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Netflix Announces New 'Latest' Section

Charlotte Henry ·

Netflix unveiled its new ‘Latest’ section Thursday. It provides a personalized list of forthcoming content, TechCrunch reported.

Netflix had confirmed in August that the Latest section would be available on its streaming app for TVs, including Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku, and others. But it also had a similar feature available on Android and is testing the feature on iOS, it said at the time. Today, the company confirms the new tab will now be available on many game consoles and Roku, with smart TVs and other devices getting the upgrade in the next couple of months.

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Facebook Dating Launches in U.S.

Charlotte Henry ·

Mired in data breaches and privacy scandals Facebook has turned to love. It launched its dating service in the U.S. Thursday The Verge reported.

Facebook says it will suggest matches for you based on preferences you express when you create your profile, along with your interests and Facebook activity. The app, which borrows many design elements from the dating app Hinge, allows you to send a “like” and a corresponding message to any profile you encounter on the service. You won’t see your Facebook friends in the app unless you use its “secret crush” feature, which lets you express interest in up to nine Facebook friends (or Instagram followers). If you both like each other, you’ll get a notification letting you know.

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Researchers Test Phones to See if They're Secretly Listening

Andrew Orr ·

Researchers put an iPhone and a Samsung phone into a room, playing cat and dog food advertising for 30 minutes.

The security specialists kept apps open for Facebook, Instagram, Chrome, SnapChat, YouTube, and Amazon with full permissions granted to each platform…They repeated the experiment at the same time for three days, and noted no relevant pet food adverts on the «audio room» phones and no significant spike in data or battery usage.

The results won’t surprise those in the information security industry who’ve known for years that the truth is that tech giants know so much about us that they don’t actually need to listen to our conversations to serve us targeted adverts.

For some people, maybe the belief that phones secretly spy on us is less terrifying than learning how much data these corporations actually have on us.

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Canceling Difficult Content is a Bad Omen for Apple TV+

Charlotte Henry ·

We learned this week that Apple TV+ show Bastards has been scrapped. The show, which starred Richard Gere, is not the first piece of challenging content pulled by Apple. At Cult of Mac, Luke Dormehl made a compelling case as to why this might not be the right approach.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard murmurs about Apple’s family-friendly TV and movie ambitions. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Tim Cook made the call to cancel a semi-autobiographical drama about Dr. Dre… Apple TV+ should arrive this fall at roughly the same time as a bunch of other new streaming services. The biggest of the newcomers, Disney+, will presumably sate many people’s appetite for family-friendly fare. Carving out a niche for Apple TV+ in this crowded environment could mean counter-programming against Disney. Where Disney goes light, Apple could have gone dark. Cupertino’s enormous cash reserves give it the capability to take risks that few others can.

 

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Prepare Your iPhone for Hurricane Conditions

John Martellaro ·

USA Today has a list of excellent tips on how to prepare your smartphone for disaster conditions.

If you’re preparing for a hurricane, your survival plan should include your smartphone. But you’ll want to do a few things in advance to make sure it will work, and actually be helpful in an emergency. And it’s a good time to remember: you won’t be able to rely on your mobile device for everything.

The author’s checklist is impeccable.

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Google Built Fake Webpages Called 'Push Pages' to Defy GDPR

Andrew Orr ·

As part of Google’s DoubleClick/Authorized Buyers advertising system, the company created hidden webpages for advertisers that violate its own policies.

Google Push Pages are served from a Google domain (https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com) and all have the same name, “cookie_push.html”. Each Push Page is made distinctive by a code of almost two thousand characters, which Google adds at the end to uniquely identify the person that Google is sharing information about. This, combined with other cookies supplied by Google, allows companies to pseudonymously identify the person in circumstances where this would not otherwise be possible.

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Apple Prepares to Offer Bonds to Fund Share Buybacks

Andrew Orr ·

Apple is preparing a bond offering to raise money for share buybacks so it doesn’t have to dip into its cash hoard. The company hasn’t offered bonds since 2017.

We estimate the net proceeds from sales of the notes will be approximately $ , after deducting underwriting discounts and our offering expenses. We intend to use such net proceeds for general corporate purposes, including repurchases of our common stock and payment of dividends under our program to return capital to shareholders, funding for working capital, capital expenditures, acquisitions and repayment of debt.

TMO Deals

Pump Up Your Pool Party with This Wireless and Waterproof Speaker: $29.99

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a deal on the Aquathump Waterproof Speaker, a Bluetooth speaker designed for wet environments. It has an IPX7 waterproof rating and can be submerged in water for up to 30 minutes. It also has four hours of playback time in its rechargeable battery. This device is $29.99 through our deal. I’m linking to the black unit in the link below, but there are also deals for a blue model, purple model (shown), and a model called Palms.

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That Apple iPhone 11 Document is Probably Fake

Andrew Orr ·

A document that Twitter account AppleBeta2019 claims is an internal Apple document provides iPhone 11 data like new names, build numbers, and launch dates. Inconsistent information within the document suggests that it’s fake, but we’ll share the link in the interest of our readers.

It seems very unlikely that anyone creating such a document would be aware of marketing names and include said branding in the document, whose only purpose is to mention the software rollout plans. Moreover, files intended for the eyes of retail stores often include watermarking and fingerprinting techniques to help Apple detect leaks. This PDF seemingly lacks any such identifying markers.