Apple’s 21March event: How to livestream it from iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac, or PC

Apple has announced a press event for later this month, but you can still tune in and watch live even if you aren’t part of the media.

The company confirmed it will livestream its just-announced 21 March event. It is expected to unveil several new products during the keynote, including a 4-inch iPhone SE and 9.7 inch iPad Pro. Apple typically hosts livestreams of its events in recent years, so the news isn’t too surprising.

Still, if you’re wondering how you can watch the action unfold in real time, we’ve explained everything you need to know.

Apple 21 March event: When does it start?

The main keynote will kick off at 10 am PST on 21 March 2016.

Apple 21 March event: What will Apple unveil?

Check out Pocket-lint’s round-up below – where we discuss everything the Cupertino-based giant might unveil.

• Read: What to expect at Apple’s March event: iPhone SE, iPad Air 3

Apple 21 March event: How can you watch the livestream?

Apple will stream a live broadcast (otherwise known as a livestream) of the event, and there are a number of ways you can access that stream.

• iPhone: Visit this link with Safari on iOS 7.0 or later
• iPad: Visit this link with Safari on iOS 7.0 or later
• Apple TV: Go to the Apple Events channel on your Apple TV (2, 3, or 4)
• Mac: Visit this link with Safari 6.0.5 or later on OS X v10.8.5 or later
• PC: Visit this link with Microsoft Edge on Windows 10

You will not be able to embed the livestream anywhere.

Apple 21 March event: Want to know more?

Go to Pocket-lint’s Apple hub for related news and analysis.

Run the Jewels made a VR music video for ‘Crown’

Rappers Killer Mike and El-P teamed up for two albums worth of tracks under the name Run the Jewels. There’s also a collection full of remixes made entirely from cat sounds. After creating some of the best hip-hop in the last two years, the duo is now letting fans take a step inside its video for the song “Crown” with a little help from the New York Times’ VR app. What’s more, Run the Jewels says that this immersive video marks the launch of its virtual reality platform VRTJ. For “Crown,” the pair teamed with VR production company WEVR to complete the 360-degree views.

There’s just the single video for now, but expect more VR visuals from Run the Jewels in the future. While you can watch a clip in the YouTube video above, you’ll have to head over to the NYT VR app to view the whole thing. RTJ has also prepped a special edition Google Cardboard headset for Record Store Day on April 16th.

FCC Chair proposes new data privacy rules for consumers

Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler made his case for an ambitious plan to better defend consumer data privacy on Wednesday. His proposal would effectively govern how ISPs can leverage user data for marketing and advertising purposes in the same way that that the FCC already regulates data collected by your phone company.

“Think about it. Your ISP handles all of your network traffic,” Wheeler wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed. “That means it has a broad view of all of your unencrypted online activity — when you are online, the websites you visit, and the apps you use.”

Basically, since your ISP has access to every piece of unencrypted data you send along its network, it can build an incredibly detailed dossier of your online life. And, up until now, the ISP could use that information anyway it saw fit. Wheeler wants that to change.

“The information collected by the phone company about your telephone usage has long been protected information,” he continued. “Regulations of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) limit your phone company’s ability to repurpose and resell what it learns about your phone activity. The same should be true for information collected by your ISP.”

To that end, Wheeler has put forth a plan that would “empower consumers to ensure they have control over how their information is used by their Internet Service Provider.” In broad strokes, it would demand more transparency from ISPs on what information is being collected, give consumers the right to have meaningful control over that information, make it the ISP’s “duty” to secure and protect your data for the duration that it is on the ISP’s network.

In terms of user control, Wheeler proposes a three-tiered approach. The basic marketing of services would remain unchanged. “For example, your data can be used to bill you for telecommunications services and ensure your email arrives at its destination, and a broadband provider may use the fact that a consumer is streaming a lot of data to suggest the customer may want to upgrade to another speed tier of service,” Wheeler wrote. However, any data used for affiliate marketing or otherwise shared would require an active opt-out from the user and all other forms of marketing would need the user to explicitly opt in.

As for ensuring data security, Wheeler’s proposal would only require ISPs to take “reasonable steps”to defend user data from snooping. There’s actually a lot less wiggle room for ISPs in that directive than you’d expect. “At a minimum,” Wheeler wrote, “it would require broadband providers to adopt risk management practices; institute personnel training practices; adopt strong customer authentication requirements; to identify a senior manager responsible for data security; and take responsibility for use and protection of customer information when shared with third parties.”

Take note that this proposal only applies Internet Service Providers. Websites like Facebook or Twitter would be exempt from these rule changes — namely because their operations are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. The FCC will vote on Wheeler’s proposition on March 31, after a period of public comment from the American people.

Via: Huffington Post

Source: FCC

Use your fingers to play in Vive’s world with the Manus VR glove

The Manus VR glove promises to take handheld controllers out of virtual reality, allowing players to use natural hand and finger motions within immersive, digital spaces. It’s compatible with the HTC Vive, taking advantage of that system’s Lighthouse positional tracking tech, and pre-orders for its first-ever developer kit open in Q2 this year. The kits cost $250 and should ship in Q3.

The Manus VR developer kit includes a USB dongle, a pair of washable gloves and two wrist-mounted holders for the HTC Vive’s controllers. The gloves have an eight-hour battery life and a programmable vibration motor for tactile feedback, plus an open-source SDK.

Manus VR is a Dutch team that started up in 2014 with the goal of creating the world’s first consumer VR glove (no, the Power Glove doesn’t count). Manus VR will be at the Game Developers Conference next week and so will Engadget, so stay tuned for some hands-on — or on-hands — impressions. And keep in mind, the HTC Vive starts shipping on April 5th.

On the Brink of Greatness: Social Video

Instagram videos cap out at 15 seconds. Vines? Six. As Steve Goldboom learns, though, those are still too long — by 13 and four seconds, respectively. Yep, the new episode of his mockumentary series On the Brink of Greatness is all about the ridiculousness of social video apps. Welcome to the future where celebrities are made overnight and all they need to do is have a door slammed into their face while someone points a cellphone at them.

Rhapsody’s music-streaming service comes to the Wii U

Rhapsody doesn’t often beat Spotify to the punch, but today it did. The streaming service has announced that its music catalog, which features over 30 million songs, is now available on Nintendo’s console. While the app is free to download from the eShop, you’ll need a Rhapsody account to get access to any tracks. That said, people who don’t have a subscription can sign up for a 30-day trial directly from the Wii U. This includes those of you who live outside the US, too, where Rhapsody operates under the Napster brand.

Source: Rhapsody

Yahoo streaming deal nets weekly NHL hockey games

Yahoo is no stranger to streaming live sports, and starting this week it’s adding hockey coverage. The company struck a deal with the National Hockey League (NHL) to offer live action from up to four out-of-market games in the US through the 2016-2017 season. The NHL “Game of the Day” will be available to stream free of charge (no cable subscription required), complete with in-game highlights for each matchup. Yahoo will also show “Best of the Day” and “Best of the Week” highlights alongside condensed games under the terms of the deal. What’s more, Yahoo Sports will still be the NHL’s official fantasy hockey partner.

Last year, Yahoo became the first site to nab exclusive streaming rights to a regular-season NFL game. The company also has deals in place for live and on-demand coverage of Major League Baseball (also labeled “Game of the Day”) and PGA Tour golf. Yahoo’s struggles are well-documented at this point, but that’s not stopping it from expanding its streaming library, especially when it comes to sports.

Source: Variety

An interview with one of NASA’s Curiosity Rover engineers

With his Elvis haircut, his fondness for cowboy boots and the way he’ll launch into soliloquies about big ideas like how to bend humanity toward collective self-improvement, Adam Steltzner might come off at first as some kind of hipster philosopher.

That’s one of the things that makes him such a memorable ambassador for NASA, his employer.

Steltzner is in fact an engineer with an improbable combination of geek cred and California cool who this October will have spent 25 years working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He looks like a rock star — plays bass guitar, in fact — and can forcefully insist on humanity’s imperative to explore the stars and to press against the limits of the known universe with little prompting.

When he talks up the ambitious projects on the drawing board at JPL, he describes the place as a sort of intellectual and engineering combat zone. One where complex designs and the successful execution of missions are the result of brilliant scientists and engineers bashing their ideas against each other.

“We’re known for having a very intellectually aggressive culture,” he laughs. “I just came out of an all-day review yesterday with people from outside, from NASA headquarters, and they were chuckling at times because our interaction can be such a full-bore, bare-knuckled brawl.”

Small wonder, given the scope of some of the projects JPL has on the docket at the moment.

Steltzner’s current responsibilities include serving as chief engineer for the Mars 2020 project — a plan to send another rover to the red planet in 2020, this time with instruments that will collect samples of rock and soil and hermetically seal them for a future mission that will retrieve them and bring them home. That project will also offer a deeper look at the potential for life on Mars, Steltzner explains, by characterizing the geology and habitability of the Mars environment and to help prepare it for eventual human exploration.

The design of the Mars 2020 rover is based in part on that of Curiosity, the rover for which Steltzner a few years ago oversaw the team that designed the hardware for the “entry, descent and landing” phase. It was such a technical achievement — sending a vehicle hurtling through space and setting it down gently on the Mars surface — that Steltzner has published a book about Curiosity, called The Right Kind of Crazy.

Working on Curiosity in the JPL Spacecraft Assembly Facility

It details some of the challenges, setbacks and high-stress moments that came with the development of Curiosity’s Sky Crane landing system. That undertaking, he writes, taught him and his team a lot — that engineering tasks are dependent on “honestly facing the hard data,” and that in an organization as sprawling and complex as NASA, the best problems are “too complicated to have a clean equation that describes them.”

Meanwhile, he’s got plenty more to keep him busy. Steltzner’s also working on a new kind of parachute that would help carry humans to Mars, and developing robotics systems that will be used to explore Europa and Enceladus — the moons of Jupiter and Saturn thought to have the best chance of hosting alien life.

“Here’s what I believe to be true,” Steltzner tells Engadget. “Our human curiosity is one of our greatest attributes, and an outgrowth of that curiosity is our desire to explore that which we do not know. I don’t have something like a great business model about why we should explore space — in fact, there’s an old aerospace adage that goes, ‘The way to make a small fortune in aerospace is to start with a large one.’

“What I do know is that when we explore, it makes us better. It makes us bigger, and that is profound. Think about that. What is the effect culturally, societally, if everybody sits just a tiny bit taller because of something we do here? That’s not to be undersold. It’s difficult to quantify. I can’t give you ‘Oh, the GDP goes up by 1 percent when everyone is inspired to be a little more and to try to do a little more,’ but the effect is profound.”

The mysteries of the galaxy are indeed so profound that they convinced a young man who grew up in Sausalito, California, playing bass for several bands, to do something different with his life.

Coming home from a gig one night, Steltzner found himself preoccupied by the distinct and changing patterns of the stars he saw above him. He’d never shown much of a predilection for science and math as a student, but even so, something nagged at him — to the point that he decided to enroll in a nearby community college, signing up for a physics course.

He transferred to the University of California, Davis, after a few years and ended up majoring in mechanical engineering and design. It was the start of a preoccupation with the stars that’s shaped his career and ultimately brought him to NASA, to a coterie of like-minded space geeks working to explore the next frontier.

“It’s a big deal,” Steltzner says of Mars 2020. “It’s part of the science community, where every 10 years we do a survey and ask a research council, ‘What should we be doing?’ They’ve been telling us we need to bring samples back from Mars, so that’s on track now. It’s actually a great opportunity, because we’re leveraging a lot of the heritage and spare parts from the Curiosity rover.

“We just finished our PDR, our preliminary design review, at the beginning of [February], and we’re steaming ahead. There are a couple hundred people working on a wide range of activities and efforts. As chief engineer, I float. I spend almost all my time sitting in a room talking to other people about a technical problem. About trying to understand if we have a staffing shortfall. I look for holes and fill them myself if I can, or get people to move into jobs and move on to the next hole. I’m sort of a free safety, as it were.”

Founded in 1936, today JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology. It has a workforce of more than 5,000 and got $250 million for the Mars 2020 rover as part of the latest NASA budget Congress approved.

One thing that helps keep interest alive in the organization’s planned expeditions is how deeply a fascination with space has seeped into the zeitgeist. It also helps that private companies have emerged and begun to score thrilling successes on their own, with custom rockets and launches that become splashy media events.

For his part, Steltzner says he’s enthusiastic about private space ventures like Blue Origin and SpaceX.

“I love the privateers — I absolutely l-o-v-e love them,” he says. “Because they’re willing to do things differently. They’re invigorating space. Having said that, the challenge they face is in the end, eventually, someday they have to answer to investors who want them to be profitable endeavors. And that may someday exhaust their energy. But bring it on. Adam Smith was right: Competition is really important.”

So is keeping the public excited about space. It’s why JPL recently commissioned a beautiful series of retro-looking space-themed travel posters, created in partnership with Seattle-based design firm Invisible Creature. “Visit the Historic Sites … Mars … Multiple Tours Available,” reads one, presenting rockets in flight and designed in a way that makes you think you could be looking at the creation of a Madison Avenue ad shop in the ’50s.

It’s also why Steltzner wrote his book. He insists that the sustainability of the human race depends on our willingness to pursue schemes that sound crazy but are “the right kind of crazy” — things like sending rovers to Mars that could pave the way for eventual human habitation of the planet.

“We explore as a gesture of humanity,” he writes. “We do it because we can, and we do it as an affirmation of who and what we are. As a society, if we ever stop exploring, who will we be? I think we will be stagnant — not innovating, not building. It’s a formula not just for stagnation but for disaster. Which is why nurturing and supporting innate curiosity is still one of the most valuable survival tools we have.”

[Images: AP/Damian Dovarganes (Steltzner / Lead); NASA/JPL-Caltech (Spacecraft Assembly Facility); Nick_Rowland/Flickr (Starry sky); Nasa (Mars rover, Space Tourism posters)]

DOJ files a response to Apple in San Bernardino iPhone case

The Department of Justice is not happy with Apple’s refusal to unlock the iPhone 5c of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, as stated in a response filed today.

“By Apple’s own reckoning, the corporation — which grosses hundreds of billions of dollars a year — would need to set aside as few as six of its 100,000 employees for perhaps as little as two weeks,” the DOJ writes. “This burden, which is not unreasonable, is the direct result of Apple’s deliberate marketing decision to engineer its products so that the government cannot search them, even with a warrant.”

Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been engaged in an legal battle over unlocking the iPhone 5c used by Farook, who died during a shootout with authorities after the attack on December 2nd. The FBI ordered Apple to help it unlock the iPhone, but Apple has adamantly refused. Apple CEO Tim Cook has called the order “dangerous,” “unconstitutional” and “bad for America.”

The DOJ disagrees.

“The Court’s Order is modest,” today’s filing reads. “It applies to a single iPhone, and it allows Apple to decide the least burdensome means of complying. As Apple well knows, the Order does not compel it to unlock other iPhones or to give the government a universal ‘master key’ or ‘back door.’ … Apple’s rhetoric is not only false, but also corrosive of the very institutions that are best able to safeguard our liberty and our rights.”

Other tech companies have rallied around Apple in this case, including Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon. The DOJ has some words for these companies as well, claiming that Apple and its supporters are trying to alarm the courts and drum up a media frenzy about larger security issues.

“That is a diversion,” the department writes. “Apple desperately wants — desperately needs — this case not to be ‘about one isolated iPhone.’”

As it turns out, the DOJ is attempting to access the data on 12 separate iPhones across nine official requests. A US magistrate judge in New York recently ruled that the FBI could not force Apple to help authorities unlock an iPhone in a drug-trafficking case.

Source: CNBCDigital

Scientists find new bacteria species that can eat plastic

Plastic is a problem. We use too much of it — over 300 million tons are produced every year — and we can’t easily get rid of it (there’s that whole lack of biodegradability thing). But scientists in Japan may have come upon a solution to our environmental woes with a new bacteria, Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, that can fully break down PET, which is used to make plenty of plastic material. As Fast Company notes, this is the first time we’ve found bacteria that can completely degrade PET.

I. sakaiensis works by turning PET into another substance called MHET, and then it uses an additional enzyme to turn that into the basic components of PET. Additionally, the bacteria also gives us the option of turning the MHET into new PET material.

While that makes I. sakaiensis sound like some sort of miracle solution, there’s still one big issue to work through: It takes forever. Scientists found that it took six weeks to eat through a thin layer of PET. But, naturally, they’re also working on ways to speed up the process. They’ve already sequenced the bacteria’s genome, which could lead to building stronger and faster strains.

In the end, it could end up being our most useful tool in our war against plastic. Scientists have already found worms and microbes that can also break down plastic, but they’re not nearly as effective. There’s also the vast amount of plastics out there that don’t use PET, and which will require another method for destroying.

Via: Fast Company

Source: Science