by Jason Snell

May 18, 2017 4:13 PM PT

Google’s AI challenges

Google’s doing a lot of things with AI and machine learning, many of them pretty impressive. But from an Apple perspective, I found this portion of Harry McCracken’s interview with google senior VP John Giannandrea interesting:

TensorFlow Lite, a new offshoot of Google’s open-source TensorFlow software for creating machine-learning applications, runs directly on Android devices, enabling features such as new features in Android O that are smart enough, for instance, to notice that the text you’re trying to highlight is an address. It wouldn’t work nearly as smoothly if it had to talk to a server across an internet connection.

“You want to do machine learning on the device as much as you possibly can,” Giannandrea says. “It’s lower latency, it’s closer to the user, it’s distributed.”

What’s interesting is that, due to privacy issues, this has been Apple’s approach all along—doing machine learning on the device, rather than in the cloud. Google’s now driving in the same direction, not because of a lack of prowess in cloud AI, but it’s better for users if as much of that stuff runs locally as possible.

by Dan Moren

May 18, 2017 6:18 AM PT

How a British security researcher accidentally stopped last week’s ransomware outbreak

Really fascinating story at Ars Technica from the anonymous MalwareTech, the British security researcher who stopped last week’s ransomware attack in its tracks by registering an unused domain name:

You probably can’t picture a grown man jumping around with the excitement of having just been ransomwared, but this was me. The failure of the ransomware to run the first time and then the subsequent success on the second meant that we had in fact prevented the spread of Wanna Decryptor and prevented it ransoming any new computer since the registration of the domain. I initially kept quiet about this while I reverse engineered the code myself to triple check this was the case, but by now Darien’s tweet had gotten a lot of traction.

As the researcher explains, attempting to register domains referenced by malware is a standard part of the security toolkit–it just so happens that in this case, the malware was (perhaps erroneously) written in such a way as to not encrypt files if the domain could be reached.

by Jason Snell

May 17, 2017 4:47 PM PT

Emoji Defragmentation: Goodbye, Google blobs

As I’ve written about before, one of the problems with emoji is that different operating systems and websites render emoji differently—which can lead to misunderstandings and confusion when sending messages across platforms or when switching between platforms.

Among the many announcements today at Google’s I/O developer conference¹ was the next version of Android, currently called Android O. And it includes a major step for Google’s emoji designs: They’re all new, with support for the brand-new Emoji 5.0 spec, including a dinosaur and a vomiting face.

But the biggest step may be the death of the Google gumdrop blob, as explained by Emojipedia’s Jeremy Burge:

The “blob” character seen in previous versions of Android has been a divisive character; morphing over time from an alien, into a consistent gumdrop shape. In Android O, the gumdrop is gone: replaced with round smiley shape, consistent with all other operating systems.

As a Gmail user I see these blobs occasionally and I don’t like them. Not only do I find them unappealing aesthetically, but they’re rendered in a way utterly unlike the equivalent emoji on other platforms. The new Android O emoji, on the other hand, look awesome. I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple’s take on the Emoji 5.0 spec is, presumably when iOS 11 is announced in June.

by Jason Snell

May 17, 2017 11:17 AM PT

Panic source code stolen in HandBrake app hack

Steven Frank of Panic:

In a case of extraordinarily bad luck, even for a guy that has a lot of bad computer luck, I happened to download HandBrake in that three day window, and my work Mac got pwned. Long story short, somebody, somewhere, now has quite a bit of source code to several of our apps.

It’s quite a story. The good news is, after a lot of consideration, Panic doesn’t feel this is a hugely damaging breach—and customer data doesn’t appear to have been affected. Apple has been notified and the FBI is investigating.

But if you see Panic apps on pirate sites, be warned—they could very well be compromised in the same way that HandBrake was, in order to compromise even more Macs and user data. (Also, don’t pirate software.)

[via John Gruber]

by Jason Snell

May 17, 2017 10:11 AM PT

Developers introduce new feed format

Longtime Mac and iOS developers Manton Reece and Brent Simmons announced on Wednesday that they’ve created JSON Feed, a format that’s intended to be a successor or alternative to RSS and Atom, but built using the common JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format.

Their rationale is that JSON is less bug-prone than XML, upon which the other formats are based. Many developers prefer JSON and are more familiar with it. And if reliance on XML was limiting development of RSS and blogging, Simmons (who was the longtime developer of the NetNewsWire RSS reader) and Reece (who recently launched the micro.blog blogging service) wanted to find a way to escape those limitations.

As someone who was wrangled XML-based feeds for a long time, I can see the appeal.
If other developers adopt and build on it, it could big a great new addition to data feeds on the Internet.

Update: Six Colors now has a JSON Feed available here.

by Jason Snell

May 16, 2017 3:07 PM PT

CMD-D: Masters of Automation

On August 9, former Apple automation guru Sal Soghoian is hosting an all-day conference in Santa Clara on the state of automation technologies across macOS and iOS. I’ll be there (and will do an end-of-day interview session), and if you care about automation across Apple’s platforms, you should be there too.

by Dan Moren

May 16, 2017 9:05 AM PT

Inside the new Apple Park campus

Over at Wired, veteran tech journalist Steven Levy got a first hand look at the new Apple Park campus that the company has been building in Cupertino for the last few years, and it’s a fascinating read:

Apple’s answer is that the perfection here will inspire its workforce to match that effort in the products they create, that the environment itself is meant to motivate engineers, designers, and even café managers to aspire for ever-higher levels of quality and innovation. (Francesco Longoni, the maestro of the Apple Park café, helped Apple patent a box that will keep to-go pizzas from getting soggy.) “We’re amortizing this in an entirely different way,” Ive says. “We don’t measure this in terms of numbers of people. We think about it in terms of the future. The goal was to create an experience and an environment that felt like a reflection of who we are as a company. This is our home, and everything we make in the future is going to start here.”

Most of Apple Park, of course, will never been glimpsed by the folks who don’t work there. An insular circle is kind of the perfect shape for it. (Though, as Levy points out, not the first proposed design of it.)

by Dan Moren

May 16, 2017 5:04 AM PT

iCloud to begin requiring app-specific passwords for some third-party apps

MacRumors’s Tim Hardwick reports that Apple has sent out an email indicating that third-party apps that access your iCloud account and don’t support two-factor verification codes will require app-specific passwords, starting June 15:

Beginning on 15 June, app-specific passwords will be required to access your iCloud data using third-party apps such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or other mail, contacts and calendar services not provided by Apple.

The change applies only to iCloud accounts that have two-factor authentication enabled. (As all of them should: here’s a guide for turning it on.)

App-specific passwords are just what they sound like: a password that can be used by an app to log in to your iCloud account. It’s essentially a loophole that allows apps to access your iCloud account without having to go through the two-factor authentication process. The benefit over using your standard iCloud password is if a single app or service is compromised, you can easily revoke its app-specific password, instead of having to change your standard iCloud password everywhere. And since Apple generates the app-specific passwords for you, it can ensure that they’re as strong as possible.

There’s more info on using app-specific passwords on Apple’s support site.

by Dan Moren

May 11, 2017 1:51 PM PT

Report: Amazon Prime video coming to Apple TV, this time for real?

Following a rumor circulating earlier this week, BuzzFeed’s John Paczkowski reports that Amazon Prime Video will come to the Apple TV at WWDC:

Sources in position to know tell BuzzFeed News that Amazon’s Prime video app – long absent from Apple TV – is indeed headed to Apple’s diminutive set-top box. Apple plans to announce Amazon Prime video’s impending arrive to the Apple TV App Store during the keynote at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 5 in San Jose, CA. A source familiar with the companies’ thinking say the app is expected to go live this summer, but cautioned that the hard launch date might change. Amazon had previously declined to even submit a Prime Video app for inclusion in Apple’s Apple TV App Store, despite Apple’s “all are welcome” proclamations.

As part of the deal, Amazon will reputedly start offering Apple TVs for sale on their site again; the retail giant pulled them a year and a half ago (along with Google’s Chromecast) because they didn’t support Amazon Prime Video.¹

Paczkowski tends to be in the know about these things, and I have no reason to doubt him. But, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard this rumor so, as I said on Twitter, I am not prepared to believe it until the app is actually on my Apple TV. Up until then, let’s just watch this supercut of Bullwinkle trying to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

by Dan Moren

May 11, 2017 10:58 AM PT

iTunes coming to the Windows App Store

The Verge’s Tom Warren:

Apple is planning to bring its iTunes desktop app to the Windows Store. In a surprise announcement at the Build developer event today, Microsoft revealed it has been working with Apple to get iTunes listed in the Windows Store. It might not sound like an important addition, but iTunes is one of the most searched for apps that’s currently missing in the Windows Store.

iTunes, of course, did run on previous Windows platforms, and Apple no doubt wants to give Microsoft users a chance to become Apple Music subscribers (hence the same reason there’s an Apple Music client for Android).

So this isn’t quite giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell, especially with the shape that iTunes is in these days. More like giving someone scalding hot coffee when they’re in the desert.