It’s an open-source tool that helps security researchers examine malware code.

You can’t use Ghidra to hack devices; it’s instead a reverse engineering platform used to take “compiled,” deployed software and “decompile” it. In other words, it transforms the ones and zeros that computers understand back into a human-readable structure, logic, and set of commands that reveals what the software you churn through it does.

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Examining Apple's Recycling Ambitions

Andrew Orr ·

Maddie Stone wrote a great dive into Apple’s recycling ambitions and the company’s quest to some day stop mining resources.

For a company that sells over 200 million smartphones a year, along with millions more tablets and computers, achieving what sustainability wonks call a “circular economy” will amount to a complete overhaul of everything from how Apple devices are manufactured to what we do with those devices at the end of their lives…The question is whether that’s a future Apple truly wants—or one that its investors will allow.

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Prey Finds You're More Likely to Lose Your iDevice Than Have it Stolen

Charlotte Henry ·

New data from Prey, an app that helps secure and retrieve lost iPhones, iPads and Macs, showed that your device is much more likely to be misplaced than stolen. 9to5Mac picked up on some of the bizarre lost device scenarios. One user drunkenly put their phone in the fridge following a night out, while another took their corporate laptop having faked their own death!

When it came to analysing the main reasons for putting a device into missing mode, Prey found that theft was relatively low down the list. Misplaced: 69.12%, Pickpocket: 10.98%, Home invasion: 7.6%, Robbery: 6.76%, Car Break-in: 2.77%, Business Break-in: 2.77%. And among the two-thirds of devices that were merely misplaced by their owner, the most common scenario was accidentally leaving it at home.

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Inside the Lives, and Servers, of Digital Hoarders

Charlotte Henry ·

Despite the best efforts of Marie Kondo, many of us still hoard physical items. Perhaps not surprisingly, digital hoarding is getting ever more widespread too. Gizmodo looked into the lives of digital hoarders, who collect huge amounts of data, including rare files, audio recordings, and video games, and build their own data servers to do so.

Online, you’ll find people who use hashtags like “#digitalhoarder” and hang out in the 120,000-subscriber Reddit forum called /r/datahoarder, where they trade tips on building home data servers, share collections of rare files from video game manuals to ambient audio records, and discuss the best cloud services for backing up files…Many self-proclaimed digital hoarders say they enjoy their collections, can keep them contained in a relatively small amount of physical space, and often take pleasure in sharing them with other hobbyists or anyone who wants access to the same public data.

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Apple Security Tool Unveiled at RSA Conference 2019

Andrew Orr ·

The RSA Conference is a series of computer security conferences. This year, security researcher Patrick Wardle announced a new tool for Macs called GamePlan.

…GamePlan, a tool that watches for potentially suspicious events on Macs and flags them for humans to investigate. The general concept sounds similar to other defense platforms, and it hooks into detection mechanisms—has a USB stick been inserted into a machine? has someone generated a screen capture? is a program accessing a webcam?—Apple already offers in macOS. But GamePlan, cleverly written with Apple’s GameplayKit framework, collects all of this data in a centralized stream and uses the videogame logic engine to process it.

I use a couple of Mr. Wardle’s security tools. I look forward to downloading GamePlan.

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Laurene Powell Jobs on the Future of Media and Democracy

Charlotte Henry ·

Laurene Powell Jobs is amongst a number of wealthy Americans increasingly investing in media. For example, in November 2018 her Emerson Collective purchased the company behind the Sunday Magazine and Pop-Up Magazine. She also bought a major stake in the Atlantic in 2017. The widow of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs discussed her vision of the future of media with Re/Code‘s Kara Swisher.

Our issue areas are those that we think are the most calcified and the most important that reflect the American values and that are important to democracy. So we work in education, we work in immigration, we work in environment. And outside of that, it started to become really obvious to us that the cultural narrative, that the kind of in-depth journalism that exposes the injustices in these fields was under attack from both a business model point of view …

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Female British Siri Voice Given an Upgrade

Charlotte Henry ·

LONDON – Apple customers in the UK might be feeling that Siri is just that little bit more human. It is reported that the digital assistant’s British female voice has been given an upgrade. Cult of Mac noticed a number of users commenting on the improvement to the voice on iPhone, iPad, and HomePod. The male voice was improved earlier in 2019.

Apple launched a mission to make Siri sound less robotic in 2017. The release of iOS 11 that fall brought big improvements to Siri’s voice in a number of markets, and the improvements have slowly but surely continued since then. Apple is thought to be using machine learning techniques to make its assistant sound more natural. It hasn’t changed the voice artists behind Siri — at least not for the British accents — but they now sound more human.

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How to Determine Which Version of iPad (or iPhone) You Have

John Martellaro ·

Apple doesn’t make it easy, for some crazy reason, to go into iOS Settings and look up the version and generation of an iPad or iPhone. For example, is that an iPad mini 3 or mini 4 on your desk? Apple’s update cycles can be so long, we sometimes forget!  iPhone Life writes:

“The first piece of information you’ll need to help discover which iPad version you own is to find your iPad’s model number. Once you’ve found the model number on your iPad, you can learn which type and generation of iPad you own…” [by going to the handy tables provided.]

The tables in this article are very handy, worthy of a bookmark.

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Swift Playgrounds 3.0 Beta 1 is Out

Andrew Orr ·

If you use Apple’s TestFlight app and signed up to beta test Swift Playgrounds app, you’ll be pleased to know that Swift Playground 3.0 beta 1 is out.

The full extent of what’s new in Swift Playgrounds 3.0 isn’t clear as of yet, but Apple’s release notes for the beta update provide a bit of detail. The new version of the app allows Playground Books to contain directories of Swift code and resources that can be imported for use by any page in the book.

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Apple Sold 10.4M Apple Watches in 4Q18

Andrew Orr ·

Apple sold 10.4 million Apple Watches in quarter 4 of 2018 (4Q18). The Series 4 remains a strong seller and should remain the market leader as more healthcare organizations utilize the device.

The worldwide market for wearable devices grew 31.4% during the fourth quarter of 2018 (4Q18), reaching a new high of 59.3 million units according to data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker.

Apple has the number one spot in a list of five companies. Other companies include Xiaomi #2, Huawei #3, Fitbit #4, and Samsung #5.

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Tim Cook Made Sure Apple Won in the US-China Trade War

Charlotte Henry ·

A new in-depth report on Politico revealed the full extent of Apple’s involvement in the U.S.-China trade dispute, And how it was it was successful. A key factor was that CEO Tim Cook remained one of the few tech-leaders who engaged directly with President Donald Trump after comment’s from the President’s caused others to stop doing so. Mr. Cook was also aided by having strong business connections in China.

In the U.S., Cook has made a point of directly engaging with Trump, even as the president’s immigration policies and remarks about minorities have scared off other executives from liberal-leaning Silicon Valley. And in China, Cook — who knows some Mandarin — has actively cultivated government and business leaders during his frequent visits to a country where Apple’s supply chain supports an estimated 3 million jobs. “Among the tech titans, he’s probably the one who is best placed to deal with both sides at the same time,” said James Lewis, a former State and Commerce department official who dealt with China trade issues and now directs the technology policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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NSA Spying Program Has Allegedly Ended

Andrew Orr ·

The NSA spying program that analyzed the calls and texts of American citizens has allegedly been shut down.

Christopher Augustine, an N.S.A. spokesman, told The New York Times in January that agency officials were “carefully evaluating all aspects” of the Freedom Act program, and were discussing its future. Mr. Augustine made clear that the White House would make the final call about whether to ask Congress to extend the Freedom Act.

I hope this is actually true. Now we need the GCHQ to not spy on us either.

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Lots of Arguments Against Cord Cutting Are Stupid

Charlotte Henry ·

Despite cord cutting getting ever more popular, lots of people continue to put up lots of arguments against it. The thing is, most of them just do not make sense. Fast Company helpfully compiled a list of 6 of the dumbest arguments against cord cutting. Something to deploy, perhaps, when friends and family tell you to renew the cable subscription.

By dropping cable or satellite TV for cheaper streaming services–or perhaps an over-the-air antenna–you can easily save hundreds of dollars every year. Yet we’re constantly being told by a parade of contrarian pundits that this is actually a bad idea–that the savings are illusory or that some future consequence will doom cord-cutting in the end. Most of these arguments collapse under scrutiny, which might explain why people are ignoring the naysayers and abandoning cable and satellite TV in record numbers.

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Apple Acquires Patents From Failed AI Powered Home Security Startup

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple acquired patent’s from Lighthouse AI in late 2018, it has emerged. Apple purchased 8 patents from the smart home security startup. They related to, amongst other things, computer-vision based security, visual authentication, and incident sharing. Lighthouse AI  closed down in December 2018. The purchases are another indication of the renewed seriousness with which Apple is approaching AI. 9to5Mac wondered if we could see the technology associated with the patents used to improve Face ID.

The patents in question (via Patently Apple) relate to technology used for computer-vision based security, visual authentication, and more. In total, Apple acquired eight patents and patent applications from Lighthouse. Lighthouse AI officially shut down in December of last year after it failed to achieve commercial success. Lighthouse focused on using augmented reality and 3D sensing to make it easier for users to understand and sort through security footage.

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Foldable Smartphone Displays are Plastic, but Glass is Coming Next

John Martellaro ·

Wired writes:

Foldable phones like Samsung’s Galaxy Fold and Huawei’s Mate X are coming, whether you’re ready or not. In fact, they’re coming whether they’re ready or not. The software remains untested or nonexistent. The prices are either astronomical or unannounced. But those potential issues can be fixed on the fly. The real thing you should hold out for? Glass.

Wired explores the technical prospects for real, foldable glass. It’s coming.

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Hospital Program for Pregnant Women Compatible With HealthKit

Andrew Orr ·

At a hospital in New Orleans a program for pregnant women called Connected Maternity Online Monitoring (MOM) was set up like a Genius Bar and is compatible with HealthKit.

Hatamian was intrigued and agreed to sign up. After her first visit with an obstetrician, she went over to the Ochsner “O Bar,” a part of the hospital modeled on the Apple Genius Bar. But instead of iPhones, the technologies on display included connected weight scales, blood pressure monitors and activity trackers. The O Bar gave Hatamian a set of devices selected for expectant mothers, including a wireless weight scale and a blood pressure cuff, as well as dipsticks and cups to measure protein levels in urine.

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USB4 Will Bring Thunderbolt 3 Speeds

Andrew Orr ·

USB is suffering a clusterf*ck of names. Last week 3.2 was finalized, and today the media is talking about USB4. This one will bring Thunderbolt 3 speeds.

You probably won’t see USB4 hardware in the near future, however. The USB 3.2 specification was published in 2017 and is due to show up in products this year. USB4 is just a specification at the moment, and it hasn’t even been published. The publication date is scheduled for sometime in mid-2019, which means we won’t likely see USB4 hardware until 2020 or beyond.

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