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Who Might Build The Apple Car?

Charlotte Henry ·

Talk about a potential Apple Car continues apace. One of the key questions is who will be the partner that actually makes the vehicle – Hyundai and Kia said recently that talks with them are not happening. Bloomberg News has a good rundown of the potential candidates.

The secret project has gained momentum in recent months, adding multiple former Tesla Inc. executives, gaining the supervision of Apple’s top artificial intelligence executive and ramping up road tests. The initiative, known as Project Titan inside Apple, is attracting intense interest because of its potential to upend the automotive industry and supply chains, much like the iPhone did to the smartphone market. If and when Apple commits to building a car, it is likely to seek multiple partners — including a major one to assemble the vehicle and many others to supply key components.

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HBO Max Launching Internationally in June

Charlotte Henry ·

HBO Max is going to launch internationally in June, The Verge reported. It will start in Latin America and the Caribbean, and they later become available in the Nordics, Spain, Central Europe, and Portugal. At the moment the streaming service is only available in the U.S.

The June launch will see HBO Max expand to 39 countries and territories across Latin America and the Caribbean, including Anguilla, Antigua, Argentina, Aruba, B.V.I., Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Cayman Islands, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Curacao, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Montserrat, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago, Turks and Caicos, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

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Google Photos for iOS Adds Video Editing, New Photo Editing Features

Andrew Orr ·

Google has added new editing features to its Photos app on iOS, including video editing. New editing features will be available exclusively to Google One members.

Starting today, we’re bringing some of the editing features currently available on Pixel to Google One members as a part of their membership. These effects transform your portraits using machine learning: with Portrait Blur, you can blur the background post-snap, and with Portrait Light, you can improve the lighting on faces in portraits. Both features work for photos just taken or images from the past — even if the original image wasn’t taken in portrait mode.

Cool Stuff Found

Apple TV+: ‘Servant’ S2E4 With M. Night Shyamalan

Andrew Orr ·

Apple shared a video on its YouTube channel with M. Night Shyamalan discussing the latest episode of his series “Servant.” In this special episode directed by M. Night Shyamalan, the audience is introduced to a new area of the Turner house: the attic. As the brownstone reaches new heights, will the family dynamics change along with it? “Servant” follows a Philadelphia couple in mourning after an unspeakable tragedy creates a rift in their marriage and opens the door for a mysterious force to enter their home.

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35 Companies Including Apple Hacked in Supply Chain Attack

Andrew Orr ·

Security researcher Alex Birsan was able to breach over 35 companies’ internal systems, including Apple, Microsoft, PayPal, Spotify, Netflix, and others. He did this through bug bounty programs and pre-approved penetration testing arrangements (aka, he’s one of the good guys). He earned over US$100,000 in bounties.

The attack comprised uploading malware to open source repositories including PyPI, npm, and RubyGems, which then got distributed downstream automatically into the company’s internal applications.

Unlike traditional typosquatting attacks that rely on social engineering tactics or the victim misspelling a package name, this particular supply chain attack is more sophisticated as it needed no action by the victim, who automatically received the malicious packages.

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Apple Apologizes For Mistakenly Removing Student’s Indigenous Language App from App Store

Charlotte Henry ·

Student, Brendan Eshom, a member of the Gitga’at community of the Ts’msyen First Nation, launched an app that shared his community’s culture and promoted a word each day in its language – Sm’algyax. However, it was removed and the young developer tried to contact Apple to found out. He got no answers, but the company has confirmed to Global News that it was taken down in error, has been reinstated, and apologized.

He says he reached out to Apple multiple times for an explanation, but couldn’t get answers. “It was definitely more discouraging to not even hear why they took it down in the first place,” he said. Eshom contacted Consumer Matters for help. Consumer Matters contacted Apple asking why the app had been removed and why Eshom’s status on Apple had been terminated. In an email, Apple stated: “Maintaining the integrity of the App Store is a responsibility we take seriously to ensure the safety of our customers, and give every developer a platform to share their brightest ideas with the world. Unfortunately, this developer’s app, which is a great example of how technology can be used to bridge cultural understanding, was mistakenly removed from the App Store

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Hackers Tried to Poison Florida Town’s Water Supply

Andrew Orr ·

Most security news I’ve shared involves purely digital hacking. This story from Reuters is a case of using hacking to affect the physical world, like an attempt to poison a town’s water supply.

The hackers then increased the amount of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, being distributed into the water supply. The chemical is typically used in small amounts to control the acidity of water, but at higher levels is dangerous to consume.

Oldsmar Mayor Eric Seidel said in a press conference on Monday that the affected water treatment facility also had other controls in place that would have prevented a dangerous amount of lye from entering the water supply unnoticed.