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.
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.
Macs with Apple Silicon will largely be faster than existing notebooks. This isn’t too far-fetched, given Apple’s claims about the superior performance of the 2018 iPad Pro when it was announced. If the iPad Pro is faster than most PC laptops, wouldn’t it stand to reason that even the slowest of the new generation of Macs would be as fast or faster than the competition?
Let’s not forget how Apple’s pride factors in to this transition. If Apple releases a Mac that’s not any faster than the Intel-based competition, that reflects poorly on the prowess of Apple’s processor design. I firmly believe that Apple would never initiate a processor transition like this unless it was confident that its chips would end up looking like world-beaters.
How this plays out will be interesting but as Snell says, it’s a mortal lock they will be faster than their equivalent Intel counterparts.
The most important thing to understand about the role Arm processor architecture plays in any computing or communications market — smartphones, personal computers, servers, or otherwise — is this: Arm Holdings, Ltd. owns the design of its chips, and the architecture of their instruction sets, such as 64-bit Arm64. For its customers who build systems around these chips, Arm has done the hard part for them.
Apple Silicon is the phrase Apple presently uses to describe its own processor production, beginning last June with Apple’s announcement of the replacement of its x86 Mac processor line. In its place, in Mac laptop units that are reportedly already shipping, will be a new system-on-a-chip called A12Z, code-named “Bionic,” produced by Apple using the 64-bit instruction set licensed to it by Arm Holdings. Again, Arm is not the manufacturer but the designer of the processing cores and other on-chip parts. In this case, Arm isn’t the designer either, but the producer of the instruction set around which Apple makes its original design.
I don’t know if it’s everything you need to know but there is a lot of information here.
Do you remember your childhood phone number? How about saying your name backwards? Dave has all kinds of questions today. We also talk about Apple Music lyrics, Twitter hacking, and Apple News+ audio before Dave tells a wonderful story about iPhone and spending some time with his dad.
This starts with a retelling of the hack story, but that’s just the start. The real juice starts down below that.
People within the SIM swapping community are obsessed with hijacking so-called “OG” social media accounts. Short for “original gangster,” OG accounts typically are those with short profile names (such as @B or @joe). Possession of these OG accounts confers a measure of status and perceived influence and wealth in SIM swapping circles, as such accounts can often fetch thousands of dollars when resold in the underground.
And:
In a post on OGusers — a forum dedicated to account hijacking — a user named “Chaewon” advertised they could change email address tied to any Twitter account for $250, and provide direct access to accounts for between $2,000 and $3,000 apiece.
Great Dalrymple’s Beard!!! That can’t be real, can it?
Lucky225 said that just before 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, he received a password reset confirmation code via Google Voice for the @6 Twitter account. Lucky said he’d previously disabled SMS notifications as a means of receiving multi-factor codes from Twitter, opting instead to have one-time codes generated by a mobile authentication app.
But because the attackers were able to change the email address tied to the @6 account and disable multi-factor authentication, the one-time authentication code was sent to both his Google Voice account and to the new email address added by the attackers.
“The way the attack worked was that within Twitter’s admin tools, apparently you can update the email address of any Twitter user, and it does this without sending any kind of notification to the user,” Lucky told KrebsOnSecurity. “So [the attackers] could avoid detection by updating the email address on the account first, and then turning off 2FA.”
Lucky said he hasn’t been able to review whether any tweets were sent from his account during the time it was hijacked because he still doesn’t have access to it
Read the whole Krebs on Security post via the headline link. Fascinating and not a little scary. Amazing to me so little damage was done.
As I’ve said before, not convinced that this was the end of this particular misadventure. Would not be surprised if this was just some misdirection to hide a more critical unlocking event that will rear its head in the future.
This is just a great watch, Rene Ritchie presents a master class on Apple’s history with Arm and what it means today. If you have any interest in the Mac’s path to Apple silicon, this is incredibly informative and not too jargony.
Apple on Thursday released a note on its developer website that the company is updating its coding terminology. The changes will be across the company’s ecosystem.
“At Apple, we’re working to remove and replace non-inclusive language across our developer ecosystem, including within Xcode, platform APIs, documentation, and open source projects,” according to the note.
It’s clear that Apple has been working on these changes for months because they started appearing in documentation and betas during its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in June. You can’t make that kind of a switch on the fly with a couple of days’ notice. For example, Apple is now using terms such as “allow list” and “deny list” in its documentation.
Of particular note to developers is Apple’s APIs—you’ll want to keep an eye on this.
“Developer APIs with exclusionary terms will be deprecated as we introduce replacements across internal codebases, public APIs, and open source projects, such as WebKit and Swift,” Apple said on its website. “We encourage you to closely monitor deprecation warnings across your codebases and to proactively move to the latest APIs available in the platform SDKs.”
It’s good to see Apple being proactive about making these changes.
Camo is a new app for iPhone and iPad that allows you to repurpose your mobile device’s camera as a pro-quality webcam for your Mac that works with all your favorite applications.
Users can choose which lens to use on their iPhone, adjust video zoom, and control individual settings like saturation, exposure, temperature, and contrast. The iPhone’s flash can be controlled to adjust lighting, and users can even jump between multiple iOS devices during a call.
Out of the box there is a massive list of applications that Camo supports. This includes Zoom, Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Slack, Google Chrome, WebEx Teams, QuickTime, and many others. There are more than 40 in total. At the moment FaceTime is left off the list, but is on the roadmap.
I’ve been a beta tester for Camo for a couple of weeks and, while it works mostly as advertised, $40/year to rent camera software seems steep for personal use considering simply plugging your iPhone into your Mac via USB and using the latest version of QuickTime accomplishes the same thing for free.
The biggest “advantage” Camo has is the ability to make adjustments to video zoom, saturation, exposure, etc. But if you already have good lighting, you may not need those features.
Just an FYI from a professional user of the software.
A Twitter insider was responsible for a wave of high profile account takeovers on Wednesday, according to leaked screenshots obtained by Motherboard and two sources who took over accounts.
And:
“We used a rep that literally done all the work for us,” one of the sources told Motherboard. The second source added they paid the Twitter insider. Motherboard granted the sources anonymity to speak candidly about a security incident. A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that the company is still investigating whether the employee hijacked the accounts themselves or gave hackers access to the tool.
And:
After a wave of account takeovers, screenshots of an internal Twitter user administration tool are being shared in the hacking underground.
And this response from Twitter:
After the publication of this piece, Twitter said in a tweet that “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
Were the employees duped by social engineering? Or was there complicity here, was a Twitter insider paid, as indicated by the article.
Also, there is some question as to whether the bitcoin scam was the hackers’ endgame. Or if access to the accounts opened a door that could be exploited later.
Terrific take on the iOS 14 beta, bike elevation data, and the benefits that came to wheelchair users. I’m hoping the Apple Maps and Accessibility team gets a look at this video, both for the bravo moment, as well as for the suggestions made for future releases.
Fantastic take from Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall). Just a few highlights from a much longer piece:
Apple has now grown up and realized it is not just about using content to sell devices. Eventually, those devices will stop being as profitable as they are now, but content (and the financial value of that content) lives forever.
And:
The pieces are now finally in place and Apple is steering itself into a new direction. It is showing the industry and shareholders that they have a real roadmap in place, and by next year (COVID-19 potentially notwithstanding), the company thinks it can (at a higher level) compete with the Netflix machine.
The “pieces” being the foundational elements of making and acquiring content, with Tom Hanks and Greyhound as a critical moment.
Greyhound being acquired and launching was step one – and again, make no mistake, the pandemic allowed Apple to basically bypass the lead-up to that step, because as mentioned, it had an award-level film literally drop in its lap. It also doesn’t hurt that this is going to be a very weak year for films because of all the delays, so the bar is not the same as in the past.
And:
Content is king, and Apple is putting together high-level packages that could siphon off projects that originally seemed earmarked for the Netflix pipeline.
