Netflix And YouTube Reducing Streaming Quality in Europe to Help Reduce Network Strain

Netflix and YouTube are going to reduce their streaming quality for the next month, CNN reported. They are aiming to help reduce strain on networks as more-and-more people are forced to work from home due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Both companies said the measures will affect all video streams for 30 days. «We estimate that this will reduce Netflix traffic on European networks by around 25% while also ensuring a good quality service for our members,» a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement. A spokesperson for Google (GOOGL), which owns YouTube, said: «We will continue working with member state governments and network operators to minimize stress on the system, while also delivering a good user experience.» The changes follow appeals from EU officials for streaming services and individual users to ditch high definition video to prevent the internet from breaking. With so many countries on forced lockdowns to fight the spread of the virus, hundreds of millions working from home and even more children out of school, the officials were concerned about the huge strain on the internet.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkYUSeAs4mE&feature=emb_logo

Google: “We Don’t Sell Your Data, We Just Monetize It”

One way to avoid the California Consumer Privacy Act is to claim that you don’t sell data. This is what Google has seemingly done.

Google monetizes what it observes about people in two major ways: It uses data to build individual profiles with demographics and interests, then lets advertisers target groups of people based on those traits. It shares data with advertisers directly and asks them to bid on individual ads.

As I tweeted yesterday, there is no difference between selling “access” to data and selling data “directly.” In both scenarios, people are products for advertisers. Although I’m sure lawsuits have been won and lost on lesser technicalities.

Watch This Full Bruce Springsteen Set on Apple Music For The First Time

Bruce Springsteen’s entire 2009 London Calling: Live In Hyde Park set is available in entirety for the first time on Apple Music. The set was filmed at the Hard Rock Calling festival. It kicks-off, naturally, with The Clash’s London Calling, before plowing through a host-of Springsteen classics. For those without an Apple Music subscription, you can now also watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Comparing the PS5 and the Xbox Series X

Time at home making you fancy a new games console? Wired has put what we know about the forthcoming devices head-to-head.

Several of the Xbox Series X and PS5 specs sound similar. They have fast all-SSD storage, 16GB GDDR6 RAM and both a CPU and GPU made by AMD. But if you a little deeper, their differences become apparent. To simmer it down to a reductive analogy: the PS5 is nimble while the Xbox Series X is out to win with brute force power. The PS5 uses incredibly intelligent hardware optimisation and custom silicon to tease remarkable performance out of its core components. But the Xbox Series X has a more powerful GPU, which is the first metric by which any console is usually judged. Their hardware belongs to the same family, though. They have AMD Zen 2 generation CPUs and AMD Navi-based graphics chipsets. The latter will share some hardware with PC graphics cards not even released yet.

Is Apple the Company That Can Transform the AR Industry?

Lucas Matney wrote for TechCrunch and asked if Apple can keep the AR industry alive.

AR startups have already been struggling and hardware efforts have largely cratered. The software platforms have had some success building what Apple hasn’t or won’t for niche enterprise customers, but as the economic realities shift, all bets are off.

First, I don’t think there’s much of an AR industry right now to keep alive. We have a scattering of AR features on iPhones and Androids, but right now it still seems niche. Second, in my biased opinion as an Apple blogger, I think Apple is the one to truly make AR mainstream. As an example, Apple didn’t invent the cellphone, but the iPhone transformed our lives and the cellphone industry. For the company to do the same with AR, we need an AR headset.

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Craig Federighi Demonstrates Trackpad Support in iPadOS

Apple’s Senior Vice President, Software Engineering, Craig Federighi stars in a new video, published on The Verge. In it, he demonstrates trackpad support in iPadOS. The way the cursor changes is particularly clever, I think.

The iPad’s UI is powerful, but in many ways it’s difficult to learn, in part because so many of us still have desktop UI paradigms in our heads. One interesting thing you can’t do is just have a bunch of traditional windows like you’re used to having on a desktop or even a Windows tablet. Apple is sticking to its guns on its attempt to rethink how we move and rearrange windows on the iPad screen, with stuff like split screen and Slide Over. For better or worse (and I think for the better), the new trackpad features don’t turn the iPad into a Mac. Whether any of that radically changes this year with iPadOS 14 is anybody’s guess. Federighi himself recently said, “If you like what you’ve seen us do with iPadOS, stay tuned, we’re going to keep working on it.”