Innehållsförteckning för #414 från AppleMagazine

THOUGHTS AS VARIOUS NEW ECHO DEVICES BREAK COVER The days when Amazon’s Echo smart speaker was deemed a mere novelty now seem like a distant memory. At an excitingly packed event in Seattle, the online-store-turned-tech-company unveiled a staggeringly large array of new devices housing the now-iconic voice assistant Alexa, providing us with a tantalizing insight into how Alexa could extend its reach far outside the home. However, as the assistant becomes more ubiquitous, could familiar issues about privacy grow in complexity? PRIVACY CONCERNS CONTINUE TO LINGER It’s not that Amazon didn’t acknowledge the whole issue of privacy as the Seattle event opened. In August, Bloomberg reported that Amazon had decided to allow Alexa users to opt out of their voice recordings being human-assessed through a program designed to improve the…

With Apple winning a United Nations award for its use of 100% renewable energy and the company making great strides towards cleaning up its carbon footprint, we take a closer look at the future of one of the world’s most sustainable and eco-conscious technology giants… INVESTING IN GREEN ENERGY “Truly innovative products leave their mark on the world instead of the planet,” Apple proudly states on its website. It’s a big claim for a company that produces millions of iPhones, iPads, MacBooks and other technology products that, in the majority of cases, are used only for a year or two before they’re discarded for the latest model. Indeed, Apple has built its business on “newness” and innovating its products from the ground up every year, whether that’s a major new…

An oversight board has observed the Transportation Security Administration’s test of facial recognition using biometric technology at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. The five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight board is responsible for ensuring that new technology helps prevent terrorism while balancing the need to protect privacy and civil liberties. It was founded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports the 30-day test in the TSA pre-check lane in Terminal 3 at McCarran began in late August and ended last week. The TSA assessed its ability to compare passengers’ photo taken at the checkpoint against an image taken from the passenger’s identity document. According to the Review-Journal, the board hopes to have a decision on the usefulness of facial recognition technology sometime next year.…

Yesterday (2019) Luckless musician Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) decides to give up on his dreams, only for the whole world to be plunged into a blackout and himself to be hit by a bus. After regaining consciousness, he realizes that he is seemingly the only person who still remembers the Beatles. This leads him to plagiarize their songs to gain stardom. FIVE FACTS: 1. The film originated as a screenplay called Cover Version penned by Jack Barth and the actor Mackenzie Crook, who also planned to direct the film. 2. However, Crook later abandoned the project, which passed to writer-director Richard Curtis, who rewrote the script to put further emphasis on the lead character’s musical and romantic success. 3. According to director Danny Boyle, surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo…

“Abominable” is just about the most cuddly piece of East-West synergy a corporation could dream up. The first co-production between DreamWorks Animation and the Shanghai-based Pearl Studios (formerly known as Oriental DreamWorks), “Abominable” is a rare kind of creature but the sort we’re likely to see more and more of in movie theaters. The Chinese box office will soon overtake the North America as the globe’s top movie market, inevitably reorienting big-screen entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with aiming for moviegoers on each side of the globe. For Hollywood productions of a certain budget, it’s long been considered a necessity. And, of course, the intermingling of cultures — like in Lulu Wang’s lovely and heartfelt “The Farewell,” released earlier this year — often fuels brilliant, border-straddling tales. But “Abominable,” about a…

Elon Musk has unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry a crew and cargo to the moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system and land back on Earth perpendicularly. In a livestreamed speech from SpaceX’s launch facility near the southern tip of Texas, Musk said Saturday that the space venture’s Starship is expected to take off for the first time in about one or two months and reach 65,000 feet (19,800 meters) before landing back on Earth. He says it’s essential for the viability of space travel to be able to reuse spacecraft and that it’s important to take steps to extend consciousness beyond our planet. A crowd watched as Musk spoke from a stage in front of the large spacecraft, which has a reflective, metal exterior. Musk…

Turn off the lights when they aren’t needed? Check. Lower the thermostat a few degrees in winter? Maybe. Go full-time vegetarian? Probably not. Americans are willing to go only so far in engaging in habits that conserve energy and reduce emissions that are warming the planet, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll adds to research showing that many take modest steps they consider convenient and feasible — and good for their pocketbooks. But actions that would involve significant lifestyle choices such as diet or transportation are a tougher sell. Roughly 9 in 10 Americans say they often or always turn off unnecessary lights, including 6 in 10 who do so all the time. About half often or always set the…

Users of Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant can now request that recordings of their voice commands delete automatically. Amazon says it saves such commands to improve the service. But the practice has raised concerns with privacy experts who say the recordings could get into the wrong hands, especially as Amazon and other companies use human reviewers rather than just machines. Previously, users had to go into Alexa’s settings and delete recordings manually. Users can now ask Amazon to automatically delete recordings after three months or 18 months. But users need to specify that in the settings, as recordings are kept indefinitely by default. And there’s no automatic option for immediate deletion. Users would still need to do that manually. When users ask for automatic deletion, a warning will pop up saying…

Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google into promising to slash their carbon emissions. But there’s another thing these tech giants aren’t cutting: Their growing business ties to the oil and gas industry. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were accelerating the oil companies’ greenhouse gas emissions. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms, in many cases…

A former Yahoo software engineer has pleaded guilty to hacking into the accounts of some 6,000 Yahoo users in search of sexual photos and videos. The US Attorney’s Office says Reyes Daniel Ruiz admitted in court that he mostly targeted accounts belonging to younger women, including his personal friends and work colleagues. Prosecutors say once he gained access to Yahoo accounts, he was able to compromise iCloud, Facebook, Gmail and other online services in search of private images. The 34-year-old stored the material on a private computer that he destroyed after his employer noticed the suspicious activity. Ruiz, of the Northern California city of Tracy, pleaded guilty to one count of computer intrusion. He faces five years in prison when he’s sentenced Feb. 3.…

Over It Summer Walker The Atlanta-born singer-songwriter Summer Walker broke into the mainstream earlier this year when Drake featured on her remix of “Girls Need Love”. Her new full-length album, Over It, is a follow-up to Last Day of Summer, her commercial mixtape from last year – and crucially, shows her staking a claim as one of R&B’s future stars. FIVE FACTS: 1. On this album, Walker is joined by a long list of big names, including Usher, Bryson Tiller, 6LACK and PARTYNEXTDOOR. 2. Two songs from the album, “Playing Games” and “Stretch You Out”, have already been released as singles. 3. “Stretch You Out” features the rapper A Boogie wit da Hoodie. 4. The single has also drawn attention due to its video, which features Walker using a pole…

Drugmakers have embraced artificial intelligence — using computers to analyze reams of data and then make predictions or recommendations. Germany’s Bayer has been testing how the technology can help diagnose complex or rare conditions, hasten drug development and more. The aspirin-creator has partnered with startups and other tech companies to develop software and apps to speed diagnosis and guide treatment. The company is working with hospitals, academic researchers and others to compile everything the AI software needs to “learn” before it analyzes a patient’s condition. That includes information on disease causes, symptoms and progression, plus many past patients’ test results, doctor reports and scanned images. AP recently interviewed Angeli Moeller, who heads artificial intelligence projects across Bayer’s pharmaceutical business. Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity. Q: Why use…

NASA’s InSight lander on Mars has captured the low rumble of marsquakes and a symphony of other otherworldly sounds. Scientists released an audio sampling this week. The sounds had to be enhanced for humans to hear. InSight’s seismometer has detected more than 100 events, but only 21 are considered strong marsquake candidates. The rest could be marsquakes — or something else. The French seismometer is so sensitive it can hear the Martian wind as well as movements by the lander’s robot arm and other mechanical ”dinks and donks ” as the team calls them. “It’s been exciting, especially in the beginning, hearing the first vibrations from the lander,” said Imperial College London’s Constantinos Charalambous, who helped provide the audio recordings. “You’re imagining what’s really happening on Mars as InSight sits…

An international conservation group is warning that more than half of the European tree species that exist nowhere else in the world are threatened with extinction. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature said in a new report that 58% of Europe’s 265 endemic trees face an elevated risk of disappearing from the continent. More than 150 experts contributed to the report, which the conservancy called the first comprehensive assessment of the extinction threat for all types of trees native to Europe. The European Red List of Trees classified 37% of Europe’s 454 native tree species as “threatened.” Of those, 15% are “critically endangered,” a step away from extinction, the report said. The findings come amid heightened concern about environmental issues and extinction risks in Europe and beyond. A…

UPS has won government approval to operate a nationwide fleet of drones, which will let the company expand deliveries on hospital campuses and move it one step closer to making deliveries to consumers. Many regulatory obstacles remain, however, before UPS — or other operators who are testing drones — can fill the sky over cities and suburbs with drones carrying goods to people’s doorsteps. United Parcel Service Inc. said Tuesday that its drone subsidiary was awarded an airline certificate last week by the Federal Aviation Administration, the first U.S. company to get such a broad approval. Even before getting that designation, UPS Flight Forward, as the subsidiary is called, has operated more than 1,000 flights at WakeMed’s hospital campus in Raleigh, North Carolina. The designation removes limits on the size…

The growing options for outsourcing meal planning, grocery shopping and cooking can be called time-saving blessings or culture-destroying curses. In the end, they’re probably a complicated mix of both. The positive spin goes something like this: Assuming you can afford it, you’ll save precious time by clicking a few digital boxes and getting someone else to choose your vegetables and deliver your groceries. No time to plan a meal? An ever-expanding list of meal kit services including Blue Apron and HelloFresh will send you premeasured ingredients to whip up a variety of recipes — complete with step-by-step, photo-enhanced instructions. All that for around $8 to $10 per person. No time to cook? Get a week’s worth of frozen meals delivered courtesy of Home Chef, Freshly or a host of other…

A federal court has cleared the way for state and local governments to bar internet providers from favoring some services over others, even as the court affirmed the Federal Communications Commission’s right to dump national rules. Even so, legal experts say state and local efforts will be subject to challenges. Tuesday’s appeals court ruling is the latest development to shine a light on states’ lead on tech policy. California has enacted a strict data privacy law to protect users on services run by Facebook, Google and Amazon, for example, while Congress is still debating a national privacy law. And it’s California that passed the strongest net neutrality law in the wake of the FCC’s 2017 repeal of federal rules approved during the Obama administration. While the appeals court ruling handed…

An air of menace and a cloud of controversy accompany the arrival of Todd Phillips’“Joker” like a thick perfume. That, in itself, could be something to celebrate. Danger isn’t a quality often found in the sanitized corporate-made movies of today, least of all in the safe, fan-friendly world of comic-book films. “Joker,” though, is a calculatedly combustible concoction, designed, like its chaos-creating character, to cause a stir. To provoke and distort. I wish it was as radical as it thinks it is. Instead, “Joker” is a mesmerizing, misjudged attempt to marry the madness of a disturbed individual to today’s violent and clownish times. It’s a shallow, under-examined movie that renders the dark descent of a troubled man with an operatic fervor. That this feels so familiar, like the backstories of…

U.S. factory activity hit a decade low last month in the face of President Donald Trump’s trade conflicts, adding to a weakening picture of the global economy. The Institute for Supply Management, an association of purchasing managers, said that its manufacturing index shrank for a second straight month to 47.8% in September, down from 49.1% in August. Any reading below 50 signals that the sector is contracting. Investors on Wall Street responded by dumping stocks, given that the slowdown in manufacturing fanned fears that growth might be slowing more than expected and could squeeze corporate earnings. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had been up early in the day, was down about 300 points in mid-afternoon trading. Trump’s nearly 15-month trade war with China and his tariffs on steel, aluminum…

On their first week in class, a group of students is playing a first-person shooter video game in a sleek new digital studio. It’s their introduction to the degree in esports they’ve all enrolled in. The group clicking away on their mice are at the University of Staffordshire, one of several U.K. and U.S. schools launching programs aimed at capitalizing on the booming industry’s need for skilled professionals. Ryan Chapman, 18, said his parents were “skeptical at first” about studying esports, or competitive multiplayer videogaming. “But now they understand how big the industry is growing, the pace it’s growing at. They’re now really all for it because it’s a great industry to start to get into,” said Chapman, who was among the students in the lab playing Counter-Strike, one of…

China’s factory activity improved in September ahead of talks with Washington aimed at ending a tariff war. Surveys released by an industry group and a business magazine both showed improvement, though gains were small. The China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing; Purchasing said its purchasing managers’ index rose to 49.8 from August’s 49.5 on a 100-point scale on which numbers below 50 show activity contracting. The magazine Caixin said its index rose to 51.4 from 50.4. Demand for Chinese goods has been hurt by weakening domestic and global economic growth as well as U.S. tariff hikes in a fight over trade and technology. Negotiators are due to meet next week in Washington but there has been no sign of progress toward ending the dispute, which threatens to tip global economic…