MacRumors:

A trailer for the second season of Apple Original series “For All Mankind” has today been shared on IMDb, but it has not yet been officially released by Apple.

Apple TV+ trailers and promotional videos are usually shared on the ‌Apple TV‌+ YouTube channel and via the ‌Apple TV‌+ newsroom, but the “For All Mankind” season two trailer has yet to appear on either. It is possible that the trailer has been prematurely uploaded to IMDb today ahead of an official announcement from Apple. A release date for the second season has also not yet been announced.

Very odd to not see this released on the official Apple TV+ YouTube channel as of this writing but it is on the Apple TV+ Facebook page. I watched the first season and, while I don’t think it rose to the level of great TV, I’m still looking forward to season 2.

UPDATE: It is now on Apple TV+ YouTube channel.

Bloomberg:

Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan spent almost an hour on Thursday discussing an idea that would once have been unthinkable for the world’s largest semiconductor company: Not manufacturing its own chips. Intel’s shares tumbled as much as 18% Friday morning. Outsourcing is the norm in the $400 billion industry nowadays, but for 50 years Intel has combined chip design with in-house production. And until recently, Intel was even planning to churn out processors for others.

“To the extent that we need to use somebody else’s process technology and we call those contingency plans, we will be prepared to do that,” Swan told analysts on a conference call, after the company warned of another delayed production process. “That gives us much more optionality and flexibility. So in the event there is a process slip, we can try something rather than make it all ourselves.”

As the article says, outsourcing is the norm so, in the long run, this is unlikely to hurt Intel significantly. It will be their delays in production that hurt them.

MyHeritage: >Perhaps you have old photos that look grainy or blurred, or photos of large family gatherings with many faces that are too small to recognize clearly. The MyHeritage Photo Enhancer aims to solve these age-old problems and produces phenomenal results that let you see your ancestors more clearly than ever before.

The examples of what the service offers are incredible. If you’ve got old, sepia-toned, poor quality photos, the photo enhancer does an amazing job of bringing out long lost details in the shots. You’ll see pictures of your great-grandparents in ways you never thought possible. As you preserve these precious memories, consider setting up a wedding registry online to start creating new memories that will last for generations. If you’re currently planning your wedding, you may hire wedding photographers Northern Virginia.

To get started, you have to create an account, including giving up your credit card info. But you can skip this step and go straight to the upload page here. You can upload a photo and the site will still ask you to create an account but there’s no need to enter any credit card info. From there, you choose your photo to be enhanced (FYI in my tests, it would only accept JPGs and at least 300 pixels by 300 pixels) and/or colourized.

The results are pretty incredible. I only have one old photo of my father (who I never met) and I ran it through the process and this is the result:

Notice the tiny watermarks on the lower left and right. If you are a paid-up subscriber, those aren’t present. Subscriptions are pricey at $17/month but you can cancel at any time, according to the site. Give it a try yourself but, when you sign up, use a throwaway email address. MyHeritage opts you into a buttload of their emails.

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. told U.S. employees they can take as many as four hours off with pay on Election Day to vote or volunteer at a polling place.

The policy applies to retail employees and hourly workers and is similar to moves made by other companies, including Twitter Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. It was announced in a memo to Apple employees seen by Bloomberg News. Election Day is Nov. 3.

“For retail team members and hourly workers across the company, if you’re scheduled to work this Election Day, we’ll be providing up to four hours of paid time off if you need it to get to the polls,” Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s senior vice president of retail and people, told staff. “If they choose, our teams can also use this time to volunteer as an election worker at one of your local polling stations.”

Great idea but why isn’t this a nationwide law as it is in some third world countries?

VOX:

Earlier this year, the Pentagon released three videos of UFOs recorded by the Navy — one taken in 2004 and the other two in 2015. The videos, which first leaked a couple of years ago, show … well, it’s not exactly clear.

There are various objects — two of which look like aircraft — spinning through the sky and moving in ways that defy easy explanation. As the images bop across the screen, you can hear the pilots’ excitement and confusion in real time as they track whatever it is they’re seeing.

I’m not what you would call a UFO enthusiast, but the videos are the most compelling I’ve ever seen. They seem to confirm, at the very least, that UFOs are real — not that aliens exist, but that there are unidentified objects buzzing around the sky.

Now, do I think aliens are real? Yeah, probably. Are they flying spaceships into our atmosphere? Who the hell knows?

I think this is really interesting in an entirely “thought experiment” kind of way. I do believe there is “alien life” out there but do I believe they’ve visited Earth? No. How about you?

AppleInsider:

Apple is donating its share of earnings from documentary film “John Lewis: Good Trouble” to the National Civil Rights Museum and National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“Representative John Lewis’s life and example compel each of us to continue the fight for racial equity and justice,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. “This film celebrates his undeniable legacy, and we felt it fitting to support two cultural institutions that continue his mission of educating people everywhere about the ongoing quest for equal rights.”

Lewis was an important figure in the American Civil Rights Movement and this is a documentary everyone should watch.

Wired:

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube, which debuted July 19, 2000. It also marks the 19th anniversary of Apple’s announcement that it was putting the Cube on ice. That’s not my joke, it’s Apple’s, straight from the headline of its July 3, 2001, press release that officially pulled the plug.

For one thing, the price was prohibitive—by the time you bought the display, it was almost three times the price of an iMac and even more than some PowerMacs. By and large, people don’t spend their art budget on computers.

That wasn’t the only issue with the G4 Cube. Those plastics were hard to manufacture, and people reported flaws. The air cooling had problems. If you left a sheet of paper on top of the device, it would shut down to prevent overheating. And because it had no On button, a stray wave of your hand would send the machine into action, like it or not.

I was at the Macworld Expo launch of the Cube in 2000 and not to toot my own horn but I (and to be fair, many others) predicted the demise of the Cube as soon as we saw it. Rather, as soon as we saw the eye-watering price of the little box of plastic. Then we saw what the display would cost (and you “had to” buy the display – why would you connect this beautiful cube to an ordinary monitor?) and the prediction was an easy one to make.

That being said, many of us lusted after the Cube – maybe less so when all the issues surrounding it became apparent but nonetheless, like the Twentieth Anniversary Mac, it was less a computer and more of a design statement and a way to show off your cool factor.

TechCrunch:

Streaming media platform Plex announced today it’s further expanding into live TV with the addition of over 80 free live TV channels accessible by free users and subscribers alike. The company had already allowed consumers to capture and record live TV by way of a digital antenna and tuner connected to a Plex media server, but this required investment in additional hardware and involved a more complicated setup process.

The channel lineup includes Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Toon Goggles, Kidoodle TV, KidsFlix, fubo Sports Network, Cooking Panda, DrinkTV, IGN TV, AFV Family, Tastemade, Revry, FailArmy, Dove Channel, Docurama, The Pet Collective, WeatherSpy, Made in Hollywood and others.

While none of these are big names, they expand Plex’s service with a range of free content where you might catch something interesting upon browsing — like a cooking show, old movie, classic TV episode, funny video or kids cartoon, for instance.

There’s not much familiar here but if you’ve already watched everything on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, Peacock, etc, maybe you can find something watchable.

TidBITS:

Apple has announced that it is releasing a special version of the iPhone to approved security researchers as part of a new Apple Security Research Device Program (SRD). The SRD, which was originally announced during last year’s Black Hat information security conference, is a standard iPhone with key security controls disabled to allow security researchers to run their own tools. Apple will provide SRDs on one-year renewable loans to researchers who are accepted into the program.

In a private briefing, Apple provided additional details about and background on the SRD program.

I posted yesterday on Apple’s PR regarding the Apple Security Research Device Program and now the guy I trust most on Mac security related issues has posted about his briefing with Apple about these devices. As always, Mogull writes well and in-depth while not being nearly as techy or geeky as the subject warrants. It’s a good read if you have any interest in this kind of program.

DPReview:

Adobe has pushed live security updates for its Bridge, Photoshop and Prelude applications that patch a number of critical vulnerabilities.

ThreatPost says each of the 12 ‘critical flaws stem from out-of-bounds read and write vulnerabilities, which occur when the software reads data past the end of — or before the beginning of — the intended buffer, potentially resulting in corruption of sensitive information, a crash, or code execution among other things.’ Specifically, five flaws were addressed in Adobe Photoshop, three in Adobe Bridge and four in Adobe Prelude.

According to Adobe, no known uses of these critical bugs have been reported in the wild, but you’re going to want to make sure all of your programs are up to date if you don’t have automatic updates installed. All updates can be downloaded via the Creative Cloud desktop app for macOS and Windows computers.

Patch now.

Rolling Stone:

The part of the streaming shell game that I’ve never been able to fully understand — and that has somehow gotten worse with each passing year and each new service debut — is just how bad the user experience is on all of them. It’s been 13 years since Netflix began offering streaming content, with Hulu and others soon to follow, yet the user interfaces consistently seem designed to make finding what you want to see — whether continuing a binge or discovering something new — a Herculean effort. Spend enough time toggling between the services, and you’ll want to quote Hall of Fame baseball manager Casey Stengel trying to make sense of the historically inept 1962 Mets: Can’t anybody here play this game?

Simply put, there are a lot of basic practices that all streamers should be following, and that most of them don’t seem to understand in the slightest. Here’s our four-point plan to optimize user experience.

Like a lot of people since the beginning of (waves hands around) all of this, we’ve been watching a lot more streaming stuff. The user experience is uniformly awful.

9to5Mac:

An analyst of the US contact tracing landscape paints a depressing picture. Not a single US state currently offers an app that uses the Apple/Google coronavirus contact tracing API — and only four states plan to do so.

Others have launched GPS-based apps that raise immediate privacy concerns and are unlikely to see significant adoption, while the majority of states who responded plan to offer nothing at all…

Legal blog Lawfare describes its mission as covering “that nebulous zone in which actions taken or contemplated to protect the nation interact with the nation’s laws” – making an analysis of the state of play of coronavirus contact tracing an ideal topic. The results of that analysis don’t make for cheery reading.

There’s an argument to be made for the fact that until contact tracing is widespread, we won’t get a handle on this pandemic. This patchwork of (non)efforts isn’t helping. Thanks to Michael D for the link.

Gonna stop here for a second and acknowledge the English language/UK-US bias, right off the top.

That said, this is still quite interesting. Before you follow the link, take a guess as to who in the pop universe has the biggest vocal range. Challenge is to name anyone in the top three.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple in iOS 14 added a new Translate app, which, as the name suggests, is designed to offer translations from one language to another. The Translate app has some useful features that are handy both when learning a new language and when attempting to talk to someone who speaks a different language.

And:

The Translate app can translate to and from Arabic, mainland Chinese, English (US and UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Nice walkthrough. Interesting that this is available on iPhone, but not iPad. For more detail on what’s coming to iOS but not iPadOS, check this Macworld article by Michael Simon.

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

We’ve heard reports before that Apple plans to include a periscope lens on future iPhones, and a new Ming-Chi Kuo report today suggests this is coming in 2022.

Rumor aside, the focus of the linked article is this:

What exactly is a periscope lens, and what would it mean for future iPhones?

A typical iPhone lens stacks its elements perpendicularly away from the iPhone. That lens stack is what makes the camera bump in the iPhone case.

A periscope lens uses a mirror to let the stack of lens elements live inside the case, with optical zoom without a camera bump made possible by sacrificing interior space.

Ben does a great job explaining all this. Great read.

Wired:

The best time to catch a glimpse of Neowise was in early July, just after it made its closest approach to the sun and reached peak brightness. The comet has grown noticeably dimmer over the past few days as it moves away from the sun, but if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, it’s not too late. Neowise makes its closest approach to the Earth on Thursday, and if you live in the northern hemisphere you’ll still be able to see it with your naked eye for a few more days. We asked amateur astronomers for their best tips on how to go comet-spotting.

There’s no telling how quickly it will fade from view so get out and see it as soon as you can.

The Quietus:

It was really just a name change because the technology already existed, but it was to become the luggage tag on a revolution.

On 14th July 1995, audio engineers at the Fraunhofer Society in Munich finally settled on what the filename extension for the compressed digital format they had developed should be named. What was previously known as .bit was now to be called .mp3.

It really only had a 12-year window at its peak, but it packed a lot into them. In just over a decade it changed the record business completely. Twice. It also paved the way for streaming – all streaming, not just music streaming – to become the default way to, drawing on the industry’s own terminology, “consume” “content”.

No other music format since the phonograph in 1877 has had anything even approaching the profound impact that the MP3 has had on the music business. All formats before the MP3 were designed specifically to plump up the profitability of the music business; the MP3 ripped it to shreds.

It’s hard to overstate the seismic shift the MP3 created in the music industry.

Apple:

As part of Apple’s commitment to security, this program is designed to help improve security for all iOS users, bring more researchers to iPhone, and improve efficiency for those who already work on iOS security. It features an iPhone dedicated exclusively to security research, with unique code execution and containment policies.

The Security Research Device (SRD) is intended for use in a controlled setting for security research only. Shell access is available, and you’ll be able to run any tools and choose your entitlements. Otherwise, the SRD behaves as closely to a standard iPhone as possible in order to be a representative research target.

How soon do you think it will be before we see some developer release “benchmarks” for this iPhone? Thanks to Rich Mogull for the link.

CNBC:

On Wednesday, Apple presented some arguments defending the App Store that could factor into next week’s testimony. While the company says it’s not a preview of what Cook will say at Monday’s hearing, it commissioned a study from Analysis Group released on Wednesday that finds that Apple’s App Store’s fees and practices are largely in line with other digital marketplaces, including the Google Play app store and the Amazon Appstore.

“The commission rates charged by digital marketplaces most similar to the App Store, such as other app stores and video game digital marketplaces, are generally around 30%,” the authors of the study wrote.

The House probe into big technology companies will not result in enforcement, but it may spur legislation that could restrict Apple and other large tech companies.

This is Apple “softening the ground” ahead of Cook’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee along with chief executives from Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

This group has recreated a number of official macOS wallpapers over the years, using a drone. This year, with Big Sur, a drone wouldn’t quite cut it.

A little bit of the story, in their own words:

My friends and I had one choice, we had to get a helicopter to fly us over Big Sur. After talking to an aerial photographer, we got connected with a pilot, who funny enough was the same pilot that helped Apple take the photo (shoutout Chris from Specialized Helicopters — he was amazing!!)

The problem was Apple’s photo was taken in the winter. And since it’s summer, that means that the sun will rise differently and at a different time. Moreover, June is known for coastal fog, so it was up to chance whether or not we would get a clear day.

The video below does a great job telling the story, with a live shot of them actually watching Craig Federighi do the big reveal.

Amber Neely, AppleInsider:

If you’re not a fan of the original Apple TV remote, you’re not alone. Between its glass design, unintuitive orientation, and high replacement cost, it has left many Apple TV users looking for alternatives.

That’s me.

The Button Remote touts itself as a more traditional alternative.

It features buttons that closely mirror that of a VCR or DVD remote. There are buttons for controlling volume, navigating menus, video playback functions (such as pause, rewind, and fast forward), and a power button.

Here’s a link to the FUNCTION button remote. Note that it doesn’t ship until the second week in August.

Jabari Young, CNBC:

As part of the league’s Covid-19 health and safety protocols, MLB said it would ban traditional video stations shared throughout clubhouses. The league took advantage of its 2016 partnership with Apple to expand the dugout iPad program. It will now distribute 15 iPads to each team for players and staff to dissect performances and additional team content like scouting reports.

Far more interesting to me is the fact that teams will pump in fake crowd noise so the players, as well as viewers at home, can get a sense of how excited the crowds would be if they existed.

If you made it this far, you might be interested in knowing that Opening Day is tomorrow (Thursday), with the World Champion Nationals vs the Yankees at 7p ET and the Giants vs the Dodgers at 7p PT.

Someone tell Siri.