Streaming media platform Plex announced today it’s further expanding into live TV with the addition of over 80 free live TV channels accessible by free users and subscribers alike. The company had already allowed consumers to capture and record live TV by way of a digital antenna and tuner connected to a Plex media server, but this required investment in additional hardware and involved a more complicated setup process.
The channel lineup includes Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Toon Goggles, Kidoodle TV, KidsFlix, fubo Sports Network, Cooking Panda, DrinkTV, IGN TV, AFV Family, Tastemade, Revry, FailArmy, Dove Channel, Docurama, The Pet Collective, WeatherSpy, Made in Hollywood and others.
While none of these are big names, they expand Plex’s service with a range of free content where you might catch something interesting upon browsing — like a cooking show, old movie, classic TV episode, funny video or kids cartoon, for instance.
There’s not much familiar here but if you’ve already watched everything on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, Peacock, etc, maybe you can find something watchable.
Apple has announced that it is releasing a special version of the iPhone to approved security researchers as part of a new Apple Security Research Device Program (SRD). The SRD, which was originally announced during last year’s Black Hat information security conference, is a standard iPhone with key security controls disabled to allow security researchers to run their own tools. Apple will provide SRDs on one-year renewable loans to researchers who are accepted into the program.
In a private briefing, Apple provided additional details about and background on the SRD program.
I posted yesterday on Apple’s PR regarding the Apple Security Research Device Program and now the guy I trust most on Mac security related issues has posted about his briefing with Apple about these devices. As always, Mogull writes well and in-depth while not being nearly as techy or geeky as the subject warrants. It’s a good read if you have any interest in this kind of program.
Adobe has pushed live security updates for its Bridge, Photoshop and Prelude applications that patch a number of critical vulnerabilities.
ThreatPost says each of the 12 ‘critical flaws stem from out-of-bounds read and write vulnerabilities, which occur when the software reads data past the end of — or before the beginning of — the intended buffer, potentially resulting in corruption of sensitive information, a crash, or code execution among other things.’ Specifically, five flaws were addressed in Adobe Photoshop, three in Adobe Bridge and four in Adobe Prelude.
According to Adobe, no known uses of these critical bugs have been reported in the wild, but you’re going to want to make sure all of your programs are up to date if you don’t have automatic updates installed. All updates can be downloaded via the Creative Cloud desktop app for macOS and Windows computers.
The part of the streaming shell game that I’ve never been able to fully understand — and that has somehow gotten worse with each passing year and each new service debut — is just how bad the user experience is on all of them. It’s been 13 years since Netflix began offering streaming content, with Hulu and others soon to follow, yet the user interfaces consistently seem designed to make finding what you want to see — whether continuing a binge or discovering something new — a Herculean effort. Spend enough time toggling between the services, and you’ll want to quote Hall of Fame baseball manager Casey Stengel trying to make sense of the historically inept 1962 Mets: Can’t anybody here play this game?
Simply put, there are a lot of basic practices that all streamers should be following, and that most of them don’t seem to understand in the slightest. Here’s our four-point plan to optimize user experience.
Like a lot of people since the beginning of (waves hands around) all of this, we’ve been watching a lot more streaming stuff. The user experience is uniformly awful.
An analyst of the US contact tracing landscape paints a depressing picture. Not a single US state currently offers an app that uses the Apple/Google coronavirus contact tracing API — and only four states plan to do so.
Others have launched GPS-based apps that raise immediate privacy concerns and are unlikely to see significant adoption, while the majority of states who responded plan to offer nothing at all…
Legal blog Lawfare describes its mission as covering “that nebulous zone in which actions taken or contemplated to protect the nation interact with the nation’s laws” – making an analysis of the state of play of coronavirus contact tracing an ideal topic. The results of that analysis don’t make for cheery reading.
There’s an argument to be made for the fact that until contact tracing is widespread, we won’t get a handle on this pandemic. This patchwork of (non)efforts isn’t helping. Thanks to Michael D for the link.
(Dorna wants you to go to their YouTube page to watch this. Start at the 2:38 mark)
This past Sunday. 3rd gear. 150kmh (93mph). Leaned over 54 degrees.
The rear tire of the motorcycle loses traction, slides out from under him and then suddenly regains grip, causing the dreaded “high side” crash. The rider is world champion Marc Marquez. He broke his right forearm (if you watch the video again, it was likely when, to add insult to injury, his bike hits him after the crash) and had surgery to fix a titanium plate internally to his right humerus Tuesday.
He’ll be back on the bike on Saturday and likely in the next race this Sunday. The pain and recovery threshold of these guys is amazing.
There was a discussion flying around Twitter yesterday about the term Jiggle Mode and when it was introduced. Someone on Reddit showed up with this video, where Steve Jobs is introducing the concept of folders in iOS 4.2.
Jump to about 18:32 for the Jiggle Mode mention.
Interesting also is the introduction of the ill-fated Ping. And the unusual “One More Thing…” at about 50:23.
UPDATE: Steve does introduce jiggling in this keynote (about 16:35 in), though he doesn’t (as far as I can tell) use the term Jiggle Mode.
Gonna stop here for a second and acknowledge the English language/UK-US bias, right off the top.
That said, this is still quite interesting. Before you follow the link, take a guess as to who in the pop universe has the biggest vocal range. Challenge is to name anyone in the top three.
Originally released in 1969, the Maverick (or the “Custom”) was a wildly unique six-string guitar crafted from leftover 12-string necks, bodies and pickups. 51 years later, the Parallel Universe Maverick Dorado steps up the swagger of its predecessor with a pair of Tim Shaw-designed Filter’Tron-style humbucking pickups, a Bigsby vibrato and dark ebony fingerboard.
I love the idea of the parallel universe series, updates of old school guitars. [H/T @cyclonus]
Apple in iOS 14 added a new Translate app, which, as the name suggests, is designed to offer translations from one language to another. The Translate app has some useful features that are handy both when learning a new language and when attempting to talk to someone who speaks a different language.
And:
The Translate app can translate to and from Arabic, mainland Chinese, English (US and UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
Nice walkthrough. Interesting that this is available on iPhone, but not iPad. For more detail on what’s coming to iOS but not iPadOS, check this Macworld article by Michael Simon.
We’ve heard reports before that Apple plans to include a periscope lens on future iPhones, and a new Ming-Chi Kuo report today suggests this is coming in 2022.
Rumor aside, the focus of the linked article is this:
What exactly is a periscope lens, and what would it mean for future iPhones?
A typical iPhone lens stacks its elements perpendicularly away from the iPhone. That lens stack is what makes the camera bump in the iPhone case.
A periscope lens uses a mirror to let the stack of lens elements live inside the case, with optical zoom without a camera bump made possible by sacrificing interior space.
Ben does a great job explaining all this. Great read.
The best time to catch a glimpse of Neowise was in early July, just after it made its closest approach to the sun and reached peak brightness. The comet has grown noticeably dimmer over the past few days as it moves away from the sun, but if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, it’s not too late. Neowise makes its closest approach to the Earth on Thursday, and if you live in the northern hemisphere you’ll still be able to see it with your naked eye for a few more days. We asked amateur astronomers for their best tips on how to go comet-spotting.
There’s no telling how quickly it will fade from view so get out and see it as soon as you can.
Several websites have posted news about the 2020 version of the iPhone Photography Awards. Their site says, “founded in 2007, IPPAWARDS has been celebrating the creativity of iPhone photographers since the iPhone first began to inspire, excite and engage users worldwide.” Cult of Mac called the award “an incredibly prestigious prize to win.”Tim Cook tweeted this morning about them, saying, “Congratulations to this year’s @ippawards winners from all around the world! Your extraordinary photos beautifully preserve the moments that make life so magical. Outstanding work!”
But I remember having my spidey senses tingle last year with these awards so I did some digging into it.
The first thing I noticed was you have to “pay to play” – that is, it costs $5.50 to submit a single image with “discounts” given for multiple image submissions. Paying to submit images to a contest is not necessarily a bad thing but it always raises concerns for me.
Next up was the judges – or lack thereof. In an interview with Input, the founder of the IPPAWARDS Kenan Aktulun (whose Twitter account is protected) wouldn’t say who the judges were: >I asked Aktulun to share some details behind the curtains about the judging process. Though he wouldn’t say specifically who the panel of judges was for the 2020 winners, he said they were made up of a diverse cast of visual storytellers including photographers and designers.
That’s always a red flag for me. Every reputable photo completion, from Apple on down, lists the names of the people doing the judging. Similarly, when using tools like image to video ai, transparency about the technology and process is essential for ensuring trust and credibility in the results.
The site says the Photographer of the Year was Dimpy Bhalotia from the UK who won an iPad Air. As well as the overall title, a first, second, and third place Photographers of the Year each won an Apple Watch Series 3. If you’re charging a minimum of five bucks a submission and claim to have had “tens of thousands” of submissions, it seems they could award the latest and greatest Apple Watch or at least be more clear and upfront about the specifics of the prizes being awarded. Checking the details, 1st place winners in each of the 18 categories also received a “Gold Bar from the most recognizable private gold mint in the world.” The 2nd and 3rd place winners of the 18 categories won a Palladium Bar. Sounds good until you read the fine print – the prize is a one gram bar of each, worth $60.00 and $69.00 respectively.
And finally, for a worldwide photography website, their information on their social media accounts is non-existent. The awards have a Twitter account and a Facebook page but neither are linked from the website and both are fairly sparse.
None of the above is damning but, taken in the aggregate, I find the whole exercise something I wouldn’t personally get involved in nor would I recommend it to others. Caveat Emptor.
UPDATE: Well, this is awkward…
The 2020 iPhone Photograph Awards “Photographer of the Year” Dimpy Bhalotia’s “Flying Boys” photo also won 2nd place in the “Movement/Street Photography” category of the International Photography Awards. But the rules of the IPPAwards say photos can’t have been posted elsewhere. Ooops.
It was really just a name change because the technology already existed, but it was to become the luggage tag on a revolution.
On 14th July 1995, audio engineers at the Fraunhofer Society in Munich finally settled on what the filename extension for the compressed digital format they had developed should be named. What was previously known as .bit was now to be called .mp3.
It really only had a 12-year window at its peak, but it packed a lot into them. In just over a decade it changed the record business completely. Twice. It also paved the way for streaming – all streaming, not just music streaming – to become the default way to, drawing on the industry’s own terminology, “consume” “content”.
No other music format since the phonograph in 1877 has had anything even approaching the profound impact that the MP3 has had on the music business. All formats before the MP3 were designed specifically to plump up the profitability of the music business; the MP3 ripped it to shreds.
It’s hard to overstate the seismic shift the MP3 created in the music industry.
As part of Apple’s commitment to security, this program is designed to help improve security for all iOS users, bring more researchers to iPhone, and improve efficiency for those who already work on iOS security. It features an iPhone dedicated exclusively to security research, with unique code execution and containment policies.
The Security Research Device (SRD) is intended for use in a controlled setting for security research only. Shell access is available, and you’ll be able to run any tools and choose your entitlements. Otherwise, the SRD behaves as closely to a standard iPhone as possible in order to be a representative research target.
How soon do you think it will be before we see some developer release “benchmarks” for this iPhone? Thanks to Rich Mogull for the link.
On Wednesday, Apple presented some arguments defending the App Store that could factor into next week’s testimony. While the company says it’s not a preview of what Cook will say at Monday’s hearing, it commissioned a study from Analysis Group released on Wednesday that finds that Apple’s App Store’s fees and practices are largely in line with other digital marketplaces, including the Google Play app store and the Amazon Appstore.
“The commission rates charged by digital marketplaces most similar to the App Store, such as other app stores and video game digital marketplaces, are generally around 30%,” the authors of the study wrote.
The House probe into big technology companies will not result in enforcement, but it may spur legislation that could restrict Apple and other large tech companies.
This is Apple “softening the ground” ahead of Cook’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee along with chief executives from Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
This group has recreated a number of official macOS wallpapers over the years, using a drone. This year, with Big Sur, a drone wouldn’t quite cut it.
A little bit of the story, in their own words:
My friends and I had one choice, we had to get a helicopter to fly us over Big Sur. After talking to an aerial photographer, we got connected with a pilot, who funny enough was the same pilot that helped Apple take the photo (shoutout Chris from Specialized Helicopters — he was amazing!!)
The problem was Apple’s photo was taken in the winter. And since it’s summer, that means that the sun will rise differently and at a different time. Moreover, June is known for coastal fog, so it was up to chance whether or not we would get a clear day.
The video below does a great job telling the story, with a live shot of them actually watching Craig Federighi do the big reveal.
If you’re not a fan of the original Apple TV remote, you’re not alone. Between its glass design, unintuitive orientation, and high replacement cost, it has left many Apple TV users looking for alternatives.
That’s me.
The Button Remote touts itself as a more traditional alternative.
It features buttons that closely mirror that of a VCR or DVD remote. There are buttons for controlling volume, navigating menus, video playback functions (such as pause, rewind, and fast forward), and a power button.
Nothing particularly newsworthy here, I just love the look of this video. In part, I’m sure, because we’ve got a bunch of anime/manga fans in the house.
As part of the league’s Covid-19 health and safety protocols, MLB said it would ban traditional video stations shared throughout clubhouses. The league took advantage of its 2016 partnership with Apple to expand the dugout iPad program. It will now distribute 15 iPads to each team for players and staff to dissect performances and additional team content like scouting reports.
Far more interesting to me is the fact that teams will pump in fake crowd noise so the players, as well as viewers at home, can get a sense of how excited the crowds would be if they existed.
If you made it this far, you might be interested in knowing that Opening Day is tomorrow (Thursday), with the World Champion Nationals vs the Yankees at 7p ET and the Giants vs the Dodgers at 7p PT.
Bare Bones Software, makers of BBEdit, is one of my favorite software companies — in fact, I’ve been using BBEdit for more than 20 years. BBEdit has been updated to version 13, and is available in the Mac App Store as a subscription! Same great features. Same user experience. You can subscribe in the Mac App Store or purchase perpetual licenses directly from Bare Bones Software. Also, you can still get great merch, including Classic and Rebus T-shirts, enamel pins, and more in their merch store!
Marc Levoy, the researcher who used software to turn Google’s Pixel camera into a powerhouse, has joined Adobe to build a universal camera app, Adobe announced today.
Levoy headed up the team that developed the impressive computational photography technology used in Google’s Pixel smartphones, including features like Night Sight, Portrait Mode, and HDR+.
My basic theory is that Google, institutionally, is bored with Android — and if Google has lost interest in Android generally it’s going to lose interest in Pixels specifically.
Not a big leap to the possibility that Marc Levoy was feeling a bit bored/limited with the future in Google’s computational photography efforts.
Google’s loss is Adobe’s gain. And, if a cool new camera app comes to iOS, Apple’s gain as well.
Apple is being sued for allegedly refusing to help those who have fallen victim to a iTunes gift card scam. An 11-count class action lawsuit has been filed against the company.
Apple is accused of lying when it says that there is no way to trace or refund the value of the cards.
Once you buy the card, the caller then will demand the gift card number and PIN on the back of the card. Those numbers let them immediately get the money you loaded onto the card. And once they’ve done that, the scammers and your money are gone, usually without a trace.
Is Apple responsible for scammers emptying a card of its value? That’s the question that this lawsuit will address. This has been going on long enough, you’d think someone would have come up with a more bulletproof scheme for gift cards.
Is resistance to a new design concern for lack of convenience? Is the day of the gift card coming to an end?
Apple’s VP, Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, and former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa P Jackson, on Medium:
Decades of research have shown that climate change and pollution disproportionately hurt poor communities and communities of color, deepening inequality in the U.S. and around the world.
And:
Since our carbon emissions peaked at 38.4 million metric tons in 2015, we’ve managed to reduce our carbon footprint by 35%. As of 2018, every Apple office, Retail store, and data center has run on 100% clean energy. And today, our facilities and corporate operations worldwide are carbon neutral.
And:
It’s in that spirit that we’re beginning a new chapter in our environmental journey, one that starts with a promise. By 2030, Apple will be 100% carbon neutral. Our comprehensive carbon footprint will net to zero. And we’re sharing a detailed plan for how we’ll get there — so that companies large and small can not only see why we’re doing this, but how we’re doing it.
To business leaders in every industry: the eyes of our children are on us. We can’t talk about equality without curbing pollution, or confine our climate efforts to corporate emissions when our real impacts stretch deep into the supply chain. We have a generational opportunity to help build a greener and more just economy, one where we develop whole new industries in the pursuit of giving the next generation a planet worth calling home.
When you consider Apple’s iPhone 12 and the potential for shipping a much smaller package, leaving out EarPods and charging bricks, keep Apple’s promise in the back of your mind.
Apple today unveiled its plan to become carbon neutral across its entire business, manufacturing supply chain, and product life cycle by 2030. The company is already carbon neutral today for its global corporate operations, and this new commitment means that by 2030, every Apple device sold will have net zero climate impact.
This is an incredibly ambitious announcement. And I have to believe that Apple would not put this out into the world if they didn’t have complete faith that they’d have the ability to be true to their word.
Apple posted these two videos over the weekend, both highlighting the artistic possibilities of the Mac.
The first shows off photographer Tyler Mitchell:
“What can I do with the sweaters I’ve worn on my back.” Tyler Mitchell takes us to his place in Bed-Stuy, as he works on a new portrait series using only elements from his own bedroom. Remote cameras were set up in the fashion photographer’s apartment, capturing his creative process as he shot and edited the series over a 24 hour period. Digging through references, compiling a mood board, capturing the images, scanning them into his MacBook, and editing the selects in Photoshop. Putting the final touches on the portraits just before midnight.
Fascinating to watch the process unfold, all taking place in an apartment with some amazing light, and right off the train tracks. I spent my youngest years living in Queens, right around the corner from the el. Those trains really struck a chord. Beautiful video.
And next up is musician James Blake, putting his MacBook and Logic Pro X through their paces:
“It feels like a dream that I’m sort of walking through and I’m able to affect what happens in it.” James Blake lets us inside his brain as he writes the new song “ASK FOR MORE.” Remote cameras were set up in the GRAMMY® Award winner’s home studio, capturing his entire creative process as he worked on writing, recording and editing the song over a 24 hour period. From time spent crafting a melody at his piano, to looping and pitching the melody and adding layers, instruments and vocals in Logic Pro X on his MacBook, to editing it into a finished song. Completing the track just after 1am.
Owners of Apple Card are reporting Apple is finally expanding the number of credit reference agencies it will report to, with claims the Apple-branded credit card is starting to appear on credit reports generated by Experian.
So far, Apple has limited its reporting of consumer balances to one credit bureau, TransUnion, while no reporting was being made to either Experian or Equifax. While this has been the case for months, it now seems that the reporting is being made to more agencies.
Have an Apple Card? Your credit behavior just got more exposure, with Goldman-Sachs being an extra creditor reporting to Experian.
See also, this Reddit thread of folks reporting Apple Card sightings on their Experian credit reports.
Before the rapid growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, a protocol called Gopher briefly made the internet easy to use by combining the world’s online resources. Here’s what made it special, and why it was quickly eclipsed by the web.
Gopher is a client/server directory system that launched in 1991. It allowed people to quickly browse resources on the internet. When you used a Gopher client, you would see a hierarchical menu of links that either led to documents, telnet-based applications, FTP sites, or other Gopher servers. You could also search across “Gopherspace” to find documents instead of hunting through FTP servers one by one.
