Google is working with authoritarian China to build a censored version of its search engine, completely sh*tting on its old motto “Don’t Be Evil.” With dollar signs in its eyes, Google (and Apple mind you) can’t resist the siren call of dystopia:

The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans.

The planned move represents a dramatic shift in Google’s policy on China and will mark the first time in almost a decade that the internet giant has operated its search engine in the country.

Facebook and Spotify have recently removed some content from Alex Jones from their platforms. In my opinion I think Apple should be next. Recode reports on Spotify’s move:

Infowars founder Alex Jones is getting another slap on the wrist from a major tech company: Spotify, the music streaming service that also streams podcasts, has removed multiple episode of “The Alex Jones Show” for violating the company’s policies around hate speech.

Before I get emails from readers accusing me of political bias (it happened recently) let me give you my take. Regardless of whether Alex Jones is considered alt-right, conservative, or whatever you want to call him, this shouldn’t be a political issue. People from all political sides should support compassion for others, as well as support evidence-based discourse. Alex Jones isn’t compassionate, and many of the things he says aren’t based on evidence.

Here are the coolest space images of the week collected by  digg.com. Highlighted: Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, photographed by the Cassini spacecraft.

Apple’s resistance to Cupertino’s proposed “head tax” on employees paid off because the city backed down from putting it to a vote in November. Mayor Darcy Paul says the city wants more input from businesses before revisiting the tax. Now he wants Apple to help fund a hyperloop line in Cupertino. From the Silicon Valley Business Journal:

[Mayor Paul] said he believes there’s a strong possibility that Silicon Valley tech companies like Apple would ‘heavily subsidize’ construction of a cutting-edge transportation solution in their own back yard and that no new tax should be imposed until that possibility is fleshed out.

Apparently Paul thinks Elon Musk’s hyperloop concept—a sealed tube that transports people at high speed—is the way to bring in more tax revenue.

Japan Display Inc., a Japanese manufacturer known for producing iPhone screens, unveiled some futuristic technology at a recent event.

The presentation, perhaps unintentionally, highlighted the company’s challenges in reducing its reliance on screens for mobile phones, which account for 80 percent of revenue. Samsung Electronics Co. and Sharp Corp. earlier this week reported earnings that took a hit from sluggish global smartphone sales and JDI is due to report first-quarter results on Aug. 8. In addition, Apple is shifting to next-generation organic light-emitting diode displays, which JDI doesn’t produce in mass quantities.

I love me some futurism, and it’s good to see Japan Display start to branch out now that we seem to be in peak smartphone.

CNET looked at Apple’s track record over the past few years to pick the most likely date for the new iPhone announcement and came up with Wednesday, September 12th. That takes into account the days of the week and time in September Apple usually chooses for its iPhone events. Next, they looked at prior announcement proximity to Labor Day. They say,

For the last six years, Apple held its iPhone announcements on either a Tuesday or Wednesday, and usually no later than the second full week of September…For 2018, Labor Day falls on Monday, September 3. So, if Apple follows its recent pattern, the company would announce its new iPhones the following Tuesday or Wednesday: September 11 and September 12.

Considering the negative connotations that go along with September 11th in the United States, that leaves the 12th. Since first deliveries follow about a week and a half later, that means we’ll have new iPhones in our hands on September 21st.

New payment systems abound. Artificial Intelligence mania continues. AIs interrogating other AIs and probing their minds. AIs doing cancer diagnosis. And mostly right but sometimes wrong. Facial recognition bites back. Can we keep up?  It’s all in Particle Debris page 2.

u/beyondthetech recently posted in the Apple subreddit about ways to improve the Phone app. I think it’s an interesting list, and it could improve the iPhone experience.

I certainly believe that these changes are not too difficult to implement, and I’ve been asking Apple for years to make this happen. Maybe CallKit and Do Not Disturb were their first implementations to my request, but honestly, they’re still both very basic and very naive. With everything else in iOS getting more robust and more smart, Apple needs to really take a fresh look at this area and address it much better this time around in time for iOS 12’s release, or at least in a 12.1 release, if they are already time-constrained.

Cyber warfare has three aspects: physical, informational, and cognitive. So writes Richard Forno for The Conversation. It seems to me that cognition would be a subset of informational warfare, instead of being a separate dimension. Cyber tools can be used to target your thoughts and perceptions of reality, and we’re seeing this virtually in real time.

However, I believe this isn’t a new form of war at all: Rather, it is the same old strategies taking advantage of the latest available technologies. Just as online marketing companies use sponsored content and search engine manipulation to distribute biased information to the public, governments are using internet-based tools to pursue their agendas. In other words, they’re hacking a different kind of system through social engineering on a grand scale.

Flash is dead and any remaining support for the former king of online multimedia officially ends in 2020, so Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is urging U.S. government agencies to drop the platform. In a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology he said,

While Flash will continue to exist past this point, it will no longer receive necessary technical support, significantly magnifying its existing cybersecurity deficiencies.

Considering the ridiculously long list of security flaws in Flash, ditching the platform is something the government should’ve done long ago.

Check out this great account from former NeXT employee Chris MacAskill. He talks about how a phone call he made behind then-NeXT CEO Steve Jobs’s back (as you do) to Intel CEO Andy Grove probably played a role in Apple eventually buying NeXT. It’s a long story with lots of anecdotal details about working at NeXT and the things that were happening there in the lead-up to Apple buying the company. I love this stuff, I love the lore and the behind-the-scenes stories of how things happened. Mr. MacAskill isn’t taking all the credit for Apple buying NeXT, but he played a (hidden) role. If you like Apple history, this is a must-read. Here’s just a tiny taste:

The thing I loved most about working in developer relations at NeXT was how Steve could call anyone.

He would burst in my office and say, “I’m gonna call Bill about TrueType,” and gesture for me to follow. A minute later he’d have Bill Gates on the speaker phone with me in fly-on-the-wall mode.

“BUT BILL! You ripped off Adobe and made John cry.” (John Warnock was the CEO of Adobe.)

“Steve, we didn’t want to get into the font business. It’s a nightmare. But Adobe wouldn’t open their fonts until they had competition.”

The White House is working on a proposal for an American GDPR. Over the past month, the Commerce Department has met with representatives of over 80 companies, trade associations, and consumer groups.

The government’s goal is to release an initial set of ideas this fall that outlines Web users’ rights, including general principles for how companies should collect and handle consumers’ private information, the people said. The forthcoming blueprint could then become the basis for Congress to write the country’s first wide-ranging online-privacy law, an idea the White House recently has said it could endorse.

A spokesperson for President Trump said that the administration wanted to achieve “the appropriate balance between privacy and prosperity.” Here’s the Orr Translation: Corporations will continue to erode our privacy with Trump’s blessing.

Scooters are apparently a fad again with middle schoolers. Scooter startups are getting VC cash and attention from big companies like Alphabet. The smart scooters are also tracking your kids and selling their data.

A new blog post from the organization’s Northern California branch analyzes all of the data-collection practices of Spin, Bird, and Lime. To put it mildly, these companies’ policies all seem a bit reckless. For example, all three startups have persistent user tracking, meaning they are following users’ every move from the time they use the scooter until the end of the session. As the ACLU writes, this means it will know if you’re going to a “political protest, or to a religious service, or to see a medical specialist.” And, of course, these companies are keeping this data for an undisclosed amount of time while reserving the right to share it with third parties.

I’ve been interested in ReGen villages for a couple years now. It’s a high-tech, eco-friendly village located in the Netherlands. Vertical farms will provide food, food waste is turned into fish food for local aquaculture, houses filter rainwater, and there’s a village OS platform that uses AI to manage various systems.

The neighborhood works differently than most. Because of the expected arrival of self-driving cars in coming years, and to encourage walking and biking, the houses aren’t designed with parking; a new bus line along the edge of the neighborhood, with a dedicated bus lane, can take residents to the town of Almere or into Amsterdam.

It sounds like a great place to live, and projects like this should be a model for the future. More sustainability and more environmentally-friendly designs.

iMac Pro owners and now 2018 Touch Bar MacBook Pro owners are dealing with an ongoing problem: kernel panics. The Apple-designed T2 processor, which handles encryption along with system verification and Siri commands, is the suspected culprit and the company is looking into a solution. Apple is suggesting a work around for now that’s surprisingly drastic. Digital Trends sums it up saying,

Apple suggests that iMac Pro owners wipe and reload MacOS from scratch, disable FileVault, and disable Power Nap, the latter of which worked for some iMac Pro owners.

Some users are saying they also can’t daisy chain devices, use Secure Boot, use Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapters, use power management, unlock with Apple Watch, or load third-party kernel extensions without triggering kernel panics. For now, it seems the best way to keep these Macs from crashing is to not load software, use security features, or link them to other devices. Sounds like Apple needs to get this problem sorted out right away.