Wired:

There are any number of reasons why monitoring your kid’s phone makes sense. These range from the relatively benign (they could be cheating on their homework) to the severe (they could be texting a drug dealer). Cyberbullying is a particular concern, and it’s a veritable epidemic; 42 percent of children say they’ve been bullied online, according to i-Safe, and 35 percent have been actively threatened. Of those kids, 58 percent never tell their parents.

Nevertheless, am I a bad person to be so suspicious of my pride and joy? Am I guilty of—shudder—invading my children’s privacy?

While this may be a (minor) ethical dilemma for many parents and a conversation I enjoy having with other parents to see where they draw the line, I maintain that up to a certain age, “Children have zero expectation of or right to privacy from their parents.” Or, as my mother would have put it if she had children today, “My house. My rules.”

I know this sounds like piracy, but it’s not about that. This is a walkthrough of some lesser known resources that you can mine, free, for a pretty wide range of content.

Before you follow the link, think about what the list of the most borrowed books of all time (well, since the New York Public Library opened in 1895) might look like.

Don’t forget kids books, a favorite at most libraries.

Enjoy.

The Unofficial Apple Archive:

My videos may be down but my spirit is up. Standby please.

Even as it was talked about all over the Mac web last week, I knew it was only a matter of time before it got taken down. You can’t publicly aggregate this much of Apple’s content and not have them notice. There is still lots of content there but all the videos seem to have been pulled. The Verge has more of the story.

CNET: I’ve heard it, you’ve heard it and anyone remotely familiar with electric cars has heard it: range and charging anxiety. It’s the fear of running out of charge while driving, or not finding a proper plug to juice up the car before hitting the road again.

Well, here’s a not-so-shocking revelation: Owning an electric car actually eases those anxieties. AAA released its latest EV study on Wednesday and it found car buyers shouldn’t dismiss battery-powered cars until they actually live with one. For those who invest in an electric vehicle, proper care for your EV batteries is crucial to protecting your investment.

After surveying 40,000 electric vehicle owners, plus another 1,000-plus plug-in hybrid owners, AAA concluded that owning an EV is the best prescription for the unknown factors surrounding them. In total, 71% of those surveyed were first-time EV buyers, and 96% of them said they would shop for another EV. Don’t knock the EV life until you try the EV life.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard similar feedback from the few Tesla and Leaf owners I know. They enjoy the convenience of charging at home and typically find their vehicles more than sufficient for daily commutes. The dealbreaker for me, however, is the mileage range; while it’s rare someone will blow through an entire 200-mile range in a single day, the peace of mind that comes with having a bit more flexibility matters. It’s somewhat like the used cars in Montclair, which offer reliable performance and a bit of extra range for longer trips. You’re not just paying for functionality; you’re getting that added assurance on the road.

At least on my motorcycle, I regularly and easily do that much in a day four days out a week. An electric car that can’t do 300-400 miles on a charge means I’ll never own an electric car.

Ars Technica:

Almost two years have passed since the appearance of Shlayer, a piece of Mac malware that gets installed by tricking targets into installing fake Adobe Flash updates. It usually does so after promising pirated videos, which are also fake. The lure may be trite and easy to spot, but Shlayer continues to be common—so much so that it’s the number one threat encountered by users of Kaspersky Labs’ antivirus programs for macOS.

Since Shlayer first came to light in February 2018, Kaspersky Lab researchers have collected almost 32,000 different variants and identified 143 separate domains operators have used to control infected machines. The malware accounts for 30 percent of all malicious detections generated by the Kaspersky Lab’s Mac AV products. Attacks are most common against US users, who account for 31 percent of attacks Kaspersky Lab sees. Germany, with 14 percent, and France and the UK (both with 10 percent) followed. For malware using such a crude and outdated infection method, Shlayer remains surprisingly prolific.

Tell your less technically adept family and friends FLASH IS DEAD and they shouldn’t install any version of it, particularly if those family and friends visit “sketchy” websites.

The Verge:

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence just published a statement on the company’s website to try to clear up an announcement made earlier this week: on Tuesday, Sonos announced that it will cease delivering software updates and new features to its oldest products in May. The company said those devices should continue functioning properly in the near term, but it wasn’t enough to prevent an uproar from longtime customers, with many blasting Sonos for what they perceive as planned obsolescence. That frustration is what Spence is responding to today. “We heard you,” is how Spence begins the letter to customers. “We did not get this right from the start.”

“Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and we intend to honor that investment for as long as possible.”

Thanks for all the feedback & my apologies for not responding sooner. I wanted to make sure we get it right. All Sonos products will continue to work past May: https://t.co/bmwQQgPd86

— Patrick Spence (@Patrick_Spence) January 23, 2020

Sonos is saying this was more of a misstep in communication.

New York Times:

Names, and their concomitant marketing strategy, aside, today’s launching of the Macintosh by Apple, unlike I.B.M.’s recent introduction of the rather unexceptional PCjr, presages a revolution in personal computing. Like all major innovations, this one entails a high risk of failure. Apple lost the first battle, begun with its $10,000 Lisa. The second assault is with a machine only a fourth the cost of its big sister and almost as versatile.

The Mac display makes all the other personal computer screens look like distorted rejects from a Cubist art school. With a 512-line horizontal by 342-line vertical, the display conveys an image that is refreshingly crisp and clear. The fundamental difference between the Mac and other personal computers is that the Macintosh is visually oriented rather than word oriented. You choose from a menu of commands by simply pressing the wandering mouse’s button rather than by using a number of control keys or by entering words.

As today is the Mac’s 36th birthday, read (or reread for those of you old enough) the Times’ original review of the Macintosh.

John Gruber, digging into this Wall Street Journal article:

But what caught my eye was this graphic halfway down the page, showing “Q4 2019 U.S. customer base by service”, sourced to Ampere Analysis. Their numbers, in millions:

• Netflix: 61.3
• Amazon Prime: 42.2
• Apple TV+: 33.6
• Hulu: 31.8
• Disney+: 23.2

At first blush, Disney+ being behind Hulu is shocking. But then:

It’s worth noting that Disney+ didn’t launch until November 12, halfway through the quarter; I expect Disney+ to eventually take the number one spot on this list.

Absolutely agree. I do expect Disney+ to roar into the top spot in the next quarterly report.

That said, I think this is about customer onboarding strategy for the new players. Apple’s approach is a logical masterstroke. Buy a new device, even an Apple TV will qualify, and you get added to the list. Even if you forget to sign up, we’ll remind you. And it’s free.

Amazon used the same approach to build up their customer base, albeit with a slight twist. If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you’re on the list, even if you never watch a single movie. To me, that makes Amazon’s numbers a bit softer.

Hulu will likely benefit, at least somewhat, from the amazing success of Disney+. So we might see their numbers bump past Apple next quarter. But long run, I think Apple TV+ will grow past Amazon, so we’ll see Disney+, Apple TV+, then Amazon Prime in the third spot in the next report.

Juli Clover, MacRumors, pulled together a nice walk down memory lane for Mac’s 36th birthday.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today overhauled its Apple jobs website, introducing a new look and a new video in an effort to better recruit employees. The updated video on the site features the different Apple logo designs that Apple first created for its Mac-centric event in October 2018.

Take a minute to visit the newly refurbished Jobs site. Watch the video, with those animated logos, a nod to those logo designs from the October ’18 event.

The prose narrating the video:

To the constant beginners who sing off-key against the beat. To those unfamiliar with convention, unmoved by rules, and reborn with every new discovery. Those open to daydreams and night dreams and visions and mirages. Who can see the millions of shades of green in a field of grass. Whose days are filled with mysteries that cannot be solved with facts. You are more powerful than you think… and you are welcome here.

Reminds me of this…

MacRumors:

The Wall Street Journal today published a profile of Tony Blevins, Apple’s vice president of procurement, providing an inside look at Apple’s corporate culture and what Blevins does for the company.

As Apple’s vice president of procurement, Blevins’ job is to get suppliers to cut their prices, and he will apparently stop at little to score a favorable deal for Apple, which has earned him the nickname “the Blevinator.”

His negotiating skills are so important to Apple that Cook tapped him to manage negotiations for Apple’s spaceship-shaped Apple Park campus. When getting bids for the curved glass used for the structure, he invited glass makers to Hong Kong, put them in separate conference rooms, and went from room to room to get the lowest price, ultimately saving Apple hundreds of millions of dollars.

There’s a guy like this at almost every successful company, for better or worse.

Forbes:

“We pitched to a bunch of different places, and the truth is some of these more traditional outlets that have been around for decades, were a little hesitant about the show,” explained Kumail Nanjiani.

“We went with Apple because they seemed extremely passionate about it and they said they would trust us, let us make the show we wanted to make, and they would support it. We wanted the show to be something that was going to be accessible to a lot of people.”

While First Nations peoples were here long before them, America and Canada are the creation of immigrants. We became who we are today because of people from many places coming together to create these places. While the filmmakers say, “These are not stories with any kind of agenda,” that’s obviously disingenuous. The agenda is subtle but it’s still there. But in my opinion, it’s a good agenda.

Politico:

Anyone who recalls the widespread mockery of the questions posed to Mark Zuckerberg when he testified before a couple Senate committees in 2018 knows that this isn’t even a dirty secret in Washington: Nobody, from lawmakers to regulators to reporters, really and truly understands how companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, work, day in and day out. So David Cicilline – a 58-year-old representative from Rhode Island – says he wants to lift the hood, and then describe in intricate detail to the rest of Washington exactly how the engines of Silicon Valley work.

Cicilline has drawn allies because his investigation is regarded as scrupulous and serious, something Congress does not always have a reputation for these days.

Even so, the investigation needn’t be antagonistic, Cicilline insists. He got on the phone with top tech company executives, including Apple’s Tim Cook, back when he started his investigation, he says, just so their firms’ first experience with the subcommittee wouldn’t be at the other end of a subpoena or document request.

At first blush, these hearings seemed like the typical grandstanding by know-nothing politicians. But Cicilline is well respected and knowledgeable. Hopefully, that means his findings will be taken seriously by all involved.

CNBC:

Apple on Thursday announced its new “Apple Watch Connected” gym initiative, a new series of partnerships with fitness facilities that makes it easier for people who own Apple Watches to track workouts, buy stuff and earn rewards for working out.

It’s Apple’s latest fitness expansion, helping it to build an entire ecosystem around the Apple Watch and providing owners with more places to use it to improve their fitness tracking. It creates yet another reason for people to buy Apple Watches: If you’re trying to work out, why not get a watch that works seamlessly with the gym you’re joining? And it helps gyms keep customers through rewards-based initiatives.

While this is a fairly localized and limited offering, anything that gets people up and active is a good thing. If we had a “connected gym” around us that offered these kinds of incentives, we’d be very interested in checking it out. I love the idea of saving a few bucks on your monthly bill just for going to the gym and working out.

Vice:

A report investigating the potential hack of Jeff Bezos’ iPhone indicates that forensic investigators found a suspicious file but no evidence of any malware on the phone. It also says that investigators had to reset Bezos’s iTunes backup password because investigators didn’t have it to access the backup of his phone. The latter suggests that Bezos may have forgotten his password.

The report, obtained by Motherboard, indicates that investigators set up a secure lab to examine the phone and its artifacts and spent two days poring over the device but were unable to find any malware on it. Instead, they only found a suspicious video file sent to Bezos on May 1, 2018 that “appears to be an Arabic language promotional film about telecommunications.”

It’s hard to have much sympathy for Bezos but this is a chilling story nonetheless.

The Verge:

The not-a-car sits on the gleaming black stage surrounded by a halo of light. It’s orange and black and white, and roughly the same size as a crossover SUV, but somehow looks much larger from the outside. There is no obvious front to the vehicle, no hood, no driver or passenger side windows, no side-view mirrors. The symmetry of the exterior is oddly comforting.

I don’t find the symmetry “oddly comforting.” Frankly I think the vehicle, even absent its external sensors, butt ugly.

Its official name is “Origin,” and Kyle Vogt, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Cruise, is clearly excited to be showing it off.

Inside are two bench seats facing each other, a pair of screens on either end… and nothing else. No steering wheel, no pedals, no gear shift, no cockpit to speak of, no obvious way for a human to take control should anything go wrong.

“I guess it’s important to note that we haven’t validated and released our technology yet,” he says. “But we’re getting pretty close. By the time this vehicle goes into production, we think the core software that drives our AVs will be at a superhuman level of performance and safer than the average human driver,” he says. “And we’ll be providing hard empirical evidence to back up that claim before we put people in a car without someone in it.”

And there’s the rub. This thing isn’t even close to being ready for production, let alone being allowed on the streets of our cities. Even when/if that happens, if it is indeed built “around the idea of not having a driver and specifically being used in a ride-share fleet,” it’s going to be a failure. How many users of Lyft or Uber want to share a ride? If they don’t, then all that glorious space inside is wasted on just one or two passengers at a time.

There’s been a lot of press/hype about this vehicle over the past couple of days as the media who were blessed with rides and interviews get their articles out. But there’s not nearly enough skepticism, healthy or otherwise, around this particular implementation.

9to5Mac:

Sleep tracking with Apple Watch is a great way to gain new insight into your sleeping habits and trends over time. Apple is apparently working on its own sleep tracking features for Apple Watch, but those features aren’t available just yet. In the absence of a first-party solution for Apple Watch sleep tracking, a handful of incredibly powerful third-party apps have come to the App Store.

My wife is wanting to get more info on her sleep tracking using the Apple Watch v3. Does anyone use or recommend any of these apps or any that aren’t on the list?

If you have an older model Apple Watch, and you’ve wondered about the benefits of switching to a Series 5, Adam Engst, TidBITS, has your back.

Great post, pointing out the features that are more marketing fluff, and those that really made a difference to him.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

OtterBox’s stackable wireless charging system OtterSpot includes a base that can charge up to three disc-shaped 5,000 mAh batteries and an iPhone, AirPods case, or other device on the top simultaneously. The idea is that you can quickly pick up one of the batteries from the stack and charge any Qi-enabled device on the go.

This is clever. Wasteful, in the same way as any inductive charging system, but definitely clever.

Stack up the batteries, grab one when you are on the go, and you’ve got a battery-based Qi charging system with you on the road, and it’ll be freshly topped off.

Flash still a thing? This does deserve a “finally” I think.

Back in April, 2010, Steve Jobs famously released an essay called, Thoughts on Flash. Take a minute to read it, to reconnect with Steve and with an era gone by. Note that it’s still up on Apple’s site.