Lots have been written, both seriously and in jest, about whether our AIs spy on us. But why not just ask Siri? Will she lie? This light-hearted experiment has been tried, in the provided link, and the nature of the responses is interesting. Some day, Siri will be a lot smarter, but will the answer be just as blunt? Or more helpful? Right now, ::cough:: it seems more like the game of Eliza.

Algorithms need a conscience in the public sector, according to author Virginia Eubanks. She has a book called Automating Inequality, and she argues that the poor are a testing ground for new technology that increases inequality.

To some extent, we’re used to companies making arbitrary decisions about our lives — mortgages, credit card applications, car loans, etc. Yet, these decisions are based almost entirely on straightforward factors of determination — like credit score, employment and income. In the case of algorithmic determination in social services, there is bias in the form of outright surveillance in combination with forced PII share imposed upon recipients.

The Department of Defense is looking for special AI to help with classification. The DOD issued a request for information (ROI) from the tech industry, looking for help.

Defense IT officials are seeking software that “must be able to make real-time decisions about the classification level of the information and an individual’s ability to access, change, delete, receive, or forward the information based on the credentials of the sending and/or receiving individual, facility, and system.”

Jason Momoa, well known for his role as Khal in Game of Thrones, has been signed for the lead in Apple’s original TV series See. The show is a futuristic “world building drama” written by Steve Knight and directed by Francis Lawrence. Variety says Momoa’s character is “Baba Voss, a fearless warrior, leader and guardian,” which is pretty much what he’s known for playing. That said, Apple isn’t shying away from big-name talent for the shows in its upcoming television series lineup.

Nvidia and MIT have partnered to create a photo AI that can automatically remove noise from images. The system is called Noise2Noise AI and it was trained using 50,000 photos.

In their paper, the researchers show that their AI can successfully remove enough noise to make the pictures usable again, with detail and clarity that’s remarkably close to the source images. The AI could likely find use in software for cleaning up noisy photos captured in low-light conditions on phones and cameras, as well as improving astronomical imagery and MRI scanning.

Although Silicon Valley has changed the world through its proliferation of tech companies, it has also created a bunch of problems, says Antonio Martínez from Wired. He says that Silicon Valley has created a modern caste system.

But it is the vision of the future that San Francisco offers: highly stratified, with little social mobility. It’s feudalism with better marketing. Today’s “sharing” economy resembles the “sharecropping” of yesteryear, with the serfs responding to a smartphone prompt rather than an overseer’s command…Inequality rarely decreases, and when it does it’s often as the result of wars, revolutions, pandemics, or state collapse.

Netflix isn’t holding back on its original content and could spend US$13 billion this year on its shows and movies. To put that in perspective, Apple is moving aggressively with its $1 billion investment in original content and still well above more traditional content creators. David Z. Morris writing at Fortune said,

Netflix will spend $12-13 billion on original programming this year. That’s much more than the $8 billion it planned to spend as of October 2017. It would also be vastly more than legacy studios are spending: HBO spent $2.5 billion on content in 2017, and even CBS spent just $4 billion.

The streaming media company has plans for 82 feature films this year, and could be spending $22.5 billion a year on content by 2022. That moves the bar for Amazon, HBO, Hulu, and now Apple.

An iPhone 8 Plus, in the U.S., with 256 GB of storage goes for US$949. But the that’s the lowest price you’ll pay. Here’s an interesting chart that show how much it’ll cost in many other countries, in equivalent U.S. dollar.s. For example, those in Brazil will pay the equivalent of $1377.  Why? Import taxes.

Actress Rosey Blair and her husband were on a plane recently, and they live tweeted a “love story” between passengers sitting in front of them. It was rife with photos and details to her followers, and many saw it as an invasion of privacy where the people didn’t consent.

Of course, the sexual implication is something [the man is] praised for, while the woman is attacked…There’s another unfortunate dimension to this whole saga that mimics the coercive effect of public marriage proposals: everyone innocently cheers on the romance because it tells a good story, but it places the woman in the invidious position of being the “bad guy” if she says no.

Leif Johnson writes how the App Store changed his life.

All the recent talk about the App Store’s 10th anniversary makes me wonder if I’d have finished it if I had access to the same apps I now enjoy on my iPhone and my iPad. That sometimes makes the frustrations feels almost fun. Discussions of the App Store’s impact tend to focus on how it gave thousands of small-time developers a good way to make money or how it changed our social lives; we give relatively little attention to how it simplified our routines. I don’t think I’d be the same person I am today without it. Heck, I’ll bet the same could be said about you.

Writing for Macworld, Dan Moren wants Apple products to be colorful again. Apple products like the iPhone and IPad come in metallic colors like silver, gray, and gold, but they aren’t as colorful as the products of old with the six colors of the old Apple logo.

The recent chromatic identity of Apple has clearly been one of simplicity and elegance. From the featureless white room in which Jony Ive seems to give all his product spiels to the non-illuminating Apple logo on the latest notebook computers, the company’s design over the past decade and change has often seemed to treat colors as frivolous and silly. Even that six-color Apple logo, long the distinctive badge of the company, was retired in 1998; for the last 15 years or so, it’s merely been a monochromatic silhouette.

China is running headstrong in to surveillance with facial recognition and is already using the technology to identify and arrest criminal suspects. Right now the country is experimenting with facial recognition glasses police can wear to look for potential arrest targets. It’s pretty creepy and growing by leaps and bounds with China expected to have some 300 million cameras installed by 2020. Philip Elmer-DeWitt says on his Apple 3.0 blog that the iPhone and iPad maker is getting in on the game, too. He says:

I’m told by an analyst who tracks headgear technology that Apple is three to five years away from a marketable product. It sounds like the Chinese, unhampered by any privacy concerns—in fact, incentivized to surveil—may get there first.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer, Apple and Samsung Settle 7-Year Patent Battle, Terms Not Known, but Samsung’s smartphone sales growth is slowing. This, from Reuters:

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd estimated on Friday earnings grew at the slowest pace in more than a year in the second quarter, as analysts said weak smartphone sales likely offset record high chip earnings. Samsung shares fell 2 percent as the guidance gave investors insight into how badly the decline in smartphone profitability is hurting the company’s bottom line, after it warned in April of an earnings slowdown amid tougher competition.

In the northern hemisphere, at least. Yes, the Earth is farthest from the Sun, in its slightly elliptical orbit, in the northern hemisphere summer. And so it’s natural to ask why summer gets so warm. That’s a classic astronomy 101 question, and it’s nicely explained in this link at Gizmodo. (Image credit: NASA.) For more, see: “Aphelion Day 2018: Earth Is Farthest from the Sun Today.”

There’s a reason why you can’t stop reading Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. The apps have interfaces designed to be addictive, according to Silicon Valley insiders talking with the BBC. Aza Raskin, a former Jawbone and Mozilla employee and the guy who invented infinite scroll found on social networks, was just one of the many developers who spoke with the BBC for a new documentary program. He said,

It’s as if they’re taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back. Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting.

Social networks need your eyes and your attention to keep revenue coming in, so the idea they would find ways to make us want to stay seems plausible. Other insiders say leaving social networks behind is a lot like quitting cigarettes. It’s no wonder so many people live for Facebook’s “like” button.

It’s summer. We’re outdoors at night more than other seasons. Then, when people think about becoming more familiar with the night sky, the various stars and constellations, they often think that a telescope is required. And while it’s true that good views of planets, nebulae and galaxies do require a telescope, there’s a lot one can learn by an organized effort with the naked-eye. In fact, one can argue that a good familiarity with the constellations is an important starting point for all things astronomical. This linked article has great information on exactly how to become a good naked-eye stargazer