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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.

LG screen issues may spell trouble for Apple. The supplier has cut its investment plans out of concern for the global smartphone market. It recently posted a second quarterly loss in a row because of bad display prices.

LG said it would trim investment by 3 trillion won ($2.7 billion) from what was planned by 2020, without revealing its total or previous capex targets. It also warned that it could adjust production in South Korea and China in response to trade disputes between Washington and Beijing.

The investment cut would not impact plans to “speed up the shift” from LG’s mainstay liquid crystal display (LCD) business toward next-generation organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels, the company said.

This isn’t doom and gloom for Apple, but it does mean the company will have to keep relying on Samsung for OLED iPhone X screens.

Reports claim Apple is introducing more iPhone colors this fall, but not everyone is agreeing on what those will be. First, sources said we’d get blue, gold, grey, orange, and red. Now Macotakara sources are saying (english translation) the colors are black, blue, orange, taupe, and yellow. Red, at least according to their sources, isn’t on the list. Assuming the sources are right—regardless of which colors we really get—this year’s iPhone lineup looks to be much brighter.

Apple will reportedly introduce 5.8-inch, 6.1-inch, and 6.5-inch display iPhone models this fall, but you won’t be able to get all three at launch. Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty says the rollout is coming in September, but the 6.1-inch model won’t be available until October. Barron’s quoted from her investor note:

We currently see no delay in the ramp of Apple’s upcoming flagship 5.8″ or 6.5″ OLED iPhones. However suspected issues with LED backlight leakage have caused a 1 month delay in mass production of the 6.1″ LCD iPhone, although this is down from a 6-week delay baked into the original production forecast, according to suppliers.

That’s raising concerns about overall iPhone sales, which sounds a lot like fears investors had last year when the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus launched at a different time than the iPhone X. That turned out to be a non-issue for sales, and odds are that’s how sales will play out this fall, too.

Indeed, the nanobots in this MIT research are primitive, but the present and future prospects look to be amazing. “The first [component of the aerosol] is a colloid, an extremely tiny insoluble particle or molecule…. The second part of the sensor is a complex circuit containing a chemical detector built from a two-dimensional material, such as graphene. When this detector encounters a certain chemical in its environment, its ability to conduct electricity improves. The circuit also contains a photodiode, a device that can convert ambient light into electric current. This provides all the electricity needed to power the circuit’s data collection and memory.” This is fascinating research, well explained in the link. It will open new doors.

It involves scraper bots and the ways in which retailers use them against rivals.

For retailers, scraping can be a two-way street, and that’s where things get interesting. Retailers want to see what their rivals are doing, but they want to prevent rivals from snooping on them; retailers also want to protect intellectual property like product photos and descriptions, which can be scraped and reused without permission by others. So many deploy defenses to subvert scraping. One technique: showing different prices to real people than to bots. A site may show the price as astronomically high or zero to throw off bots collecting data.

Machines making machines and fighting other machines. How perverse.

You can use Apple Pay for eBay purchases starting this fall. That’s great news for Apple and its contactless payment platform, but not so much for PayPal. From the Bloomberg piece:

EBay gives Apple Pay a credibility jolt in the digital wallet space that online shoppers have been slow to embrace since using credit cards online and in stores isn’t that difficult. EBay could shore up some sales for loyal iPhone users who occasionally back out of purchases when Apple Pay isn’t accepted. Apple gets a small fee from transactions made on the platform.

Of course, PayPal most likely saw this coming since eBay has been openly moving away from the online payment processing company since the two split in 2015.

Twitter is home to alt-right trolls, neo-Nazis, and then there’s Alex Jones. Will Oremus writes about Twitter’s free speech problem (problem is my opinion).

The Twitter executive leading these moderation efforts is Vijaya Gadde, the company’s legal, public policy, and trust and safety lead. I recently interviewed Gadde on Slate’s technology podcast, If Then, where we discussed Twitter’s current approach to harassment, hate speech, and misinformation; whether the social network’s very structure encourages these problems; and why conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are still allowed to have Twitter accounts.

If you want to see a good example of platform moderation, look to r/AskHistorians on Reddit. Twitter and Facebook need to pay attention.

On 31 July 2018, the planet Mars will be closer to Earth than it has been in 15 years. Technically, it’s called opposition, and the distance will be 35.7 million miles (57.6 million kilometers.) Look south in the late evening, west of the constellation Sagittarius, to see the dazzling red planet. Even a small telescope will bring out some detail, polar cap, etc. And check with your local planetarium for a special observing event. This NASA doc has the details.

Have we reached peaked smart home? Craig Lloyd writes that we have, and there are a couple of things holding the industry back, like competing standards, expensive devices, and problems with voice control.

There’s a problem with the smarthome industry—multiple problems, actually. And after experiencing a huge boom over the last few years, smarthome as a whole has reached a plateau of sorts.

Don’t get us wrong; smarthome technology is a really exciting market, and it’s become so popular that big players like Amazon and Google have dived head first into offering comprehensive smarthome product lines. The thing is, smarthome in general still has a long way to go.

Jaron Lanier is a VR pioneer, musician and author and he’s been around Silicon Valley for most of his life. He has a new book called Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and he takes a look at social media that was supposed to “connect humanity” but instead divides us. His argument is to delete social media accounts.

“If info-consumers see the world through agent’s eyes, then advertising will transform into the art of controlling agents, through bribing, hacking, whatever,” Lanier wrote, presciently. “You can imagine an arms race” between armor-plated agents and hacker-laden ad agencies. Lovely . . . An agent’s model of what you are interested in will be a cartoon model, and you will see a cartoon version of the world through the agent’s eyes.”

Why did Planet of the Apps tank? It’s not because it wasn’t compelling or that it was poorly edited; it’s because Apple sucked at marketing the series. Or at least that’s what Gary Vaynerchuk says. Business Insider caught his comments from an Ask Gary Vee video. Vaynerchuk, who was one of the celebrity business mentors on the show, said,

I was on an Apple show, ‘Planet of the Apps,’ Gwyneth [Paltrow], Will[.i.am], Jessica Alba, and me. And Apple didn’t use me or Vayner to do the marketing, and did everything wrong. Apple!

He goes on to say he was frustrated during Apple’s marketing meetings, Apple did “everything wrong” with its marketing, and Jimmy Iovine should’ve been more involved. Considering how flat the show was, it’s hard to imagine any level of marketing would’ve helped make the show a success.

Laurene Powell Jobs invested some of her immense fortune in The Atlantic magazine in 2017. If you’ve been wondering what she’s been up to since, Politico (via Philip Elmer-DeWitt) reported a major expansion of The Atlantic’s political coverage, including 10 new job openings. From Politico:

The Atlantic is posting 10 new jobs today, including three White House reporters and two Pentagon reporters. There are also new openings to cover the State Department, intelligence, immigration and politics. The Washington hiring spree is part of a broader expansion announced in February under new majority owner Laurene Powell Jobs and Atlantic Media chairman David Bradley.