Variety:

Today (Dec. 10), the original song and official video for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” taken from the group’s 1975 album “A Night at the Opera,” surpassed 1.6 billion streams globally across all major streaming services.

And:

Brian May, Queen’s guitarist and founding member said, “So the River of Rock Music has metamorphosed into streams! Very happy that our music is still flowing to the max!”

And:

-“Bohemian Rhapsody” is the only song in history ever to have topped the U.K. charts twice at Christmas.

Whoever pulled together the marketing campaign for the Bohemian Rhapsody movie did a masterful job.

Epic Games:

The three Infinity Blade games are no longer available for purchase as of today, 12/10/18. This groundbreaking trilogy took mobile gaming to new heights and pushed Epic Games in new, innovative directions. Along with the three Infinity Blade games, all in-app purchase options have been removed. Current owners will continue to be able to play these games, and download* them to their devices from an account that owns them, for the foreseeable future.

The Infinity Blade games really showed off the iPhone’s graphics engine. But the franchise is getting a bit long in the tooth. Infinity Blade III was released in 2013.

I think this says more about the massive success of Fortnite. Epic knows where their bread is buttered.

Reuters:

Computer hardware maker Super Micro Computer Inc told customers on Tuesday that an outside investigations firm had found no evidence of any malicious hardware in its current or older-model motherboards.

That outside firm was Nardello & Co. From the Nordello web site:

Nardello & Co. is a global investigations firm with experienced professionals handling a broad range of issues including the FCPA/UK Bribery Act and other corruption-related investigations, civil and white collar criminal litigation support, asset tracing, strategic intelligence and political risk assessment, computer forensics and reputational due diligence.

Digging a bit more, this seems to fall into their Digital Investigations & Cyber Defense Division, headed by Mark Ray. From Mark Ray’s page:

Mark was a Director in PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Incident Response practice and led the firm’s US Cyber Threat Intelligence Center. Prior to joining PwC, Mark had a distinguished career as a Special Agent with the FBI’s Cyber Division, where he led several of the FBI’s most preeminent criminal and national security cyber investigations.

Impressive CV. Wondering where this goes from here. Bloomberg sticking to their guns?

As a reminder, here’s a link to the original Bloomberg article that started this all.

The Cut:

A Southern California Catholic school recently discovered that two of its nuns were low-key bon vivants who embezzled approximately $500,000 to go gambling and take vacations, according to the casinosenligne.com blog — a clear violation of that whole vow of poverty thing.

Although church leaders were shocked to discover the sisters had been embezzling from tuition and other school funds, BuzzFeed News reports that past and current families connected to the school have been writing social-media posts about how they’re not all that surprised to learn of the nuns’ behavior, as their beloved pastimes of traveling and gambling — both of which require a decent amount of money! — weren’t exactly secret.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…” indeed. You just know there’s a Hollywood screenwriter working on turning this into a movie as we speak.

NASA:

For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars. NASA’s Voyager 2 probe now has exited the heliosphere – the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun.

Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5. This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.

This is truly an amazing feat. The fact that both Voyagers are still sending back data is a testament to the men and women who worked and continue to work on and with these incredible spacecraft.

DJ Riko:

For the 17th year in a row, it’s Merry Mixmas time! This year’s mix has lots of songs you’ve never heard before, and lots of songs with exclamation points in the title! Festive satisfaction is guaranteed or your money back. You can download it by clicking the image above or through this direct link. And of course you can find each and every one of the Merry Mixmas entries at the Christmas page. Get Jolly!

I’m a traditionalist when it comes to Christmas music but I gotta admit, I enjoyed this way more than I expected to.

Ars Technica:

Two months after disclosing an error that exposed the private profile data of almost 500,000 Google+ users, Google on Monday revealed a new leak that affects more than 52 million people. The programming interface bug allowed developers to access names, ages, email addresses, occupations, and a wealth of other personal details even when they were set to be nonpublic.

On Monday, Google said it planned to expedite the closure from August 2019 to April. Google said it still planned to give users the opportunity to transition off of consumer Google+ and would provide them with information on ways to safely and securely download their data and move it to other services, if wanted.

While Google said it had no evidence either data leak was actively exploited, it has no way of assuring users that developers haven’t accessed the profile data that was supposed to be non-public. That means users should assume all profile data of this type is now in the public domain, regardless of how they had set up their permissions.

On the Google blog announcement of this, Google said in the second paragraph, “…We’ve recently determined that some users were impacted by a software update…”

“Some users” is defined by Google as “…approximately 52.5 million…”

Today, the For You tab is making its way over to Google Maps in over 40 countries on iOS and 130+ new countries on Android—helping you stay up to date on fun, new places so you’ll know exactly where to take the fam this winter. The For You tab is designed to be a constant source of inspiration tailored to your tastes and preferences. Simply follow neighborhoods or places you’re interested in to get updates and recommendations—everything from recent news about an opening or pop up, a new menu item, and even restaurant suggestions based on what you’re likely to enjoy. If you’re making a trip this holiday season, the For You can help you get a jump start on travel planning even before you take off.

I mostly use Apple Maps, but I’ll give this a try just to see how it does picking places for me to visit.

Pudding:

This is a story about how to perceive the population of cities.

From my perspective (albeit a US-centric one), it was eye-opening to see how the world’s population is so unevenly distributed.

What stands out is each city’s form, a unique mountain that might be like the steep peaks of lower Manhattan or the sprawling hills of suburban Atlanta. When I first saw a city in 3D, I had a feel for its population size that I had never experienced before.

This is a mind blowing way of visualizing population and density. Thanks to Tim Harford for the link.

Reuters:

Chip supplier Qualcomm Inc on Monday said it had won a preliminary order from a Chinese court banning the importation and sale of several Apple Inc iPhone models in China due to patent violations, though Apple said its phones remain available in the country.

The preliminary order affects the iPhone 6S through the iPhone X sold with older versions of Apple’s iOS operating system. Qualcomm, the biggest supplier of chips for mobile phones, initially filed its case in China in late 2017.

In a statement, Apple said that all iPhone models remain available for its customers in China. New iPhones use Apple’s latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 12.

Yet another skirmish in the war between the two companies. But China is the largest battlefield in the world.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that as many as 6.1 million Americans are living with a-fib, and that number is only expected to increase as the population grows older. Apple’s hope is that with the single-lead ECG available anytime you are wearing your watch, you have a better chance at screening for atrial fibrillation at the time it is happening.

This is a well-written, easy to understand first look at the just-released Apple Watch’s ECG feature. It’s full of little details, such as:

The new Apple Watch features are cleared, but not approved, by the US Food and Drug Administration. It may seem a subtle point, but for something to be approved by the FDA, it is subjected to much more rigorous testing and data collection. Clearance is typically given to medical devices that have been determined to be substantially equivalent to another legally marketed device — an easier hurdle to cross.

And:

According to clearance letters sent by the FDA to Apple on September 11, the app is intended for use only in people ages 22 and up, whom the FDA considers adults. The irregular rhythm notification feature is not intended for use in people who have been diagnosed with a-fib, who should be under a doctor’s care.

There are already lots of stories floating around about people who have tried this feature out and caught a potentially life-threatening condition. I have yet to see a downside emerge, a rash of false positives for example.

So far, this seems like a hugely positive rollout. Time will tell, obviously, but I like what we’ve seen so far and I’m looking forward to more features like this from Apple and the Apple Watch and Health teams.

NASA:

NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander, which touched down on Mars just 10 days ago, has provided the first ever “sounds” of Martian winds on the Red Planet.

Incredible to me that this video was shot on another planet, and I get to embed it in this post. Will humans eventually live on other planets? Will we someday see videos like this that include news from other extraterrestrial outposts?

Not sure selfies is the right term here, but these panorama shots are both cool and, if you are into this sort of trick photography, inspiring.

China va ganando en todo, también en hacks para selfies. pic.twitter.com/5ruEe6koXY

— Oscar Yasser Noriega "Akira" (@akirareiko) December 9, 2018

Load the tweet above, click play.

This quiz original came out in 2013 but has been flying around the internet over the past few days.

In a nutshell, you answer 25 questions that try to pry out how y’all refer to things like soda, rubber bands, and service roads and, in return, you’ll get a surprisingly accurate guess as to where you grew up.

Obviously, this is specific to the US and will be more accurate if you spent a good chunk of your developing years in one place.

From John Gruber’s take on the state of native Mac apps:

In some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is that it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that should have been nothing but good news for the platform — more users means more attention from developers. The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see. The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps — users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right — were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don’t know or don’t care about what makes for a good Mac app.

Fascinating read, all the way through.

Jake Swearingen, The Intelligencer:

From roughly 2007 until 2013, the smartphone market grew at an astonishing pace, posting double-digit growth year after year, even during a global recession.

And:

Smartphone growth began to slow starting in 2013 or 2014. In 2016, it was suddenly in the single digits, and in 2017 global smartphone shipments, for the first time, actually declined — fewer smartphones were sold than in 2017 than in 2016.

And:

In 2017, per the International Data Corporation, global shipments of smartphones declined year-over-year for the first time in history. In 2018, IDC says the same thing happened in the U.S. market.

And:

Some manufacturers and analysts may hope that flat sales in the developed world could be offset by strong sales in other markets. Fat chance. The markets where smartphone saturation hasn’t set in yet — such as India, Southeast Asia, pockets of Latin America, and Africa — are different than the markets that fueled the first decade of smartphone growth. “In those markets, there are extremely competitive devices down near the equivalent of $200,” says Stanton. “It’s becoming a real battlefield, but it’s a low-margin business and consumers down at the those price points tend to be not very brand-centric. That really plays into hands of a few really hyperaggressive brands of smartphones, most of which are coming from China.”

But what about Apple? Can they continue to defy gravity?

While the rest of the smartphone market worries about commodification and what each brand will need to do to gain or defend market share in a world where smartphones are like cars, Apple stands alone. “Apple has a different set of options available to it,” says David Yoffie, a professor of international business at Harvard Business School who also sits on the board of HTC. “They have this extraordinary user base that allows them to do things other firms could never get away with.”

All of this is the lead-up to a very interesting analysis of Apple’s gravity defying potential. Good read.

LA Review of Books:

A mild-mannered engineer stands onstage at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. A massive video screen looms behind him, displaying a close-up of his face in the lower right half of the screen, with a close-up of his computer display superimposed over his face to the left. Introducing his team, he sounds a bit nervous, saying, “If every one of us does our job well, it’ll all go very interesting, I think.”

Today, this presentation would be completely unremarkable. But it’s not 2018 — it’s December 9, 1968. The engineer is Douglas C. Engelbart, founder of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, and nobody in his audience — or in the history of the world — has ever seen anything like it before.

I never tire of hearing more stories and details about the “mother of all demos”. Try to imagine what it was like to be in that audience. Wired also has a piece about it called, “How Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos” that’s worth the read as well.

SwiftOnSecurity:

Note the kickstart pedal.

I can’t imagine actually using one of these things.

Reddit:

Ok holy hell…. strap in.

If you have the Apple Watch 4 please please update to the new firmware released yesterday and take your ECG.

I did last night and tried it out. Weird. Abnormal heat rate notifications. Ran the ECG app and came back afib. Well…glitchy firmware. Let’s try again. Afib. Again and again and again. Piece of crap watch.

My wife wakes up and I put it on her. Normal. Normal. Me afib. Try the other wrist, try the underside of the wrist. Every time afib warning.

As always, take what you read on Reddit with a grain of salt but, if true, this is an incredible story and one I’m sure will be repeated.

Atlas Obscura:

The moka pot is a symbol of Italy: of postwar ingenuity and global culinary dominance. It is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and other temples to design. It is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most popular coffee maker, and was for decades commonplace to the point of ubiquity not only in Italy but in Cuba, Argentina, Australia, and the United States.

It’s also widely misunderstood and maligned, with approval in the modern coffee world coming perhaps a bit too late, in only the past few years. Get one while you can.

If you love coffee but don’t have a Moka Pot (or a “caffettiera” as an Italian girlfriend who turned me on to them called it), then you don’t actually love coffee. Buy one for yourself (Amazon affiliate link) or a fellow coffee lover this Christmas.

Ars Technica:

On Thursday, the Australian parliament approved a measure that critics say will weaken encryption in favor of law enforcement and the demands of government.

The new law, which has been pushed for since at least 2017, requires that companies provide a way to get at encrypted communications and data via a warrant process. In short, the law thwarts (or at least tries to thwart) strong encryption.

Companies who receive one of these warrants have the option of either complying with the government or waiting for a court order. However, by default, the orders are secret, so companies would not be able to tell the public that they had received one.

The Australian government wants companies to expose themselves but not to be exposed in turn.

DxOMark:

For photography, the iPhone XR offers a single-cam solution, as opposed to the dual-cam setup of the XS models. In terms of specs, the iPhone XR’s camera is broadly what you expect from a high-end single-cam device, featuring a 12Mp 1/2.55″ sensor with 1.4µm pixel pitch, a 26mm f/1.8 aperture lens with optical image stabilization, phase-detection autofocus, and a dual-tone LED flash.

Despite the different camera hardware, on the software and image processing side of things, the XR comes with the same innovative feature as the XS models — for example, when shooting stills, the camera continuously captures a multi-frame buffer at different exposures, allowing for simultaneous zero shutter lag and HDR processing. Thanks to this technology, the latest iPhones can display HDR images in real time, making for a true “what you see is what you get” preview image.

So how does the quality of the iPhone XR’s images stack up against the competition’s? Read our full review to find out.

The fact it’s a great camera on a phone is not surprising. Just how good it is, even from a technical point of view, is pleasantly surprising.

Lori Dorn, Laughing Squid:

Legendary script supervisor Martha Pinson, who has worked with such luminary directors as Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Oliver Stone, Milos Forman, Brian De Palma and Peter Yates, sat down with Vanity Fair to dissect a scene that was deliberately strewn with serious continuity problems. Pinson spotted many of these errors, explained what was wrong and made corrections in real time. Actually, Pinson spotted all of the errors, but left them for the viewers to find.

I love movies. This was a lot of fun.

John Gruber:

You can say $40 is too much for an iPhone case, but I’d say Apple’s $40 clear case is easily worth twice as much as the $20 clear cases I’ve tried. If I bought an XR and wanted to use a case, this is the case I would buy. It’s so good it makes me wonder why Apple doesn’t make clear cases like this one for the iPhone XS and XS Max.

High praise. Puzzling that it took so long to get to market. Is it the material science involved?

CNBC:

Apple is in advanced talks to buy rights to a gritty Israeli TV show called “Nevelot” (English translation: “Bastards”) and adapt it for the U.S., beating out bids from competitors including Showtime, FX and Amazon, according to several people with knowledge of the deal. The show’s plot involves two military veterans who go on a youth-focused killing spree because they believe today’s kids don’t understand the sacrifices of their generation.

And:

Apple’s heads of programming, Zach Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, who started in June, have been working overtime to dispel the myth that Apple is interested only in family-friendly material.

In general, Apple wants high-impact content based on things people have heard of, like books, franchises or ideas that have resonance, according to people who have spoken to the company.

Not clear that Apple will actually close on this deal and, if they do, whether Apple’s version of the show will retain the grittiness and violence of the original.

Hard to judge Apple’s true aims here until the new wave of shows actually hit the market.

Van Amburg and Erlicht, who were previously presidents of Sony Pictures Television, are highly respected in the entertainment industry. One of their biggest successes was bringing “Breaking Bad” and its showrunner Vince Gilligan to Sony.

The duo has made it very clear they are now looking for Apple’s version of the series, which revolved around an high school teacher turned meth dealer.

Apple brought this team on board. Hard to believe they would hamstring them, keep them from doing what they do best. Time will tell.

Alex Fitzpatrick, Time:

> Captain America and Black Panther were about to defend Earth from the villain Thanos when Kevin Foley first noticed something was wrong. Foley, a 46-year-old information-technology worker from Kyle, Texas, was heading into the theater to see Avengers: Infinity War when he realized he was having trouble breathing normally. The sensation struck again during another movie the following night, but more severe this time. Once the credits on the second film rolled, Foley took action: he looked at his wristwatch. It was a bigger step than you might imagine, because Foley was wearing an Apple Watch equipped with medical sensors and experimental software to track basic functions of his heart. And the watch was worried. It had, according to the display, detected signs of an irregular heartbeat.

“The watch was worried”. Love that. More:

> Along with competitors, Apple gadgets have already offered fitness functions, such as apps to track the steps you’ve walked. But with the new ECG scan, Apple is moving squarely into medical aspects of health, a distinction underscored by the fact it sought–and received–Food and Drug Administration clearance for the cardiac monitor.

And:

> Even as it was devising new sensors and software, Apple was also beefing up its health expertise. In a move that didn’t attract much attention among tech journalists but that made a splash in the medical-tech world, Apple hired Dr. Sumbul Desai from Stanford’s medical school to serve as its vice president of health.

Dr. Desai got a computer science degree, went to work for IBM, then ABC and Disney, then went back to med school. Getting into med school is an incredibly stressful, difficult process which If the case is that it comes to affect you, you should try the new Budpop tinctures. To leave the comfort of a big paycheck, make a major career left turn, then face and conquer that challenge is impressive, to say the least.

> She went back to school for a medical degree and completed her residency at Stanford, eventually joining the university and later becoming vice chair of strategy and innovation for the department of medicine. She continues to serve as a clinical associate professor of medicine there in addition to her Apple responsibilities, a signal of the level of cooperation between the organizations.

Great hire for Apple. Nice to see her hard work getting this exposure.

Terrific article, great overview of Apple’s path into health and the newly rolling out ECG feature.

Washington Post:

You can’t put a price on loyalty. Just kidding, it’s $1,000.

And:

For some perspective, we charted out the past few years of prices on a few iconic Apple products. Then we compared them with other brands and some proprietary data about Americans’ phone purchase habits from mobile analytics firm BayStreet Research.

What we learned: Being loyal to Apple is getting expensive. Many Apple product prices are rising faster than inflation — faster, even, than the price of prescription drugs or going to college. Yet when Apple offers cheaper options for its most important product, the iPhone, Americans tend to take the more expensive choice. So while Apple isn’t charging all customers more, it’s definitely extracting more money from frequent upgraders.

And:

Not everything Apple has gone up in price: An entry-level iMac and iPad have gotten cheaper since 2014, though in both cases the company has since added a new higher-end (and higher-price) “Pro” version to its lineup.

This piece is full of interesting data. Be sure to stop and process the graphics. And keep reading. One core point that struck home for me:

Most technology products are commodities that go down in price over time. Apple has worked very hard not to become a commodity.

And that’s it exactly. It’s become harder and harder over time to distinguish all those Windows laptops and Android phones, one from another. Apple continues to pour R&D dollars into ensuring the uniqueness of its products.

If people stop buying into the Apple ecosystem, if Apple Stores stop being so crowded, that’d surely shift Apple’s pricing strategy. As is, seems like Apple has their pricing strategy well tuned.

MacStories:

Today, with the release of watchOS 5.1.2, Apple has shipped the ECG app. As we explained in the MacStories Series 4 overview, the ECG functionality is enabled by new hardware including a new titanium electrode built into the Digital Crown.

Apple’s ECG sensor is notable because it’s the first of its kind available over the counter to consumers. ECG results taken with the Apple Watch are stored in the Health app, from which they can be exported as a PDF for sharing with your physician.

You folks lucky enough to have an Apple Watch 4 should let us know what you think about this app.