Innehållsförteckning för #482 från AppleMagazine

General Motors is teaming up with Microsoft to accelerate its rollout of electric, self-driving cars. In the partnership announced this week, the companies said Microsoft’s Azure cloud and edge computing platform would be used to “commercialize its unique autonomous vehicle solutions at scale.” Microsoft joins General Motors, Honda and other institutional investors in a combined new equity investment of more than $2 billion in Cruise, bringing its valuation to about $30 billion. Cruise, which GM bought in 2016, has been a leader in driverless technology and got the go-ahead from California late last year to test its automated vehicles in San Francisco without backup drivers. Auto companies have been joining forces and bringing technology firms on board to try to spread out the enormous costs -- and by nature, risks…

President Donald Trump pardoned a former Google engineer who was sentenced to prison last year for stealing trade secrets from the tech giant related to robotic vehicles. Anthony Levandowski left Google in early 2016 where he worked in the autonomous vehicle division to start his own company called Otto. That company was acquired by Uber for $680 million as the ride-hailing venture pursued its own autonomous vehicle division. Before leaving, Levandowski downloaded a trove of Google’s self-driving car technology, leading eventually to 33 counts of intellectual property theft against him. He plead guilty to one count and was sentenced to 18 months in prison last summer. Levandowski was among the more than 140 people included in a flurry of clemency action in the final hours of Trump’s White House term,…

AppHarvest — an indoor farming company backed by Martha Stewart — thinks the agriculture sector is ripe for disruption. And now, its tomatoes are ripe for eating. The Morehead, Kentucky-based company said it has begun shipping beefsteak tomatoes to Kroger, Walmart, Publix and other grocers. Eventually, AppHarvest plans to ship 45 million pounds of tomatoes each year from its 60-acre indoor farm in Morehead. AppHarvest is one of many players in the fast-growing field of indoor farming. Others include New York-based Gotham Greens, which has eight urban greenhouses across the U.S., and Plenty, a vertical farming startup in San Francisco. In a recent global survey, Agritecture Consulting — which works with urban farmers — found that at least 74 indoor farming companies were founded in 2020 alone. The industry is…

The NHL is temporarily ditching microchipped pucks six days into the season after concerns were raised about their performance. The league announced games from Tuesday night on would be played with pucks made for last season. A review showed the first supply of pucks used for tracking weren’t finished the same way as those from the playoffs, when player and puck tracking made its debut in the conference finals. The first 44 games this season were played with the “tracking” pucks that players and coaches could tell were a little off. “I was aware that the NHL was using a different puck,” Philadelphia Flyers coach Alain Vigneault said. “I thought a couple times it didn’t slide as well on the ice. We didn’t know if that was the puck or…

Just before the outbreak of the World War II, a small-time archeologist was hired by a local woman to excavate her land. The thought was that it possibly contained some Viking remnants. But what was unearthed in the mounds out in the fields was far more significant than they could have imagined: Buried in the grounds of Sutton Hoo was actually a ship that would end up providing a deeper understanding of the sophistication of the early Anglo-Saxon period. It’s this true story that John Preston used as the stage for his novel “ The Dig,” which has been adapted into a very lovely film by screenwriter Moira Buffini and director Simon Stone. Carey Mulligan stars as the Sutton Hoo landowner, Edith Pretty, a wealthy widow, mother to a preteen…

The European Union has issued fines to a U.S. video game platform and five game makers after they blocked players from buying cheaper copies of the games in other countries in the bloc. The EU’s executive Commission said Wednesday that it fined Valve Corp., which owns the Steam online PC game distribution platform, and the game makers a total of 7.8 million euros ($9.5 million) because they restricted cross-border sales in violation of the bloc’s antitrust rules. The companies used so-called geo-blocking practices to prevent players from activating and playing games sold either on DVD or by download, the commission said. Steam activation keys prevented games from working outside the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, it said. “Such practices deprive European consumers of the benefits…

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The U.S. government has blacklisted Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp. and China’s third-largest national oil company for alleged military links, heaping pressure on Beijing in President Donald Trump’s last week in office. The Department of Defense added nine companies to its list of Chinese firms with military links, including Xiaomi and state-owned plane manufacturer Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China (Comac). U.S. investors will have to divest their stakes in Chinese companies on the military list by November this year, according to an executive order signed by Trump last November. Xiaomi said in a statement that its products are for “civilian and commercial use” and said it is not owned, controlled or affiliated with the Chinese military. “The Company will take appropriate course of actions to protect the interests of the…

Efforts to assess the impact of a more than seven-month-old cyberespionage campaign blamed on Russia — and boot the intruders — remain in their early stages, says the cybersecurity firm that discovered the attack. The hack has badly shaken the U.S. government and private sector. The firm, FireEye, released a tool and a white paper to help potential victims scour their cloud-based installations of Microsoft 365 — where users’ emails, documents and collaborative tools reside — to determine if hackers broke in and remain active. The aim is not just to ferret out and evict the hackers but to keep them from being able to re-enter, said Matthew McWhirt, the effort’s team leader. “There’s a lot of specific things you have to do — we learned from our investigations —…

As messaging giant WhatsApp prepares to hand over more data to Facebook, users are flocking to rival services in protest, with Signal jumping from 250,000 downloads on the App Store a week to almost 10 million. The move sparks debate over the relationships we hold with the world’s biggest technology companies and a new war on privacy is rearing its head. WHATSAPP CONTROVERSY As Facebook continues to integrate its Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp services to harvest more data from consumers and to futureproof itself against anti-trust investigations and growing pleas to break itself up, the company announced early January that it was planning to make changes to its privacy policy. For the first time, the application will begin sharing information about what you share on the app with Facebook,…

When her suburban Dallas high school was forced to move online last spring because of the coronavirus pandemic, Charvi Goyal realized that the schoolmates she’d been informally tutoring between classes would still need extra help but wouldn’t necessarily be able to get it. So she took her tutoring online, as well. Goyal, a 17-year-old high school junior from Plano, roped in three classmates to create TutorScope, a free tutoring service run by high schoolers for other kids, including younger ones. What started with a handful of instructors helping friends’ siblings in their hometown has blossomed into a group of 22 tutors from Texas, Arizona, and Ohio that has helped more than 300 students from as far away as South Korea. “I could foresee that schools were going to go virtual.…

Promising Young Woman Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) looked set for a rosy future until a tragic event in her past led things to go awry. While still suffering from trauma as a result of the tragedy, she has an unexpected encounter that will enable her to seek vengeance and right past wrongs. FIVE FACTS: 1. Promising Young Woman is the feature-length directorial debut of Emerald Fennell, who is best known as the show-runner for the second season of the BBC America thriller series Killing Eve. 2. The film’s title refers to Brock Turner, a Stanford University student who, although convicted of sexual assault in 2016, was sometimes described as a “promising young man”. 3. When Mulligan took the lead role, Fennell sent her a playlist intended to set the film’s…

Doug Liman’s “Locked Down,” one of the first and most ambitious films to be conceived and shot during the pandemic, is, like our own quarantine experiences, erratic, a little absurd and sporadically delightful. Unlike our time in quarantine, it has Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway. This, not a small difference, is crucial in “Locked Down,” an energetic romantic comedy-slash-heist movie that makes a game entry into the emerging genre of COVID-19 movies. Liman, the director of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,”“The Edge of Tomorrow” and “The Bourne Identity,” has always, in a movie world of lumbering, oxygen-depleted action films, had a knack for more agile and playful films that give A-list performers ample room to breathe. That serves “Locked Down” well, with Hathaway and (especially) Ejiofor making a charming pair, even…

FedEx plans to cut up to 6,300 jobs in Europe as it completes the process of combining its own operation with that of a Dutch delivery company it bought in 2016. FedEx said in a statement that the cuts will take place over 18 months and include express-delivery operations and back-office employees of TNT Express across the continent. Memphis, Tennessee-based FedEx said severance payments for between 5,500 and 6,300 layoffs will cost between $300 million and $575 million through 2023, but that the job cuts will save the company between $275 million and $350 million a year beginning in 2024. The president of FedEx’s European express-delivery operation, Karen Reddington, said in a statement that the job cuts are crucial to make the company more competitive in a changing market. FedEx…

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China’s highest-profile entrepreneur, Jack Ma, appeared this week in an online video, ending a 2 1/2-month absence from public view that prompted speculation about the future of the e-commerce billionaire and his Alibaba Group. In the 50-second video, Ma congratulated teachers supported by his foundation and made no mention of his disappearance or official efforts to tighten control over Alibaba and other internet companies over the past six months. The video appeared on Chinese business news and other websites. The normally voluble Ma disappeared from public view after he irked regulators by criticizing them in an Oct. 24 speech at a Shanghai conference. Days later, regulators suspended the planned multibillion-dollar stock market debut of Ant Group, a financial platform that grew out of Alibaba’s payments service, Alipay. That prompted speculation…

Google has completed its $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness-gadget maker Fitbit, a deal that could help the internet company grow even stronger while U.S. government regulators pursue an antitrust case aimed at undermining its power. The completion of the acquisition comes 14 months after Google announced a deal that immediately raised alarms. Google makes most of its money by selling ads based on information it collects about its billions of users’ interests and whereabouts. Privacy watchdogs feared it might exploit Fitbit to peer even deeper into people’s lives. But Google wound up entering a series of commitments in Europe and other parts of the world pledging it won’t use the health and fitness data from Fitbit’s 29 million users to sell more ads. It insists it is more interested in…

Dr. Dre was back at home after being treated at a Los Angeles hospital for a reported brain aneurysm. Peter Paterno, an attorney for the music mogul, said Dre was home but offered no other details in an email exchange. The rapper and producer reportedly was released from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. In a Jan. 5 social media post, Dre, 55, said he was “doing great and getting excellent care from my medical team.”TMZ had reported that he suffered a brain aneurysm the day before and was recovering at the medical center. The actor and rapper Ice T posted that he had connected with Dre on FaceTime and that he had “just made it home. Safe and looking good.” Born Andre Young in the Southern California city of Compton, Dre broke…

NASA declared the Mars digger dead after failing to burrow deep into the red planet to take its temperature. Scientists in Germany spent two years trying to get their heat probe, dubbed the mole, to drill into the Martian crust. But the 16-inch-long (40-centimeter) device that is part of NASA’s InSight lander couldn’t gain enough friction in the red dirt. It was supposed to bury 16 feet (5 meters) into Mars, but only drilled down a couple of feet (about a half meter). Following one last unsuccessful attempt to hammer itself down over the weekend with 500 strokes, the team called it quits. “We’ve given it everything we’ve got, but Mars and our heroic mole remain incompatible,” said the German Space Agency’s Tilman Spohn, the lead scientist for the experiment.…

Nobody is Listening ZAYN Former One Direction singer Zayn Malik has described his third studio album as his “most personal project to date”, and it’s not hard to see why, given the undoubtedly introspective tone threaded through the album’s musical content, which walks a thin line between pop and R&B. FIVE FACTS: 1. Although long known to his fans as Zayn Malik, the English-born singer-songwriter has taken up simply “ZAYN” as his professional artist name. 2. In the week of the album’s arrival, Malik tweeted a phone number which fans could call to hear preview snippets of the album. 3. The album’s lead single, “Better”, was released on September 25, 2020, followed by the second single “Vibez” on January 8, 2021. 4. The iTunes review of the album remarks that…

Netflix’s video streaming service has surpassed 200 million subscribers for the first time as its expanding line-up of TV series and movies continues to captivate people stuck at home during the ongoing battle against the pandemic. The subscriber milestone highlighted Netflix’s fourth-quarter results released this week. The service added another 8.5 million subscribers during the October-December period, capping Netflix’s biggest year since its inception as a DVDby-mail service in 1997. Netflix ended the year with nearly 204 million worldwide subscribers. The fourth-quarter gains easily topped the projections of the roughly 6 million additional subscribers projected by Netflix’s own management and Wall Street analysts. Netflix’s stock surged by more than 13% extended trading after the latest subscriber numbers came out. After its upending of the DVD-rental industry, Netflix introduced the then-revolutionary…

The Boeing 737 Max can return to Canadian airspace beginning this week, officials said, concluding nearly two years of government review after the aircraft was involved in two deadly crashes that saw the planes grounded worldwide. Transport Canada said the planes will be permitted to fly as long as they meet conditions specified by Transport Canada in December, including allowing pilots to disable a faulty warning system that was found to be central to two deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019. “Canadians and the airline industry can rest assured that Transport Canada has diligently addressed all safety issues prior to permitting this aircraft to return to service in Canadian airspace,” Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said in a statement. The measures go beyond those announced by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration…

Billionaire Samsung scion Lee Jae-yong was sent back to prison after a South Korean court handed him a two and a half-year sentence for his involvement in a 2016 corruption scandal that spurred massive protests and ousted South Korea’s then-president. In a much-anticipated retrial, the Seoul High Court found Lee guilty of bribing then-President Park Geun-hye and her close confidante to win government support for a 2015 merger between two Samsung affiliates. The deal helped strengthen his control over the country’s largest business group. Lee’s lawyers had portrayed him as a victim of presidential power abuse and described the 2015 deal as part of “normal business activity.” Wearing a mask and black suit and tie, Lee was taken into custody following the ruling. He didn’t answer questions by reporters upon…

E-commerce workers who kept China fed during the coronavirus pandemic, making their billionaire bosses even richer, are so unhappy with their pay and treatment that one just set himself on fire in protest. China’s internet industries already were known for long, demanding days. With millions of families confined at home, demand surged and employees delivered tons of vegetables, rice, meat, diapers and other supplies, often aboard scooters that exposed them to sub-freezing winter cold. For white-collar workers in the technology industry, pay is better than in some industries but employees are often expected to work 12 hours a day or more. The human cost caught public attention after the deaths of two employees from e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, known for selling fresh produce at low prices. Their deaths prompted suggestions they…