Apple, AT&T, the FCC and Alphabet’s X division have all put into motion efforts to give residents of Puerto Rico more cellular connectivity.
Apple has been working with AT&T to extend and activate cell service for users in Puerto Rico. To improve what is a terrible connectivity situation there, it’s going to enable a provisional band of LTE that has been recently approved, but not activated in the US and Puerto Rico, where it has not been licensed. This will allow iPhones to connect to Alphabet X’s Project Loon balloons in the region, which were activated today.
This should allow users to send text messages and access some critical online services.
This is great news and hopefully will ease some of the pain of the people in those affected areas.
Follow the link, take a look at those images, especially that last one. This is an incredibly beautiful storefront, perfectly incorporated into the surroundings.
In a complaint lodged with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, plaintiffs emonster k.k. and Enrique Bonansea, a U.S. citizen living in Japan, registered for the “Animoji” mark in 2014, reports The Recorder. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office subsequently granted rights to the property in 2015.
And:
According to the complaint, Apple not only had knowledge of the Animoji app prior to September’s iPhone X launch, but attempted to purchase rights for the mark from emonster. Bonansea claims he was approached by Apple “fronts,” like The Emoji Law Group LLC., to sell the property this past summer. These entities allegedly threatened to file a cancellation proceeding if the developer failed to acquiesce to their requests.
Facebook’s effort to help media companies sell subscriptions has hit a snag: Apple.
The two companies are butting heads over Facebook’s plan for a new subscription tool in its mobile app. The tool will put paywalls around some articles in Facebook’s news feed, and then send users to publishers’ sites to buy subscriptions.
The issue: Apple wants to take as much as 30 percent of any subscription revenue Facebook helps generate. Facebook wants all of the money to go to publishers.
This is nothing new. The 30 percent model has been in place since inception. But:
People familiar with Facebook’s plans say Google won’t take a cut of subscriptions users sign up for using its Android operating system.
And there’s the rub. I don’t think there are many people who will switch platforms because of this issue. This is about the publishers.
Note that not every publisher likes Facebook’s subscription plan. Notable holdouts from the test plan the company is announcing today include the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
And you can see why. Both the NYT and WSJ have existing paywalls that work for them. This is a complex problem, one I hope gets resolved quickly.
Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that relates to displays having a substrate with a visually imperceptible texture that provides tactile sensations varying with an object contacting the surface. Apple is considering applying a new finish on displays for Macs and iDevices that acts as an added protection layer with a different texture to the glass. The glass may feel smooth to the touch but slightly rougher with a little drag when using it with an Apple Pencil.
Not clear if this difference in feel is what they were going for in the first place, or a side product of the finish. What would really be cool is if there was a way to control that texture electronically, adjust it based on context.
Robots, smartphones, computational cameras, and a true pop culture phenomenon round out the list.
I’m sure we’ll have arguments about this list but I hope we can agree that if the fidget spinner is the “most ingenious gadgets of 2017”, we’re doomed.
I was in the Grand Central Station Apple Store for a third time in a year, watching a progress bar slowly creep across my computer’s black screen as my Genius multi-tasked helping another customer with her iPad. My computer was getting its third diagnostic test in 45 minutes. The problem was not that its logic board was failing, that its battery was dying, or that its camera didn’t respond. There were no mysteriously faulty innerworkings. It was the spacebar. It was broken. And not even physically broken — it still moved and acted normally. But every time I pressed it once, it spaced twice.
“Maybe it’s a piece of dust,” the Genius had offered.
And:
“If a single piece of dust lays the whole computer out, don’t you think that’s kind of a problem?”
Read the article. Well written, it makes the case that Apple has made their keyboards too thin, with too little key travel for comfortable typing and too fragile for the lifetime of hammering for which they were designed.
Next up, check out this Reddit thread, chock full of folks with similar complaints (balanced with complaints about the article itself, of course).
I find these keyboards — specifically, the tales of woe about keys getting stuck or ceasing to work properly — a deeply worrisome sign about Apple’s priorities today.
For the first time, the Apple Watch can have an independent cellular connection, allowing people to use it to make voice calls, send and receive text and data even if the watch isn’t wirelessly connected to an iPhone.
But in China, the feature was abruptly cut off for new subscribers, without explanation, after a brief availability with one telecom company.
Industry analysts say the suspension likely stemmed from Chinese government security concerns to do with tracking users of the device, which uses different technology than standard mobile phones.
This is a stunning development. After all the approvals were in place, prototypes no doubt submitted for inspection, deals signed with all players, manufacturing process completed, product packaged and distributed, and cash laid on the table as promised product was delivered and paid for, the rug was pulled out from under.
In the five years since Netflix started streaming original series like the Emmy-winning “House of Cards” and “Master of None,” the shows have had a question hanging over them: How many people are watching?
Outside of Netflix, nobody knows the answer.
But Nielsen (the people who, for decades, have been crunching data to tell us who is watching what) has worked out a scheme to tell us:
Nielsen announced the initiative on Wednesday morning, but it has been collecting Netflix viewership data over the last two months in a kind of test run.
The company said it was able to determine how many viewers were streaming Netflix content through audio recognition software in the 44,000 Nielsen-rated homes across the United States.
Yes. Audio recognition software. They are eavesdropping on Nielsen households, obviously with permission, and parsing exactly who is watching Netflix, and exactly when and for how long.
This is fascinating to me, but it also made me wonder about Amazon and Google. With the Amazon Echo and Google Home in more and more homes, this kind of data would be easy enough to gather. With permission, of course.
Here’s a link to the photo. I actually like the iPhone 8 design, but there’s no denying the extra screen real estate you get with the iPhone X, notch and all.
There’s been a ton of controversy over the past few days as Pixel 2 XL reviews come in. Though some reviews are glowing, a number of reviews (here’s one launch point we posted yesterday) are taking the Pixel 2 XL to the woodshed.
Vlad Savov, The Verge:
Look at that New York Times icon in the image above. Stop flinching and really look at it, soak in the kaleidoscope of colors washing over it. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, I’m seeing a haze of green in the middle of the gothic “T”, which then blooms into a red that eventually transitions into the white that the icon is supposed to be. But the fun isn’t over; when you get up real close, you’ll see the edges of the icon are all fringed by a sort of purply-red and, again, green. The neighboring heart icon, which is also supposed to be white, presents us with a crosshatch of red and green and white micropixels.
Click to Vlad’s review and really get up close and personal with that image. Hard to argue with his logic.
If you own a Switch, you’ve no doubt wondered about the lack of save file portability. For example, if my Switch breaks, how do I recover my game progress? If my Switch is stolen, is there a recovery option? Or if I’m visiting a friend with a Switch, is there a way I can play my games on their Switch?
With other systems, I can back up my data and bring it with me. Not so with the Switch.
People often ask me why I love Eric’s guitar playing so much—this song sums it up. Clapton doesn’t need to play 100 notes a second to make you appreciate his playing. The opening riff is so heartfelt and meaningful, it makes you listen.
Adobe has unveiled a raft of new apps and updates for Max 2017, most notably a big revamp of Lightroom CC to make it more cloud-friendly for mobile users. The centerpiece is an all-new Lightroom CC with a 1TB cloud service — the “Project Nimbus” app that leaked last year. It features a streamlined version of Lightroom CC that keeps images, edits and metadata synced in Creative cloud across PC and Mac, Android and iOS. For desktop users who prefer the current, non-cloud app, Adobe has re-branded it as Lightroom Classic CC.
To be clear — because Adobe’s new naming system is pretty darn confusing — Lightroom CC is a series of apps app and a service. As Adobe describes it, Lightroom CC “is designed to be a cloud-based ecosystem of apps that are deeply integrated and work together seamlessly across desktop, mobile and web.”
As usual for anything Adobe related, this will cause a lot of consternation among its users and customers. Personally, I will hold off “updating” for as long as possible.
On Monday, a team of thousands of LIGO scientists around the globe published an incredible finding spread throughout several papers in the journal Physical Review Letters. Not only did these scientists detect, for the first time, the gravitational waves produced from two colliding neutron stars, but they were able to pinpoint their location in the sky and witness the event with optical and electromagnetic telescopes.
The gravitational waves tell physicists how large and how far away the objects are, and allow scientists to recreate the moments before they collided. Then the observations in optical light and electromagnetic waves fill in the blanks that gravitational waves can’t answer. They help astronomers nail down exactly what the objects were made out of, and which elements their collisions produced. In this case, the scientists were able to conclude that the resulting explosion from a neutron star merger produces heavy elements like gold, platinum, and uranium (which has been previously theorized but not confirmed by direct observation).
These scientists were able to witness, directly, the alchemy of the universe in action.
This is such a cool, amazing discovery. We’ve always known everything was created from stars but the knowledge your gold jewelry was probably created in the aftermath of a kilonova is mindboggling.
The “Hey Siri” feature allows users to invoke Siri hands-free. A very small speech recognizer runs all the time and listens for just those two words. When it detects “Hey Siri”, the rest of Siri parses the following speech as a command or query. The “Hey Siri” detector uses a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to convert the acoustic pattern of your voice at each instant into a probability distribution over speech sounds. It then uses a temporal integration process to compute a confidence score that the phrase you uttered was “Hey Siri”. If the score is high enough, Siri wakes up. This article takes a look at the underlying technology.
We take speech commands like “Hey Siri” for granted these days, but what goes on in the background is absolutely amazing.
Gord Downie, the Tragically Hip frontman who united a diverse array of music lovers with his commanding stage presence and Canadiana-laced lyrics, has died.
He was 53.
Downie had an aggressive and incurable form of brain cancer called glioblastoma, which he discovered after a seizure in December 2015.
He died Tuesday night surrounded by his children and family, according to a statement on the band’s website.
If you’re selling (or generously handing down) your MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, Apple recommends an extra step when erasing your data before parting ways with your machine. This step requires an obscure Terminal command that you wouldn’t assume and isn’t required on Macs without the Touch Bar.
Check out step 6, “If you have a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, clear its data”.
Begs the question, what is specifically stored in the Touch Bar that requires cleaning? Good to know that this step is necessary, but a bit of a mystery. Anyone know the specifics? Please do ping me.
Nice find, Zac.
UPDATE: And the answer is, this script removes your Touch ID data from your Mac, as proved by Stephen Hackett, written up on this 512 Pixels post.
This is an amazing look at the state of the art in computer graphics, movie CGI.
From the Vimeo page:
It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real… but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is… what happens now?
I found the whole thing riveting.
We are so very close to a world filled with conjured realities that are indistinguishable from real life. When that becomes our reality, what then?
On Friday CEO Jack Dorsey announced plans to act more aggressively. Twitter will introduce new rules around unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence, he tweeted. To add a sense of urgency, the company is holding daily meetings on the issue.
And:
The new plans stop short of sweeping measures such as banning pornography or specific groups like Nazis. Rather, they offer expanded features such as allowing observers of unwanted sexual advances—as well as victims—to report them, and expanded definitions, such as including “creep shots” and hidden camera content under the definition of “non-consensual nudity.” The company also plans to hide hate symbols behind a “sensitive image” warning, though it has not yet defined what qualifies as a hate symbol. Twitter also says it will take unspecified enforcement actions against “organizations that use/have historically used violence as a means to advance their cause.”
Follow the link, read the email in full. I would love to see progress made here, but I’ve reluctantly filed this under “I’ll believe it when I see it”.
Auto-Tune — one of modern history’s most reviled inventions — was an act of mathematical genius.
The pitch correction software, which automatically calibrates out-of-tune singing to perfection, has been used on nearly every chart-topping album for the past 20 years. Along the way, it has been pilloried as the poster child of modern music’s mechanization.
And:
For inventor Andy Hildebrand, Auto-Tune was an incredibly complex product — the result of years of rigorous study, statistical computation, and the creation of algorithms previously deemed to be impossible.
And:
“The sampling synthesizers sounded like shit: if you sustained a note, it would just repeat forever,” he harps. “And the problem was that the machines didn’t hold much data.”
Hildebrand, who’d “retired” just a few months earlier, decided to take matters into his own hands. First, he created a processing algorithm that greatly condensed the audio data, allowing for a smoother, more natural-sounding sustain and timbre. Then, he packaged this algorithm into a piece of software (called Infinity), and handed it out to composers.
And:
Infinity improved digitized orchestral sounds so dramatically that it uprooted Hollywood’s music production landscape: using the software, lone composers were able to accurately recreate film scores, and directors no longer had a need to hire entire orchestras.
“I bankrupted the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” Hildebrand chuckles. “They were out of the [sample recording] business for eight years.”
I’ve owned almost every Nexus and the original Pixel, but problems with the Pixel 2 display may force me to look elsewhere for my yearly Android fix.
I bought most of Google’s Nexus phones, starting with the Nexus One. I bought the original Pixel. I pre-ordered the Pixel 2 XL right after the event. Now I’m thinking of canceling that order. The reason? It seems like Google chose to ship bad displays on their flagship phones.
Rene follows up with a host of quotes from other reviewers, almost all from traditional Android bloggers. This was really surprising to me. I expected a best-in-class display at this price point.
Read the post, and dig into the other quoted reviews. I’m not sensing Google-bashing here, more disappointment at the screen performance from people who want to love their new Google phone.
Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, is teaming with NBCUniversal to bring scripted programming — like short-form comedies and dramas — to mobile screens. The companies have established a studio joint venture to produce programming exclusively for the social-messaging and media platform.
And:
The companies have recruited Lauren Anderson, who has served as NBC Entertainment’s senior VP of current programming, to be the JV’s chief content officer. “Lauren was a great get for us,” said Mills, who has worked with Anderson on the NBC shows created for Snapchat. “She has tremendous experience, and instantly got what we were going for.”
Yet another twist in the unfolding story of what we’ll be watching in the future and who will hold the puppet strings. This is an industry in the midst of disruption. At some point, the models will settle down and we’ll see who is making money, long term, determine who survives, prospers.
The more companies that jump into the soup, the more chaotic the model. Might be an advantage for Apple to wait before jumping in whole hog just to let the new model form more fully, to let the money find its path. I find this whole thing fascinating.
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