Hollywood Reporter:

Terry Jones, a founding member of Monty Python and a beloved comedian, screenwriter, film director, poet, historian and author, has died. He was 77.

His agent confirmed his death to the BBC. He had been suffering from dementia, which was revealed publicly by his son, Bill, in September 2016. It left him unable to speak.

Renowned for his depictions of middle-aged housewives, often with hysterically falsetto voices, it was Jones who would famously scream the iconic line, “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy,” while playing mother to the titular not-quite-son-of-god in the 1979 comedy Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which he also directed. The line twice was voted the funniest in film history in U.K. polls.

Not an unexpected loss but sad nonetheless. I spent many a Saturday afternoon in front of the TV as a kid doubled over with laughter at the utter silliness of The Flying Circus and the same in theatres watching Holy Grail (which I haven’t seen in years but can still recite most of it from memory), The Life of Brian, and The Meaning of Life – although I can no longer watch the Mr. Creosote scene.

It’s hard if not impossible to overstate Monty Python’s influence on comedy and comedians. Very much like the Beatles in music.

The ad embedded below shows off the 4″ iPhone form-factor as being perfect for the human hand, and thumb.

I bring this ad up because it is one of the ads unearthed by the Unofficial Apple Archive, which I truly love, but also because of the rumored iPhone SE 2, which I posted about earlier.

Enjoy.

Sandra E. Garcia, New York Times:

Recently, after having dinner in Midtown Manhattan, I put on my AirPods Pro as I walked to the subway station. I began getting hot, so I gently pulled off my red beanie while at 58th Street and Broadway. Then it happened.

The AirPod in my right ear fell out. By the time I realized it, the headphone was about to hit the concrete. I tried to catch it, but it fell past my reach.

It bounced off a metal chair, then disappeared through a subway grate and into the abyss.

An entertaining anecdote, especially interesting if you’ve ever spent any time in New York City.

John Gruber:

I want to go deep on this, because, if true, it’s staggering, heartbreaking news. Go read Menn’s entire report. I’ll wait.

Here’s the link to the Reuter’s article John references.

Gruber’s post is relatively easy to follow, and worth your time.

Part of the problem for me with this whole encryption debate is the jargon. You have to work hard to make sure you are following along properly, to understand the implications of end-to-end encryption, and encrypting iCloud backups.

End-to-end encryption means your messages are encrypted when you type them, then decrypted on the receiving end. Encrypting iCloud backups means what it says, that the backup of your iPhone stored in the cloud is encrypted.

I say this, not with any air of authority (believe me, I struggle to keep all the concepts straight in my head), but because it brings a Steve Jobs quote to mind:

Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly.

Things have gotten pretty abstract, no?

Side note: Can’t I still make an encrypted backup if I want one? At the very least, using a cable between my iPhone and my Mac?

Follow the headline link to follow the rumor, as you like. But, to me, this is key:

It will look similar to the iPhone 8 from 2017 and include a 4.7-inch screen.

If the inches doesn’t give you a sense of phone size, the iPhone 8 is 4.7 inches. The iPhone SE is 4 inches. So the idea of this new phone being an SE 2 doesn’t click for me.

I know a lot of people (small hands, small or no pockets) who would love a 4″ phone. If the rumor is true (and it sure seems like it is), there’s no future for the 4″ form-factor.

Interesting anecdote. One key takeaway:

Cook also told Winter to look for other investors who believe in the product, rather than venture capitalists simply looking to make a quick return.

To me, belief in your product, whether as a builder, salesperson, or investor, is vital to success.

Gizmodo:

Planned obsolescence is the bane of consumer electronics. On that front, Sonos has stood out as one of the few tech companies that build longer-lasting products. In fact, the company is keen to point out that 92 percent of all the products it has ever shipped are still in use today. But now, Sonos wants you to know that all things must eventually die. The company announced that starting in May 2020, it will stop pushing software updates and new features to some of its oldest products.

A cynic might say this is a ploy by Sonos to get customers to shell out for newer speakers. Sonos claims that isn’t the case. The company says its oldest devices just aren’t powerful enough anymore.

Sonos owners are pissed. But do they have a right to be? I don’t own any Sonos products so I have no dog in the fight.

CNET:

Ask an enthusiast about what makes a location good for driving, and they might talk about access to curvy roads or long stretches of freeway that lack median turnarounds for police officers. Ask that same question to your average car buyer, and the answer will probably mention none of that stuff. The latter was clearly the group in mind behind the latest study that looks at which states are great for drivers.

Wallethub on Tuesday unveiled its latest study, which ranks the best and worst US states for the average car owner. The study, which compiles data into four major categories, says that Iowa is the best state in the Union for driving, with Hawaii ranking dead last. Tennessee and North Carolina round out the top three, respectively.

I’d definitely take number two and three over number 1. As CNET says, “Clearly, curves and topography were not factored in.”

FastCompany:

The entrance to the radiofrequency isolation chamber, near the middle of the Lefkowitz Building in lower Manhattan, looks like an artifact from the Apollo program, shielded by two airtight, metallic doors that are specially designed to block electromagnetic waves. Inside the room, against one wall, are dozens of Apple iPhones and iPads in various states of disrepair. Some have cracked glass fronts or broken cases. Others look like they’ve been fished out of a smoldering campfire. Of course, the devices are not there to be fixed. They are evidence confiscated during the commission of alleged crimes.

Welcome to ground zero in the encryption battle between state and federal law enforcement officials on one side, and trillion-dollar tech giants Apple and Google on the other.

Fascinating if a little (lot?) scary.

Reuters:

Attorneys for a former Apple Inc executive on Tuesday will try to convince a skeptical judge of a core tenet of tech startup culture – that employees can plan a competing venture while still in a job.

Apple’s lawsuit against a former chip executive-turned-rival will have implications for employees all over California who are considering striking out on their own and creating the startups that drive tech business and culture.

Judge Mark H. Pierce last week issued a tentative ruling allowing the case to proceed but wrote wrote that “an employee is not permitted to plan and prepare to create a competitive enterprise prior to termination if the employee does so on their employer’s time and with the employer’s resources.”

This is an interesting case because, on the face of it, you’d think Apple is entirely in the right in saying that an employee can’t spend time “planning his new startup while on company time at Apple, spending hours on the phone with colleagues who eventually joined the venture.”

BoingBoing:

You may think you haven’t heard The Typewriter, but I bet you have!

“The Typewriter for Orchestra” was written by Leroy Anderson in 1950. In this performance, the soloist is Alfredo Anaya, with conductor Miguel Roa, at the Concierto “Voces para la Paz”, Músicos Solidarios, Auditorio Nacional de Música de Madrid, in 2011. It is one of the silliest performances using a typewriter you’ll ever see.

TechCrunch:

Apple is announcing that Apple Card users will be able to export monthly transactions to a downloadable spreadsheet that they can use with their personal budgeting apps or sheets.

Here’s how to export a spreadsheet of your monthly transactions:

Open Wallet

Tap ‘Apple Card’

Tap ‘Card Balance’

Tap on one of the monthly statements

Tap on ‘Export Transactions’

While I would argue this is a feature that should have been available at launch, it’s good to see it available now for Apple Card users.

Fast Company:

To better understand the current landscape of digital technologies that watch or track people in some form or another, and how their deployment affects both people and the places they inhabit, we might start to think about surveillance technology not only in terms of what it does, but who it is used by and, importantly, who it is used on or against.

Amazon’s Ring may inspire a feeling of safety and security in the device’s owner, but it also induces hypervigilance and increased anxiety about “crime” at a time when the frequency of violent crime is decreasing all over the country. More than providing any real deterrence, Ring militarizes public space by helping construct a web of police surveillance that would be otherwise impossible.

The issues being brought up in this piece are not often thought about by the general public and certainly aren’t being addressed by our authorities and/or the companies who sell these products and tools except for them to say, “Trust us.”

The video embedded below is purported to show a Cellebrite police kiosk, used to unlock cell phones. Here’s a link to the Cellebrite Kiosk product page. Indeed, does appear to be one and the same, even though the Scotland Police page does not specifically mention the name Cellebrite.

Though the phone in the video appears to have a USB-C connector, Cellebrite does claim to be able to unlock both Android and iOS devices (iOS 7 to iOS 12.3).

Reuters:

Apple Inc dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

And:

The tech giant’s reversal, about two years ago, has not previously been reported. It shows how much Apple has been willing to help U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite taking a harder line in high-profile legal disputes with the government and casting itself as a defender of its customers’ information.

And:

When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan.

“Legal killed it, for reasons you can imagine,” another former Apple employee said he was told, without any specific mention of why the plan was dropped or if the FBI was a factor in the decision.

Because this story is about a decision made several years ago, it’s not clear that Apple will ever comment on it. But it’s another piece of the big picture of how Apple handles your privacy, how they respond to requests from the FBI, et al, to hand over information about seized phones.

Michael Simon, Macworld:

The company, Xnor.ai, might not be one you’ve ever heard of, but they’re hardly unknown. Since last summer, the Seattle-based startup’s tech has been the brains behind the popular Wyze cam’s marquee feature: people detection. Simply put, it allowed the $20 camera to distinguish between faces, pets, and dust, and vastly improved its abilities, putting it a somewhat level playing field with the far-more-expensive Ring and Nest cams of the world.

Michael makes the case that Xnor.ai’s “Edge AI” approach can greatly enhance what Siri might be able to do on-chip, without iCloud.

For example:

Xnor.ai estimates that Edge AI runs 10 times as fast with 15X memory than cloud-based systems, and a responsive assistant dedicated to each specific phone could finally let Apple build a voice recognition system with near-perfect accuracy.

And:

That same engine could be applied to speech patterns. Siri dictation isn’t bad at all, but saying “period” and “comma” gets tedious. Edge AI could recognize our vocal patterns, so when we pause a certain way it adds a period, or if we change out inflection it adds a question mark.

Really interesting read.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple today began selling certified refurbished iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max models for the first time since the devices were released in September 2018.

At the time of writing, the refurbished models are available in Space Gray, Silver, or Gold with 64GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage through Apple’s online store in the United States. All of the models are unlocked, aka SIM-free.

Follow the headline link for all the pricing info.

One example: A 64GB iPhone XS Max, $799. Compare that to a 64GB iPhone 11 Pro Max at $1099.

Variety:

Apple TV Plus is on the board. The new streaming service won its first major Hollywood honor on Sunday, as “The Morning Show” star Jennifer Aniston picked up a SAG Award for best female actor in a drama.

“The Morning Show” had previously been nominated for three awards at the Golden Globes (for Aniston and co-star Reese Witherspoon, as well as best drama), while Billy Crudup won a Critics’ Choice Award for best supporting actor. But the SAG Award gives “Morning Show,” Aniston and Apple TV Plus major momentum as it enters what should be the most crowded Emmy race in history.

Interesting first-time individual win for Aniston. She was up against a strong field in Helena Bonham Carter and Olivia Colman for The Crown, Jodie Comer in Killing Eve, and Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Yahoo:

Everyone knows that the global corporate tax system needs to be overhauled, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said on Monday, backing changes to global rules that are currently under consideration.

“I think logically everybody knows it needs to be rehauled, I would certainly be the last person to say that the current system or the past system was the perfect system. I’m hopeful and optimistic that they (the OECD) will find something,” Cook said.

“It’s very complex to know how to tax a multinational… We desperately want it to be fair,” the Apple CEO added after receiving an inaugural award from the Irish state agency responsible for attracting foreign companies recognising the contribution of multinationals in the country.

Cook’s not wrong but trying to overhaul the entire global system may be a task worth of Sisyphus.

The Verge:

Comcast and NBCUniversal announced today that Peacock will be available in three tiers: a free option (Peacock Free) that comes with limited programming; an ad-supported complete version that is free to existing Comcast customers and $5-a-month for everyone else; and a $10-a-month ad-free subscription option that is open to anyone. That one is known as Peacock Premium.

And:

This brings us to Comcast and NBCUniversal’s final ace in the hole: licensing. NBCUniversal and Comcast own some of the most important licenses in Hollywood. The entire Harry Potter collection, for example, belongs to NBCUniversal right now. WarnerMedia licensed the rights to the franchise a while back, and it will have to wait until those expire (or a new deal is struck) before the movies can migrate over to HBO Max. Since NBCUniversal owns a few important licenses and can license its own series to other streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, which rely on third-party content, Peacock becomes less of a risky bet on streaming. There’s always something for the customer, with NBCUniversal being able to rotate new and older series in and out on a constant basis.

If the streaming biz is of interest, read the whole article. From the marketing shots I’ve seen, NBC has an Apple TV app in the works. I suspect it’ll be available at rollout.

Here’s a link to the Peacock home page. Be sure to click play/sound on to play the weird egg-hatching video at the top of the page.

9to5Google:

Last year, Google announced that all Android 7+ devices can be used as two-factor authentication when signing into Gmail, Drive, and other first-party services. Most modern iPhones can now be used as a built-in phone security key for Google apps.

And:

A built-in phone security key differs from the Google Prompt, though both essentially share the same UI. The latter push-based approach is found in the Google Search app and Gmail, while today’s announcement is more akin to a physical USB-C/Lightning key in terms of being resistant to phishing attempts and verifying who you are. Your phone security key needs to be physically near (within Bluetooth range) the device that wants to log-in. The login prompt is not just being sent over an internet connection.

Feels like a step in the right direction, a tool to help stop SIM-swapping. Ultimately, I’d love all my log-in services to offer a setting that limited logins to Face ID only, with Face ID required to change that setting as well.

The op-ed is a long, logical walkthrough of the claims by Attorney General Barr and the counterclaim on the values of both privacy and encryption.

But at its heart:

Apple is no doubt looking out for its commercial interests, and privacy is one of its selling points. But its encryption and security protections also have significant social and public benefits. Encryption has become more important as individuals store and transmit more personal information on their phones — including bank accounts and health records — amid increasing cyber-espionage.

Criminals communicate over encrypted platforms, but encryption protects all users including business executives, journalists, politicians, and dissenters in non-democratic societies. Any special key that Apple created for the U.S. government to unlock iPhones would also be exploitable by bad actors.

If American tech companies offer backdoors for U.S. law enforcement, criminals would surely switch to foreign providers. This would make it harder to obtain data stored on cloud servers. Apple says it has responded to more than 127,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies over the past seven years. We doubt Huawei would be as cooperative.

A worthy read.

FastCompany:

When I looked into the user interface of Mojo Vision’s augmented reality contact lenses, I didn’t see anything at first except the real world in front of me. Only when I peeked over toward the periphery did a small yellow weather icon appear. When I examined it more closely, I could see the local temperature, the current weather, and some forecast information. I looked over to the 9 o’clock position and saw a traffic icon that gave way to a frontal graphic showing potential driving routes on a simple map. At 12 o’clock, I found my calendar and to-do information. At the bottom of my view was a simple music controller.

This is a mock-up, not a shipping product, but still, an audacious concept.

In the coming decade, it’s likely that our computing devices will become more personal and reside closer to—or even inside—our bodies. Our eyes are the logical next stop on the journey. Tech giants such as Apple and Facebook are just now trying to build AR glasses that are svelte enough to wear for extended periods. But Mojo is skipping over the glasses idea entirely, opting for the much more daunting goal of fitting the necessary microcomponents into contact lenses.

I do believe the future will see more and more augmentation, tech that brings the human body across the chasm, towards robots that are themselves trying to become more human. Will we meet in the middle? Become one giant AI, discarding flesh and bone entirely?

Fascinating read. And worth noting that one of the principals in this project is Steve Sinclair, formerly of Apple.

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. has engaged a specialist in drone and aviation law as a Washington lobbyist, suggesting the company is pushing further into the growing field.

The Cupertino, California-based tech giant retained Lisa Ellman, a parter at Hogan Lovells, to conduct the lobbying. Ellman leads the law firm’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems practice. She also co-founded the Commercial Drone Alliance and is working to expand the commercial drone industry, according to her biography online.

And:

The company used drones a few years ago to help it collect mapping data. In December, it met with regulators about a proposed law that would require drones to sport virtual license plates. The company also sells several drones from DJI through the Apple website and Apple retail stores.

And:

Apple has a team exploring satellites, a type of unmanned aircraft, and Ellman could assist in regulatory efforts that would need to be conducted to launch such an effort. Apple rivals, including Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc., have developed drones in recent years.

Drones are certainly a massive business, especially on the military side. Does this connect to Apple’s reported autonomous vehicle efforts? Does this simply fall under miscellaneous?