Innehållsförteckning för #260 från AppleMagazine

Montenegrin officials blocked popular messaging services WhatsApp and Viber during the country’s parliamentary election, a ban that drew allegations of interference from opposition politicians and concern from European election watchers Monday. “Blocking such apps is unthinkable in any normal country,” said opposition party leader Ranko Krivokapic, who previously monitored voting for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “I have never heard of that happening anywhere ever in an election.” Authorities said they blocked Viber and WhatsApp for several hours during Sunday’s inconclusive election because “unlawful marketing” was being spread through the networks. Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic’s long-ruling party won the most votes in the contest, but without enough support to govern alone. Both the opposition and the Democratic Party of Socialists will now have to try form a…

Customers at Macy’s flagship store in New York will be able to wander over from eyeliner to iPads. Macy’s launched an Apple shop last week at its Herald Square store, the first U.S. department store with a hub devoted to the brand. The shop features a range of products including iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, and the new Nike-branded Apple watch. Staffed by Apple associates, it’s on the main floor in the heart of the busy cosmetics and fragrance area. “This is one of the most sought-after products,” Terry Lundgren, the outgoing CEO of Macy’s, told The Associated Press. “We really cater to women better than most retail stores do. I do think that we are going to end up creating a business that is more female-friendly.” Beyond the Apple shop, Macy’s…

Netflix Inc. (NFLX) reported third-quarter profit of $51.5 million. On a per-share basis, the Los Gatos, California-based company said it had net income of 12 cents. The results topped Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of 16 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of 6 cents per share. The internet video service posted revenue of $2.29 billion in the period, which also beat Street forecasts. Twelve analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $2.28 billion. Netflix shares have fallen 13 percent since the beginning of the year, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has increased 4 percent. In the final minutes of trading on Monday, shares hit $99.80, up less than 1 percent for the year.…

A self-driving car with two engineers on board was switching lanes in Singapore when it hit a truck Tuesday, authorities said. No one was hurt. The vehicle was operated by autonomous vehicle software startup nuTonomy, which made headlines last month when it offered free rides in its self-driving taxis in a Singapore district. The Land Transport Authority said the car was “involved in a minor incident” on a public road designated for testing. “The test vehicle was changing lane when it collided with a lorry at a low speed. There were no injuries,” it said in a Facebook post. The transport regulator said it is working with police to investigate. NuTonomy, a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which has offices in Massachusetts and Singapore, said in a statement…

Alice Through the Looking Glass Alice returns to the fantasy realm of Underland and takes on the White Queen with the help of the Mad Hatter. FIVE FACTS: 1. The movie is based on the novel Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, published in 1871. 2. Tim Burton directed the Alice in  Wonderland remake back in 2010, but was replaced by James Bobin for the sequel. 3. Alice Pleasance Liddell (1852-1934) was the inspiration for the original novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 4. The film had a budget of $170 million and took $299 million at the box office, meaning it is considered an “underperformer”. 5. This is the fourth adaptation of the classic novel, the last in 1998 having starred Kate Beckinsale. Café Society A young man…

Following Bob Dylan’s win for the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature, the singer-songwriter’s music has increased by more than 500 percent on Spotify. A day after Dylan’s win, the digital music platform said Friday that streams for his songs jumped by 512 percent globally. His most-listened song after earning the prize was “Like a Rolling Stone,” which was increased by 258 percent. Dylan is the first musician to earn the Nobel Prize in literature. The 75-year-old is arguably the most iconic poet-musician of his generation. He’s the first American winner of the Nobel literature prize since Toni Morrison in 1993.…

The best thing young players can do for their basketball careers is not play too much basketball. They should participate in other sports and delay specializing in just basketball until they are at least 14 years old. They should also take at least one day off from organized competition each week and extended time off at least once a year for proper physical and mental recovery. Those were among the guidelinesannounced Monday by the NBA and USA Basketball to begin Jr. NBA Week. The Jr. NBA is the league’s youth basketball participation program for boys and girls ages 6-14. The research and recommendations come from panels of medical experts, former players, and coaches and administrators throughout basketball. They found that athletes who have the most success played multiple sports at…

German carrier Lufthansa is the latest airline to impose a total ban on passengers taking the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone on any of its flights. The airline had previously banned the phone from flights in the United States and told passengers on other flights to keep the device switched off and unplugged. On Tuesday, Lufthansa said on its Twitter account: “As per an official directive, Samsung Note 7 smartphones are not permitted on any of our flights. Please leave them at home!” Samsung has recalled more than 2.5 million of the phones after faulty batteries reportedly caused the device to catch fire.…

How do you make a video game about World War I fun? After nearly 15 years of creating shoot-’em-up games about World War II, the Vietnam War and fictionalized contemporary and futuristic military conflicts, the creators of the “Battlefield” series are going back - way back - with their latest installment. Uncharacteristically, the new “Battlefield” is set amid a century-old war rarely depicted in the interactive medium. “In the beginning, we had many preconceptions, such as there were only single-bolt rifles and the action was primarily in the trenches,” said Lars Gustavsson, design director at Stockholm, Sweden-based studio DICE. “As we dug deeper, we realized the Great War was really the dawn of all-out warfare and paved the way for everything we’ve done in the past.” For the interactive industry,…

WikiLeaks says that founder Julian Assange’s Internet access has been cut by an unidentified state actor. Few other details were immediately available. Assange has been up holed up at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for more than four years after skipping bail to avoid being extradited over sex crimes allegations. The cramped quarters haven’t prevented the Australian transparency activist from working and WikiLeaks continues to deliver scoops, including revelations that have rattled Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president as the U.S. election enters its final stretch. Calls, texts and emails left with WikiLeaks weren’t immediately returned Monday. A woman who picked up the phone at the embassy said: “I cannot disclose any information.” Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry released a brief statement that didn’t mention the Internet cut off, but reaffirmed its decision…

T-Mobile, the country’s No. 3 wireless carrier, will pay $48 million for not clearly telling customers how “unlimited” data plans weren’t really, well, unlimited. The Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday that T-Mobile had a policy to slow down the speeds of customers who were the heaviest data users. But the agency said the company didn’t let customers know how much data used would trigger the lower speed. The FCC says T-Mobile started doing a better job with disclosures in June 2015. The carrier now says in small print on its website that slower speeds may result for customers using more than 26 gigabytes a month if the network is congested. Asked about changes to company policy, T-Mobile spokesman Clint Patterson referred to CEO John Legere’s tweet that it was a…

WALLS Kings of Leon The seventh studio album from the American rock band Kings of Leon is the follow-up to 2013’s Mechanical Bull. FIVE FACTS: 1. Kings of Leon is made up of three brothers and one cousin. 2. Band member Caleb put his Nashville home on the market because he was getting too much fan mail. 3. Walls is the first Kings of Leon album not to have five syllables in its title, after Youth and Young Manhood, Aha Shake Heartbreak, Because of the Times, Only by the Night, Come Around Sundown and Mechanical Bull. 4. The album title is an abbreviation of We Are Like Love Songs. 5. The band will begin its tour to support Walls in 2017, heading to the National Harbor, Air Canada Centre and…

Samsung Electronics said Friday that the discontinuation of the Galaxy Note 7 would cost the company about $3 billion during the current and next quarters, bringing the total cost of the recall to at least $5.3 billion. The Note 7 discontinuation will cost in the mid-2 trillion won range during the October-December period and another 1 trillion won ($884 million) during the January-March quarter, the company said in a statement. Samsung already slashed its third-quarter profit forecast by $2.6 billion earlier this week, an amount that could wipe out its entire mobile business profit. That did not include the cost of Samsung’s first recall, which analysts estimated at 1 trillion won to 2 trillion won. Samsung has enough cash and other businesses to absorb the shock from the phone recall.…

From the outside, the single-engine Cessna Caravan that took off from a small airport here on Monday looked unremarkable. But inside the cockpit, in the right seat, a robot with spindly metal tubes and rods for arms and legs and a claw hand grasping the throttle, was doing the flying. In left seat, a human pilot tapped commands to his mute colleague using an electronic tablet. The demonstration was part of a government and industry collaboration that is attempting to replace the second human pilot in two-person flight crews with robot co-pilots that never tire, get bored, feel stressed out or become distracted. The program’s leaders even envision a day when planes and helicopters, large and small, will fly people and cargo without any human pilot on board. Personal robot…

Scott Brusaw has a vision for the nation’s roads. He believes the solar-powered glass pavers his company makes could transform thousands of miles of pavement into a new energy source. His business, Solar Roadways, recently unveiled its first public installation, in a downtown plaza in this northern Idaho resort town. It’s 150 square feet of hexagon-shaped solar panels that people can walk and bicycle on. The company is working on proof that the panels, for which it has a patent, are strong enough and have enough traction to handle motor vehicles, including semitrailers. “Our plan is to replace all the asphalt and concrete,” said Brusaw, noting concrete occupies over 48,000 square miles in the U.S. “If you cover it with solar panels, we can make three times our energy needs.”…

Google’s ambitious new smartphone, the Pixel, doesn’t offer a lot that’s new. Yet it’s still one of the best out there. Google achieves that by pulling together the best features from Apple, Samsung and other phones and offering them at prices comparable to iPhones - starting at about $650 for the regular, 5-inch model and $770 for the 5.5-inch “XL” edition. Both versions go on sale Thursday through Verizon, Best Buy and Google’s online store. I tested the Pixel XL model; the regular version has identical features except for its smaller display and battery - still enough for 13 hours of internet use, according to Google. With either, you get an excellent camera and a strong voice assistant that promises to get smarter. The Pixel isn’t quite an iPhone replacement,…

Until a few months ago, if you wanted a bird’s eye view of North Korea’s capital, there was basically only one option: a 150-meter (492-foot) -tall tower across the river from Kim Il Sung Square. Now, if you have the cash, you can climb into the back seat of an ultralight aircraft. With the support of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has vowed to give North Koreans more modern and “cultured” ways to spend their leisure time, and with foreign tourism companies looking to entice visitors with unique things to do besides visit war museums and political monuments, a Pyongyang flying club has started offering short flights over some of the capital’s major sights. The tours, which began in late July, are operated by the Mirim flying club…

The Ben Affleck thriller “The Accountant” tallied up a healthy launch at the box office, earning $24.7 million in its first days in theaters, pushing last weekend’s winner “The Girl on the Train” to second place with $12.2 million. The stand-up concert film “Kevin Hart: What Now?” dropped to third place in its debut after initial estimates placed it ahead of “The Girl on the Train” on Sunday. Hart’s film took in $11.8 million. Holdovers “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” placed fourth with $9 million in its third weekend in theaters, and the BP oil spill film “Deepwater Horizon” held onto fifth with $6.4 million. The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per…

China launched a pair of astronauts into space Monday on a mission to dock with an experimental space station and remain aboard for 30 days in preparation for the start of operations by a full-bore facility six years from now. The Shenzhou 11 mission took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China at 7:30 a.m. (2330 GMT) aboard a Long March-2F carrier rocket. It will dock with the Tiangong 2 space station precursor facility within two days, conduct experiments in medicine and various space-related technologies, and test systems and processes in preparation for the launching of the station’s core module in 2018. Space program commander-in-chief Gen. Zhang Youxia declared the launch a success at 7:46 a.m. (2346 GMT). Defense Minister…

Passengers and flight crews will be banned from bringing Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones on airline flights under an emergency order issued Friday by the Department of Transportation in response to reports of the phones catching fire. The order, which goes into effect on Saturday at noon EDT, says the phones may not be carried on board or packed in checked bags on flights to and from the United States or within the country. The phones also can’t be shipped as air cargo. Passengers caught attempting to travel with the phones will have the phones confiscated and may face fines, the department said. Samsung has recalled more than 2.5 million of the smartphones, citing a battery manufacturing error. The South Korean company discontinued the product earlier this week, less than…