Sam Biddle, writing for The Intercept:

After Tuesday’s revelatory story by Reuters’ Joseph Menn that exposed an apparent vast, secret, government-ordered email surveillance program at Yahoo, the company has issued a brief statement through Joele Frank, a public relations firm.

Here’s a link to the Reuters article in question.

Yahoo’s email statement, via Jacob Silber of the Joele Frank communications firm:

Good morning –

We are reaching out on behalf of Yahoo regarding yesterday’s Reuters article. Yahoo said in a statement:

“The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.”

Best,

The Joele Frank Team

Sam Biddle:

This is an extremely carefully worded statement, arriving roughly 20 hours after the Reuters story first broke. That’s a long time to craft 29 words.

And:

It would mean a lot more for this denial to come straight from the keyboard of a named executive at Yahoo—perhaps Ron Bell, the company’s general counsel—rather than a “strategic communications firm.”

This feels like a disaster for Yahoo.

Phil Edwards, writing for Vox:

Comic book culture is mass culture — even lacrosse moms and field hockey dads who’ve never been in a comic book store can recognize the “comic book font.”

But calling it a font is a misnomer — as the above video shows, this distinctive style of handwriting is an aesthetic shaped by culture, technology, and really cheap paper.

Watch the video.

Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge:

Nailing down exactly what the Google Assistant is capable of can be strangely difficult right now. That’s because Google currently has three different ways to use the Google Assistant. Google says it’s the same Assistant in each place, but it can (and can’t) do different things depending on where you use it.

• Google Assistant on Google Home (the new speaker)
• Google Assistant on Pixel (the new phones)
• Google Assistant on Allo (the new-ish chat app)

At its core, Google Assistant is a model of you, with threads through your life, your calendar, your photos and other media, your travel plans, food ordering habits, etc. Each of these examples is a window into your Google model and a well-defined read and write access to that model.

One of the challenges to creating this sort of model is the ability to keep that model online and distributed. Ideally, you’d be online with a super-fast net connection with secure, unlimited storage at all times. That would mean storing your model in a central repository and giving access to the various assistants as needed.

But real life imposes limits such as limited net access, limited storage, and different form factors. Getting all these pieces to play together is a daunting challenge.

Notably, Apple has been meditating on this problem since the early days of the Mac. Check out this Knowledge Navigator video from 1987. This is an incredibly complex problem, and solutions are still in their infancy. Fascinating to watch this unfold.

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5mac:

The gradual death of the third-gen Apple TV is continuing this evening, as Apple has officially discontinued the device. In an email sent out today to employees and education partners, obtained by 9to5Mac, Apple confirmed that it is discontinuing the device, shifting its focus entirely to the fourth-gen, tvOS-powered model and possibly a new model.

I have a third-gen Apple TV and it still works well. Perfect solution to add Netflix, Hulu, etc. to a lower-use TV. If I could get another one at a heavily discounted price, I’d snap it up in a heartbeat.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, writing for Apple 3.0:

Apple has moved up by two days its final quarterly earnings call of fiscal 2016 due to what Apple Investor Relations calls a “scheduling conflict.”

What’s the conflict? Why Tuesday Oct. 25 and not Thursday Oct. 27? Apple didn’t say, and reporters’ inquiries (including mine) were met with silence.

And, among the rumors encountered for the change:

The best guess for the date shift, in my book, was also the most popular:

A launch event for new Macs

Just food for thought, here are the October events since 2010:

• Oct 20, 2010, Wednesday – Back to the Mac
• Oct 4, 2011, Tuesday – iPhone 4s
• Oct 23, 2012, Tuesday – iMac, iPad 4th Generation, iPad mini, Mac mini and MacBook Pro 13 inch
• Oct 22, 2013, Tuesday – iPad Air, iPad mini with Retina display
• Oct 16, 2014, Thursday – iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 3, 27-inch iMac

Notably, there was no October event last year.

What the hell were they thinking.

CBC:

There isn’t one defined set of Canadian values — but there may be five.

That’s the conclusion of the Angus Reid Institute, after polling thousands of Canadians in a joint partnership with the CBC on their beliefs, values and identities.

“The notion that there are a common set of Canadian values, it’s far more complex than that. It’s a much more complicated and complex equation,” said Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute.

One of the problems we Canadians have always had is that of “national identity”. Even if you’re not Canadian, it might be fun to see where you might fit in this wonderful country. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a “Permissive Reformer”.

The New York Times:

Paine was an ecologist, so he had no shot at the prestige, power and wealth that the Nobels bestow. The same can be said for the world’s top geologists, oceanographers, meteorologists, climatologists, crop scientists, botanists, entomologists and practitioners of many other fields.

Science’s reach has relentlessly expanded to include ever more facets of our world, and it has become increasingly important to our lives. But the world’s most important scientific honor society has largely ignored that evolution. As a result, the Nobel Prizes, which will be announced this week, are reserved for an ever-shrinking fraction of the scientific community and are receding from the interests of society at large. It’s high time for an update.

Like many things, the Nobel is a product of its time. Does it need to be updated to reflect the 21st century and not the 19th?

The Thumb Factory:

See how the rest of the world is feeling right now! Take part in the world’s largest, real-time mental health survey starting October 10. After logging how you feel, you can then use the interactive dashboard to see how the rest of the world is feeling through maps and graphs – all in real-time.

How is the World Feeling? is an initiative of Spur Projects – an Australian not-for-profit organisation dedicated to eliminating suicide. To participate in the study, simply download the free app from iTunes.

These kinds of studies and surveys are what I magine Apple envisioned when they created the infrastructure for these apps.

Sly Marton:

Let’s get this out-of-the-way right off the top. I realize I’m 53 years old, long past the age some would say where meeting your musical idols, if even possible, should be out of your system.

But Bruce Springsteen is more than just a musical idol to some, myself included.

“They”, whoever “they” are, say you should never meet your idols. “They” were wrong.

My friend Sly has been a lifelong fan of Bruce Springsteen. I’m so happy for her to have been able to meet him, even if for only a few brief moments. Read this story and ask yourself, what hero/idol would you like to meet? Or do you believe it’s true you shouldn’t meet your idols? I’m very glad Sly met hers.

Glen Fleishman, with a little help from Josh Centers, walks through the payment apps that work inside the iMessage infrastructure. Learned a lot, all very interesting, but found this telling:

We’re still in the early days of iMessage apps, but two prominent payment apps have added iMessage integration: Square Cash and Venmo. A third, Circle, was launched on multiple platforms by entrepreneurs with deep Internet roots. Oddly, PayPal hasn’t yet updated its app to support iMessage payments, but the company often lags putting improvements in its native software.

Is this a wait-and-see on PayPal’s part? They’ve clearly opened a door to the competition. Or perhaps iMessage support is just not that big a deal in the larger world of payment processing.

Chris Mench, writing for Complex:

> Scientists at Sony’s CSL research lab unveiled a new track called “Daddy’s Car.” If that sounds bizarre to you, you’re not wrong. Although the song sounds like any run-of-the-mill track, it’s actually created by the artificial intelligence software Flow Machines. The software draws from a massive database of songs to compose its music, combining small elements of many tracks to create new compositions. All someone has to do to create a song is choose a style of music or artist from the database and the software will make the score for them. The most represented genres are jazz and pop, but all types of music are represented. In this case, a musician named Benoît Carré wrote the lyrics and arranged the music.

The song is embedded below. Take a listen. Even if this style of music is not your cup of tea, set that aside and listen to the changes and harmonies. This showed us a glimpse of the future of ai relationships. There’s a lot of derived musical techniques at work, all playing very softly together. No edge, no instrumental expression, but lots of vocal shifts. I’m hearing Beatles and XTC. Artificial Intelligence News is the website to follow for all things AI, chatGPT, AI insights, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural network, GPT 3, AI model, Intelligence.

To me, this is a harbinger of things to come. Our robotic overlords have their sights set on our music streaming revenue.

Jeff Benjamin, writing for 9to5mac, goes into a fair amount of detail on the new iPhone 7 home button. If you’ve not yet had the chance to play with one, this post will answer a lot of questions.

The Home button on the iPhone 7 feels more responsive than the old mechanical Home button, as long as you ensure that you make skin contact with it.

To me, the home button feels different, even odd, because the underlying mechanism is completely different. Rather than a directly coupled microswitch which clicked as you pressed it, the new mechanism relies on a circuit to activate a taptic engine lying underneath the home button.

I get the slightest feeling of delay from the moment I apply pressure to the home button to the moment when I actually feel the vibration from the taptic engine. This could be my imagination, the way my brain translates that different feel, but it certainly will take some getting used to.

Because the new solid state Home button requires skin contact to register presses, this makes interacting with the Home button through non-capacitive gloves or other barriers a non-starter. It also means that you can no longer click the Home button with your fingernail, a practice that many of us with soiled hands have relied on in the past.

I’ve also used my fingernail to press the button without unlocking the phone, just to see the lock screen. Again, just something to get used to.

Yes, the Home button has changed and the change may feel odd at first, but after you get used to it, it’s much better. Going back to the mechanical Home button on my iPhone 6s now feels weird. I’ve simply come to the realization that the new Home button isn’t bad at all, it’s just the way that a Home button on an iPhone 7 is supposed to feel.

The big win here is waterproofing resistance, something the old design would not have supported. So get used to it we will.

Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog, walks through the mechanics of enabling/disabling macOS and other auto-downloads.

The Daily Beast:

The LP era gave us a plethora of great double albums—the visceral urgency and variety of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., the mish-mash collection of eccentricities on the Beatles’ “White Album,” Marvin Gaye’s achingly personal Here My Dear, Elton John’s melodic pop opus Goodbye Yellow Brick Road—none of those great albums achieve the kind of balance in creative scope, musical variety and consistent listenability that Stevie Wonder captures so masterfully on his magnificent Songs In the Key of Life.

I can definitely say this was the first album that showed me the power of music. The whole thing is utterly incredible.

Conde Naste Traveler:

It may be one of the smaller continents, but what Europe lacks in size, it makes up for in style: staggering alpine views, fields of lavender and vine, limestone cliffs, and art and architecture threatening to upstage some of nature’s finest. Here, take a look at 50 of the most breathtaking sites across Europe.

It’s set up as a really annoying 50 page slideshow but the photography is spectacular.

Nature’s balance. Love this.

Keir Thomas walks through the process of rebonding/regreasing his MacBook Pro’s heatsink. Is this necessary? Will it extend the life of your MacBook Pro? Keir says yes, and he’s got the tech chops to make this look relatively easy.

Though I love getting my hands dirty, I think I’ll hold off on this one until I get my hands on a new MacBook Pro. That said, I found this post and the accompanying pictures fascinating and well worth the read. And, sure enough, his MacBook Pro runs much cooler after his tweaking is done. Cool.

Blog “Which? Tech Daily” ran the HTC 10, LG G5, Samsung Galaxy S7, and the Apple iPhone 7 through a series of battery tests.

The most notable difference:

Whilst the iPhone 7’s 712 minutes of call time (nearly 12 hours) may sound acceptable, the rival Samsung Galaxy S7 lasted twice as long – and it doesn’t even have the longest lasting battery. The HTC 10 lasted an incredible 1,859 minutes (that’s almost 31 hours).

And:

So just why does the iPhone 7 have such a poor battery life? It may sound obvious, but the majority of the fault lies in its comparatively tiny cell. Smartphone batteries are measured in milliampere hours (mAh). The iPhone 7 has a 1,960mAh battery, whilst the HTC 10 has a 3,000mAh battery: it should hardly be surprising that one battery nearly half the size of another offers roughly half as much charge.

So was this a fair test? Is call time a fair measure of battery life? In browsing/email testing, the battery life was much closer, though the iPhone still finished last.

To me, the bottom line is a battle between thinness/weight and battery life. I rarely have to recharge my iPhone battery during the day. So, for me, the thinness of my iPhone is worth the shorter battery life.

UPDATE: The test compares the iPhone 7 (138.3mm x 67.1mm) against the HTC 10 (145.9mm x 71.9mm), the Samsung Galaxy S7 (142.4mm x 69.6mm), and the LG G5 (149.4mm x 73.9mm). All three competing phones are a fair bit larger than the iPhone 7. Bigger phone equals bigger battery. Thus the addition of the word “flawed” to the post’s title.

Tim Cook hopped on stage for a Q&A with Senator Orrin Hatch on Hatch’s Utah Tech Tour. Here’s the video.