Charlotte Henry

A new survey makes grim reading for tech giants. It found that users gave a number of firms, including Apple, low marks when asked whether they trust them.  Interestingly, Amazon came out on top, Cult of Mac reported. It looks like Tim Cook’s privacy message is not quite getting through yet.

All seven of the tech giants mentioned in a YouGov survey received jarringly negative results from an undisclosed number of respondents from the U.S. and United Kingdom. The survey, sponsored by Tresorit, which offers encrypted file sharing, shows Amazon as most trusted, but with just 28 percent. Microsoft was second with 24 percent, Apple was third with 22 percent, Facebook and Google each had 13 percent, while Dropbox and Instagram were at the bottom with single digits.

International bodies like the EU have made some effort to protect the open internet recently. However, it is also happening at a more local level too. The Mozilla Foundation told Fast Company about the important action being taken by cities.

“Cities are a place to shape what we want from the internet, which might be faster and more powerful than what national governments can do,” says Mark Surman, the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. He points to an example from 2015, when the New York City Department of Education was able to require Amazon to make its e-books accessible to blind people, even though the company had been ignoring the same request from the National Federation for the Blind for years. How? By making it a stipulation of the city’s $30 million contract to create an e-book store for teachers in 1,800 schools.

Tony Fadell, the co-creator of the iPhone, left Apple in 2010. Since then he has founded smart-home company Nest, and been on adventures around the world. He spoke to Bloomberg News about his current time in Asia, studying startups.

Fadell discovered his wanderlust as a young employee of Apple spinoff General Magic in the early 1990s, when business trips to Sony’s Tokyo headquarters took him outside North America for the first time. “I was like, ‘Whoa!” he recalls. A few years later, he spent 16 weeks backpacking across Latin America, then traveled the Middle East in similar fashion. “If you are a designer or entrepreneur, you have to see different ways of living,” he says. “It’s the sights, sounds and smells that inspire you.”

Amazon is set to launch a hi-fidelity music service to challenge TIDAL. It will cost $15 per month for this “better than CD quality” audio, Techcrunch reported.

The company’s investment in music not only allows for new revenue streams through advertising and subscriptions, it also provides a direct connection to Amazon’s smart speakers: its Echo line of devices. For consumers pinching pennies, the ad-supported service streaming over an Echo Dot may be good enough. But those who bought, say, a stereo pair of Echo Plus devices and an Echo Sub, may want a better-quality music subscription, too.

There is a new Avengers movie out. You might have heard about it.  CNET’s Abrar Al-Heeti attended a 59-hour Marvel movie marathon in preparation for Avengers: Endgame.

My 59-hour Marvel movie marathon is here. Yes, I’m watching 59 hours of Marvel movies, back to back (to back). For two and a half days, I’m essentially confined to a chair at an AMC theater in San Francisco as I attempt to watch all the movies from start to finish, beginning with Iron Man and wrapping up with Avengers: Endgame on Thursday (read our CNET review of Endgame here). I’ll sleep in a theater chair and eat way more popcorn than I probably should. It’s been nice knowing you, everyone.

Apple’s Service’s division would be $400 -$450 billion standalone company. That is according to a new note from analyst Dan Ives, reported on by Cult of Mac. That valuation is twice the size of Netflix, and a mere $100 billion less than Facebook.

Apple’s Services division includes everything from the App Store and iCloud to newer offerings like the Apple News+ magazine subscription service and upcoming additions like Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade. While Apple has been selling goods via the App Store and iTunes for years, the company recently pivoted to concentrate more heavily on Services as a growth metric.

Material depicting child abuse l is still being widely shared across WhatsApp. An investigation by The Next Web found the Facebook-owned messaging service had failed to tackle the problem, despite assurances it would do so.

Despite Facebook’s attempts to clamp down on inappropriate content, the two-week long investigation conducted in March found dozens of WhatsApp chat groups with hundreds of members that share child sexual abuse material. The groups were identified through a third-party WhatsApp public group discovery app that Google recently banned from Play Store, but can still be sideloaded using the installation files that are available online elsewhere. Nitish Chandan, a cybersecurity specialist who is also the project manager of CPF, found that members are being solicited using invite links, who are then called on to join a more private group using virtual numbers so as to evade detection.

Sir Jony Ive does not make a huge number of media appearances. When he does, they tend to be worth taking in. Design magazine Document has an in-depth interview with Sir. Jony and Dior top designer Kim Jones in its new edition. In it, he talked about design tools, the future, and the values that run through Apple.

To me, what the institution represents first and foremost is a set of values and a clear sense of why Apple exists, and what contribution we can make to culture—what contribution we can make to society. What I can bring to that is to practice what I do within those values and to extend them. I think it stems from my sense of curiosity. I’m absurdly, frantically inquisitive. Given that I’ve been at Apple for nearly 30 years now, I think I’m sort of steeped in those values. I think the values are powerful but they’re general, and it’s how you turn your curiosity and ideas into vision. I think that very simplistically describes my relationship with Apple.