Sometimes, well almost always, it’s good to wait awhile after Apple encounters a crisis of some sort and not get swept up in the venting, rage and fury. Later, cooler, experienced heads weigh in. This time it’s Ben Thompson at Stratechery. “As rare as last week’s Apple revenue warning from CEO Tim Cook may have been — the company last issued a revenue warning in June 2002 — the company has had other bad quarters in the iPhone era.” This is great analysis, worth reading.
TMO Background Mode Interview with Journalist & TMO Contributor Charlotte Henry
Charlotte is a London-based technical journalist. She writes about Apple — and is now The Mac Observer’s newest regular contributor. She has also written for City A.M. (London’s daily business tabloid,) Computer Business Review, The Independent on Sunday and CapX. Her first book, Not Buying It, will be published in June.
I asked Charlotte how she got started in technical journalism. The first factor derived from the fact, that, as a youth, there were always new technical gadgets showing up in her home. The second was via her early interest in music creation on a Mac during her college years. We chatted about her first news blog and then meeting Jeff Gamet on the British Tech Network. Finally Charlotte shared some of her personal interests when she’s not writing: music, soccer and mystery novels.
CES - Maximus Offering Increased Security with Dual Camera Video Doorbell
LAS VEGAS – Maximus is showing answer, the first dual camera video doorbell that sees what other devices miss.
CES - SECUREDATA Shows Highly Secure (FIPS 140-2 Level 3) External Drives
LAS VEGAS – SECUREDATA is showing SecureDrive KP, one of their FIPS 140-2 Level 3 drives for when you really need to protect your data.
CES - LumiCharge Shows Second Generation Smart Lamp
LAS VEGAS – LumiCharge is showing the second generation of their smart lamp, which does more than just illuminate.
Add Four Displays To Your Mac with Targus USB-C Universal Quad HD Docking Station
The beauty of our new USB-C docking station world (don’t say dongles!) is the flexibility and expandability it provides for our Macs. Targus highlights this perfectly with their new USB-C Universal Quad HD Docking Station that they were showing off Sunday at CES Unveiled. In addition to four USB 3.0 ports, an audio in/out port, and a USB-C port with 15W of power, this dock includes four (yes, 4!) HDMI ports, each connectable to a 1080p display. MacOS sees each of these connected displays individually, meaning you could just as easily have four separate screens for your day-trading delights as you could build a multi-screen video “wall” and spread your image across all four of them simultaneously. At US$275 this is a no-brainer if you need those kind of display options. A unit supporting four 4K screens will be out later this year, due to be priced at US$375.
AirPlay 2 on TVs, Project Erasmus Update – TMO Daily Observations 2019-01-07
Samsung announced AirPlay 2 coming to TVs, and there’s a Project Erasmus update. Kelly Guimont hosts Charlotte Henry and Andrew Orr.
NSA to Release Free Reverse Engineering Tool GHIDRA
The U.S. National Security Agency is releasing a free and open source reverse engineering tool callee GHIDRA at the upcoming RSA security conference.
Browser Fingerprinting? DuckDuckGo says DuckDuckNo!
In a Whonix forum a person alleged that DuckDuckGo was using browser fingerprinting techniques to track people. The search engine denies the claim however.
“Fingerprinting-detection libraries unfortunately create false positives because they don’t anticipate good actors using some browser APIs for non-nefarious purposes for which they were designed. We know this not only because we’re falsely identified here (and have been elsewhere) but because we are building this type of detection into our mobile app and browser extension and don’t similarly want to make false claims.”
DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said an API they use to determine the size of the browser might be triggering the fingerprinting flag.
Apple Unveils New HomeKit Products From CES Partners
More HomeKit products mean a more integrated home, with products that aren’t competing against each other.