Fortnite Breaks Twitch Records With Black Hole Event

Fortnite caused quite a stir when it pulled a stunt showing the wildly popular game disappearing into a black hole. In fact, it broke streaming site Twitch’s viewing record, VentureBeat reported.

Twitch revealed that Fortnite broke the site’s peak concurrent record on a single game on October 13. That was when all of Fortnite, including even the start menu, got sucked into a black hole. The curious and surprising event drew a max of 1.7 million concurrent viewers… No one knew exactly what was going on with the black hole, and that intrigue helped attract viewers. Rumor also suggested that once Fortnite came back, it would launch with a new map. That’s what happened when Season 2 came online.

IBM Gets Sniffy at Google's Quantum Supremacy Claim

It is fair to say IBM was not impressed with Google’s declaration of Quantum Supremacy. In post full of withering put-downs, the computer giant refuted many of the claims made in a paper published in Nature, and welcomed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Recent advances in quantum computing have resulted in two 53-qubit processors: one from our group in IBM and a device described by Google in a paper published in the journal Nature. In the paper, it is argued that their device reached “quantum supremacy” and that “a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task.” We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced. Because the original meaning of the term “quantum supremacy,” as proposed by John Preskill in 2012, was to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, this threshold has not been met.

Apple Patents Discuss Digital Government ID

Two new Apple patents discuss methods for replacing paper documents with a digital government ID, and how they could be verified.

US Patent applications numbered 20190325125 and 20190327228, both titled “Identity Credential Verification Techniques,” follow previous reports of Apple hoping to make iPhones central to ID security.

The two new patent applications separate out the functions of such systems into the creation or collection of a user’s identity details, the later authentication of that ID, and then the user’s ability to provide this detail on request.

I’m normally all about privacy but personally I look forward to the day when such documents are digital.

AT&T Customers Hit By Weeks of Voicemail Problems

AT&T Customers have been having voicemail issues for weeks. The Verge tried valiantly to get to the bottom of what is going on, but the situation is not getting much clearer.

AT&T has been experiencing a weeks-long voicemail outage affecting some customers across the country. But it’s hard to tell exactly what’s causing the outage, or how long until it will be fixed — and AT&T is saying conflicting things about what’s going on. Here’s what the company told us, when we asked “A recent software update to some devices may be affecting our customers’ voicemail. We are working with the device manufacturer to issue a patch to resolve this and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.” That statement seems to suggest that only a single phonemaker is affected, and that phonemaker might share the blame for the outage — but that wouldn’t make sense, because AT&T customers are reporting a wide array of different phones are having the same issue.

Travel Platform Autoclerk Just Leaked 179GB of Military Data

Hosted on AWS servers, Autoclerk leaked 179GB of military data containing sensitive personal data of users and hotel guests.

The most surprising victim of this leak wasn’t an individual or company: it was the US government, military, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Our team viewed highly sensitive data exposing the personal details of government and military personnel, and their travel arrangements to locations around the world, both past and future. This represented a massive breach of security for the governmentagencies and departments impacted.

LumaFusion 2.1.0 Adds External Drive Support

Big news for video editors: LumaFusion 2.1.0 adds support for external drives on iOS 13. You’ll be able to browse for files directly within the app.

iOS 13 External drive support fully integrated in the Library. Select the new Files source in the Library, then tap “Add Link To Folder” to connect to any external drive or other app’s shared folder. Browse, preview trim, and add media to your projects. Press-and-hold on a linked folder to remove it at any time.

App Store: US$29.99

Mophie Launches iPhone 11 Battery Case

mophie launched an iPhone 11 battery case. The juice pack access case keeps your Lightning port free and your iPhone powered past sunset.

The juice pack access for the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro comes equipped with a 2,000mAh integrated battery, while the juice pack access for the iPhone 11 Pro Max includes a 2,200mAh integrated battery. Each case employs Qi wireless charging technology to pass power to the iPhone while leaving the Lightning port available for simultaneous EarPods use during charging.

You can pick one up for US$99.95.

School Surveillance: How Millions of Kids are Spied On

When we hear the word “surveillance” we usually think about the NSA, or perhaps tech companies like Facebook and Google. What we probably don’t think about is school surveillance used to spy on kids.

The new school surveillance technology doesn’t turn off when the school day is over: anything students type in official school email accounts, chats or documents is monitored 24 hours a day, whether students are in their classrooms or their bedrooms.

Tech companies are also working with schools to monitor students’ web searches and internet usage, and, in some cases, to track what they are writing on public social media accounts.

Google Celebrates Quantum Computing Milestone

On Thursday, Nature’s 150th-anniversary edition featured news of a quantum computing breakthrough from Google.  The company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, explained in a blog why he felt it as so significant.

For those of us working in science and technology, it’s the “hello world” moment we’ve been waiting for—the most meaningful milestone to date in the quest to make quantum computing a reality. But we have a long way to go between today’s lab experiments and tomorrow’s practical applications; it will be many years before we can implement a broader set of real-world applications. We can think about today’s news in the context of building the first rocket that successfully left Earth’s gravity to touch the edge of space. At the time, some asked: Why go into space without getting anywhere useful? But it was a big first for science because it allowed humans to envision a totally different realm of travel … to the moon, to Mars, to galaxies beyond our own. It showed us what was possible and nudged the seemingly impossible into frame.  That’s what this milestone represents for the world of quantum computing: a moment of possibility.