Charlotte Henry

Popular gaming platform Twitch had a bad week last week. A very bad week. First, leading Fortnite streamer  Tyler “Ninja” Blevins left the platform for a rival. Then, it inadvertently promoted porn on the channel he left behind. And that is not Twitch’s only problem. Eurogamer summed it all up:

After Tyler “Ninja” Blevins left Twitch for rival platform Mixer 10 days ago, visitors to his channel were redirected to a variety of other Fortnite streams – and one stream in particular got Twitch into serious trouble. Last night, Blevins tweeted a video criticising how Twitch had turned his channel into an “ad page” – and one of the promoted streams was a porn broadcast. “I’ve been streaming for eight years to build that brand and build that channel”, Blevins said. “There was a porn account that was number one recommended on my channel. And I have no say in any of this stuff.”

Apple increased the team that test-drives its self-driving cars. The team in California has gone from having 110 members in April to 143 members now, macReports noted.

Apple is, currently, testing a total of 69 cars on public roads of California, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The company also has 143 registered safety drivers in the State. This is an increase in drivers since April 24, when Apple had 69 test vehicles and 110 registered drivers. This means that Apple got permits for 33 more self-driving vehicles since April while keeping the same number of cars. The increase suggests that Apple is adding more drivers to the fleet at a steady rate. The new figures show that Apple still has the third-largest autonomous-car test fleet in California.

Huawei is working to find ways to withstand the U.S. – China trade war. Bloomberg News outlined some of its tactics and how it shapes up compared with Apple.

The newly hostile environment is putting to the test not just Apple’s “Designed in California, Assembled in China” slogan, but the overall preparedness of two smartphone-making giants as the decades-old made-in-China model fractures. Here’s a look at how dependent Apple and Huawei are on external suppliers. OS: Apple’s strength has always been the integration of software with hardware, and it has absolute control over iOS. Huawei is trying to do the same with Hongmeng, but it has everything left to prove, starting today. For the foreseeable future, Huawei remains dependent on Android for its mainstream smartphones, especially outside China. Advantage: Apple.

In a piece for Wired, author Chris Stokel-Walker argued that Netflix should fear UK users getting subscription fatigue. He’s right. The same should be true for all the other firms in the UK and elsewhere who have or are planning a video subscription service. That includes Apple.

However, with the number of subscriptions climbing, are we likely to see subscription fatigue? Research by MUSO, an anti-piracy data consultancy, has found that eight in ten European consumers believe they’re already paying too much for content streaming, with two-thirds saying they wouldn’t pay for any more streaming services this year. “I think we’re in an incredible position as an industry where there’s so many things happening this year,” says Chris Elkins of MUSO. “The reality is we’re going into a world of fragmentation, where content is being removed from certain platforms – like Friends and The Office coming off Netflix.”

DeepMind, the Google owned AI firm, is a company on a mission. In its UK cover story this month, Wired went into the company’s new HQ and spoke with CEO Demis Hassabis.

For DeepMind, the emergence of the new headquarters is symbolic of a new chapter for the company as it turns its research heft and compute power to try to understand, among other things, the building blocks of organic life. In so doing, the company hopes to make breakthroughs in medicine and other disciplines that will significantly impact progress in a number of fields. “Our mission should be one of the most fascinating journeys in science,” Hassabis says. “We’re trying to build a cathedral to scientific endeavour.”

Dark mode arrived on the Android version of Apple Music. Cult of Mac reported that the app also introduced time-synced lyrics support.

The new dark mode makes Apple Music easier on the eyes when you’re listening to your favorite tracks in a dimly-lit room at night. And it works just as well as the dark mode in iOS 13. The option inverts Apple Music’s color scheme, but intelligently differentiates things like images and text to prevent everything on-screen from going dark. Time-synced lyrics support is even more impressive. Not only does it let you follow the words to a song in real-time, but it also lets you skip to certain parts of the track by tapping on specific phrases.

Some teens were making thousands of dollars a month running Instagram accounts that shared memes. Then the photo-sharing network shut their accounts down. MarketWatch spoke to one of those affected.

The purge has cost some users thousands of dollars. Ben told MarketWatch his pages earned him $4,000 a month and were his only salary. He made the money through selling shoutouts: Users looking to grow their pages paid Ben to promote those pages on his account. “I don’t have another job as Instagram paid in one week what I would get in one month of an actual job,” Ben said. He did not think it would last forever, however. Ben saved most of the money he earned from his page, but is now looking for another source of income.

Smart camera firm Arlo has added HomeKit support to some of its products, DigitalTrends reported. Interestingly, the top-of-the line Arlo Ultra 4K was not amongst the cameras that got the update.

Unfortunately for buyers of the company’s top-of-the-line cameras, the new connectivity to HomeKit only applies to select Arlo cameras, specifically the popular Arlo Pro and Arlo Pro 2 systems. Owners of the VMB5000 model and the corresponding Arlo Ultra 4K will have to wait a bit longer to add their smart cameras to Apple’s smart home ecosystem. On the bright side, the firmware update reduces the need for Apple HomeKit users to use the Arlo app or its corresponding remote control. The select models of Arlo smart cameras will appear in the directory of other HomeKit accessories in a user’s Home app and can also be controlled using Apple’s digital assistant, Siri, via an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch,or Mac computer.

Amazon expanded its Amazon Scout autonomous delivery service. eDelivery reported that the company started testing the service in Irvine, southern California Wednesday. It initially tested the service back in January 2019, in Snohomish County, Washington.

A small number of the cooler-sized robots will begin delivering from today (7 August) in Irvine, part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, in daylight hours from Monday to Friday . They will follow pre-set delivery routes while accompanied by an Amazon employee. They travel at a walking pace, with the ability to avoid obstacles in their path… Customers in the area order as they normally would via the site or app and can choose from the same delivery options including same-day, one-day and two-day shipping for Prime members.

Apple quietly conducted a record buyback of stock in the second quarter of 2019. It totaled $24 billion. AppleInsider analyzed the move.

It appears clear that Apple expects its share price to grow much higher in the future. So rather than carefully timing its repurchases to only occur when the stock price hits its lowest levels, Apple continues to buy shares back nearly as fast as it can all the time, even as the stock price jumps up and down as it continues to increment higher. Since 2012, Apple has now funded a total of $271.3 billion in stock buybacks. Most of these shares were repurchased at what would today be an incredible discount. While analysts have occasionally picked out a given trough in Apple’s stock price and declared that its buybacks were a huge mistake, it’s hard to imagine in hindsight how Apple could have better invested $271 billion of its past iPhone profits.

Apple is reportedly set to launch a Mac bug bounty program before the end of August. Forbes also reported it handed out special iPhones to top hackers.

The iPhones will be given to the rock star hackers that participate in the Cupertino company’s invitation-only bug bounty program, where participants disclose bugs in Apple products in return for monetary rewards. The payments can go as high as $200,000, as announced at the 2016 Black Hat conference. What makes these iPhones special? One source with knowledge of the Apple announcement said they would essentially be “dev devices.” Think of them as iPhones that allow the user to do a lot more than they could on a traditionally locked-down iPhone. For instance, it should be possible to probe pieces of the Apple operating system that aren’t easily accessible on a commercial iPhone. In particular, the special devices could allow hackers to stop the processor and inspect memory for vulnerabilities. This would allow them to see what happens at the code level when they attempt an attack on iOS code.