New York Times:

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists.

After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm.

One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.

This is terrifying on so many levels.

Apple:

Just as we design our products to be simple, intuitive, and capable, we design them to be secure. Key security features, such as hardware-based device encryption, can’t be disabled by mistake. Other features, such as Touch ID and Face ID, enhance the user experience by making it simpler and more intuitive to secure the device. And because many of these features are enabled by default, users or IT departments don’t need to perform extensive configurations.

This documentation provides details about how security technology and features are implemented within Apple platforms. It also helps organizations combine Apple platform security technology and features with their own policies and procedures to meet their specific security needs.

Not necessarily a site you’d read over a glass of wine late at night but it’s still great to see Apple saying, “This is who we are and what we stand for.” Here is the web site associated with it.

Vice:

Try as you might, Christmas fiends, you cannot kill Williams-Sonoma. I know because I’ve been sh*tting on this company’s catalog every Christmas for YEARS, as a matter of both tradition and moral principle. But all of my efforts to drown this yuppie trinket hive in the toilet have seemingly been in vain.

In fact, last year, I myself nearly died before this company did. And I’m a sturdy fellow. I work out an elliptical trainer five times a week and occasionally eat fruit. I am strong. I am invincible. I AM MAN. Alas, I am no match for a company wily enough to sell Star Wars Le Creuset roasting pans for $450 (HOLY LIVING F*CK) and somehow make it work.

How does W-S do it year after year?

This guide to hating Williams-Sonoma (which, BTW, is a store I love!) is something I look forward to every year.

Lodged with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by plaintiff Pro Music Rights, the suit focuses on unpaid royalties and ongoing infringement related to 15 registered copyrights covering a clutch of songs.

I have a feeling that there is more to this than meets the eye. Apple is not new to licensing and how the music business works, so it’ll be interesting to see how this progresses.

Graham Cochrane, a freelance recording and mix engineer:

Does anyone even care about rock music, or real instruments like drums and guitars anymore?!

It’s a question that’s been asked and talked about for years. I believe Rock is alive and well, but it is going through some changes that make many people uncomfortable. Graham has some interesting thoughts on the issue.

A German court on Thursday banned Uber ride-hailing services in Germany, arguing the U.S. company lacks a necessary license to offer passenger transport services using rental cars.

Uber also lost its license in London last month. I’m not sure what the path forward is for Uber in Europe, but it doesn’t look promising.

AppleInsider:

Apple on Wednesday announced “Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet,” a hotly anticipated comedy series from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” creators Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney, will debut as an Apple TV+ exclusive in February.

Produced by McElhenney and Day, and co-created by co-created by McElhenney and fellow “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” executive producer Megan Ganz, “Mythic Quest” delves into the challenges of running a successful video game studio, Apple said in a press release today.

This looks utterly ridiculous and I can’t wait to watch it.

Jeremy Olshan, editor-in-chief of MarketWatch:

We are all drowning in a firehose of information at the expense of not only our attention spans but also true understanding. Our industry has a moral responsibility to help readers translate all that information into knowledge. Into wisdom.

This article isn’t specifically about tech journalism, but all journalism. I believe in reporting the truth, without bias, about any topic I write about. You may not agree with me, and that’s okay—in fact that’s healthy. When it comes to reporting on Apple, which I’ve been doing fo 25 years, I find myself in more disagreements with other writers more than ever before. A lot of that comes from me questioning the motives of why a story was written—which are often sensationalized—instead of enjoying the read. We need to help readers understand the information we write about.

The Atlantic:

The past 10 years have been eventful ones, beginning with Iceland’s erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, through the violent rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the refugee crisis in Europe, the U.S. presidential election of 2016, the first close-up images of Pluto, the #MeToo movement, an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, and so much more.

Warning: There are several very disturbing images in this post but all of them are powerful, important images.

It’s no secret that we’re pretty big fans of machine learning and we love thinking of new and exciting ways to use it in Pixelmator Pro. Our latest ML-powered feature is called ML Super Resolution, released in today’s update, and it makes it possible to increase the resolution of images while keeping them stunningly sharp and detailed. Yes, zooming and enhancing images like they do in all those cheesy police dramas is now a reality!

There is just no way to express how impressed I am with the folks at Pixelmator. They continue to evolve and innovate in a very difficult market.

Future Crunch:

Maybe, like us, you willingly chose to take part in this crazy, collective global experiment: take a nervous system that’s evolved for running away from cheetahs, and give it a big glowing screen showing it all the bad things happening in the world in near real time.

Fortunately, that wasn’t the only news. There were other stories out there, stories of conservation, better health, rising living standards, tolerance, peace, cleaner energy and environmental stewardship. Most of that stuff didn’t make it onto our Facebook feeds though, and that means that what we saw on our screens in 2019 was not the world. It was a negative image of the world, in both the photographic and tonal senses.

Here’s a slightly different picture.

Things are never as bad as we think nor as good as we hoped. H/T to @kottke for the link.

Royal Aeronautical Society:

For the past 70 plus years, nations around the world have attempted to intercept a mysterious hypersonic, high-flying intruder from the North Pole and learn its aeronautical secrets. Our Lapland aerospace Correspondent CHRIS TINGLE reports on the secret effort to counter these annual airspace intrusions.

The intrusion by this unknown vehicle (hereby referred to by its codename Supersonic Atmospheric Northern Transport Aircraft (SANTA) – travelling at incredible speeds in a single 24hrs has been not just a cause of concern for military planners around the world, baffled by this incredible capability – but also by civil aviation experts – concerned about a hypersonic aircraft weaving between scheduled commercial flights. Many suspect the only reason a mid-air collision has not occurred is that the SANTA flights take place at a time of year when scheduled airline operations are quieter.

For over 60 years NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) has taken on the role of attempting to track through the world’s airspace, provide updates and potentially unlock the secret of SANTA’s amazing aerospace technology and the secret Polar base from which this vehicle (or vehicles) operate. Despite SANTAs predictable schedule and a whole year to prepare defences, its astonishing speed and height have enabled it to outrun and outfly multiple attempts to intercept it.

This is the most wonderfully silly thing you’re likely to read all week. Thanks to @movinmeat for the RT of @RAeSTimR.

Macworld UK:

From now until New Years Eve you can get a six months subscription to Apple Music for free. All you need to do is Shazam something with the Shazam iPhone app. When you do so you will automatically be able to sign up for six months Apple Music for free.

The deal isn’t only open to those who have never subscribed to Apple Music. Apple has confirmed to Macworld that previous subscribers who resubscribe can get three months for free.

Great deal if you’ve never signed up although, while the story says resubscribers can get three months free and the app says “Get up to four months of free Apple Music,” when I went to redeem the code I was only offered a one month free “Apple Music individual membership.” so YMMV.

It’s true. Spent some time roaming the big box stores on-line: Costco, Target, Walmart, Amazon, all sold out.

And on the Apple Store itself? Shipping pushed out until February 2020.

Amazing.

This was fun to look through. Rabbit hole warning.

Joseph Cox, Motherboard:

From across the other side of the world, a colleague has just accessed my Ring account, and in turn, a live-feed of a Ring camera in my apartment. He sent a screenshot of me stretching, getting ready for work. Then a second colleague accessed the camera from another country, and started talking to me through the Ring device.

Earlier today, we posted about the Apple, Amazon, Google alliance designing an IoT open standard. I’d love to see Amazon close up these security holes.

Until then, I’ll limit my video doorbell candidates to those who sign up for HomeKit Secure Video.

There’s been a lot of Twitter griping about the new Mac Pro Geekbench results not being that much better than the 2017 iMac Pro, essentially making the point that the Mac Pro is not worth all that extra money.

If you check out the Geekbench scores, you’ll see that the lowest model of the new Mac Pro scores worse than the top end 2017 iMac Pro.

I priced out the top-end iMac Pro (256GB RAM, top video card) at $13,299. That does include a display, obviously.

I priced out a base model new Mac Pro (went up to 384GB RAM) at $11,999. More RAM, no display.

The pricing seems reasonable to me. And one is the top of its line, the other the absolute bottom of its line. Close enough.

First things first, the headline link takes you to a 6-movie Studio Ghibli collection. Appears to be US only. $100 for all six. A great deal if you are a Studio Ghibli fan.

That said, there are other Studio Ghibli movies in the iTunes Store that are not part of the collection. It’d be nice if you could type Studio Ghibli in one of the many search fields (iTunes Store, TV app on Mac, Apple TV, etc.)

For example, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a great movie, not part of the collection, worth exploring.

UPDATE: Zac Hall, 9to5Mac, pulled together links for all the Studio Ghibli films. Nice job, Zac!

Apple:

Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet.

This has huge potential. It will be interesting to see if Amazon opens up their Ring doorbell protocol. All the Ring doorbell hacking stories, true or not, are hurting their brand, and likely hurting the overall product category trustability.

Would love to see a path where Apple forces stronger privacy/security, rather than a weaker standard that allows all entrants to play.

Here’s the link to the main alliance page. Note that Apple’s name (all the way at the bottom) is plain text, no logo. Odd.

New York Times:

Just shy of 25 years since its last original installment, the offbeat comic strip “The Far Side” has returned. In a manner of speaking, but please don’t call it a comeback.

“I’m not ‘back,’ at least in the sense I think you’re asking,” said Gary Larson, the cartoonist who created it, via email last week ahead of a website revival. “Returning to the world of deadlines isn’t exactly on my to-do list.”

Beginning Tuesday, the “Far Side” site will provide visitors with “The Daily Dose,” a random selection of past cartoons, along with a weekly set of strips arranged by theme. There will also be a look at doodles from the sketchbooks of Larson, who said: “I’m looking forward to slipping in some new things every so often.”

What a great Christmas present to all of us Far Side fans who have missed Larson’s particular brand of silliness these past 24 years.

The Verge:

How do you replace a legend like Steve Jobs and, at the same time, adapt to the slow decline of your most important, most iconic product? Those were the twin challenges Apple faced in the 2010s. Under CEO Tim Cook, the company has found some answers and flourished financially, but it hasn’t been without a few wrong turns and big changes to the very nature of its business.

In the past decade, Apple has grown huge. Its fiscal 2019 revenues were six times the size of revenues in fiscal 2009. Its new headquarters building is larger than the Pentagon. Each of its five business segments would be a Fortune 500 company on its own.

But what about its products? Its culture?

The apparently-out-of-retirement Mossberg is a good candidate to take a clearheaded look at the “Tim Cook at Apple” decade. I wouldn’t agree with everything Uncle Walt says but there’s no arguing he knows what he’s talking about.

New York Times:

My choices as a doctor in the emergency room are up or out. Up, for the very sick. I stabilize things that are broken, infected or infarcted, until those patients can be whisked upstairs for their definitive surgeries or stents in the hospital. Out, for everyone else. I stitch up the simple cuts, reassure those with benign viruses, prescribe Tylenol and send home.

Emergency rooms respond like overbooked restaurants during a chaotic dinner rush, with doctors pressed to turn stretchers the way waiters hurriedly turn tables. The frantic pace leaves little time for deliberating over the diagnosis or for counseling patients. Up, out.

Private exams on stretchers in hallways, patients languishing without attention for hours, nurses stretched to the breaking point; all of it has become business as usual. I think about this on nights like tonight, when I start my shift inheriting 16 patients in the waiting room. I think about what I will learn that these people need, and about what I will fail to provide.

Reading these kinds of stories is both fascinating and scary.

BGR:

Ryan Reynolds’ new Netflix movie launched on Friday. The Michael Bay action flick 6 Underground features lots of shooting, car chases and fighting. The film has an interesting premise — a tech billionaire fakes his death to right the wrongs of the world with five other highly-trained individuals — and could spawn sequels if it meets whatever targets Netflix has in place for it.

But while it’s great that you can watch 6 Underground from your own home, it’s not a must-see, best-in-class film. Sure, the action is entertaining, as is the humor, but the storyline isn’t perfect, and there are times when it’s difficult and even tiresome to follow. I won’t spoil any of the plot for you, I’ll just say it could have been much better. But maybe we don’t even need a better story from this Bay creation. It’s the fast-paced action that we’re after in 6 Underground. What I will spoil is a hilarious Ryan Reynolds cameo in the film that easily qualifies as one of the best cameos ever.

Full disclosure: 6 Underground is not a good movie. It is a Micheal Bay movie, for better or worse. But the fact that Reynolds filmed this Instagram bit last year and it made it into the finished film is hilarious and so on point for Reynolds.

Been looking forward to this teardown. The most repairable Apple device, by far, though replacement parts might be expensive/hard to find.

Peter Cohen, Harris Craycraft, iDownloadBlog:

iPadOS 13.3 adds Hot Corners, a new feature that works with a Bluetooth mouse. You can set up the corners of your iPad screen to automate actions just like you can on the Mac. Learn how it works in this short video.

Great feature, nicely detailed in the video below.