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Apple has hired designer Andrew Kim. Mr. Kim first got traction back in 2012 for creating a design language for Microsoft as an experiment.

His LinkedIn profile says that he joined the company in December of this year, while his Instagram confirms that his first day working at Apple Park was last Tuesday. Along with the recent news of Tesla’s chief vehicle engineer returning to Apple, Kim’s move will certainly stoke speculation that Apple is once again working on an actual car.

While his hiring is certainly interesting, I personally don’t see this as evidence of Apple’s car project, at least not a consumer car. I think the project was for their fleet of Apple Maps vehicles.

There’s a short article on Medium where the author explains how iOS push notifications work. Apple added push notifications in 2009.

Push notifications were introduced to the greater public by Apple in 2009 to solve the problem of wanting to receive messages in real time without having to run the entire app in the background. Until then, there were two predominant methods of sending notifications to applications.

There aren’t a lot of technical details but that makes it easier for people to understand.

If you’ve ever had a jailbroken iOS device you’ll be familiar with the Cydia app store. But Cydia’s creator Saurik says it’s being shut down after a bug was discovered on the platform that put user data at risk.

The reality is that I wanted to just shut down the Cydia Store entirely before the end of the year, and was considering moving the timetable up after receiving the report (to this weekend); this service loses me money and is not something I have any passion to maintain…

Nowadays I’m surprised to hear that people still jailbreak. But back in the day it was a bit more relevant. I remember jailbreaking my 5th gen iPod touch back in 2011.

OSXDaily has a cool tip on how to put an iOS Linux shell on your iPhone or iPad. It involves installing an app called iSH through TestFlight. You can also side load it.

In case it’s not obvious, iSH is not a full version of Linux with a window manager and GUI like Ubuntu for iPad or iPhone, it’s just a shell, but it is by far the most functional local command line environment in iOS that is currently available.

Sounds like a fun weekend project for all you Terminal tinkerers 😉

Carriers insist that 2020 will be the year of 5G. Apple says it won’t have 5G iPhones until 2020. But it’s going to take years for widespread rollout.

The industry is doing its best to hype 5G up as The Next Big Thing™, but 5G hardware in 2019 is going to be a decidedly first-generation affair. Early adopters for 5G will have to accept all manner of tradeoffs. And when there might not even be 5G reception in your area, it might be better to just wait the whole thing out for a year or two.

4G LTE will remain the dominant spectrum for a long time. There are a lot of problems with 5G millimeter-wave broadband, and my opinion is that we won’t see America fully 5G until 2030 or so.

Apple Pay adoption in Australia has been slow because of tough negotiations. However, CommBank will be supporting the payment service starting in January 2019.

Currently you can order and activate a CommBank PayTag for your iPhone with a one-off fee of $2.99. CommBank PayTag is a small sticker, around a third of the size of a credit card.  The PayTag is attached to the back of your iPhone, allowing you to make Tap & Pay purchases using your phone.

I’ve seen a lot of these headlines. The latest one is from FastCompany: “If these insanely good athletes can give up meat, so can you.” Is that enough to fix climate change? Nope.

The whole point of Markkanen’s campaign with Neste, called #DontChoke, is to ask people to pledge to take simple actions to decrease their personal carbon footprint.

While I don’t doubt that giving up meat would be better, we also need to take a good, hard look at our rich overlords. Example: This study found that 10% of rich people are responsible for 50% of carbon emissions, whereas 50% of poor people are responsible for 10%. Nice symmetry.

CNBC learned that Apple has up to 50 doctors working for it as it continues its move into health tech. The report said that some of the physicians operate at very senior levels of the firm, including one who works closely with COO Jeff Williams.  Many continue to see patients as well as working for Apple. While a large number of the doctors work on the Apple Watch, some work at Apple’s AC Wellness primary care group, which cares for its employees.

These hires are not just for show, according to people familiar with the doctors and their roles. Many haven’t disclosed their role at Apple at all, which is commonplace at a company that prides itself on secrecy. One example is Stanford pediatrician Rajiv Kumar, who has worked there for several years. CNBC was able to locate 20 physicians at Apple via LinkedIn searches and sources familiar, and other people said as many as 50 doctors work there. Apple has more than 130,000 employees globally.

Keepsafe is launching a phone number lookup service. Text “Hello” to (855) 228-4539 and it will send you a small report of public data associated with your phone number.

Keepsafe co-founder and CEO Zouhair Belkoura said that while marketers are able to access this information with relative ease, it’s difficult for consumers to check. “We said, ‘Why don’t we make it super easy?’” he said. “Here’s a number you can text that tells you what information is publicly available.”

I’m pleased to report that my phone number isn’t publicly associated with certain information in any way, like my name, home address, age, gender, carrier, and associated people. In my privacy score, they did figure out what carrier I use, as well as the zip code of my former home town. But again, no actual address. Although it sounds like Keepsafe uses your number for marketing, in the ultimate act of irony.

Vitaminwater is willing to pay US$100,000 to anyone who can give up their smartphone for an entire year. If you last six months you’ll get US$10,000.

The contest rules clarify that your cell phone is likely a smartphone if it can get on the internet and texting is a pleasant experience. It also clarifies that tablets also aren’t allowed and neither is using someone else’s smartphone. The rules don’t go into detail about how the year-long technology abstinence will be proven, but the company indicates that a lie detector test is involved.

As tempting as $100k sounds I wouldn’t be able to give up my iPhone for a year.

Last week DuckDuckGo published a study examining the amount of Google bias in products like Google Search. CEO Gabriel Weinberg then told Business Insider:

What [our study] does reveal, or at least suggests, is that Google’s collection and use of personal data, including location, which is then used to filter specific search results, is having an effect akin to the effects of a political bias. That is an important nuance often missed in these discussions.

First, there’s a big difference between what a study suggests, and what it reveals. Language is important. Second, like other studies, the first one is interesting, but more studies need to be done in the form of peer review. I’d be interested to see one from an independent party that doesn’t have Google as a competitor.

Scout FM is a podcast radio service for iOS, and yesterday it released a feature called Station Creator. It lets users create their own personalized FM stations.

Once you have created a station, Scout FM does all the work for you. The station will automatically pick up new episodes and then play them in the order of your fondness to the show based on your listening habits. You can add or remove shows at any time.

I think it’s a cool concept, and it works differently than traditional podcast apps where you do everything manually.

Stalkerware is a term given to apps that let someone spy on your smartphone activity. They’re also called “spouseware” because they tend to be used by abusers to spy on their partners.

Most of this software ends up on a device through one of two ways: A phishing attack (email or text links that contain viruses and trick you into clicking on them by pretending to be something/someone else), or physical access to the device.

The article is a good read with tips for people in abused relationships.

ISPs tell the FCC that poor people don’t deserve fast internet speeds. It wouldn’t be fair on these corporations otherwise.

In a letter [PDF] recording a meeting between the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) and the legal advisors to two FCC commissioners, the industry group “emphasized that the Commission’s goals would be better served by directing support to areas that lack any service at all and those that have access only below 10/1 Mbps.”

I’m continually amazed at the human capacity to be giant d*cks to each other. The amount of hatred leveled at poor people in this country is also a bit scary.