Jack Dorsey and other Twitter executives will have a 30 minute meeting with President Trump about “The health of the public conversation on Twitter.”
“As you know, I believe that conversation, not silence, bridges gaps and drives towards solutions,” Dorsey wrote. “I have met with every world leader who has extended an invitation to me, and I believe the discussions have been productive, and the outcomes meaningful.”
Jack: “Mr. President, please stop threatening people on Twitter.”
Apple is now serious about MacBook keyboard problems some people may have, and repairs at Apple Stores promise next-day turnaround.
Most keyboard-related repairs will be required to be completed in store until further notice. Additional service parts have been shipped to stores to support the increased volume.
These repairs should be prioritized to provide next-day turnaround time. When completing the repair, have the appropriate service guide open and carefully follow all repair steps.
How about some wholesome news for once? Recently, botanists in Hawaii used a drone to find a flower they thought was extinct: Hibiscadelphus woodii.
During the expedition that led to the rediscovery of H. woodii, Wood and Nyberg had hiked hundreds of feet down the Kalalau Valley cliffs, but the difficult terrain prevented them from going any further.
It was then that Nyberg deployed the drone, flying it further down the cliffs, toward the sea, to take a closer look at a specific area of interest. Able to get within a meter or two of the sheer cliff face, he was able to confirm the continued existence of H. woodii.
Sprint and At&T have settled their legal dispute. Sprint sued its rival, accusing AT&T of being “deliberately misleading” in putting a 5G E logo on devices. The legal wrangling may be over, but 9to5Mac points out that not much will change for consumers. The 5G E logo will still appear on iPhones.
AT&T defended itself by saying that 5G Evolution is meant to “simply let customers know when their device is in an area where speeds up to twice as fast as standard LTE are available.” Of course, certain speed tests have cast doubt on the true speeds of 5G E.The lawsuit between Sprint and AT&T is certainly one where we’d like to learn the settlement details. Unfortunately, however, it seems that we’ll simply keep staring at the 5G E logo on our iPhones, with little recourse available.
Remember Vine? The short-form video app was hugely popular until Twitter killed it and TikTok replaced it. Founder Don Hoffman is back though, with a new app called Byte. Techcrunch reported on the Vine reboot, which has begun closed-beta testing.
It will be a long uphill climb for Byte given TikTok’s massive popularity. But if it differentiates by focusing less on lip syncing and teen non-sense so it’s less alienating to an older audience, there might be room for a homegrown competitor in short-form video entertainment. Hoffman tells TechCrunch that he’s emboldened by the off-the-cuff nature of the beta community, which he believes proves the app is compelling even before lots of creative and funny video makers join. He says his top priority is doing right by creators so they’ll be lined up to give Byte a shot when it officially launches even if they could get more views elsewhere.
When podcast app Luminary announced its subscription model and tweeted an image of a bunny with a sign saying “Podcasts don’t need ads,” it faced something of a backlash. The platform will exclusively host some original shows, but it will not have some very popular shows available. Luminary CEO and co-founder Matt Sacks sat down with The Verge to explain what happened, and what’s next for his firm.
What the $100 million venture-backed podcasting company was trying to communicate, Sacks says, is that podcast listeners should have a choice: pay for subscription-based shows without ads or listen to podcasts for free but deal with ads as a price. “We really do feel like what we’re introducing is choice and optionality and trying to help elevate premium and paid podcasting, which would be good for creators and listeners, as well,” he says.
The Product Placement Blog compiled a list of all of the Apple product placements in movies, TV shows, and music videos.
You will find here the most complete list on the web about brands seen in Hollywood movies, TV shows and official music videos, embedded marketing examples and information about them.
It’s 80 pages long, which is notable since Apple doesn’t pay for product placements in television.
The Verge writes about legal issues when an AI composes music.
The word “human” does not appear at all in US copyright law, and there’s not much existing litigation around the word’s absence. This has created a giant gray area and left AI’s place in copyright unclear. It also means the law doesn’t account for AI’s unique abilities, like its potential to work endlessly and mimic the sound of a specific artist.
Not to mention the question of who owns the copyright of this new music. Fascinating discussion here.
Messages posted by an unknown female Microsoft programmer in internal Yammer boards say that white and Asian men are being discriminated against.
To be clear, I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men. I have an ever-increasing file of white male Microsoft employees who have faced outright and overt discrimination because they had the misfortune of being born both white and male.
Microsoft’s 2018 demographic report shows that 55.1% of employees are Caucasian, 31.9% are Asian, and 73.4% are male. Personally, I think it’s a bit telling if you feel oppressed by more equality and diversity.
This morning we heard that JCPenney quietly removed support for Apple Pay from its stores. Now we have a better idea why.
The retailer now claims the move was necessitated by the April 13, 2019 deadline in the U.S. for supporting EMV contactless chip functionality. As of this date, all terminals at U.S. merchants locations that accept contactless payments must actively support EMV contactless chip functionality, and the legacy MSD (magnetic stripe data) contactless technology must be retired. JCPenney was not ready to comply, it seems, so it switched off all contactless payment options as a result. However, it hasn’t ruled out re-enabling them later on, it seems.
We have a deal on the KOBRA Wireless Car Scanner. This device plugs into your car’s on-board diagnostics port to read data on your car’s performance. It then connects with a iOS, Android, or Windows device via Wi-Fi so you can make use of that data. It works on any car made after 1996, and it’s $14.99 through our deal.
Left-wing memes are often very popular on Instagram. They have even made some of the people who share them quite well-off. Now some of those creators want to form a union, according to Vox.
The union, the first major organizing effort for professional meme creators on Instagram, is made up of that latter group, and now has thousands of followers on its official account and an open application process for new members. As Taylor Lorenz notes in the Atlantic, it will probably never be recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that governs unions, but the organizing drive is still very real: Not only does it use traditional union organizing tactics, but the memers have concrete demands they want Instagram to agree to. And with growing membership, they’ll likely have a bit of leverage.
The Indian election is the world’s largest democratic exercise. There is, unsurprisingly, some concern that it could be undermined by fake news. Bloomberg News met Boom Live, an 11-strong team of fact-checkers that make up 1 of the 7 firms working with Facebook’s efforts.
Based on the early tallies, more than 60 percent of India’s 900 million eligible voters are expected to cast ballots between now and May 19, as the center-left Congress Party tries to seize power from the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. As in other elections around the world, paid hacks and party zealots are churning out propaganda on Facebook and the company’s WhatsApp messenger, along with Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and other ubiquitous communication channels. Together with Facebook’s automated filters, Boom’s 11 fact-checkers and its similar-size fellow contractors are the front line of the social network’s shield against this sludge.
Apparently, Apple employs a full-time philosopher named Joshua Cohen. But he doesn’t have permission to talk to the media.
The company hired Joshua Cohen, formerly a political philosophy professor at Stanford University to work at Apple University, an institution created by Steve Jobs in 2008 to offer employees the kind of training typically available at university programs. The specifics of this university are kept tightly under wraps.
Apple has made a good start when it comes to privacy, but there are more private features the company can add. Here are four.
…based on Apple’s marketing focus as of late, which has centered on privacy, it’s reasonable to assume that the company will unveil additional privacy protections for users and their data in its next operating systems. What those privacy protections might be is anyone’s guess–but here are my hopes.
End-to-end encryption for iCloud backups is definitely on my wish list. But it should remain optional, because people who forget their password would be unable to access this kind of backup.
We have a deal on the ChargeHub X5 Elite with Wireless Charging hub. It includes one USB-C charging port, four USB charging ports, and the top is a Qi wireless charging pad. That makes it a one-stop-shop for most of your charging needs, for $59.99.
In Wired’s latest magazine, Clive Thompson writes that for some programmers, efficiency isn’t just a way to make a job easier. It’s aesthetically pleasing.
Many of today’s programmers have their efficiency aha moment in their teenage years, when they discover that life is full of blindingly dull repetitive tasks and that computers are really good at doing them.
I’m not a programmer, but I’m a big fan of efficiency and optimizing my life. I don’t go as far as the “optimized self” movement, but I like to automate whenever possible. The less time you spend doing repetitive tasks, the more you can spend enjoying life.
This is part of Andrew’s News+ series, where he shares a magazine every Friday to help people discover good content in Apple News+.
Roughly 500 million iOS users have been affected by a cyberattack that takes advantage of an iOS Chrome bug.
The attacks are the work of the eGobbler gang, researchers said, which has a track record of mounting large-scale malvertising attacks ahead of major holiday weekends. Easter is coming up, and the crooks are banking on consumers spending a lot more time than usual browsing the web on their phones.
Another research firm says this attack can also affect Safari users. Be careful this weekend.
This week, TikTok got banned in India. Apple removed it from the iOS App Store in the country. However, the video-sharing app remains hugely popular with a young audience worldwide. Bloomberg Businessweek looked at why.
TikTok decides what videos to show by tapping into data, starting with your location. Then, as you start watching, it analyzes the faces, voices, music, or objects in videos you watch the longest. Liking, sharing, or commenting improves TikTok’s algorithm further. Within a day, the app can get to know you so well it feels like it’s reading your mind. That’s why Jade, the Oklahoma teen, mostly sees videos of people dancing, while her mom regularly gets clips of dog tricks.
This week, Facebook banned far-right groups in the UK. These included the likes of Britain First and the English Defence League. At Wired, Matt Reynolds looked at the profound shift by the company this move signalled.
And Facebook says it will go further than just banning these organisations and individuals. It will also go after their followers…This is a dramatic switch for a company that, until a month ago, still talked about itself as a digital “town square” – a space where all voices, including the distasteful and dubious, jostled for attention, free from any interference. It is a seductive ideal that harks back to the early days of the internet and its promise of unfettered freedom of speech.
Apple has hired former Lionsgate Executive Vice President Danielle DePalma. She will be a Senior Film and TV Series Marketing executive, leading on promoting Apple’s forthcoming content. Deadline reported that she will report to Head of Video Marketing Chris Van Amburg.
DePalma was a Lionsgate veteran who spent about a decade at the company before leaving in January. At Lionsgate she previously served as SVP digital marketing and VP new media and marketing, overseeing the digital/social media campaigns for such movies as The Hunger Games franchise and Kick-Ass.
Microsoft closed its eBook store several weeks ago. People lost their books, but at least the company refunded them. Because of this, Michael Kozlowski of Good e-Reader says people are experiencing a “crisis of confidence” in eBooks.
I believe that ebooks are suffering from a crisis of confidence. It is beginning to be quite difficult to trust a retailer to not disappear overnight with your ebooks, no matter how big they are…A recent study published in the journal Electronic Markets found that the vast majority of people felt a constricted sense of ownership of ebooks versus physical books, based on the fact that they don’t have full control over the products.
He also mentions how a lot companies use DRM on eBooks, which factors into the “You license, not own, your eBooks” argument. I’d like to point out that Apple Books doesn’t apply DRM to most if not all of its books. I can take books I buy on there and move it to another service if I want, which makes me feel as if I truly own them.
ZDNet writes:
The term 768k Day comes from the original mother of all internet outages known as 512k Day.
512k Day happened on August 12, 2014, when hundreds of ISPs from all over the world went down, causing billions of dollars in damages due to lost trade and fees, from a lack of internet connectivity or packet loss
This time we’re much better prepared. However,
There will certainly be some network operators and corporate end-user organizations who will be caught unaware and will experience problems…
We have a deal on the Sinji fitness tracker, a device that lets you track activities, monitor sleep, and stay connected—on a budget. It features an IP67 dust and waterproof rating, and includes a heart rate monitor, pedometer, distance walked tracking, and a sleep monitor. It’s $22 through our deal.
