In an ultimatum, Iranian officials asked iPhone manufacturer Apple Inc. to either officially register in Iran or have its products banned, a local news agency reported Monday.
“If Apple will not register an official representative in Iran within the next few days, all iPhones will be collected from the market,” Tasnim News Agency quoted the director of Iran’s anti-smuggling office as having said on Sunday.
More than 40 million Iranians are using smart phones, including millions of iPhone users, whose devices are often imported into the country by smugglers.
And:
For anti-smuggling purposes Iran has started a project, running under the president’s office, to ban smuggled mobile phones. The scheme, which will start later this week, will require all mobile phones to be registered with Iran’s telecommunications user database. Any that are not will not be able to be used.
Hard to know what to make of this. Given past events, is it wrong to be skeptical here?
Google’s grand plans for a futuristic new campus in the North Bayshore district of Mountain View, CA may finally become a reality thanks to a new real estate deal struck with LinkedIn. According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, the two tech companies came to an agreement on a property swap that puts to rest a longstanding feud over lucrative current and unused square footage in Silicon Valley. Google paid $215 million for the swap, while LinkedIn paid $331 million, the report states.
In a nutshell, Google’s plans for their campus were put on hold last year when the Mountain View city council voted to award a huge tract of land to LinkedIn instead of Google. With the swap, Google now has the property it needs to push forward.
Politics aside, follow the various links to see pictures and video of this planned campus. To me, it’s like a science fiction fantasy. It will be interesting to watch this unfold. Looks like Apple, Facebook and Google will all have their grand palaces.
Starting today, Apple Pay is now available in France for credit and debit cards issued by Banque Populaire, Ticket Restaurant, Carrefour Banque, and Caisse d’Epargne. Apple’s website also notes that support will soon be added for cards issued by Boon and Orange.
Out of the 4 big banks in France, just BPCE is supported (Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne merged to become BPCE in 2009). There is no word on when cards issued by the other three big banks (BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole or Société Générale) will be supported by Apple Pay.
The iPhone is “faster; smoother. Android freezes up” and has to be restarted too often, the source said. The problem with the Android is particularly noticeable when viewing live feed from an unmanned aerial system such as Instant Eye, the source said.
Makes sense that the Army would want the best equipment they can get.
I am absolutely astounded by what this report from F-Secure says. It makes the “gangs” seem like companies being graded on their customer service after hacking your computer:
Ransomware criminals actually care about your convenience. That’s according to a recent experiment detailed in a new F-Secure report, Evaluating the Customer Journey of Crypto-Ransomware and the Paradox Behind It. The experiment involved evaluating the “customer experience” of five current crypto-ransomware variants, beginning with the initial ransom screen all the way to interacting with the ransomware criminals behind each of those variants.
The report’s findings include:
Those families with the most professional user interfaces are not necessarily also those with the best customer service.
Crypto-ransomware gangs are usually willing to negotiate the price. Three out of four variants were willing to negotiate, averaging a 29 percent discount from the original ransom fee.
Ransomware deadlines are not necessarily “set in stone.” 100 percent of the groups contacted granted extensions on the deadlines.
One of the groups claimed to be hired by a corporation to hack another corporation — a kid playing a prank, or a sinister new threat actor?
If you installed any of the updates Apple released today, you may be interested in the security content of what you installed. These are for the official releases, not the betas.
It’s a big day for Apple updates. In addition to a number of beta updates released today, Apple also updated iTunes to version 12.4.2. According to the update, it “resolves a playback issue with short Apple Music songs in your Up Next queue.”
You can download iTunes by checking for new updates in the Mac App Store.
For children, playgrounds are where magic happens. And if you count yourself among Baby Boomers or Gen Xers, you probably have fond memories of high steel jungle gyms and even higher metal slides that squeaked and groaned as you slid down them.
When you dismounted from a teeter-totter, you had to be careful not to send your partner crashing to the ground or get hit in the head by your own seat. The tougher, faster kids always pushed the brightly colored merry-go-round, trying to make riders as dizzy as possible. In the same way, you’d dare your sibling or best friend to push you even higher on the swing so your toes could touch the sky.
Today, these objects of happy summers past have nearly disappeared, replaced by newer equipment that’s lower to the ground and made of plastic, painted metal, and sometimes rot-resistant woods like cedar or redwood.
This is a fascinating article about the history of the playgrounds many of us horsed around on as kids. We think of them with nostalgia but, if we’re honest with ourselves, some of that equipment was incredibly dangerous. We had metal slides that, in the heat of the summer, could cause significant burns. And who doesn’t remember being spun off (or doing the spinning off) the Merry Go Round? And how many kids fell from the top of the Monkey Bars, hitting every steel bar on the way down, knocking out multiple teeth?
Here’s some good news and bad news for publishers losing sleep over the rise of adblocking: The good news is that most people don’t hate all ads. The bad news is that, no, they won’t turn off their adblockers, even if you beg them.
This is according to a new survey from AdBlock Plus and marketing company HubSpot, which quizzed both users and non-users of adblocking plugins on why they use (or don’t use) the tech.
I’ve said it many times, this is an issue the ad publishers have brought on themselves and, for the most part, we have little sympathy for them. But it’s going to cause a significant shift in the way all web sites monetize their offerings.
Infamous software developer MacKeeper has demanded that four videos critical of its maligned tune-up utility suite be removed from the internet, threatening the teenager behind the videos with $60,000 in court costs and legal fees.
One of the biggest complaints about Apple Music over the past year was that it wouldn’t properly match songs subscribers had in their existing iTunes libraries. That problem is being fixed by Apple.
Apple has been quietly rolling out iTunes Match audio fingerprint to all Apple Music subscribers. Previously Apple was using a less accurate metadata version of iTunes Match on Apple Music, which wouldn’t always match the correct version of a particular song. We’ve all seen the stories of a live version of a song being replaced by a studio version, etc.
Using iTunes Match with audio fingerprint, those problems should be a thing of the past.
If you had songs that were matched incorrectly using the metadata version of iTunes Match, the new version will rematch to the correct song. However, it will not delete any downloaded copies of songs you have in your library. This is a very good thing—we don’t want songs auto-deleting from our libraries.
This is, in fact, the same version of iTunes Match that iTunes users could pay for as a separate subscription since Apple began offering it years ago. I am one of those users. However, all subscribers to Apple Music will get the new version of iTunes Match at no extra cost. This update also means that all Matched songs will download DRM-free.
If you are a current iTunes Match subscriber and subscribe to Apple Music, you can let your Match subscription lapse when it comes up for renewal and still receive the same benefits. If you don’t subscribe to Apple Music and still want the benefits of iTunes Match, hold on to your subscription.
Personally, I’ll be holding on to my subscription for the near future, just to be sure.
If you subscribe to Apple Music, you don’t need to do anything to receive the new version of iTunes Match. Apple is switching over 1% to 2% of its users every day, automatically.
Apple is watching the rollout very closely as new users are brought on and are cognizant of the user experience during the changeover. Switching millions of customers over is going to take some time, so be patient, but know it’s coming.
If you are currently an iTunes Match and Apple Music subscriber, you probably won’t see much of a difference. We were already getting the benefits of iTunes Match, so there won’t be much change for us.
If you’re an Apple Music subscriber but don’t have iTunes Match, you will start to see “Matched” in the iCloud Status column of iTunes on your Mac as the service rolls out.
Apple has made a lot of improvements to Apple Music over the past year, but this is by far one of the most significant updates to come to the service since it was introduced.
Uber hit 2 billion rides on June 18, CEO Travis Kalanick said in a Facebook post, six months after marking its first billion rides. The company, then, completed the same number of rides in six months as it did in the prior six years – due in part to its heavy spending to recruit drivers and passengers, which is made possible by more than $13 billion in funding from investors.
That’s pretty incredible. I use Uber, and Lyft, all the time.
Igloo is an intranet you’ll actually like. It’s 100% cloud-based, so you’ll always have the latest version and it can be accessed from any device, anywhere. It’s time to simplify work and keep people more connected than ever before.
“‘You’re asking me if I’m interested in a job, if I’m willing to move out to the West Coast, but you’re not willing to tell me what the job is,'” Gartenberg joked. “He goes, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Phil will give you a call in the next couple of days.'”
Netflix and CBS Studios International today announced a landmark international licensing agreement for the new “Star Trek” television series. Netflix will be the exclusive premiere home of “Star Trek” in 188 countries (excluding the US and Canada). Each episode of the new series will be available globally within 24 hours of its U.S. premiere.
Additionally, all 727 existing episodes of the iconic “Star Trek” television library – including “Star Trek: The Original Series,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Star Trek: Enterprise” will be available on Netflix around the world by the end of 2016.
The all-new “Star Trek” will begin production in Toronto in September for its January 2017 premiere.
Interesting move by Netflix to lock up this show for streaming at such an early stage. Also notable that they will stream the show globally within 24 hours of its US premiere. Will this become the new norm?
This looks awesome. More pledges needed to make this book a reality. Worth it.
From the Synopsis:
Mac gaming welcomed strange ideas and encouraged experimentation. It fostered passionate and creative communities who inspired and challenged developers to do better and to follow the Mac mantra “think different”.
The Secret History of Mac Gaming is the story of those communities and the game developers who survived and thrived in an ecosystem that was serially ignored by the outside world. It’s a book about people who made games and people who played them — people who, on both counts, followed their hearts first and market trends second. How in spite of everything they had going against them, the people who carried the torch for Mac gaming in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s showed how clever, quirky, and downright wonderful videogames could be.
Started in 1990 as a spinoff from Acorn Computers, a now-defunct British computer maker, ARM has gone from a small start-up of less than 20 people to a global leader whose technology is used in more than 90 percent of smartphones produced by Apple and Samsung, among others.
And:
Unlike Intel, ARM forgoes the high margins — and equally high production costs — of directly manufacturing microchips. Instead, its engineers design chips, which are then licensed to larger technology companies like Qualcomm that pay ARM fees and royalties for manufacturing the chips.
This is not yet a done deal. Whoever ultimately owns ARM will have control over the chip designs in most of the mobile devices in the world, no small thing. I don’t expect Apple to sit on the sidelines while this plays out.
OverType simulates, to an undesirable degree of accuracy, the experience of using a mechanical typewriter. You can have three fonts, one of which is IBM’s classic Courier, set the degree to which you want your typewriter to be broken, and the state of your ribbon ink. You cannot delete—but there is correction paper!
This will make the older readers smile and the younger readers say, “How did you put up with this!?”
James Surowiecki from The New Yorker takes a look at a question that many people have been asking for the last week—Is Pokemon success sustainable? There are a lot of factors that go into answering this question, but I think it’s too soon to know for sure.
On August 27, 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since.
It was 10:02 a.m. local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing”); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery in a north-westerly direction”); and even 3,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues, near Mauritius (“coming from the eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns.”)1 In all, it was heard by people in over 50 different geographical locations, together spanning an area covering a thirteenth of the globe.
So what could possibly create such an earth-shatteringly loud bang?
Along with the “Tunguska Event”, this is another of those phenomena that fascinated me as a kid.
They were called surfers, and they were a collection of mostly 20-somethings — including a yoga lover, an ex-banker, a divinity student, a recent college grad from Ohio hungry for adventure — all hired by a start-up called Yahoo to build a directory of the world’s most interesting websites.
I remember this so well. I can’t imagine building a directory of the most interesting Web sites by hand, but they did it.
