Jon Callas, who co-founded several well-respected secure communications companies including PGP Corp, Silent Circle and Blackphone, rejoined Apple in May, an Apple spokesman said.

Definitely a good hire for Apple.

Ars Technica: > I toggled on the auto-cruise and auto-steer, dialed the target speed up to 90mph and the desired follow distance to four cars, parked myself in the right lane, and pulled my hands slowly away from the wheel. > >It takes a while to get used to this feeling. Instead of serving as the primary means of direction for a car, you’re now a meat-based backup and failsafe system. Instincts and impulses formed by more than two decades behind the wheel scream out a warning—”GRAB THE WHEEL NOW OR YOU’LL DIE”—while the rational forebrain fights back. Eventually, the voices quiet as the car starts to prove itself. When the road curves, the car follows. If the car is ever going too fast to negotiate the curve, it slows down and then accelerates smoothly back out of the turn.

This is a really interesting read. I still won’t give up my motorcycle for a (semi) autonomous car but this description of a long trip while letting the Tesla take care of a lot of the driving shows you what the future will hold. Those who are not excited about autonomous vehicles may invest in used cars in murrieta with great features that make driving safer. Furthermore, if you have an old car that’s no longer being used, you may sell it and earn cash for junk cars.

Petapixel:

In this short presentation, photographer Mathieu Stern—who specializes in finding and reviewing “weird lenses” for his YouTube channel—introduces 4 soviet Jupiter lenses that anyone hunting for a bargain on glass should write down. Created between 1950 and 1980 in the USSR, they are: the Jupiter 9 85mm f/2, the Jupiter 11 135mm f/4, the Jupiter 11A 135mm f/4, and the Jupiter 21M 200mm f/4.

In the video each lens is shown off quickly and followed by a few sample photos Mathieu has captured using that lens. Oh, and all of them except the Jupiter 9 are going for well under $100 on eBay as of this writing, with the Jupiter 9 coming in around $150.

These are some very strange lenses but, if you are a victim of Lens Envy, they might scratch that itch. If nothing else, you’ll have some interesting photographic conversation pieces.

Metro UK:

The swarm of around 20,000 sparked chaos when their queen got stuck in a car boot.

Roger Burns of Pembrokeshire Beekeepers says the car’s owner drove away with the queen unknowingly trapped in the back, resulting in the swarm taking up the chase – even being spotted on the car’s boot the next day.

I’m sorry but I’d park the car, sell it and move to France.

Clicking the red cross on the right hand corner of the pop-up box now activates the upgrade instead of closing the box.

So you get a dialog to upgrade, click the button to close the window, and the upgrade starts instead of just dismissing the window. Yeah, that’s nasty.

Tim Cook featured at StartupFest this morning, in an interview with Neelie Kroes discussing Apple’s influence in startups and entrepreneurship culture. Cook covered many topics including the role of entrepreneurs and the App Store, the startup climate in Europe, economic optimism, technology in education, Apple Watch and more.

There are some great comments from Cook in these snippets taken from the interview.

User names and media attachments such as photos and videos will no longer count towards the length of a tweet, Twitter Inc said on Tuesday, but the 140-character limit will stay.

Good.

I had no idea you could do this.

Rather than focusing on the incremental innovation needed to win back the attention of enterprise users and premium consumers, Google’s vision for Android this year has again leapt in new directions which appear even less attainable. Android’s scattered, imitative strategies du jour are resulting in a platform that looks a lot like Apple’s—albeit the very unsuccessful Apple of the mid 90s.

This is a really interesting article from Daniel Eran Dilger. It will certainly be interesting to see what Apple does at WWDC.

i.am+, the company founded by musician will.i.am, recently announced the launch of its new i.am+ EPs, a set of premium Bluetooth earphones that are available exclusively from Apple retail stores and Apple.com.

Something about this strikes me as odd. The rumors of Apple releasing their own wireless headphones, Apple owning Beats, all of that. I don’t know.

The punch and musical character offered by the Neve EQs, compressors, and preamps have left their mark on legendary pop, rock, and hip-hop albums for over 40 years.

I’m one of those that loves what Neve gear brings to the sound of an album.

Great article. I can’t remember a time when podcasters, me included, haven’t complained about Skype.

Spotify has upgraded its family plan, now allowing up to six Premium accounts per family for $14.99 a month. The new plan is a direct match to Apple Music’s family plan — which Google Play also matched back in December — and is a dramatic improvement over Spotify’s old family offering, which would’ve cost users $30 a month for family of five (there was no six-person plan available before today).

Smart move.

Before Auburn decided what to do, the district surveyed grades seven through 12 students and teachers, Auburn School Department Technology Director Peter Robinson told the Auburn School Committee on Wednesday night.

The results were overwhelmingly in favor of laptops: 88.5 percent of teachers and 74 percent of students favored them over iPads.

Interesting that iPads showed great success in lower grades, but the schools said “iPads have shortcomings for older students.”

The Washington Post:

The only work he could find was as a night custodian at a local college. It was about a 50 percent pay cut, the work wasn’t stimulating, but the benefits were good. He decided he would take advantage of every free benefit the school offered so it would feel like he was making more money.

So Vaudreuil starting taking undergraduate classes tuition free at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts by day, and cleaning up after his classmates by night.

Nearly a decade after his life unraveled, Vaudreuil graduated on May 14 with a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering.

Someone hand me a tissue. I think I’ve got something in my eye.

The Outbound:

Based on press releases, we know that the tourist in question encountered a newborn bison in the park, physically put it in his vehicle, and transported it to a park ranger facility because he thought it was cold. The man was cited for disturbing wildlife. However, after a two-day attempt by park rangers to reunite the calf with its herd, park officials made the difficult decision to euthanize the animal. These events paint a sad but all too common picture in which humans tampering with wildlife results in detrimental, and often fatal, outcomes for the animal.

First of all, I’m embarrassed that the idiots who did this were Canadian. Secondly, if you have to go out in the woods (and I don’t recommend it), please be aware you are the visitor/intruder and leave it the same way you found it. That includes not physically interacting with the animals you come across.

Apple CEO Tim Cook laid out his company’s plans for the vast Indian market in a meeting Saturday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who in turn sought Apple’s support for his “Digital India” initiative focusing on e-education, health and increasing farmers’ incomes.

It’s fine that India ask for help from Apple, but the country is going to have to give something too—you can’t ban Apple from selling used iPhones and then ask them for help.

Amid a growing number of complaints over iOS 9.3.2 bricking some 9.7-inch iPad Pro models, Apple yesterday pulled the iOS 9.3.2 update. 9.7-inch iPad Pro users who have not installed iOS 9.3.2 no longer see the update, with iOS 9.3.1 now listed as the most current version of iOS 9 available for download.

Very specific problem for one model of the iPad. Weird.

Mr. Cook said he was not chasing market share in India but wanted to partner with telecom operators to enhance the quality of services. “We are in India for the next thousand years. Our horizon is very long. We are focussed on best, not most. So it doesn’t bother me that we don’t have top market share,” he said.

Apple is committed to its new markets, no doubt about that.

Pro Video Coalition:

The plan involved a sequence for the final three minutes of episode 595 (entitled “Simprovised”) that would be acted and animated in real time. The idea was to feature skilled improviser Dan Castellaneta, as Homer Simpson, responding to questions from live callers—real ones, who dialed a toll-free number—as a series of other animations played around him. The beginning and ending lines would be scripted but would still be performed in real time.

I find this an incredible achievement. Imagine an entire episode performed live.

Short version: Turn on Airplane Mode (though not this Airplane Mode – did we mention they’ll be the house band at the 2016 Beard Bash?)

I’m a fan of Apple Support’s Twitter account (@AppleSupport).

I wish there was a way to teach Siri to better understand my pronunciation of other words, like Draymond Green. The technique @AppleSupport shows in the linked tweet works for names in your address book, but not for other names and other words.

The New York Times:

On March 31 the Beijing Higher People’s Court upheld earlier rulings by a lower court and China’s trademark arbitration board that Xintong Tiandi had the right to use “iPhone” for products in Class 18 of the international trademark classification system, since Xintong Tiandi acquired the trademark in 2007 when the iPhone name was “not renowned” in China, the court ruled. Apple has the rights in Class 9, which covers computers and smartphones. Class 18 covers leather goods.

You’ve no doubt heard of that case. But here’s the kicker:

Xintong Tiandi didn’t exist in 2007. A Russian company acquired the rights then and Xintong Tiandi bought the rights from it in 2011, the Chinese company’s lawyer, Xiong Zhi, said in a telephone interview. Public company filings show that Xintong Tiandi was set up in 2011.

Intellectual property protection is critically important for any company that spends money on research and development. From this article from Seeking Alpha [Free Reg-wall]:

It’s probably no coincidence that Apple chose a private company for its first truly major investment in China. By pumping money into an existing firm like Didi with big growth potential, Apple avoided China’s problematic state-run sector and also minimized its risk of intellectual property (IP) theft that is rampant in the country. By comparison, India’s receipt of an R&D center plays to its strength as a software development hub, and also its stronger security systems for protecting IP.

And:

Minister Miao Wei was quoted saying he hoped Apple could improve its R&D activities in China and also provide a secure user experience.

Apple is walking a fine line here, opening an R&D center in India and not (at least yet) in China. Tricky business.

The Economic Times of India:

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan played host to Apple CEO Tim Cook at a private dinner at his home, Mannat, on Wednesday in the presence of Bollywood superstars and celebrities.

And:

Earlier in the evening, Film and TV Producers Guild of India president Mukesh Bhatt took Cook on a tour of the sets of his new horror film Raaz 4 at Mehboob Studio in Mumbai. “People from the Apple group got in touch with me, saying that Tim would not want to skip Bollywood on his first visit to India. I showed him around the sets. He seemed keen to see how Apple could partner with the industry – after all, movies don’t have to be made by just big film producers these days, it can be shot on an iPhone.

Bhatt said Cook asked questions about the studio’s history. “I found him to be down-to-earth, sensitive, passionate. His best quality is that he is a great listener,” said Bhatt, who also attended Shah Rukh’s party later in the night.

Tim Cook is a CEO and an ambassador, doing all he can to open India and China’s doors to Apple.

M.G. Siegler, writing about a closing keynote speech Steve Jobs gave at the 1997 WWDC conference (recalls that Steve Jobs was newly returned to Apple at the time):

It’s almost unbelievable how prescient nearly everything Steve Jobs says here actually is. If not all of it came to pass, nearly all of it did. And he spoke about things in great detail. As Rands notes, Jobs wasn’t underestimating the future, he was writing it, seemingly on the fly in that conversation.

This is one of my favorite Steve Jobs videos. He’s blunt, passionate, and you can feel him pulling this audience along with him.

Futurism:

This project was led by prosthetic artist Sophie De Oliveria Brata, founder of the Alternative Limb Project. Open Bionics, another prosthetics company, was in charge of the manufacturing and the 3D printing of the arm’s hands.

At £60,000, this carbon-fiber limb is controlled by muscle signals from James. He can shake hands, lift groceries, and even pick up coins. More excitingly, it features an interactive screen, a flashlight, a USB port for charging phones, and even a drone on the side—all battery powered.

This is insanely cool. Not cool enough that I’d want to try it but still pretty cool.