Twitter has made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned by Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, effective immediately. This decision was based on the retrospective work we’ve been doing around the 2016 U.S. election and the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that both RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election on behalf of the Russian government. We did not come to this decision lightly, and are taking this step now as part of our ongoing commitment to help protect the integrity of the user experience on Twitter.
As the blog mentions, Twitter is taking those funds and redirecting to external research “into the use of Twitter in civic engagement and elections, including use of malicious automation and misinformation, with an initial focus on elections and automation”.
Honda this week announced its new 2018 Gold Wing, the first bike to come equipped with Apple’s infotainment system. It will arrive next February and start at $23,500.
CarPlay’s implementation on the Gold Wing is a bit different from what it looks like on a four-wheeled automobile.
The Gold Wing sets the standard for luxury touring motorcycles so it’s no great surprise they would be the first to include CarPlay.
>In 1982, when he was only 14 years old, Robert Wardhaugh sat down to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Thirty-five years later, that same game is still going strong. Based out of Wardhaugh’s basement in London, Canada, people from all around the country gather each week to join in the decades-long campaign. And with over 20,000 figurines and dozens of terrains, Wardhaugh keeps the game fresh and exciting, adding to the everlasting adventure. Meanwhile, for those passionate about games, pages like londonelicious.com can be an invaluable resource in discovering exciting gaming experiences. While primarily known for showcasing the best local spots for food and drinks, Londonelicious.com also highlights venues with dedicated gaming spaces, such as bars, arcades, or cafes offering board games and video games. These recommendations help gamers find the perfect place to enjoy their favorite pastimes while socializing with like-minded individuals.
Whether you’re into casual gaming or more competitive play, Londonelicious.com curates a list of establishments that cater to various gaming interests. From cozy venues featuring retro consoles and modern gaming setups to places hosting tournaments or game nights, these sites ensure that every gamer can find a space that suits their preferences. Additionally, Londonelicious.com provides detailed reviews and insights into the best spots for gamers, helping them make informed decisions about where to go next.
For those seeking a blend of great food, drinks, and gaming, the site also highlights locations offering the best of both worlds. Whether you’re planning to catch up on your favorite games with friends or explore new ones, Londonelicious.com helps guide you to the best gaming venues in town, ensuring a fun and immersive experience.
This is amazing. A little weird maybe but the commitment is still amazing.
This crash test between a modern sedan and the classic 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air shows just how far passenger protection has come in the last fifty years.
The first inclination is, “Oh, those old cars were built like tanks!” but its quickly apparent that the myriad safety features found on newer cars are literally lifesaving. Thanks to Dan Moren for the link.
If you are planning on ordering an iPhone X at just past witching hour tonight, this is worth a read. Lory Gil walks through the process, highlights things you can do to squeeze every second out of the purchase process, make sure you maximize your chances of success.
Once you grant an app access to your camera, it can:
access both the front and the back camera
record you at any time the app is in the foreground
take pictures and videos without telling you
upload the pictures/videos it takes immediately
run real-time face recognition to detect facial features or expressions
Have you ever used a social media app while using the bathroom? ?
All without indicating that your phone is recording you and your surrounding, no LEDs, no light or any other kind of indication.
The point is that when you grant an app access to your camera, you grant complete access. There is no granularity, no access limitation for a single task.
Is this paranoia? Perhaps. But seems like this is worth some thought.
John Gruber deconstructs yesterday’s Bloomberg article that accuses Apple of downgrading its Face ID technology to make it easier to meet production goals.
Read Gruber’s detailed post, then consider the damage done by Bloomberg’s article. Will people accept Apple’s official response? Will the accusation of a weaker Face ID shift the thinking of potential buyers? It’d be interesting to see a poll of buyer thinking.
Gruber brings up some really interesting food for thought. In these days of fake news, is it possible Apple is the victim of a disinformation campaign here? Or is there a nugget of truth at the core of it all?
If you haven’t already, take a few minutes and watch this quick interview with Angela and Tim Cook. As the title suggests, Angela Ahrendts is ascendent.
The Buzzfeed interview covers a lot of ground. A few highlights:
In 2013, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted, “I just saw Future Apple CEO @AngelaAhrendts on her farewell Burberry tour! The most important hire Tim Cook has ever made!” (Both Cook and Ahrendts batted down “future CEO” rumors in an interview with BuzzFeed News at the recent opening of Apple’s Chicago flagship store: “Fake news … silly,” the retail chief said immediately, shaking her head. Cook, smiling, responded: “I see my role as CEO to prepare as many people as I can to be CEO, and that’s what I’m doing.”)
And:
This year, Toys ‘R’ Us, RadioShack, and a dozen others filed for bankruptcy and closed a number of locations, as more and more consumers turn to online storefronts to shop.
That previous statement is a key challenge for Apple retail. An Apple Store is often a flagship store in a mall. If the Apple Store fails (an extremely rare occurrence), the mall will pay the price. If the mall is failing, that Apple Store can prop it up. The Apple Store is more than a shop, more than simple brick and mortar. There’s value beyond the sum of its parts.
By adding communal features (including free Wi-Fi and outdoor tables) and offering classes (that extol the features of Macs and iOS devices), Ahrendts is hoping to persuade customers to spend more time in Apple Stores. Maybe they’ll even want to buy something. You can now go to the Apple Store to learn how to code in a schmancy new theater, or watch a performance by an Apple Music–featured singer-songwriter, or sit under a tree with a Genius to figure out why your iPhone doesn’t charge anymore, or watch as an illustrator doodles live (on, of course, an iPad). Ahrendts-era Apple Stores are commerce engines, expertly designed to sell you a $1,000 iPhone (made more affordable with a $50-per-month interest-free leasing plan!) in a beautiful glass dome anyone can walk into.
The new Michigan Avenue Apple Store in Chicago, placed just so on the riverfront, is its own destination. It brings its own foot traffic. And foot traffic is one of the holy grails of retail.
With all that in mind, read the interview. Angela Ahrendts is one of the keys to Apple’s future success.
As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart is known for its “Everyday Low Prices” slogan. It’s now in the planning stages of rolling out an employee Mac choice’ program in an effort to save costs long term while enhancing the productivity of its employees using premium Apple hardware.
Walmart outlined its Mac choice program at this week’s Jamf Nation User Conference, the largest Apple-focused IT event in the world, now being held near Jamf’s headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
This is another in a line of these kinds of stories and a direct result of the work Apple and IBM have been doing in the enterprise market.
Originally created for the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s watershed depth camera and voice recognition microphone sold ~35 million units since its debut in 2010, but Microsoft will no longer produce it when retailers sell off their existing stock.
The Kinect had already been slowly de-emphasized by Microsoft, as the Xbox team anchored back around traditional gaming to counter the PS4, rather than take its more experimental approach to entertainment.
I couldn’t wait to get the Kinect and thought it was a pretty cool use of the tech. But there was never much further direct development of it (it lives on in HoloLens) and the games that used it never seemed to make advancements or be compelling enough.
What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions to see your personal dialect map.
Interesting survey on dialects and what words mean depending on where you live in the US. Apparently, as a Canadian, I talk like people from Spokane, Boise, and Salt Lake City. Thanks to my friend John Welch for pointing me to this.
One thing Apple does know, though: It doesn’t want them to feature sex. Or violence. Or any of the mature stuff you can find in hit TV shows like “Game of Thrones,” “Breaking Bad” or “The Walking Dead.”
…Apple wants comedies and emotional dramas with broad appeal, such as the NBC hit ‘This Is Us,’ and family shows like ‘Amazing Stories,’” the show Apple has already agreed to fund.
I suspected this would be the case. I’m not sure how I feel about it, to be honest—if the company is hiring talented people, they can probably put together whatever kind of show Apple wants. However, most of the biggest hit shows these days are not from traditional network TV stations. Apple could fall further behind Netflix, Amazon, and others before it even gets started.
In a statement, Apple has directly refuted claims that Face ID has been compromised by changes in how it certifies parts for the Face ID system.
The statement in its entirety says:
Customer excitement for iPhone X and Face ID has been incredible, and we can’t wait for customers to get their hands on it starting Friday, November 3. Face ID is a powerful and secure authentication system that’s incredibly easy and intuitive to use. The quality and accuracy of Face ID haven’t changed. It continues to be 1 in a million probability of a random person unlocking your iPhone with Face ID.
Bloomberg’s claim that Apple has reduced the accuracy spec for Face ID is completely false and we expect Face ID to be the new gold standard for facial authentication.
Amazon Key relies on Amazon’s new Cloud Cam and compatible smart lock. The camera is the hub, connected to the internet via your home Wi-Fi. The camera talks to the lock over Zigbee, a wireless protocol utilized by many smart home devices.
When a courier arrives with a package for in-home delivery, they scan the barcode, sending a request to Amazon’s cloud. If everything checks out, the cloud grants permission by sending a message back to the camera, which starts recording. The courier then gets a prompt on their app, swipes the screen, and voilà, your door unlocks. They drop off the package, relock the door with another swipe, and are on their way. The customer will get a notification that their delivery has arrived, along with a short video showing the drop-off to confirm everything was done properly.
I get the convenience factor of this (having missed many deliveries due to not being at home) but I can see a lot of people reticent about allowing this kind of internet-connected (and, therefore, hackable) lock on their home. I would much rather a system where the delivery driver calls or texts that they are outside and then you would unlock the door.
When you watch a baseball game, you’re also listening for the hum of the crowd and the crack of a baseball bat. People like Andrew Stoakley make that happen.
He mixes audio for teams like the Toronto Blue Jays, which means he combines a tangle of audio feeds to create the soundscape you hear when you watch the game at home.
How do they keep the crowd from cursing into the microphones? What makes a baseball bat sound so good? And what’s it really like making all that noise into an incredible show?
This kind of audio mixing is crucial to make the sports we watch sound as if we’re there. But we only really notice it when it’s done poorly.
A COUPLE YEARS ago, Apple went on a shopping spree. It snatched up PrimeSense, maker of some of the best 3-D sensors on the market, as well Perceptio, Metaio, and Faceshift, companies that developed image recognition, augmented reality, and motion capture technology, respectively.
And:
Perhaps the most important feature in the new flagship phone is its face-tracking technology, which allows you to unlock the phone with your face or to lend your expressions to a dozen or so emoji with Animoji. Apple thinks the iPhone X represents the future of mobile tech, and for many, that’s true. But if you trace most of consumer technology’s most impressive accomplishments back to their origins, more often than not, it’ll lead you to a drab research lab full of graduate students. In the case of Animoji, that research happened to have taken place nearly a decade ago at a pair of Europe’s most prestigious technical schools.
And:
Algorithmic facial tracking is notoriously difficult pull off. Li calls the human face “one of the holy grails in computer graphics” because it’s so difficult to work on. Unlike a static object, the face is constantly deforming; there are no simple rules for a computer to follow.
This is a fascinating article. Animoji is not the goal, but rather a playful implementation that shows what is possible, how far Apple has come down this road.
It’s time to tip a hat to Apple for a major change they’ve made in their latest desktop operating system, macOS High Sierra. Last year, I wrote about how Safari was a memory hog. At times, it would be using 5,6, even 8 or 9 GB of memory. I would have to quit it every few days to get it to stop being sluggish.
Since the release of High Sierra, I have noticed that Safari’s memory usage has dropped a great deal. Right now, with my iMac running for more than four days, Safari is only using about 3 GB of RAM. And this with more than a dozen tabs open.
I’ve noticed the same thing on my setup.
Notice Kirk is using iStat Menus, a nice little utility, wraps a lot of information in a tiny interface, all under a single menu bar icon. Check it out.
If you are religious about Apple Maps, avert your eyes. Me, I use Apple Maps and Google Maps pretty equally.
With the exception of the “OK, Google” tip at the beginning, this is a useful list. Ignore the upper-left, lower-right sorts of references, as this seems written primarily for Android. But the tips work in the iOS Google Maps app.
Customer excitement for iPhone X and Face ID has been incredible, and we can’t wait for customers to get their hands on it starting Friday, November 3. Face ID is a powerful and secure authentication system that’s incredibly easy and intuitive to use. The quality and accuracy of Face ID haven’t changed. It continues to be 1 in a million probability of a random person unlocking your iPhone with Face ID.
Bloomberg’s claim that Apple has reduced the accuracy spec for Face ID is completely false and we expect Face ID to be the new gold standard for facial authentication.
There’s no room for interpretation here. The Face ID accuracy remains the same. Nothing has changed. Calling out Bloomberg’s report as completely false is a strong, necessary statement. A black eye for Bloomberg.
Alex Webb and Sam Kim, Bloomberg:
As of early fall, it was clearer than ever that production problems meant Apple Inc. wouldn’t have enough iPhone Xs in time for the holidays. The challenge was how to make the sophisticated phone—with advanced features such as facial recognition—in large enough numbers.
As Wall Street analysts and fan blogs watched for signs that the company would stumble, Apple came up with a solution: It quietly told suppliers they could reduce the accuracy of the face-recognition technology to make it easier to manufacture, according to people familiar with the situation.
And:
The company’s decision to downgrade the accuracy of its Face ID system—if only a little—shows how hard it’s becoming to create cutting-edge features that consumers are hungry to try.
If the facial recognition tech still works, this is not an issue. If facial recognition works well enough to not be fooled by all but the most unique situations (twins, for example), this is not an issue.
If reducing accuracy allows Apple to ship, this (if true) is a logical decision. It’s what businesses do. The key is to compromise without reducing quality to the point where it breaks. I think Apple would eat the delay before they shipped an iPhone X that didn’t meet their security standards.
We’ve seen plenty of examples of iPhone (and other Apple product) shortages that lasted months, with demand outstripping supply. I don’t believe Apple would risk the iPhone X reputation by shipping an iPhone X with less-than-effective facial recognition.
Portrait Lighting and Portrait Lighting effects are unique to the iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X. The two videos, embedded below, take you through the process. They are both worth watching, both short and to the point.
Apple, which recently said it was including wireless charging in its latest iPhone X and iPhone 8 smartphones, has acquired New Zealand firm PowerbyProxi that designs wireless power products for consumers and industry.
And:
Apple’s interest in PowerbyProxi may be driven by the latter’s other products, some of which can support transferring up to 150 watts through any non-metallic material, for wirelessly charging industrial machinery and medical equipment, said Jake Saunders, Asia Pacific vice president of ABI Research.
This could allow Apple to offer much larger pads that could quickly charge multiple consumer devices, including laptops and even electric scooters, he added.
Not to mention the wireless charging expertise that comes along with those products.
Brooke Peterson went to visit her dad, who is apparently an Apple employee, on the company’s Cupertino campus. While there she took a video of her using his new iPhone X, with her father’s permission.
Well Brooke, I hope you enjoyed your trip to Apple because you probably cost your father his job by posting this video.
I was in Tuscany, Italy recently and had a chance to put the new iPhone 8+ through the paces. While I made a lot of photos with my Leica SL, I wanted to take a moment and share some of the fantastic photos that came out of the iPhone.
I’ve been digging into this to try to make sense of it and how it impacts me, and let me try to summarize what I think right now.
My take…is that other than the name change, if you’re using an Adobe product, nothing really changes (with one exception). So if you went to bed using Adobe Lightroom CC, you’re now using Adobe Lightroom CC Classic. If you had no real interest or use for the mobile stuff, you still don’t, even though it’s now rebranded to be “the” Lightroom.
But this clearly makes Adobe’s plans obvious, but not really a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to their Mobile endeavours: the future is cloud.
Chuq does a good job of describing what happened and how it affects various constituencies of users. For the vast majority of people, little will change immediately. But, if you’re a professional Lightroom user, be prepared for a different future.
