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Spotify Doesn’t Like the Apple One Bundle, Calling it Unfair

Andrew Orr ·

Spotify doesn’t like the Apple One bundle, saying that Apple is abusing its dominant market position.

Once again, Apple is using its dominant position and unfair practices to disadvantage competitors and deprive consumers by favoring its own services. We call on competition authorities to act urgently to restrict Apple’s anti-competitive behavior, which if left unchecked, will cause irreparable harm to the developer community and threaten our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect.

Bundles save people money, therefore bundles are good for customers. As for competitors? At least Apple pays artists more. As for the dominant position claim, as of 2019 Apple Music has more paid subscribers in the U.S., but Spotify has more paid users in the world. As Neil Cybart said, this is just guerilla warfare of companies piling on against Apple because they’re not making as much money. As I say, cutthroat capitalism.

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YouTube Shorts to Begin Beta Testing

Charlotte Henry ·

YouTube unveiled plans to begin rolling out a new product called ‘Shorts’ in a blog post on Tuesday. It is user-generated videos that last up to 15 seconds. Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before…

We’re excited to announce that we are building YouTube Shorts, a new short-form video experience right on YouTube for creators and artists who want to shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones. Over the next few days in India, we’re launching an early beta of Shorts with a handful of new creation tools to test this out. This is an early version of the product, but we’re releasing it now to bring you — our global community of users, creators and artists — on our journey with us as we build and improve Shorts. We’ll continue to add more features and expand to more countries in the coming months as we learn from you and listen to your feedback. Here are more details on what to expect.

Pixelmator Photo 1.4 Brings ML Super Resolution to iPad
Cool Stuff Found

Pixelmator Photo 1.4 Brings ML Super Resolution to iPad

Andrew Orr ·

The Pixelmator Photo 1.4 update brings ML Super Resolution to the iPad. This is the feature introduced on macOS that lets you upscale images using machine learning. “Today’s update also adds a very awesome comparison slider, letting you quickly compare your edited image with the original in a split-screen view. And it works all around the app, so when using the Repair tool, you can turn on and move the comparison slider to see just the changes made with that tool. When the Color Adjustments tool selected, you’ll see just the color changes, and so on. Super useful.” Finally, the company has raised the app’s price to US$7.99, up from US$4.99.

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CISA Believes China Hacked US Government Systems

Andrew Orr ·

According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chinese-affiliated hackers have compromised U.S. government computer systems.

“This beaconing is a result of cyber threat actors successfully completing cyber operations that are often designed around emergent vulnerabilities and reliant on existing exploitation tools,” the advisory states. “CISA observed activity from a Federal Government IP address beaconing out to the threat actors’ [command and control] server.”

Get we just get it together for 10 seconds, please?

Podcast

Ice Age Ecologist Dr. Jacquelyn Gill - BGM Interview

John Martellaro · · Add Comment

Dr. Jacquelyn Gill is an Associate Professor of Paleoecology and Plant Ecology, School of Biology, Ecology and Climate Change Institute, the University of Maine. Her research interests include: Paleoecology, community ecology, vegetation dynamics, extinction, climate change and biotic interactions. She received her Ph.D. in Paleoecology from the Univ. of Wisconsin.

An outdoor life, science fiction, cave exploration and a professor who taught her how to ask questions about what she saw in the natural environment laid the foundation for Jacquelyn’s interest in Nature and Ecology. She tells a remarkable, instructive story about how she got admitted to her Ph.D. program. Then we chatted about just what Paleoecology and Biogeography are as well as the effects of animal extinction, recovering extinct animals from DNA, ecological models, and recovery from bad ecological trends. Jacquelyn is spellbinding in her description of her work.

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FCC Tests Eero Wi-Fi 6 Mesh Routers WIth BTLE, Zigbee

Andrew Orr ·

The FCC has been testing Eero’s Wi-Fi 6 mesh routers. Not much is known about these devices, including a launch date, but it appears that these products will have Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee to enable smart home automation connectivity.

Although the underside diagram for Gateway and Extender is shaped somewhat like the second-generation Beacon design, we don’t see any plugs shown—so it seems unlikely that they will be wall-wart designs like the Beacon’s or like Eero competitor Plume. We expect the new generation of devices will likely be desktop-style designs, with external power supplies.

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Gaming Company Razer Leaked 100,000 Users’ Data

Andrew Orr ·

In August, security researcher Volodymyr Diachenko found a server owned by Razer that exposed the data of over 100,000 users. It took the company over three weeks to get around to fixing the issue.

The cluster contained records of customer orders and included information such as item purchased, customer email, customer (physical) address, phone number, and so forth—basically, everything you’d expect to see from a credit card transaction, although not the credit card numbers themselves. The Elasticseach cluster was not only exposed to the public, it was indexed by public search engines.