Every time your two favorite geeks get together, something interesting happens: everyone learns at least five (5!) new things. This week’s topics include two very specific features of APFS (a pro and a con), noise-canceling headphones for travel, a solution to drives not appearing on your Desktop, some Cool Stuff Found, and much, much more. Press play or download and enjoy!
AI Mania. Can We Keep Up?
New payment systems abound. Artificial Intelligence mania continues. AIs interrogating other AIs and probing their minds. AIs doing cancer diagnosis. And mostly right but sometimes wrong. Facial recognition bites back. Can we keep up? It’s all in Particle Debris page 2.
Watch This Robot Hand Learn How to Manipulate a Block
Check out this video from OpenAI of a robot hand learning how to manipulate a block. This an incredibly difficult task, and the level of difficulty is one of the many reasons Apple needs humans assembling iPhones. OpenAI used machine learning and virtual simulations for the robot to spend 100 years of trial and error to learn what you’ll see in the video (TechnologyReview has more details). Those virtual lessons were then used by the real-world robot hand, and it’s pretty darned cool. Check it out.
TMO Background Mode Special Edition Chat with Kelly Guimont: TV Mysteries
Kelly Guimont is a Contributing Editor for The Mac Observer and Social Media Manager for Smile Software. She first appeared here in December, 2015 to tell her career story and has returned several times for interesting technical discussions. In this special edition, we chat about our favorite movie or two, and how, for some movies, the music has become a thing in itself, the soundtrack of our lives. Then we delved into the legendary BBC/CBC mysteries: Foyle’s War, Murdoch Mysteries, Shetland, Death in Paradise, and Broadchurch. For most of these mysteries, we look at their celebration of place that becomes an integral part of the show. Join us as we explore together what makes these shows so cool.
Apple Seeds iOS 12 Developer Beta 5 for iPhone and iPad
Apple released iOS 12 Developer Beta 5 on Monday for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touchl, part of Apple’s ongoing efforts to refine iOS 12.
Apple Pay to Make Up Half of All Contactless Payments by 2020
Contactless payment system users, such as Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, are on track to hit 450 million by 2020, and Apple is going to account for half of them around the world. That’s according to a new report from Juniper Research.
Cops Are Getting Access to Broadband Surveillance
The government gave AT&T free rights to the 20MHz broadband spectrum, as well as US$6.5 billion for the network rollout.
Ways That Apple Could Improve the Phone App
u/beyondthetech recently posted in the Apple subreddit about ways to improve the Phone app. I think it’s an interesting list, and it could improve the iPhone experience.
I certainly believe that these changes are not too difficult to implement, and I’ve been asking Apple for years to make this happen. Maybe CallKit and Do Not Disturb were their first implementations to my request, but honestly, they’re still both very basic and very naive. With everything else in iOS getting more robust and more smart, Apple needs to really take a fresh look at this area and address it much better this time around in time for iOS 12’s release, or at least in a 12.1 release, if they are already time-constrained.
Cyber Warfare Has Three Aspects, Including Cognition
Cyber warfare has three aspects: physical, informational, and cognitive. So writes Richard Forno for The Conversation. It seems to me that cognition would be a subset of informational warfare, instead of being a separate dimension. Cyber tools can be used to target your thoughts and perceptions of reality, and we’re seeing this virtually in real time.
However, I believe this isn’t a new form of war at all: Rather, it is the same old strategies taking advantage of the latest available technologies. Just as online marketing companies use sponsored content and search engine manipulation to distribute biased information to the public, governments are using internet-based tools to pursue their agendas. In other words, they’re hacking a different kind of system through social engineering on a grand scale.
10-Foot Cloth MFi-Certified Lightning Cable: $14.99
We have a deal on a 10-foot long, cloth covered MFi-Certified Lightning cable. The cloth is designed to be tangle-resistant, making charging from across the room that much easier. This very long Lightning cable is $14.99 through our deal.