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Huawei Ban Could Lead to Drop in Global Phone Sales

Charlotte Henry ·

Analyst’s Canalys reduced down their estimates for global smartphone shipments in a new report. AppleInsider reported that they now expect sales in 2019 to total 1.35 billion units. That is down 3.1% from the 1.39 billion units sold in 2018. The Huawei ban is a key factor in the drop in sales.

If found to be correct, the 2019 forecast would be a continuation of the industry’s decline, following a year-on-year contraction of 4.5 percent in 2018 from 2017. Canalys does not break down the figures to relate to specific companies, but in its post it spends a lot of time discussing Huawei, the main subject of the US measures. The firm’s base assumption will be that restrictions on Huawei will be “imposed stringently” once the 90-day reprieve expires, which will dramatically affect its ability to roll out new devices in the short term.

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Pl@ntNet is a Social Network for Plant Lovers

Andrew Orr ·

First created in 2009, Pl@ntNet is a social network for plant lovers, as well as a plant identification app.

Once a user makes an identification (or marks the plant as unknown), they submit their photos to the Pl@ntNet community. Thousands of professional botanists and flora-philes scan the stream of new observations to verify a species, or suggest a new one. If a person confirms your observation, a little green “crowd” icon appears. Your score rises as more people validate your labels, although a few users are certified to train the algorithm without community validation.

I haven’t used this yet but I’ll definitely check it out. I also love iNaturalist. It’s not really a social network, but it can identify both plants and animals.

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Bypassing macOS Security With Synthetic Clicks

Andrew Orr ·

Security researcher Patrick Wardle found he can bypass macOS security by using synthetic clicks built with AppleScript.

Typically apps are signed with a digital certificate to prove that the app is genuine and hasn’t been tampered with. If the app has been modified to include malware, the certificate usually flags an error and the operating system won’t run the app. But a bug in Apple’s code meant that that macOS was only checking if a certificate exists and wasn’t properly verifying the authenticity of the whitelisted app.

Mr. Wardle refers to this as a “second stage” attack, because the hacker or malware needs access to your Mac to exploit this bug.

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News+: The App Store Enables Spying, Tracking, and Analytics

Andrew Orr ·

In the latest issue of Fast Company magazine, Mark Wilson writes about the business of spying, advertising, and analytics that the App Store enables.

[Apple] designed a dead-simple interface that, to this day, allows users to sign away contacts, location data, and camera and microphone access with a single tap as they install an app. Apple also created efficient APIs—the software connecting its hardware to outside apps—to provide third-party developers access to sensitive user information. Meanwhile, iPhone apps are not required to encrypt their transmissions. “Apple was well known for usability before it was known for privacy,” says Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

This is part of Andrew’s News+ series, where he shares a magazine every Friday to help people discover good content in Apple News+.

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Eye Tracking is the Holy Grail of Advertising

Andrew Orr ·

Avi Bar-Zeev, who works on AR/VR/MR, says that eye tracking is the holy grail of advertising (And he’s all for it). While I don’t disagree with that point, I do wonder how prevalent it will become. For example, when Face ID first came out, there was a fear that it could be exploited for eye tracking ads. But that isn’t possible because Apple locks down its technology. I expect the same for Apple Glasses.

Bundled into VR headsets or AR glasses, eye-tracking will, in the near-future, enable companies to collect your intimate and unconscious responses to real-world cues and those they design. Those insights can be used entirely for your benefit. But they will also be seen as priceless inputs for ad-driven businesses, which will learn, model, predict and manipulate your behavior far beyond anything we’ve seen to date.