Charlotte Henry

Lots of shows have done special ‘at home’ or quarantine episodes. Some have even found a way to carry on in our new work from home conditions. Lots of it has been watchable, but Fast Company’s  Steve Berkowitz thinks that with its latest episode of Mythic Quest, Apple TV+ has the first great piece of quarantine TV.

The most remarkable thing about the episode is that it mostly feels like any other installment of the show. Cocreator and star Rob McElhenney spent a whole season with his creative team (Charlie Day, Megan Ganz, and David Hornsby) sketching out various dynamics—between the titular game’s creator, Ian (McElhenney), and its lead developer, Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao); between the put-upon cofounder, David (Hornsby), and the shameless CFO, Brad (Danny Pudi); and between lovestruck Rachel (Ashly Burch) and her fellow game tester, Dana (Imani Hakim)—not to mention a deep bench of side characters. The new episode nimbly toggles between all those plotlines in mini-vignettes that are so organic, the Zoom format feels almost incidental at times. (Except for a running bit about making spatial illusions in Zoom that culminates in a grand payoff.)

More information about Samsung Money, the South Korean firm’s attempt to rival Apple Card, was announced on Wednesday. The new debit card will link with the existing Samsung Pay app. The Verge has the details.

Originally announced earlier in May, today’s news offers more concrete information on what Samsung Money will actually offer — specifically, a cash management account and a Samsung Money debit card (a Mastercard issued by The Bancorp Bank). Samsung is promising that Samsung Money will feature no account fees (although the fine print reserves the right to change that in the future) and “higher interest” compared to the national average (although Samsung doesn’t go into specifics). A key part of the Samsung Money program is the Samsung Pay app integration: customers will be able to easily apply for the card directly from the app and start using it through Samsung Pay on their phones once approved, before the physical card even arrives. Furthermore, you’ll be able to use the Samsung Pay app to check your balance, review past purchases, freeze your card, and flag fraudulent purchases.

Latvia is to release a COVID-19 Contact Tracing app based on the framework recently released by Apple and Google, Reuters reported. It will become one of the first nations to do so.

Early success of tracing apps in countries like Singapore and Australia has been patchy because Apple’s iPhone does not support their approach to using Bluetooth short-range radio as a proxy for measuring the risk of infection. Latvia’s Apturi Covid (Stop Covid) app is, by contrast, based on technology launched last week by Apple and Google, whose iOS and Android operating systems run 99% of the world’s smartphones. “The developers believe that reliance on this standard will ensure widespread adoption and also compatibility over time with contact tracing apps around the world that are also expected to adopt the same exposure notification framework,” the app’s developers said in a statement.

Google Chrome recently announced a variety of new privacy features will be added when the latest version is released. These include real-time threat checking and password checking. Wired has a good rundown of what users of the popular browser can expect in the near future.

Chrome’s new Enhanced Safe Browsing mode will attempt to play catchup. If you turn the feature on the address of websites you’re visiting will be shared with Google in real-time and the company will compare it to its blocklist of unsafe sites. This builds on its existing Safe Browsing mode. “Chrome checks the URL of each site you visit or file you download against a local list, which is updated approximately every 30 minutes,” Google explains in a blog post about the new setting. “Increasingly, some sophisticated phishing sites slip through that 30-minute refresh window by switching domains very quickly.”

Just when you thought it was safe to start typing again…. the Butterfly Keyboard could be on its way back. That’s according to one Apple leaker, whose claims Cult of Mac reported on.

Despite it vanishing from Apple’s MacBook line, Apple hasn’t given up on its controversial (read: hated) butterfly keyboard design, claims Apple leaker L0vetodream. In a Friday tweet, L0vetodream said that Apple is “trying to improve on the structure, and solve the [issues]” faced by users. Should it manage to do so, “we might see it comes back again in future”… L0vetodream’s tweet suggests that, fundamentally, Apple still thinks the idea is a solid one. The company never came out and said that the butterfly keyboard had been a disaster; it only moved forward with new models without it. This is, of course, only a rumor. L0vetodream does not cite their sources when it comes to this rumor. But they have reported a number of previous Apple rumors — and had some of their messages supported by Apple leaker-of-the-moment Jon Prosser.

Spotify became the latest company to tell employees they can work from home until 2021, Music Business Worldwide reported. It joins other major tech firms in taking such a decision.

MBW understands that a memo went out earlier today (May 21) explaining that SPOT is following local guidelines on the re-opening of its offices during the current pandemic, and will be taking a “phased approach” on the matter. As part of this strategy, the company has informed its employees that they can individually decide with “full discretion” whether or not to return to company workspaces before next year. According to its latest annual fiscal report, Spotify employed 4,405 people on a full-time basis worldwide in 2019, with 2,121 in the United States and 1,437 in Sweden.

Apple regularly pushes its stance on privacy, working to turn it into a competitive advantage. In the latest in a series of pieces on the company, Wired looks at how its approach to privacy both helps and hinders the company.

Apple is able to do this because its business doesn’t rely on advertising. “Apple doesn’t have that need to have access to data,” independent security researcher Robin Wood says. Google, on the other hand, is one of the world’s biggest advertising companies and can sell ads for greater sums if it knows more about users and their interests. “Because Apple doesn’t have to have the data, they can put the effort into not having it,” Wood says. One such example is found in Apple Maps. Apple says it doesn’t collect detailed journey information: when you travel from home to work, for example, it breaks up the journey into small chunks. This way, it doesn’t hold a complete record of your route (from which it would be easy to identify you). It has also introduced a new technique it calls “fuzzing”: when you search for a destination on your phone, Apple will change the location information it stores to be less precise 24 hours later, meaning it can’t be used to identify where you have been.