Not long after his 21st birthday, Christian Rodriguez got the contract of a lifetime for his new info-tech company: The Colombian was hired as a cybersecurity consultant by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo.
In several follow-up meetings, Mr. Rodriguez testified this week, he pitched Mr. Guzmán on an elaborate plan to enhance his information security, offering to build him a private phone network that ran on the internet and was totally encrypted.
That sophisticated system was, within three years, used against Mr. Guzmán after Mr. Rodriguez became ensnared in an F.B.I. sting operation and was then persuaded to become an informant. The I.T. expert helped the American authorities secretly collect a vast trove of the kingpin’s phone calls and text messages — among them, dozens he had sent to his wife and mistresses. In two days of testimony that ended on Thursday, Mr. Rodriguez told this riveting story to great — and damaging — effect at Mr. Guzmán’s drug conspiracy trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.
As many are pointing out, this story is why you should be nice to your IT people.
The allegations stem primarily from large severance payments to Andy Rubin, who led Google’s Android mobile operating division until 2014, and Amit Singhal, head of Google’s search unit until 2016. Company investigations into both men had found accusations of sexual harassment against them to be credible, according to the lawsuits.
YouTuber Master Milo turns an old Ford Ka into a rolling, spinning, amusement park ride-like “diwheel” he calls “the RollKa.” Master Milo took an otherwise lackluster economy car, chopped it in half, and mated it to two large, parallel wheels. The wheels on the Ford Ka spin and make traction within the tracks of the larger fabricated ring wheels to move the ungainly body around.
I love watching these kinds of videos. I have zero mechanical ability or imagination but I’m always fascinated by those who do.
Ring has a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate data belonging to any person: a live, high-definition feed from around — and perhaps inside — their house.
Despite its mission to keep people and their property secure, the company’s treatment of customer video feeds has been anything but, people familiar with the company’s practices told The Intercept. Beginning in 2016, according to one source, Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world.
Consumers are far too ready to give up their privacy for security and companies are far too lax when it comes to protecting either. This is another data point for my contention that I will not allow these kinds of “security” devices in my home.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you told yourself that you’re going to lose weight as a New Year’s resolution. Congratulations! The bad news is that there’s a good chance you’re going to fail, at least if thousands of personal anecdotes and studies have any weight.
But these days it’s easier to avoid falling into that trap. The iOS App Store is as stuffed with helpful apps for losing weight as I was stuffed with turkey and bread in the aftermath of Christmas dinner.
These are the best of the bunch.
I’m using a couple of these apps, along with an Apple Watch, to track my food and calorie intake along with exercise. I find it helpful to know how much food I’m eating and what the calorie amounts are. So far, I’m doing pretty good. I just need to exercise more.
Hulu is preparing to update its streaming app in order to make it simpler to navigate to and discover content you want to watch. Some of the changes coming in the weeks ahead are smaller, but worthwhile tweaks – like adding buttons or rearranging menus. But the more notable change is that Hulu is testing the elimination of the app’s existing landing page – currently known as “Lineup” – and replacing it with a new experience.
There’s a possibility that the testing might reveal that viewers prefer “Lineup” over “Hulu Picks” so the company can’t definitively say that it will drop Lineup permanently.
I’m currently testing out Hulu and it’s a pretty good app, but these changes are a good move. There are some other changes I would like to see with the DVR and other functions, but navigation should help users find the content they want faster.
Basically, 2019 marks the first time a huge quantity of books published in 1923—including works by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost—have become legally downloadable since digital books became a thing. It’s a big deal—the Internet Archive had a party in San Francisco to celebrate. Next year, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, and so-on.
So, how do you actually download these books?
It largely depends on what site you go to, and if you can’t find a book on one site, you can probably find it on another. For instance, ReadPrint.com, as well as The Literature Network (mostly major authors), and Librivox (audio books), Authorama (all in the public domain), and over a dozen other sites all have vast selections of free ebooks.
There’s actually quite a few very interesting books that have just entered public domain status.
The word “shrubbery” is dead. I’m not sure how often it was used before 1975, when the British comedy troupe Monty Python released Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but hence, a not insignificant number of people couldn’t say it without the urge to raise their voice a pitch. There are people who can’t see a coconut without yammering on about swallows. Who can’t be injured without hollering, “It’s just a flesh wound.” Who, out of nowhere, will yell “ni!” As adults, they’re insufferable, but as kids…well, I was one of many.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is now streaming on Netflix, remains a funny film by a group of English comedians that’s become shorthand for a postwar, absurd, self-deprecating kind of humor.
Asking around, it seems that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is not dead yet.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail was meme-worthy before that was even a word. I saw it when it first came out and I’ll still quote its silliness on a weekly basis.
While in-ear headphones can create head-thumping bass by sealing your ears off from the world, they also isolate you from the sound of cars, bikes, and other people, which can be dangerous.
While most headphones transmit music through the air, entering your ear canal and vibrating your eardrum, bone conduction headphones are different. They sit outside your ear, vibrating the bones of your head until the sound reaches the cochlea—the same place the eardrum sends sounds to be converted for your brain. That means your ear canal is free to listen to the sounds around you.
This technology has been around for a lot of years but I’ve never used them. Many people who hate sticking earbuds into their ears may benefit from them though.
Ancient peoples knew none of this biology, but they were certain of blood’s importance and fascinated by its mystery. For them, blood was something hidden—visible only when flowing from a wound, or during childbirth, miscarriage, and menstruation—so it became a symbol both of life and of death.
To control blood was to master mortality, so it is unsurprising that blood features prominently in many religious traditions, and that, though our understanding of its functions is more sophisticated than ever, we remain in thrall to its primal mystique.
Along with water, blood is the most important liquid in the world. I still remember the first time I realized its power. I banged my head on the ground playing as a kid and it caused a huge cut that bled profusely. It didn’t really hurt much so I walked home, blood streaming down my face. I got in the house and said, “Mommy, I cut myself.” My mom turned around and saw me and immediately freaked the hell out.
According to its Feature Availability page, Apple today introduced a number of new features for Apple Maps. Several new Flyover locations have been added, and available maps for indoor malls have expanded.
Speed limits in Canada, new flyover locations, and indoor maps are among the changes in the latest updates.
Apple today published its annual meeting of shareholders notice and proxy statement. Filed with the SEC, the document confirms that Apple will hold its annual meeting of shareholders on March 1st, 2019 at Steve Jobs Theater.
Due to limited seating at Steve Jobs Theater, Apple is asking shareholders to register in advance if they plan to attend the meeting. The record date for the annual shareholder meeting is January 2nd, 2019. This means you must have held AAPL shares by this date in order attend.
The questions from shareholders should be particularly heated this year.
There are many ways to tell the story of Jackie Chan. He is the heir to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the comic grace of his movements leaving audiences in laughing wonder. He’s also the heir to Bruce Lee: If Lee broke old stereotypes about the Asian man being frail and craven, then Chan reinvented him once more, offering across dozens of movies a consistent character who was almost childlike in his cheerfulness, known as much for his winking smile as for the fury of his fists.
These aspects of the Chan legend are all present in his new memoir, Never Grow Up, as the threads of an unlikely rags-to-riches story.
Never Grow Up, in mostly inadvertent ways, thus offers another way of telling Jackie Chan’s story. It’s about colonialism, capitalism, and the myths we construct to justify living under both.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Jackie Chan. Even when his movies were awful, you never took your eyes off of him during stunts and fight scenes.
You’ve no doubt been walking in the park or on a trail and have seen a banana peel or orange rind lying on the ground. The outdoorsy person who tossed them no doubt thought the fruit remains would biodegrade eventually.
Sure they will. But it won’t happen overnight.
After watching hikers toss a sandwich on a trail, Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff, who hikes and works in the Grand Canyon, set up a small experiment. She put an apple core, a banana peel, orange peels, chewing gum and tissue paper in a cage of chicken wire, wide enough to allow small animals to go in and out. After six months, the orange peels had dried out, the banana peel had turned black, the chewing gum was the same and the tissue had become a blob. Nothing had been eaten or had rotted.
She buried the same items in sand and soil and six months later everything was still recognizable.
Interesting. While I don’t go for walks in the woods very often being a City Kid, I always assumed it was OK to toss organics into the woods “for the animals”. Looks like that might not be such a good idea after all.
Rostislav Blaha created gridzzly, a simple single-page website where you pick the type of grid you want (lines, square, triangle, hex, dotted), set the size of the grid units and the weight of the line, then hit print. Voila! Custom gridded paper.
I so could have used this website in high school and college for my D&D games.
Enthusiasm for aviation-related education programs in Purdue Polytechnic’s School of Aviation and Transportation Technology (SATT) continues to soar with the arrival of iPad and Apple Pencil for each of the nearly one thousand students and faculty. Undergraduate programs in SATT include professional flight, aeronautical engineering technology, aviation management and unmanned aerial systems.
Dubbed an Electronic Purdue Bag (EPB) — a nod to the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) that replaced pilots’ paper-based flight information in the cockpit during in the 1990s — the new 9.7-inch cellular iPad, Apple Pencil and Logitech keyboard and case provide Purdue’s aviation students with a competitive advantage by preparing them for the technologically advanced aviation industry where most major airlines use iPad in the cockpit. Students now have access to the latest technical documents, including operating manuals and navigational charts, can generate multimedia safety reports on the spot, and will leverage the latest virtual and augmented reality (AR) tools on iPad. Eventually, students will develop their own apps and customize their learning experience.
This is great for Purdue students, but also a necessary move for the school. Since pilots are already using iPads, Purdue needs to be on the cutting edge and they clearly are. According to Purdue, they plan to upgrade all of the iPads every two years.
Whether you’re hungry for perfect chickpeas from dried beans, succulent roasts in a fraction of the time, or a comforting soup ready when you walk in the door, a multicooker, which can act as electric pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer and even yogurt-maker, can help. The Instant Pot is the best known of the multicookers now on the market, though other manufacturers, like Breville and Fagor, make models. We’ll show you how to master them, with valuable techniques for getting the most out of the machine.
I got one of these a few months ago and I love it. I make rice, steam/roast vegetables, sear meat, make stews and pot roasts, and even cheesecake in it.
Smartphone shipments in China fell between 12-15.5 percent last year, market data indicated, suggesting a bleak outlook for the sector at a time when behemoths Apple and Samsung Electronics have already issued dour forecasts.
China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a research institute under the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said shipments dropped 15.5 percent to roughly 390 million units for the year, with a 17 percent slump in December.
Market research firm Canalys estimates shipments fell 12 percent in China last year and expects smartphone shipments in 2019 to dip below 400 million for the first time since 2014.
Starting later this year, Sony’s new 2019 Z9G Series 8K LCDs, A9G Series OLED 4K TVs, and X950G 4K LCD TVs will support Airplay 2 and HomeKit protocols from Apple.
Other TV manufacturers, including Samsung, Vizio, and LG have also announced support for HomeKit and AirPlay 2 for their 2019 smart TV lineups. All of the major TV brands will support both, with the exception of Samsung. Samsung TVs support AirPlay 2 and will have an exclusive app for accessing iTunes content, but won’t work with HomeKit.
With AirPlay 2 support, compatible Sony television sets will be able to stream videos, music, photos, and more right from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and multi-room audio across multiple AirPlay 2 devices will also be available.
Slowly but steadily, Apple is building out its base and support of AirPlay 2 and HomeKit.
Apple’s growing ecosystem of devices and services is “probably underappreciated” by naysayers on Wall Street, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in an interview Tuesday.
“In terms of the naysayer, I’ve heard this over and over again,” Cook said in an exclusive interview with Jim Cramer. “I’ve heard it in 2001, I’ve heard it in 2005, in ‘7, in ‘8, in ’10, in ’12 and ’13. You can probably find the same quotes from the same people over and over again.”
“I’m not defensive on it. This is America and you can say what you want,” Cook continued. “But … my honest opinion is that there is a culture of innovation in Apple and that culture of innovation combined with these incredible, loyal customers, happy customers, this ecosystem, this virtuous ecosystem, is something that is probably underappreciated.”
Many will, understandably, blow this off as Cook simply doing damage control – and he very well might be. But he’s also not wrong.
Apple Music Wrapped generates a personalized music report that, by default, collects your 100 most-played songs added to your library in any given year since Apple Music was launched in 2015, sorting them from largest to smallest play count. The shortcut takes less than 30 seconds1 to run and the final report is opened in Safari as a custom webpage.
I don’t use Apple Music but I’m sure many of you are like me and like seeing this kind of data. Shame Apple doesn’t make it easy to create.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is set to post its first drop in quarterly operating profit in two years as slowing economic growth in China, a key market for the South Korean tech giant, erodes demand for its products.
[…]
“Depressed demand in China will further drive down Samsung’s chip sales there. And China’s overall smartphone market is stalled and declining, which will affect not only Apple but Samsung,” Song Myung-sup, a senior analyst at HI Investment & Securities, told Reuters.
A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display’s Apple’s logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company. The scary part is that if the recipient is an iPhone user who then requests a call back from Apple’s legitimate customer support Web page, the fake call gets indexed in the iPhone’s “recent calls” list as a previous call from the legitimate Apple Support line.
Jody Westby is the CEO of Global Cyber Risk LLC, a security consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. Westby said earlier today she received an automated call on her iPhone warning that multiple servers containing Apple user IDs had been compromised (the same scammers had called her at 4:34 p.m. the day before, but she didn’t answer that call). The message said she needed to call a 1-866 number before doing anything else with her phone.
I’m sure most of us wouldn’t get caught out by something like this but not everyone is as tech savvy as we are. My wife almost got caught by this so it’s a good idea to warn family and friends to never answer these kinds of calls unless they are expecting them and specifically request the call.
I believe that Apple’s management made three critical errors in their forecast for this last quarter that were predictable precisely because they had made the same errors before — errors that I wrote about at the time. In other words, I am very much susceptible to confirmation bias as well.
That noted, if indeed I am right, then that is good news for Apple: I suspect the company is in better shape than the last week of hysteria suggests.
Good examination from one point of view of what happened to Apple last week. The Quarterly Call at the end of this month will be very interesting.
Fifteen years ago, John Mayer joined Steve Jobs on stage to introduce a new app called GarageBand. For those of us who loved to create music, GarageBand was a revolution that would change the world.
The release of GarageBand brought the recording and production ability of more complicated apps to the average user. Of course, there were apps available to record digitally, but they were not focused on the average musician.
Typical of Apple apps, GarageBand was easy-to-use and approachable, even if you didn’t play an instrument. Using loops, GarageBand allowed users to create full songs without playing an instrument.
Showing the power of GarageBand, some professional artists released songs recorded in GarageBand. While that was impressive, it was always the way that GarageBand focused on making recording music easier the inspired me.
Even today, I have a GarageBand project set up with a simple drum beat that is ready to record. I plug in my guitar, press record and play. I have the drumbeat looped so I can play for quite a while and just get ideas recorded. So many of my songs were written using this simple method.
If there is something I like, I can start a new project with that riff, and then begin to work on the other instruments. Because GarageBand is built on the same engine as Apple’s professional audio workstation, you can import that project into Logic for more professional features if you want.
It’s impossible to say how much GarageBand has changed the world of music over the last 15 years. I have spoken to so many musicians over the years that use GarageBand to write new material because it is so easy to get new ideas recorded. These are people that used to hum ideas into a recorder and let the band listen to them. Now they can record full song ideas.
I still use GarageBand all the time. With all of the professional gear and apps that I have on hand, GarageBand is one of my go-to applications. I can’t see a time when that will change.
Pick something to draw with, start tapping and dragging. This is fun, and to me, has huge potential, especially if someone created something similar as a native app, drawing on the Bionic chip and machine learning.
To get you started, tap Plant, draw some greenery, then switch to Acid, go to work.
Over the weekend, I came across the linked Twitter thread, showing off a drop-down, draggable, menu system running on an iPhone. Take a minute to watch the first few videos in the thread.
I love this approach. To me, it brings the best of the Mac to iOS. I also see it as a bit of a missing link, bridging the Mac and iOS. Imagine a menuing system that kicked in if you were allowed to run an iOS app on your Mac, or if a pointing device was ever allowed to connect to an iOS device.
