A Morgan Stanley analyst wrote that Apple TV+ will become a $9 billion a year business with 136 million paid subscribers by 2025.
Fortnite Breaks Twitch Records With Black Hole Event
Fortnite caused quite a stir when it pulled a stunt showing the wildly popular game disappearing into a black hole. In fact, it broke streaming site Twitch’s viewing record, VentureBeat reported.
Twitch revealed that Fortnite broke the site’s peak concurrent record on a single game on October 13. That was when all of Fortnite, including even the start menu, got sucked into a black hole. The curious and surprising event drew a max of 1.7 million concurrent viewers… No one knew exactly what was going on with the black hole, and that intrigue helped attract viewers. Rumor also suggested that once Fortnite came back, it would launch with a new map. That’s what happened when Season 2 came online.
IBM Gets Sniffy at Google's Quantum Supremacy Claim
It is fair to say IBM was not impressed with Google’s declaration of Quantum Supremacy. In post full of withering put-downs, the computer giant refuted many of the claims made in a paper published in Nature, and welcomed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Recent advances in quantum computing have resulted in two 53-qubit processors: one from our group in IBM and a device described by Google in a paper published in the journal Nature. In the paper, it is argued that their device reached “quantum supremacy” and that “a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task.” We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced. Because the original meaning of the term “quantum supremacy,” as proposed by John Preskill in 2012, was to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, this threshold has not been met.
Amazon Fire TV Stick now Offers Apple TV App
Amazon announced today that the Fire TV Stick (2nd gen) and Fire TV Stick 4K now both offer the Apple TV app.
Apple Patents Discuss Digital Government ID
Two new Apple patents discuss methods for replacing paper documents with a digital government ID, and how they could be verified.
US Patent applications numbered 20190325125 and 20190327228, both titled “Identity Credential Verification Techniques,” follow previous reports of Apple hoping to make iPhones central to ID security.
The two new patent applications separate out the functions of such systems into the creation or collection of a user’s identity details, the later authentication of that ID, and then the user’s ability to provide this detail on request.
I’m normally all about privacy but personally I look forward to the day when such documents are digital.
AT&T Customers Hit By Weeks of Voicemail Problems
AT&T Customers have been having voicemail issues for weeks. The Verge tried valiantly to get to the bottom of what is going on, but the situation is not getting much clearer.
AT&T has been experiencing a weeks-long voicemail outage affecting some customers across the country. But it’s hard to tell exactly what’s causing the outage, or how long until it will be fixed — and AT&T is saying conflicting things about what’s going on. Here’s what the company told us, when we asked “A recent software update to some devices may be affecting our customers’ voicemail. We are working with the device manufacturer to issue a patch to resolve this and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.” That statement seems to suggest that only a single phonemaker is affected, and that phonemaker might share the blame for the outage — but that wouldn’t make sense, because AT&T customers are reporting a wide array of different phones are having the same issue.
CNN to Challenge Apple News+ With Digital News Service
CNN is set to launch a digital news curation service to challenge Apple News+, which is currently known internally as NewsCo.
The Apple TV+ and Apple Originals Preview Show - ACM 523
Charlotte Henry joins Bryan Chaffin to talk about Apple TV+, Apple Originals, Apple’s role in the industry, the evolution of original streaming content, and a whole lot more—all in preparation for the November 1st launch of Apple TV+.
The Complete iOS 13 and SwiftUI Developer Bundle: $19
We have a deal on the The Complete iOS 13 and SwiftUI Developer Bundle, a package of developer training courses for iOS 13 and SwiftUI. It includes four full training courses with 49 hours of content, and you get the lot for $19 through our deal.
Travel Platform Autoclerk Just Leaked 179GB of Military Data
Hosted on AWS servers, Autoclerk leaked 179GB of military data containing sensitive personal data of users and hotel guests.
The most surprising victim of this leak wasn’t an individual or company: it was the US government, military, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Our team viewed highly sensitive data exposing the personal details of government and military personnel, and their travel arrangements to locations around the world, both past and future. This represented a massive breach of security for the governmentagencies and departments impacted.