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Remember Bandersnatch? Netflix Saved Your Choices

Andrew Orr ·

Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch is a choose-your-own-adventure game that went viral. As it turns out, Netflix saved the choices you made.

He found that Netflix is tracking the decisions its users make (which makes sense considering how the film works), and that it is keeping those decisions long after a user has finished the film. It is also stores aggregated forms of the users choice to “help [Netflix] determine how to improve this model of storytelling in the context of a show or movie.”

This doesn’t seem like a huge issue to me. This is standard analytics the platform keeps.

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Former Apple Vice President Charged with Insider Trading by SEC

Charlotte Henry ·

Former Apple Vice President of Corporate Law, Gene Levoff, was charged with insider trading by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday. He was put on leave by Apple in July 2018, and his employment was terminated in September 2018. CNBC reported on the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for New Jersey.

Gene Levoff, senior director of corporate law and corporate secretary until September, “traded on material nonpublic information about Apple’s earnings three times during 2015 and 2016,” according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey. “Levoff also had a previous history of insider trading, having traded on Apple’s material nonpublic information at least three additional times in 2011 and 2012. For the trading in 2015 and 2016, Levoff profited and avoided losses of approximately $382,000,” the complaint says.

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Cloud Backup Service Backblaze Raising its Price

Andrew Orr ·

Backblaze is a popular service to back up your computer to the cloud. In its first price increase, the company announced it will go from US$5 to US$6 per month. [Backblaze: The Least Reliable Hard Drives] Backblaze Price Increase The price will increase starting March 11 5PM PT for both new and existing users: The…

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Comparing Android Security Versus iOS Security

Andrew Orr ·

Keiran Dennie tweeted an interesting chart that compares the security of various smartphone operating systems.

Wondering about Android and Apple phone security? Here’s an objective chart to help you decide.

It’s a well known fact of Android that people have to rely on their carrier to push out security updates. This can take weeks, months, and sometimes they don’t get released at all.

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A Sony Smart Watch Strap That Costs as Much as an Apple Watch

Charlotte Henry ·

Sony’s latest bid in the smart watch space is the wena range. It includes a smart wrist strap that works with mechanical watches and smart modules too. Smart straps have not been hugely successful thus far, with payments being a potential saving grace for the technology. However,  the price of this particular model could be a hurdle. As a review in Wired noted, the strap alone costs as a much as an Apple Watch Series 4.

The wena wrist pro strap costs £399, which, bafflingly, is the same price as an Apple Watch Series 4 (and way more than a £279 Series 3). The bundles with the watch modules cost from £499 to £849 though Matt Oakley, who handles Sony Europe’s new business development, says that he expects that the majority of sales will be strap only.

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Facebook Lets You Search for Photos of Your Female Friends

Andrew Orr ·

Matthew Hughes writes about how Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but not your male friends. Not that you should creep on guys either, though.

Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but refuses to play dice if you want to look up pictures of your male friends. The bizarre find was discovered this weekend by notorious Belgian white-hat hacker Inti De Ceukelaire.

Every time I ask myself, “Can Facebook get any more toxic?” The answer is YES. It’s as if Mark Zuckerberg is competing to be the Worst Person in America.