Category: Apple Insider

 

By AppleInsider Staff
Tuesday, February 04, 2020, 05:23 pm PT (08:23 pm ET)

Apple News executive Liz Schimel, who managed the business side of Apple’s news aggregation and subscription service, has reportedly left the company following a rocky rollout and continuing struggles to bring in new customers.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg on Tuesday reports Schimel recently stepped down from her position as “head of news business” at Apple. Her departure comes less than a year after Apple News+ launched last March.

Schimel was hired by the Cupertino tech giant in mid-2018 to manage relationships with new publishers and advertisers. Before her time at Apple, the media veteran served as president of Conde Nast International and was named entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) at Comcast Ventures in January 2018. Prior to 2018, she served as chief digital officer at Meredith Corporation, held VP roles at Nokia and AT&T, and served as SVP of Entertainment at Comcast from 2005 to 2008.

Apple is looking to replace Schimel with a “notable name” from the publishing world, the report said.

News of the executive’s departure arrives as Apple looks to strengthen its burgeoning services arm. Apple News is a major pillar of the company’s services strategy alongside relatively new products like Apple Music and Apple TV. The category also includes legacy products iCloud, iTunes and Books.

Launched in 2015, Apple News initially served as a free first-party news aggregator for iOS. A $10-per-month subscription tier debuted last year with support from a number of high-profile publications including People and dailies like The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. Apple was unable, however, to negotiate deals with big-name papers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which offer their own subscription services.

Following what was at the time described as an impressive launch, Apple News+ has over the past months failed to attract a significant number of new subscribers, according to a report in November. Beyond slow growth rates, publishers participating in the service have complained of lower than expected revenues, an issue Apple has been working on since last June.

Apple is reluctant to share precise subscription numbers detailing its various services and instead offers only vague metrics and empty platitudes. In an earnings conference call last week, CEO Tim Cook said News “draws over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., UK, Australia and Canada,” but failed to report subscriber figures or reveal how many publications are participating in the service’s paid version.

Whether you’ve got a small desk setup or you’re just tired of giving up space for a desk lamp, BenQ’s ScreenBar is here to save the day with its over-the-monitor light.

The BenQ ScreenBar goes on top of your monitor, but nstead of physically clipping to your screen, it features an ingenious weighted hanging design. There’s enough weight that it feels secure, yet it can easily be adjusted or removed when needed. The weighted hanger fits most monitors as it can accommodate screens that are anywhere between a quarter to a half-inch thick.

The ScreenBar gets its power from a USB port, so if you’ve got a monitor that can support this, it will free up the three-pronged outlet a traditional lamp would require. Unfortunately, our monitor doesn’t feature a USB port, so we still needed to use a AC-to-USB adapter to provide power to our ScreenBar.

The length of the ScreenBar —which is just about 18 inches —is adequate to light up most workspaces without casting too much light where you don’t need it. We think that this could easily be at home in a dorm room for students who like to study into the wee hours of the morning but may not want to have lighting so bright that they’d disrupt their room mate’s sleep.

The BenQ ScreenBar also includes a Desktop Dial, a small puck-shaped device that gives you the ability to adjust the settings easily. The dial is similar to the hotkey puck that comes with some BenQ monitors. . The small size means it fits into even the smallest workspaces, while the easy to operate knob allows you to turn on the light even in the darkest of rooms.

Features

The best feature of the BenQ screen bar is the ability to adjust the temperature and brightness of the light with the Desktop Dial. At maximum brightness, the lamp is about 1000 lumens bright —a little more than a 60-watt incandescent bulb. According to BenQ, you’re able to adjust the light across 14 different brightness levels —though we found some of them relatively subtle and hard to notice. There are also eight different color temperatures to choose from, ranging from a crisp blue-white to a warmer yellow.

The Desktop Dial features an ambient light sensor that allows the light to adjust to the lighting of your room automatically. We like a warmer light, so while we appreciated this mode, we didn’t use it much.

Where it could be improved

While this is a perfectly serviceable lamp —and a nice one to boot —we do have a suggestion for future iterations. We would like to see a lower minimum brightness setting. As it stands, the lowest setting still feels rather bright.

Who is this for?

If you’re a person who has reads any physical media at your desk, be it printed reports or books, this is a great lamp. The ability to change the temperature of the light is also much appreciated, especially if you tend to be sensitive to eyestrain brought on by certain color temperatures.

It’d also be a boon to anyone who reads on an e-ink display, especially if you’ve not upgraded to one with a backlight.

Of course, the ScreenBar is a significant space saver, removing the footprint of a lamp entirely from your desk area. Desk space can be a real commodity for some folks, so getting back even a couple square inches could be a great benefit.

And, as BenQ suggests, by putting the light in front of your screen and angled away from it, you reduce any would-be glare that you’d get from many other lamps.

Overall

The BenQ ScreenBar might not be for everyone, but if you’re in the market for a desk lamp that offers a minimal footprint, adjustable brightness, and color temperature, or doesn’t cause unwanted glare on your screen, it’s a great lamp.

Where to buy: If you want to snag your own BenQ ScreenBar, you can grab one from Amazon for $129.99. If you don’t need the Desktop Dial, you can get a ScreenBar for just $99.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Pros
• Desktop Dial makes selecting color temperature and brightness easy
• Secure fit without tapes or damaging hooks
• Does not add glare to screen

Cons
• Minimum brightness is still a bit too bright

 

By William Gallagher
Saturday, February 01, 2020, 01:35 pm PT (04:35 pm ET)

Senator Lindsey Graham is pressing for new laws that would combat online child abuse, but do so by removing all end-to-end encryption and giving law enforcement open access to private data.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is behind a draft bipartisan bill called the ‘Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2019” or EARN IT. Its stated aims are to “develop recommended best practices… regarding the prevention of online child exploitation.” However, the methods Graham proposes would effectively ban all end-to-end encryption.

“The absolute worst-case scenario could easily become reality,” think tank TechFreedom president Berin Szoka told Bloomberg. “DOJ could effectively ban end-to-end encryption.”

The act would introduce a National Commission on Online Child Exploitation Prevention “and for other purposes.” Senator Graham’s draft bill proposes a structure for the Commission, which would comprise 15 people including the US Attorney General.

The greater part of Senator Graham’s proposals outline creating and enforcing age limits for online material, plus a rating system to categorize images by severity.

At no point does the draft bill mention encryption, however its requirements cannot be complied with if end-to-end encryption is used. Companies with any public or private online discussion areas, such as Whatsapp and Facebook, would be required to divulge user details to law enforcement.

“[Best practices] shall include… coordinating with law enforcement agencies and other industry participants to preserve, remove from view, and report material relating to child exploitation or child sexual abuse,” says the draft bill.

“[Also] retention of evidence and attribution or user identification data relating to child exploitation or child sexual abuse, including such retention by subcontractors,” it continues.

Senator Graham’s proposals explicitly state that the result will be changes to the Communications Decency Act of 1934, which currently allows online services to shield themselves from lawsuits over such materials.

Neither Apple nor any online companies have publicly responded to the proposals yet. However, Apple has and continues to be a strong and vocal proponent of the necessity for end-to-end encryption and the dangers of removing it.

There is currently no date for when the draft bill will proceed further toward legislation.

However, it comes after FBI officials have reportedly been concerned over US Attorney General William Barr’s pressures to weaken or remove end-to-end encryption.

Most recently, Apple’s senior director of global privacy, Jane Horvath, spoke at CES in January about the company’s position on weakening encryption to help combat crime.

“Building back doors into encryption is not the way we are going to solve those issues,” she said.

 

By AppleInsider Staff
Thursday, January 30, 2020, 06:43 pm PT (09:43 pm ET)

Apple’s WebKit engineers are working on a standardized format for SMS messages containing one-time passcodes, an initiative that could one day better protect users by streamlining two-step authentication logins.

Posted to GitHub on Thursday, the proposal from Apple seeks to simplify the OTP SMS mechanism commonly used by websites, businesses and other entities to confirm login credentials as part of two-step authentication systems, reports ZDNet.

Two-step solutions require a user’s password and another element, in this case a one-time code sent over SMS, to gain access to a target account. Currently, it is difficult to impossible for software to automatically extract the necessary information from an OTP SMS message, as they can arrive in a range of text formats. This means users must manually enter the provided code into an input box.

Apple’s proposal seeks to eliminate user intervention in the OTP SMS process, namely copy-and-pasting one-time codes from messages into a browser. It also states that a more refined solution would ensure that one-time codes sent over SMS are used only on originating sites.

Using a “lightweight text format,” the proposed format embeds an actionable one-time code in an SMS message and links that code to a particular originating URL. Doing so allows recipient systems to automatically extract the code and log in to an associated website.

Apple provides an example SMS:

747723 is your [website] authentication code.
@website.com #747723

The first line in the message above is optional human-readable text to explain the incoming message, while the second line contains information for programmatic use. Special characters are employed to denote the one-time code and originating URL, which in this case is “747723” and “website.com,” respectively.

Apple and Google have signed on to the proposal, while Mozilla has not made an official statement on the standard, the report said.

For its part, Apple has moved its products from two-step verification to more secure two-factor authentication methods that rely on passcodes sent to pre-enrolled trusted devices.

 

By Mikey Campbell
Wednesday, January 29, 2020, 08:12 pm PT (11:12 pm ET)

Apple reportedly directed artificial intelligence startup Xnor.ai to cease work on U.S. Department of Defense initiative Project Maven after it acquired the company in January.

Citing people familiar with the matter, The Information on Wednesday reports Xnor.ai was until recently working on Project Maven with fellow startup Clarifai. That ended shortly after Apple bought the Seattle-based Xnor.ai for a reported $200 million this month.

Officially announced in 2017, Project Maven seeks to develop computer vision technologies capable of autonomously analyzing image data captured by military drones and other systems. To achieve its goal, the government is working with a number of private sector specialists as it builds out the technology.

Spun out of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Xnor.ai focused on low-power, edge-based artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms that can run on-device instead of in the cloud.

As noted by the report, running AI processes like image recognition on an iPhone instead of offsite — a practice that edge-based computing enables — could raise privacy concerns. Always the bastion of consumer security, Apple likely recognized the implications — and optics — of Xnor.ai’s involvement in Project Maven and terminated the work before the press caught wind of the relationship.

Unlike other big tech firms, like Google which pulled out of Project Maven after protests from employees, Apple typically distances itself from military contracting activities. The company has in the past supplied devices to various military branches on terms similar or identical to conventional enterprise sales. In 2008, Apple allowed then recently-acquired PA Semi to temporarily continue component supply deals with military equipment makers.

 

Exclusive

By Christine McKee
Tuesday, January 28, 2020, 08:19 pm PT (11:19 pm ET)

Apple Authorized Reseller B&H Photo has clearance MacBook Pro inventory on hand right now and that means exclusive savings for AppleInsider readers. Save up to $1,900 — the lowest prices of the year — on high-end 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro notebooks. All with free expedited shipping and special financing incentives.

Loaded MacBook Pros fall to $1,229

The MacBook Pro deals, which are courtesy of B&H Photo, are available only at AppleInsider and offer the lowest prices available on the premium 13-inch and 15-inch models, according to our Mac Price Guide.

Each notebook features one or more upgrades, such as additional RAM and/or extra storage. In the case of the 2018 Core i9 MacBook Pro (15-inch), the config also offers upgraded graphics and a 2.9GHz processor (in addition to 32GB of memory and a spacious 2TB SSD).

Those looking for a 13-inch MacBook Pro can also find discounts of $450 to $500 off upgraded Mid 2017 models, with prices starting at just $1,229 for configs with 16GB of memory. When comparing these specs to similarly equipped 2019 models, it would cost anywhere from $350 to $400 more to purchase Apple’s latest version.

Let’s also not forget the loaded 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro deal. To put that offer in perspective, it would cost at least $600 more to upgrade to a 16-inch MacBook Pro with 32GB of memory and 2TB of space.

Along with the exclusive cash discounts, B&H is offering no interest financing when paid in full within 12 months using the B&H Financing Card on any of these MacBook Pros. Or save on sales tax with an instant tax refund in eligible states with the B&H Payboo Card (click on the “check savings” link on this page and enter your ship-to zip code to see if your state qualifies). Expedited shipping is also free within the contiguous U.S. for speedy delivery to your door.

To redeem the discounts below, you must shop through the pricing links in this post from the AppleInsider desktop site using a laptop, desktop or iPad (we’re sorry, but the offers cannot be redeemed in mobile apps at this time).

13-inch MacBook Pro blowout deals

2018 15-inch MacBook Pro clearance deal

*Special activation instructions
To activate the discounted prices, you must shop through the special pricing links above or in our 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro and 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro Price Guides from a laptop, desktop or iPad. We apologize, but the offer cannot be redeemed in mobile apps at this time. Need help? Send us a note at [email protected] and we will do our best to assist.

Additional Apple deals

AppleInsider and Apple authorized resellers are also running additional exclusive savings on Apple hardware that will not only deliver the lowest prices on many of the items, but also throw in bonus discounts on AppleCare, software and more. These offers are as follows:

Interested in additional Apple hardware? See if there is a Mac, iPad or Apple Watch deal that will save you $100s by checking out prices.appleinsider.com.