Drivers working for ride-hailing services such as Uber Technologies Inc and Lyft Inc will be considered employees under California’s new gig worker law, the state’s leading industry regulator said on Thursday.
The decision, by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates ride-hailing companies across the state, comes six months after a state law took effect that makes it tougher for companies to classify workers as contractors rather than employees. The latter designation exempts them from paying for overtime, healthcare and workers’ compensation.
This looks like it’s done, but the two sides have been battling for the last few years on the issue. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more lawsuits in the future.
Before June each year, content and media platforms in China anxiously anticipate a new round of censorship as the government tightens access to information in the lead-up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
This year, Chinese users lost access to two podcast apps — Pocket Casts and Castro Podcasts. Neither app is searchable within Apple’s Chinese App Store at the time of writing.
Pocket Casts, which was acquired by a group of American public radio companies in 2018, tweeted that it “has been removed from the Chinese App Store by Apple, at the request of the Cyberspace Administration of China,” the country’s internet watchdog.
When Pocket Casts asked for clarification, Apple’s app review team told the podcast firm to contact the CAC directly, an email seen by TechCrunch showed.
Apple continues to be embarrassed by its inability to fight back against the Chinese government’s censorship.
Adobe is launching a new app today called Photoshop Camera that’s filled with a bunch of very elaborate filters that can change your face and the world around you. Some of the filters are really impressive: several identify the sky behind you and replace it with perfect clouds or a magical moon; another puts you inside a Black Mirror-esque glitchy world; and another makes you look like you’re in a comic book.
The app is available for free and works on both iOS and Android (though only recent Pixel, Galaxy, and OnePlus models are officially supported for the latter). Adobe launched a preview of the app in November.
Photoshop Camera has little to do with Photoshop beyond the fact that both have to do with photos and both of them are apps. You can do some basic photo editing here — adjust contrast, exposure, saturation, and so on — but mostly you’re meant to snap a picture, filter it, and leave. If you want to make adjustments, there’s a magic wand button that automatically dials in changes for you so you don’t have to worry about the actual settings.
I was a beta tester for PS Camera (as it was then called). Whether you’ll like the app I think depends greatly on whether or not you want “insta-worthy” (ugh – I hate that term) photos or not. I found it to be fairly simplistic and over the top. Not the “Camera” app I was expecting and hoping for from Adobe.
Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis said in an interview with The Verge that Photoshop Camera is “the next one in that journey for us.” I really hope not.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and company will launch the 2020 WWDC with a “special event keynote” on June 22, at 1 PM Eastern Time — with sessions following on how to build “the next generation of apps.”
Apple says that the 2020 WWDC will be the “biggest WWDC to date, bringing together the global Apple developer community of more than 23 million in an unprecedented, virtual way.” Leading off that unique gathering is the “Special Event Keynote.”
The keynote will stream live from Apple Park on Apple.com, the Apple Developer app, the Apple Developer website, the Apple TV app, and YouTube, and will also be available for on-demand playback after the conclusion of the stream.
This might just be Apple’s most interesting and important WWDC ever.
The unfinished work of racial justice and equality call us all to account. Things must change, and Apple's committed to being a force for that change. Today, I'm proud to announce Apple’s Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, with a $100 million commitment. pic.twitter.com/AoYafq2xlp
The breadth of section 230’s immunity is historically unprecedented. While earlier legal doctrines had limited the liability of bookstores and other distributors, it hadn’t granted them the kind of total immunity that online providers now enjoy. A bookstore could still be liable if there was proof it knew it was publishing an obscene or defamatory book. By contrast, Internet providers are immune even if they know about illegal content on their sites and leave it online.
It’s hard to imagine sites like Yelp, Reddit, or Facebook existing in their current form without a law like Section 230. Yelp, for example, is regularly threatened by business owners for allegedly defamatory reviews. Section 230 allows Yelp to basically ignore these threats. Without Section 230, Yelp would need a large staff to conduct legal analysis of potentially defamatory reviews—a cost that could have prevented Yelp from getting off the ground 15 years ago.
The article quotes Eric Goldman, a professor at the Santa Clara University Law School, as saying, for better or worse, “…this rule made the modern Internet possible.”
Today, we @playgroundAI release our first product, Anonymous Camera. Designed together with investigative journalists, it lets you anonymise photos and videos in real time, locally on device. All IAP proceeds go towards @BlackVisionsMN and @UR_Ninja. pic.twitter.com/EfU0hCxpoc
I’ve been playing around with this app and it works mostly as advertised. I say mostly because if you move too quickly, the blur can’t keep up. Hopefully, you’ll never have to use this app but it’s good to know it’s available. Also, if you’d like to blur photos automatically, I found a Blur Faces iOS extension. The downside of this extension is the blur doesn’t sem customizable. In my testing, I saw that I could still recognize the faces of people I knew. The other issue is the extension sends the photos off of your phone to be blurred, creating security and data integrity issues.
Conner Carey, iPhone Life, in a post from a year back:
The Do Not Disturb function on iPhone allows you to silence all incoming calls, texts, and notifications. Here’s how to bypass Do Not Disturb for individual contacts using a feature called Emergency Bypass. This allows the people designated to reach you on your iPhone even if your Do Not Disturb settings are set to silence calls and texts from everyone.
Obviously, this has been around for a while, but the discoverability is pretty low, thought it worth posting. Here’s the details:
Go into Contacts
Search for a contact you want to be able to reach you, even if you have Do Not Disturb enabled
(Note that “Add to Emergency Contacts” is on this page. Not what we’re going for, that’s for the Health app and emergency responders)
Tap Edit to edit the contact
Scroll down and tap Ringtone
There at the top of the Ringtone page is the Emergency Bypass switch.
Emergency Bypass allows sounds and vibrations from this person even when the ring switch is set to silent, or when Do Not Disturb is on.
Since you’ve come this far, take a minute to visit:
Settings > Do Not Disturb
Note the Allow Calls From setting, which defaults to your Favorites list. Slightly different from Emergency Bypass. This is about phone calls. Odd to me that they are not integrated in some way.
Though this post is written from a software developer’s perspective, it is quite readable even if you’ve never written a line of code. And if you are interested in a potential Arm-based Mac, it’s short and worth your time.
If I had to cherry-pick one highlight:
Assertion: ARM Macs will exclusively run Catalyst apps.
The thinking goes, since major apps like Microsoft Word and Photoshop already have versions on the iPad, it would be a piece of cake for them to recompile and run on MacOS as Catalyst apps.
This would be a serious downgrade for users of these apps on MacOS, and would be a major departure from the way the apps currently behave on MacOS. And even with Catalyst, it’s still a lot of work for an iPad app to look and feel like a Mac app. You’re still going to need a team to make sure everything ports correctly, in addition to adding all the missing functionality that your users would expect to be there. I just don’t see this happening.
WWDC, and the answers it’ll bring, is a week and a half away.
Number 1, by far, is Saudi Aramco, which passed $2 trillion back in December, in its first day of public trading. Interestingly, Saudi Aramco’s market cap today is about $115B. That’s a pretty astonishing fall. Oil biz.
Next up is Apple, followed closely by Microsoft, just a whisker behind.
Will we one day look back on numbers like these as small? Will Apple hit $2 trillion?
My immediate thought on reading that headline was, “Why one year?”. To get that, here’s Amazon’s actual announcement:
We’re implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology. We will continue to allow organizations like Thorn, the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Marinus Analytics to use Amazon Rekognition to help rescue human trafficking victims and reunite missing children with their families.
We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge. We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested.
The headline linked CNBC article expands on this with coverage of IBM exiting the facial recognition business, and lots of other background snippets. Worth reading.
HBO Max has removed from its catalog “Gone With the Wind,” the 1939 movie long considered a triumph of American cinema but one that romanticizes the Civil War-era South while glossing over its racial sins.
The streaming service pledged to eventually bring the film back “with a discussion of its historical context” while denouncing its racial missteps, a spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday.
“‘Gone With the Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society,” an HBO Max spokesperson said in a statement. “These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”
But they were wrong “yesterday” as well. And the day before that and the day before that. HBO Max is making it seem like they watched the movie on Monday and thought, “Holy crap! We had no idea how racist this movie was!” HBO Max pulling it today makes you ask the question, “If it was so racist, why did you ever have it available for streaming?” Even Disney recognizes some of its racist past and has refused to ever make “Song of the South” available on any platform.
Gone with the Wind has always been a racist movie. It didn’t just become one when HBO Max recovered from the fainting couch and put away their smelling salts like Aunt PittyPat. My wife and I watched it again (me for the 10th time) this past weekend and enjoyed it immensely while still seeing, being aware of and acknowledging its racism.
Apple is discontinuing its iBooks Author platform in July and plans to do the same for iTunes U in 2021, the company said Wednesday.
In an email to publishers seen by AppleInsider, Apple said that it will no longer update the iBooks Author platform. As part of its switch to publishing with Pages, Apple also said that it will pull the app from the Mac App Store on July 1.
Apple also said that it would discontinue iTunes U, its aging education-aimed ecosystem, toward the end of 2021.
The iTunes U platform will be available for the 2020 to 2021 school year, but will stop being supported in 2021.
I had someone desperately try to convince me to help them build a business around iBooks Author and iTunes U but, having been burned by peripheral Apple tech in the past (anyone remembers QuickTime Broadcaster?) I had zero faith in Apple continuing it for the long term. Glad I made the right call.
Video editing is easier than it’s ever been, with the barrier to entry becoming less pricey every year. As long as you have some decent footage to work with, you can turn it into something presentable—and dare we say professional—using programs that won’t cost you anything. Here are six of the best free video editors to help you unleash your inner Oscar-winning director.
These are alternatives in the most generous sense of the word. FCP is a professional app and many of these are for hobbyists or those who don’t have others relying on their work. That being said, I’ve used several of these apps and many of them are very good. The article missed one excellent free editor though – DaVinci Resolve from Black Magic Design.
A few articles I found enlightening, with food-for-thought on what issues are important to consider in the potential (likely?) Mac move from Intel to ARM:
John Gruber takes apart Mark Gurman’s article (the Bloomberg piece that started off this wave), adding in his own thoughts on the question of emulation (see the Rosetta video at the end of this post), Book Camp and virtualization, and the impact this move might have on current Mac sales.
Next up is this TidBITS article from former long-time Apple Engineer David Shayer. A good backgrounder to read. Again, the question of a potential emulator rears its head. Will Windows emulation fall by the wayside in this new wave of Macs?
And, finally, here’s Steve Jobs, at WWDC 2005, announcing the Rosetta emulator, which translated PowerPC instructions to Intel x86 as the app was running. This was a critical step to moving the PowerPC universe to Intel. Jump to about 38:22 in for the start of that part of the video.
Apple Inc. plans to launch a trade-in program for Mac computers next week at its retail stores in the U.S and Canada, adding the devices to an effort already in effect for other products.
The Cupertino, California—based technology giant informed retail employees that the new program will begin on June 15 in the U.S. and June 18 in Canada, according to people familiar with the matter.
Can’t help but think this will help bring along a wave of purchases when (if) the first ARM Macs start shipping. WWDC is less than two weeks away. The ARM Mac question definitely has my attention.
This side-by-side, pitting Google against Siri, Alex, and Bixby, was interesting to watch.
The question set was limited, so it’s not really a definitive look. It’d be interesting to see an open source effort to create an extensive, defining set of questions to pose, one that could be passed along to the assistant team at any company with a voice assistant in the works.
If I was creating such a question set, I’d definitely push the boundaries, go for fully interactive conversations, with call-backs to previous questions, and questions that require the ability to plumb the depths of apps.
For example, how about questions that explore email and browsing habits, pull up orders from recent purchases, test the ability of the assistant to recall recent messaging conversations.
The tests could show how much “understanding” is going on, but also provide insight into privacy boundaries as well.
Apple Inc. told staff at its main Silicon Valley headquarters that the first phase of a plan to return to the office will begin on June 15, but stressed that most employees won’t go back for several months at least.
Phase 1 will be “very limited” and workers will only be allowed in the office on certain days depending on their job, the Cupertino, California-based company wrote in a recent memo to staff. More details will be shared later this month, it added.
And:
Apple also reiterated in the memo that it is limiting how many people are allowed in buildings and other work area simultaneously, implementing social distancing, taking temperatures and requiring employees at the office to pass a daily health check.
This approach mirrors other offices planning to reopen this month, limiting personnel both by physical space and by day.
Apple is moving quicker than some other tech companies that focus more on software than hardware. Alphabet Inc.’s Google is slowly re-opening more offices, starting July 6. San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. has said employees can work away from the office forever, while Facebook Inc. expects as much as 50% of its workforce may be remote in 10 years.
I’d quibble with the word “quicker”, purely in that it might read to some that Apple is being overly quick. With their approach, Apple is easing into their reopen with safety in mind.
I’m very lucky in that I have gotten to race a number of different disciplines, from single seat racing to NASCAR. But I have to say the pinnacle of racing, in my opinion, is done at Le Mans.
I have done four of the 24 hour races, and I’ve only finished half of them, which is a fairly typical rate. It is such a breaker of people and material.
The driving is shared between three team members, and everyone does their stint, which means driving the car until it needs to be refueled again. The goal is to get the best time that you can, without killing the tires and forcing a pit stop, with your turn at the wheel.
I love racing of all sorts but I’ve never gotten into Le Mans. It’s just “too much” racing. But I’d love to drive those cars for a few laps. BTW, this article was written by Top Gear’s The Stig.
Neighbors wanted to move a shed from one persons property to another. Watch how they accomplish this. An allegory appropriate for the times. Together trumps separate.
Apple Inc. is preparing to announce a shift to its own main processors in Mac computers, replacing chips from Intel Corp., as early as this month at its annual developer conference, according to people familiar with the plans.
The company is holding WWDC the week of June 22. Unveiling the initiative, codenamed Kalamata, at the event would give outside developers time to adjust before new Macs roll out in 2021, the people said. Since the hardware transition is still months away, the timing of the announcement could change, they added, while asking not to be identified discussing private plans.
Take this with a grain of salt, of course, but the answer is less than two weeks away. And the concept of an Arm-based Mac does seem inevitable to me. Not hard to believe this announcement will happen.
Side note: Having been to so many WWDCs in person, this year’s remote event feels jarring to me. I’m excited for the keynote, look forward to seeing how Apple will make this happen, really appreciate the fact that this year is the great leveler, a WWDC that anyone who wants to can attend.
But that said, I’m already missing the Loop Bash, missing the camaraderie, the wee hours talking tech and clinking glasses with old and new friends in person.
Unlike some Android phones, Apple’s iPhones don’t have a dedicated notification LED that lights up when you get a call, text, or other alert. What iPhones do include is an optional Accessibility feature for the deaf and hard of hearing that blinks the rear camera flash and provides a visual cue for incoming notifications.
Follow the screenshots to see how to turn this on. Definitely worth knowing about.
Get directions on iPhone and a tap on your wrist when you need to turn. Check your heart rate on Apple Watch and track it over the last hour, day, month, or year on iPhone. When you put the two of them together, they add up to so much more.
What follows is a series of use cases, each animated in a long single-scrolling series of “pages”, ending with pages to Shop Apple Watch and Shop iPhone. Take a look.
Twitter is developing a new in-app system for requesting verification, according to a recent finding from reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, which Twitter has since confirmed.
Follow the link, check out the image to see where this sits in the interface.
And if you haven’t already listened to the Twitter Pettiness episode of the Dalrymple Report, take a listen. Can’t help but wonder how this will play out for us.
Follow the headline link to see a detailed image of the updated Apple Maps satellite image of the road leading up to the White House.
This view of the now-renamed portion of 16th St. in Washington D.C . has evolved over the weekend. If you zoom in on Apple Maps, you’ll see the new name as you make your way south, towards the White House, to where the street ends. And if you switch to satellite view, you’ll see the linked image (which is from a comment on this Reddit post).
The synthetic group selfie can be a composition of still images, stored video images, or live streaming video images. The computing device can automatically arrange the individual selfies into the synthetic group selfie.
Like all patents, existence of the patent doesn’t guarantee that the underlying idea will ever see the light of day.
Great concept. Key here will be the implementation. I would love the ability to take a selfie with friends scattered across the country, even around the world, and have the result feel seamless, as if we were all within arms reach.
Forrest Fenn, an 89-year-old Santa Fe author and artifacts dealer, said his treasure chest hidden in the Rocky Mountains in 2010 was found last week.
“It’s true,” Fenn told The New Mexican in a phone call Sunday, adding that the finder of his chest located the valuable goods “a few days ago.”
I love a good treasure hunt story. This one spans a decade, starting when Forrest Fenn put out the word that he’d hidden a chest full of loot, said to be worth more than $1 million, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.
Taking this all with a grain of salt, since we’ll never see video of the treasure, of it being hidden, nor of it being found.
And:
An estimated 350,000 people have hunted for Fenn’s treasure. Some quit their jobs to do so. But it’s had deadly consequences. At least five people have died while searching for the chest.
And:
In December, David Harold Hanson of Colorado Springs, Colo., sued Fenn for $1.5 million, claiming he has deprived him of the treasure through fraudulent statements and misleading clues.
Following the resignation of co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman posted next steps in moderating hate, efforts that will no doubt be watched closely by teams at Twitter and Facebook.
Take a minute or two to read the post. Can this work? I really hope so.
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, writing about a new Qustodio survey:
Kids ages four to 15 now spend an average of 85 minutes per day watching YouTube videos, compared with 80 minutes per day spent on TikTok.
And:
Kids are now watching twice as many videos per day as they did just four years ago. This is despite the fact that YouTube’s flagship app is meant for ages 13 and up.
And:
The next largest app for online video is Netflix, watched by 33% of U.S. kids, 29% of U.K. kids and 28% of kids in Spain.
To me, this reflects the splintering we are seeing in streaming services, as Disney Plus, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, Hulu, HBO Max, CBS Online, BritBox, and a host of others fight for our monthly budget and threaten Netfix’s dominance.
Welcome to the 3rd qualifiers and marble race of the Marbula E project! 12 marbles representing the real Formula E teams will compete with each other on a course with a conveyor belt, to allow multiple laps and even more exciting racing.
The production values on these videos are insane. I actually found myself cheering for one of the marbles. In related news, I miss racing.
