The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said Apple Inc must pay more than 12,000 retail workers in California for time they spent going through security screenings at the end of their shifts.
A unanimous three-judge panel reversed a judge who had tossed the case and ordered him to enter summary judgment for the plaintiffs, after the California Supreme Court in response to certified questions in the case said in February that time spent undergoing security checks is compensable under state law.
I’ve always felt that retail workers who had to wait in line to be able to leave their job (to be screened for theft, for example) should be paid for the time they wait in line. This the end of the road for this case?
This looks great. Surprised it’s a series and not a movie. I can definitely see the short term plot playout, wondering what the long story will be. Cat and mouse all the way?
Apple has released a new version of the Apple Support app today with useful new integration with the Wallet app. With today’s update, users can now add a pass from the Apple Support app to the Apple Wallet for “easy check-in” at Genius Bar locations.
Wondering if the Apple Support app is uniformly known about, if it’s widely used. The Apple Wallet integration is an interesting twist. One less interaction with a person, one less line to stand in, a bit easier for social distancing.
Later this year, you’ll be able to acquire, retain, and win back subscribers with subscription offer codes: unique, alphanumeric codes that provide free or discounted prices for auto-renewable subscriptions. Provide your one-time use codes digitally or offline at physical events, alongside products, and more. Customers on iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 and later can redeem offer codes on the App Store, through a one-time code redemption URL, or within your app if you’ve implemented the presentCodeRedemptionSheet API.
A Russian lawmaker submitted draft legislation on Tuesday that would cut and cap the commission on the sale of mobile applications by tech giants Apple and Google.
The bill, submitted to Russia’s lower house of parliament by lawmaker Fedot Tumusov, stipulates that commissions on the sale of applications be capped at 20%. Apple currently collects a 30% commission on sales in its App Store.
This is absolutely ridiculous to me. The law would also require the sellers to pay one-third of their commission to a “special training fund.”
This is a pretty cool idea, something you can do if you have access to a 3D printer. Ideally, I’d add in a jack so you could plug the HomePod into the stand.
Take a look. There’s a bit of handwaving to get from that stud sensor to a spec for the 3D printer. That part seems like magic/impossible, so I’m guessing that the part was hand-designed, the stud sensor was purely for show. Please prove me wrong.
That aside, I kind of like the result. Not too difficult a project.
Side note, I’d love to see an app for the iPad Pro that would make use of LIDAR to actually do this scanning, feed a spec to the 3D printer.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating after an American Airlines pilot reported seeing a mystery person in a jetpack flying high above Los Angeles, right in the path of incoming jets at Los Angeles International Airport Sunday evening.
This sounds made up, but it was reported by multiple pilots and the FBI is investigating. Follow the headline link for a video containing the actual audio from a pilot reporting the sighting.
Long Way Up follows Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman as they attempt to make their way from the bottom of South America, by electric motorcycles, all the way up the coast, through South and Central America, up through Mexico and, eventually, landing in Los Angeles.
The iOS app economy has created nearly 300,000 new jobs since April 2019, helping to provide opportunities for Americans of all ages even as COVID-19 continues to create immense challenges and uncertainty for communities across the country.
And:
The App Store ecosystem now supports more than 2.1 million US jobs across all 50 states — an increase of 15 percent since last year — as part of the 2.7 million jobs Apple supports across the country.
Follow the headline link for a map showing the densest US job growth, by state. For example, Texas added 36,000 new jobs in the past year.
A strange phenomenon has emerged near Amazon.com Inc. delivery stations and Whole Foods stores in the Chicago suburbs: smartphones dangling from trees. Contract delivery drivers are putting them there to get a jump on rivals seeking orders, according to people familiar with the matter.
This is a real sign of the times. And, I suspect, a hack that will quickly spread beyond Chicago. Desperate for work, drivers have figured out that Amazon’s dispatch software hands off deliveries to the driver closest to the Whole Foods store with the goods to deliver.
Follow the headline link to see an example of one such tree. From what I’ve read, Amazon appears to be aware of the behavior. I’m assuming drivers hang their phones and then park nearby, with an eye on their phone.
A crossbreed between the LBXI and the LBXII, the seductively dark stealth LBX-S blends the Green “clean” channel with the Red “full burn” channel for a sonically diverse soundscape — from pristine cleans that soar to that sizzling modern Brit sound with high-gain attitude.
Armed with four JJ ECC83S (12AX7) preamp tubes and two JJ EL84 power tubes, this easy-to-carry lunchbox head also includes dual-concentric gain and volume controls for precise and independent control of each channel, as well as shared EQ presence and resonance controls.
I love these lunchbox type heads. I have an Orange and a Mesa Boogie, but I wouldn’t hesitate to add in an EVH into he mix.
Follow the headline link for the MarketWatch version of this story. What’s interesting is the financial side of inheriting 7,000 shares of Apple stock. It’s now worth north of $3 million.
What would you do with that money? Sell it, pay the taxes, buy a house? A car? Pay off the installment loans online that you got a year ago and have been fighting the interest payments of? Give it to charity? Start a foundation? Or just let it ride?
If you are feeling brave, here’s a link to the original Reddit post. It’s not for the faint of heart (be warned, it’s offensive), and will likely trigger all kinds of things, including your BS meter. But if that’s your thing, dive in, read the comments. All very interesting.
IGN asked Scott, director of critically acclaimed films like Alien, Gladiator, and Black Hawk Down, if he has seen the Epic remake of his famous Apple “1984” commercial.
Ridley Scott:
“I sure have and I wrote to them because on the one hand I can be fully complimented by the fact they copied [my commercial] shot for shot,” Scott says. “But pity the message is so ordinary when they could have been talking about democracy or more powerful things… And they didn’t use it.”
Scott added, “I think the animation was terrific, the idea was terrific, the message was ‘ehh’.”
Almost made that last bit the headline. Just not enough context, though. But a great take.
College student Peter Dantini discovered the notarized version of Shlayer while navigating to the homepage of the popular open source Mac development tool Homebrew. Dantini accidentally typed something slightly different than brew.sh, the correct URL. The page he landed on redirected a number of times to a fake Adobe Flash update page. Curious about what malware he might find, Dantini downloaded it on purpose. To his surprise, macOS popped up its standard warning about programs downloaded from the internet, but didn’t block him from running the program. When Dantini confirmed that it was notarized, he sent the information on to longtime macOS security researcher Patrick Wardle.
And:
The campaign is distributing the ubiquitous “Shlayer” adware, which by some counts has affected as many as one in 10 macOS devices in recent years. The malware exhibits standard adware behavior, like injecting ads into search results. It’s not clear how Shlayer slipped past Apple’s automated scans and checks to get notarized, especially given that it’s virtually identical to past versions. But it’s the first known example of malware being notarized for macOS.
Interesting how this stuff gets discovered. All this time and it’s still in the wild. So much so, that it slipped past Apple’s scanners and got notarized.
Riders in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area should now be able to add their reloadable SmarTrip fare card to the Wallet app, and simply hold their iPhone or Apple Watch near a contactless payment reader at Metrorail stations or on Metrobus buses to pay their fare.
Huzzah! Can’t wait to give this a try. Great implementation. No need to wake your iPhone. No need for Face ID.
One of the big questions raised about the new Apple Marina Bay Sands Apple Store was how you got inside. After all, it’s a big sphere, sitting there on the water. And most images of the store just show one side of it, looking impregnable.
Watch the video embedded below and you’ll get a much better sense of things.
MTV used to be a really big deal. When it first started, it was a real game changer. And here’s the very beginning, with that historic countdown and segue into “Video Killed the Radio Star”.
Just like the original Macintosh was a pirate movement against the establishment, this earliest MTV flew its own pirate flag. This first two hours started on August 1, 1981.
Since I started noticing this issue, I’ve gotten counterfeit batteries, counterfeit shampoo, and counterfeit guitar strings, and they were all sold by Amazon.com. It got so bad that I completely stopped using Amazon.
The bigger question is “what the hell is going on?” This didn’t seem to be a problem, say, 5 years ago. I started looking into why this was the case, and I found a pretty clear answer: commingled inventory.
And:
Let’s say I am a third-party seller on Amazon, and I am selling Crest Toothpaste. I send 100 tubes of Crest Toothpaste to Amazon for Amazon fulfillment, and then 100 tubes are listed by me on Amazon. The problem is that my tubes of Crest aren’t entered into the system as “SolitaryEgg’s Storefront Crest Toothpaste,” they are just entered as “Crest Toothpaste” and thrown into a bin with all the other crest toothpaste. Even the main “sold by Amazon.com” stock.
This is a fascinating read. In a nutshell, the logic here is, commingled inventory means a counterfeiter can dump their bad goods into the river of genuine goods and never get caught, since the goods are not validated until the end user receives them.
Not sure this is fixable, since the cost of validating goods on the Amazon side would be enormous, a non-starter. One thing Amazon could do is prevent third party goods from entering the validated goods stream. That way, when you make a purchase, you could choose “validated” goods or “take a chance” goods.
TechRadar, on Apple Arcade’s highly addictive game, Grindstone:
Anyone who’s played Grindstone can attest to its engagement: the novel puzzle game centers around killing like-colored enemies in sequence to rack up big combos, with plenty of items to spare. But anyone versed in free-to-play games can see how easily Grindstone could include in-app monetization: there’s in-game gems and consumable health items that feel tailor-made for players to drop real-life money to buy. It’s so apparent that it seems like the game would have released with in-game purchases had Apple not come calling.
To me, this is a tremendous value point for Apple Arcade. You will never be held up for in-app-purchases that you need to, say, complete a level, or save yourself from an unreasonably, unnecessary grind.
Continuing:
In other words, part of what’s so engaging about Grindstone’s gameplay loop overlaps heavily with addictive loops that free-to-play games deploy to get players spending real money on in-app purchases.
There’s nothing preventing Apple from adding more games to Arcade that use such gameplay loops to keep players subscribed to the service without betraying Arcade’s no-monetization policy.
Interesting take, all the way around. The takeaway I got from this is that Apple Arcade has found its sweet spot. And they are tuning their future game acquisition model to home in on games that keep people engaged.
Facebook is crying because Apple is doing its best to protect user privacy against tracking and data collection. iPadOS 14 now let’s you use Siri and apps at the same time, and Epic is continuing to whine because it shot itself in the foot and the judge won’t help them.
The FBI released information this week on the arrest of Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, a 27-year-old Russian citizen, who they claim was part of a group who attempted to extort millions of dollars from a company in Nevada, which has now been identified as Tesla.
This is a pretty solid tale, involving a Tesla employee who turned down a million dollar payday, then wore a wire in an FBI sting. Part of my takeaway from this is all the companies who paid the ransomware rather than fight.
Facebook Inc on Thursday told Reuters that Apple Inc rejected its attempt to tell users the iPhone maker would take a 30% cut of sales in a new online events feature, forcing Facebook to remove the message to get the tool to users.
And:
Facebook said that Apple cited an App Store rule that bars developers from showing “irrelevant” information to users.
“Now more than ever, we should have the option to help people understand where money they intend for small businesses actually goes. Unfortunately Apple rejected our transparency notice around their 30% tax but we are still working to make that information available inside the app experience,” Facebook said in a statement.
Speaking of disingenuous, that last sentence just leaves a bad taste all around. There’s an implication that Facebook is a champion of transparency.
But I digress:
Facebook earlier this month said it planned to roll out a new tool that would let online influencers and other businesses host paid online events as a way to offset revenue lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company said it had asked Apple to waive the 30% fee the iPhone maker charges for in-app purchases so Facebook could pass on all of the events revenue to business owners, but that Apple declined.
Facebook had aimed to provide a notice of Apple’s cut to users, according to mock-ups it released at the time, but Reuters found on Thursday that the promised message was not present on the new events feature.
On the surface, this does look bad for Apple. Did Apple actually prevent Facebook from transparently laying out the fee structure for in-app purchase? Or is there more to this story?
Hoping for a response from Apple telling its side of this story.
Apple is blocking Fortnite updates and new installs on the App Store, and has said they will terminate our ability to develop Fortnite for Apple devices. As a result, the Chapter 2 – Season 4 update (v14.00), did not release on iOS and macOS on August 27.
Apple limits competition so they can collect 30% of consumer payments made in apps like Fortnite, raising the prices you pay. Epic lowered prices through a direct payment option, but Apple is blocking Fortnite in order to prevent Epic from passing on the savings from direct payments to players. Epic has taken legal action to end Apple’s anti-competitive restrictions on mobile device marketplaces. Papers are available for our August 13, August 17, and August 23 filings. In retaliation for this action, Apple blocked your access to Fortnite updates and new installs on all iOS devices.
Apple gave Epic the chance to fix the situation, Epic made the choice to take a stand.
Both sides made choices. Epic is painting a picture of Apple is bully and Epic as choice-less victim. To me, this is just ugly. And disingenuous.
Apple each year hosts a company wide fitness challenge for its employees at corporate offices and retail stores around the world, tasking participants to close all three of their Apple Watch Activity Rings every day of the month.
Normally runs in February, but COVID. So they ran it mid-July to mid-August. Follow the headline link to see a pic of this year’s shirt and card.
Just a shirt, but one I think will have special meaning, given all everyone’s going through this year.
One of the big improvements in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 is that Siri no longer takes over the whole screen. However, in the early betas you couldn’t interact with Siri and apps at the same time – doing anything with an app, even scrolling, would dismiss Siri.
A Redditor noticed that this is no longer the case on the iPad as of iPadOS 14 beta 5.
Note that this works on iPadOS but not iOS. Not clear if that will change over time. Definitely a feature worth checking out. Siri working in parallel with the rest of the interface, rather than completely taking over, is a big step forward.
Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.
The antisocial network that makes almost all of its revenue from building a vast, constantly updated database of netizens that it then sells access to, is upset that iOS 14, due out next month, will require apps to ask users for permission before Facebook grabs data from their phones.
I’m a sucker for a well-written headline. Monstrous. Onion-worthy.
