Cool Stuff Found

'Foundation' Premieres on Apple TV+

Charlotte Henry ·

Sci-fi series Foundation premiered on Apple TV+ on Friday. The first two episodes are currently available to subscribers, with new ones released weekly. It is all based on the novels by Isaac Asimov, and there could be 70 or even 80 episodes made in total.

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iPhone 13 Review Shows Impressive Battery Results

Andrew Orr ·

We saw Apple executives on stage mention one or or one-and-a-half extra hours of battery with iPhone 13 models. This review proves it.

Apple was careful not to promise any specific battery life on the new iPhones. I think that’s because of 5G. Depending on 5G frequency and signal quality, the battery life you get can be much shorter than you see here—and the 5G situation is so confusing across different carriers and countries that I don’t think Apple was willing to make a generalization. Of course, you can always turn off 5G.

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iPhone 13: How Cinematic Mode Was Made

Charlotte Henry ·

Cinematic mode was one of the big new features in the iPhone 13. In a new interview with Techcrunch, Apple VP Kaiann Drance and Human Interface Team designer Johnnie Manzari explain how it was made.

“We knew that bringing a high quality depth of field to video would be magnitudes more challenging [than Portrait Mode],” says Drance. “Unlike photos, video is designed to move as the person filming, including hand shake. And that meant we would need even higher quality depth data so Cinematic Mode could work across subjects, people, pets, and objects, and we needed that depth data continuously to keep up with every frame. Rendering these autofocus changes in real time is a heavy computational workload.” The A15 Bionic and Neural Engine are heavily used in Cinematic Mode, especially given that they wanted to encode it in Dolby Vision HDR as well. They also didn’t want to sacrifice live preview — something that most Portrait Mode competitors took years to ship after Apple introduced it.

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Inside Story: How the Mafia is Getting Involved in Cybercrime

Andrew Orr ·

On Monday, police in Europe announced the arrests of over 100 people connected to the Mafia. They were using hackers to support efforts in traditional crime.

The authorities said that the organized crime groups employed hackers who were using phishing, social engineering attacks, and SIM swapping, as well as sending malware to victims with the goal of taking over their bank accounts and stealing their money.

This operation highlights a new trend: traditional organized crime groups, such as the Italian Mafia and Camorra, are now dabbling in cybercrime to support their traditional offline activities, according to Italian and Spanish police investigators involved in the crackdown who spoke with Motherboard.

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AirPods Market Share Dropped From 41 Percent to 29 Percent

Andrew Orr ·

Mashable‘s Alex Perry writes how AirPods revolutionized the wireless earbud space but is currently falling behind.

AirPods market share dropped from 41 percent at the end of 2019 to 29 percent at the end of 2020, according to research firm Counterpoint. That’s still a substantial lead over everyone else, but it does point to what happened in the more than two years since the last AirPods update: Other companies made cheaper and better entry-level wireless earbuds, and consumers took notice.

Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash

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'ShadowDragon' Helps Michigan State Police Surveil its Citizens

Andrew Orr ·

An investigation on Thursday shows how Michigan State Police use software called ShadowDragon to collect online data. This helps them identify “persons of interest.”

By providing powerful searches of more than 120 different online platforms and a decade’s worth of archives, the company claims to speed up profiling work from months to minutes. ShadowDragon even claims its software can automatically adjust its monitoring and help predict violence and unrest. Michigan police acquired the software through a contract with another obscure online policing company named Kaseware for an “MSP Enterprise Criminal Intelligence System.”