Jeff Bezos adds ‘puppy savior’ to his resumé

Talking to a human when you need to contact Amazon seems close to impossible. Apparently, all you need to do to get a hold of Jeff Bezos though is have your puppy stolen by a delivery driver and guess the CEO’s email address, according to CNBC. After UK resident Richard Guttfield’s black miniature schnauzer was nicked following a dog food delivery, Amazon tracked the driver, an independent contractor, and found the dog at the thief’s home.

An Amazon spokesperson called the act “inexcusable” and said this is not representative of its standards for delivery partners. The driver will no longer be delivering packages for the online retailer. No word on if puppy rescue will be the next Prime perk. Happy Friday!

Source: CNBC

Google will verify the identity of those buying US political ads

Following similar moves from Facebook and Twitter, Google has now announced how it will be handling political ads going forward. All three have been compelled to address the issues that arose from the last US presidential election, during which Russian groups purchased election ads aimed at sowing political discord. In a blog post, Google Senior VP Kent Walker described some of the measures the company will be taking now and in the near future.

Anyone who wants to purchase a US election ad through Google will now have to confirm that they are a US citizen or lawful permanent resident and will be required to provide a government-issued ID or other documents in order to verify their identity. Once purchased, political ads will also have to display who is paying for them. This summer, Google says it will also release an election ad transparency report that will show who is buying political ads and how much money is being spent on them. And the company will release a library through which users can search for specific election ads and see who bought them.

Outside of ads, Google developed Protect Your Election — a set of tools that will help those at greater risk of cyberattacks — and will work with the National Cyber Security Alliance and Harvard Kennedy School’s Digital Democracy Project to fund online security training programs for those involved in political campaigns.

Last month, Facebook began implementing its new political ad verification efforts, which include confirming ad-purchasers’ identities, labeling political ads as such and requiring those ads to disclose who paid for them. Twitter also recently agreed to support the Honest Ads Act, which will require more transparency surrounding election advertisements.

Source: Google

MoviePass competitor Sinemia offers movie plans starting at $5/month

Today, Sinemia, a MoviePass competitor, announced its lowest pricing to date. For just $4.99 (on an annual plan), moviegoers in the US, UK, Canada and Australia can get one ticket per month to any 2D, traditional movie. For $6.99, you can get two tickets per month. If you’d like to see additional movies (or add 3D and IMAX into the mix), the prices for that are $9.99 for two tickets and $14.99 for three tickets per month.

While these prices don’t match MoviePass’s $9.99 per month for one movie a day (an offer that was removed from the service’s website and only recently restored), they still are a good deal if you consider the full-price ticket of a movie. Additionally, moviegoers can buy tickets and choose their seats up to 30 days ahead of time, a service that isn’t offered with MoviePass.

Questions about MoviePass’s sustainability are becoming more and more glaring, as the company is receiving new subscribers at a high rate — and losing money every time anyone uses the service. It’s not clear how the company intends to make money. Sinemia might be more sustainable in the long term, as the company tries to balance the desires of theatergoers with the needs of movie theater owners and operators. “Our vision and goal has been to create a movie ticket subscription service that adds value for both for moviegoers and the movie industry,” said Rifat Oguz, the founder and CEO of Sinemia. “We believe the only way to accomplish this is through a sustainable movie subscription model.”

Source: Triple Point PR

iPhone X Remained World’s Most Popular Smartphone Last Quarter Despite Concerns About Poor Sales

iPhone X was the world’s most popular smartphone for the second consecutive quarter, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Strategy Analytics estimates that iPhone X shipments totaled 16 million units in the first three months of 2018, making it the best-selling smartphone model during that period, as it was during the final three months of 2017.

“For the second quarter running, the iPhone X remains the world’s most popular smartphone model overall, due to a blend of good design, sophisticated camera, extensive apps, and widespread retail presence for the device,” said Juha Winter, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics.

Source: Strategy Analytics
The findings contradict a flurry of reports that variously referred to the iPhone X as a failure, disappointment, and flop. Multiple publications said the iPhone X did not live up to the hype due to poor or dull sales.

Much of the doom and gloom centered around Apple suppliers like AMS and TSMC warning about weaker smartphone demand. Apple CEO Tim Cook has dismissed those kind of reports in the past, noting that the company’s supply chain is very complex, and that conclusions shouldn’t be drawn from singular data points.

Cook in 2013:

Even if a particular data point were factual, it would be impossible to interpret that data point as to what it meant to our business. The supply chain is very complex and we have multiple sources for things. Yields can vary, supplier performance can vary. There is an inordinate long list of things that can make any single data point not a great proxy for what is going on.

In reality, Apple accounted for the top four best-selling smartphones worldwide last quarter. iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus were the second and third most popular, with an estimated 12.5 million and 8.3 million shipments respectively, while the iPhone 7 took fourth place with around 5.6 million shipments.

The research lines up with Cook’s recent revelation that “customers chose iPhone X more than any other iPhone each week in the March quarter, just as they did following its launch in the December quarter.” He added that the iPhone X is a “Super Bowl winner,” even if “you want them to win with a few more points.”

Apple on Tuesday reported that it sold 52.2 million iPhones last quarter, but it doesn’t break out the sales on a model-by-model basis. However, the average selling price of an iPhone was $728 in the quarter, up from $655 in the year-ago quarter, suggesting the higher-priced iPhone X did sell relatively well.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi’s budget Redmi 5A was the sole Android smartphone to crack the top five on the best-selling list, with an estimated 5.4 million shipments last quarter. Samsung’s new Galaxy S9 Plus, launched in the final month of the quarter, ranked sixth with an estimated 5.3 million shipments.

iPhone X may not have lived up to the hype of some overblown Wall Street expectations, but in the end, the device was a key contributor to Apple’s record-breaking revenue in the first half of its 2018 fiscal year.

Related Roundup: iPhone XTag: Strategy AnalyticsBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Neutral)
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Cover of New Spanish-Language ‘People’ Magazine Issue Shot on iPhone X

Apple CEO Tim Cook this morning tweeted out congratulations to People en Español, a Spanish-language magazine which has an issue coming out covering the 50 most beautiful people of 2018. The issue’s cover and other individual shots were captured using Apple’s iPhone X, as Cook pointed out in his tweet.

Images via People en Español

¡Felicidades! @peopleenespanol #50MásBellos shot on iPhone X https://t.co/U2oZpZJiUO pic.twitter.com/F0GrXl2LLJ

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) May 4, 2018

The June issue includes actors and singers like Demi Lovato, Ricky Martin, Maluma, Maite Perroni, J Balvin, Jonn Leguizamo, and Geraldine Bazán. People en Español’s list mostly focuses on Latino stars from film, television, music, sports, and politics.

Apple and Tim Cook typically share when the iPhone is used to capture images for magazine covers and other media, like last September when TIME Magazine exclusively used the iPhone’s camera for its “Firsts: Women Who Are Changing The World” photo shoot. More recently, Cook posted a series of images taken during Holi festivities in India, captured by photographers Prashanth Viswanathan, Amit Mehra, and Ashish Parmar all using the iPhone X.

In an effort to reach a wider audience for its “Shot on iPhone” campaign, Apple last August finally joined Instagram. The @Apple account posts videos, user-submitted photos, and shares Stories all taken on an iPhone.

Related Roundup: iPhone XTag: Shot on iPhoneBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Neutral)
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Challenge your friends to lightsaber duels in ‘Star Wars: Jedi Challenges’

Last November, Disney and Lenovo partnered up to release Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, an augmented reality experience that combines video games with a lightweight AR headset and a matching lightsaber. With the headset on, you can play Holochess, command field troops on Hoth and, of course, have duels with bad guys like Kylo Ren. Today, Disney is releasing yet another update to the game with a hotly requested feature: local multiplayer, so you can duel your friends in the same room.

The feature is called Lightsaber Versus Mode, and as you might expect, it does require you to have two sets of the Jedi Challenges kit, each of which includes the smartphone-powered Lenovo headset, a lightsaber hilt plus a movement-tracking beacon. They have to both be on the same WiFi network in order for both players to engage in multiplayer. The two aforementioned beacons should also be in front of both players, ideally placed on the floor about three feet apart. Then fire up Versus mode, find your buddy, and start the battle.

I tried out a demo version of this with a Disney spokesperson last week, and it’s essentially the lightsaber duel mode, but with another person. Visual cues will appear on the screen to guide you through the duel, and you can see each other’s health bars at the top. To block your opponent, you line up your lightsaber with random bars that appear in front of you. To dodge, simply duck or swerve in the direction it shows on the screen. It’ll also tell you just when and where to strike, which prompted both of us to slice and swat at each other with our imaginary lightsabers. The battle will get tougher over time as the difficulty and the speed of attacks increase, and the person who manages to deal with those challenges better will likely emerge the victor.

Because I could actually see him in front of me — remember, this is augmented reality, where you can still see the world around you — I found it pretty funny to see him waving his lightsaber hilt around, and ended up laughing as I tried to fight off his attacks. It felt like playing swords at an arcade, and made me feel like I was 10 years old again. In short, it was a lot of fun. I will say that multiplayer did seem a lot more challenging than the standard duel if only because it lacks a tutorial mode, so I’d suggest trying it out solo first to get a feel for it before playing with your friends.

The multiplayer mode is the latest upgrade to Star Wars: Jedi Challenges. The first one was an expansion earlier this year that added content from Episode 8, like a duel against two Praetorian guards and three new Strategic Combat levels on the planet Crait. There was also a smaller update for iOS devices where they could play Holochess on their phones. Like with all updates, the multiplayer mode will be a free download. It’ll be available on both iOS and Android.

Lyft puts 30 self-driving cars to work in Las Vegas

If you’re in Las Vegas, you can now experience what it feels like to ride in a self-driving car: Lyft has announced that it’s unleashing 30 autonomous vehicles in the city. The ride-hailing company piloted its autonomous ride-sharing vehicles late last year in Boston and gave rides to people attending the Computer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas back in January. Unlike its trial at CES, though, the 30 vehicles part of this expansion is open to the public — and yes, you can hail them like you would any other car through its app. You’ll have to opt in to get the chance to ride one, though, so don’t worry if you don’t quite trust the technology yet.

The vehicles Lyft used during CES were BMWs powered by autonomous technology developed by Pittsburgh-based connected car solutions company Aptiv. They were equipped with nine LiDARs, 10 radars, a trifocal camera, vehicle-to-infrastructure data about stop lights and differential GPS. Chances are, they’re deploying the same vehicles for this multiyear agreement. And that’s not a bad thing — we found that they were able to handle Las Vegas’ erratic traffic well when we took a ride on one back in January.

Like the vehicles that shuttled people during CES, though, the 30 vehicles part of this testing program can only take you to and from high-demand locations. It’ll take a while before the company can fully launch a self-driving network — for now, it has to conduct more experiments to gather more data. As Aptiv chief Kevin Clark said in a statement: “…More importantly, the resulting knowledge and data [from this test] will allow us to further refine our autonomous driving capabilities and strengthen our portfolio of industry-leading active safety solutions.”

Source: Aptiv

Apple News Inking Deals With Publishers for Exclusive Video Content

Apple has begun inking deals with publishers in Apple News to gain timed exclusive video series on the platform, as it competes with news distribution outlets on Facebook, Google, and Twitter. In a new article today, Digiday highlights BuzzFeed News as one of the first major partnerships for the video initiative on Apple News, with the debut of docu-series “Future History: 1968” last month.

Under the partnership, BuzzFeed News launched the first three episodes of Future History: 1968 exclusively on Apple News, and then one week later expanded them to Facebook Watch, YouTube, Twitter, and the BuzzFeed app. BuzzFeed head of audience development Roxanne Emadi says Apple paid the publisher for first-window rights to the show’s first three episodes and cut BuzzFeed a share of ad revenue.

Apple has become so serious about competing with Facebook, Google/YouTube and Twitter as a distribution outlet for news publishers that it’s paying publishers to unveil shows on Apple News first.

“We’re focused on really just in-depth, unique video experiences and finding partners to support that,” Emadi said. “It’s very different than what you’re used to, which is social video and news feed video.”

After its launch on April 21, Future History: 1968 was featured in video galleries for an entire weekend on Apple News and got included in push notifications of users that follow the publisher in the app. According to Emadi, during the first week of the show’s availability on Apple News it received “several hundreds of thousands” of views across the three episodes. On April 28 the show launched on YouTube, Facebook Watch, and Twitter, amassing over 110,000 views across all three since then.

The show focuses on major events that happened in 1968, including the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the space race, but the depictions of each event are filtered through a modern lens. For example, conversations between King and his wife are shown visually as a text message thread. The episodes are mostly formatted in a vertical orientation to fit on iPhone screens without having to transition into landscape mode, and the shortest one runs at just over eight minutes.

Apple has been working on beefing up Apple News recently, with a report last month suggesting that the company will introduce a subscription-based plan into Apple News within the next year. The company has also been pushing for higher-quality and lengthier video series on the platform, although publishers are said to remain hesitant as the app “hasn’t delivered on the revenue front.”

Limited revenue and hassles with placing ads alongside content are some of the reasons that publishers are reluctant to adopt Apple News. This could change, as Apple reportedly plans to allow publishers to use the ad tech they already employ on their sites, such as Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers, to deliver third-party ads in the Apple News app. For publishers embracing the app, they have noted that Apple News can yield a flood of traffic to its articles, with Vox.com stating in February that Apple News accounted for as much as 60 percent of traffic for some stories.

Tag: Apple News
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Criminals used a drone swarm to disrupt an FBI hostage rescue

Drones are what you make of them. One person’s wedding videographer is another person’s drug mule. And while hobbyist drones were first used for simple jobs like sneaking contraband into prisons, over the years they’ve become the criminal’s Swiss Army knife of gizmos. The FBI’s Joe Mazel told a crowd at the AUVSI Xponential conference this week about a particularly organized gang that used drones to interfere with a hostage situation last winter. As Defense One reports, a swarm of small drones descended on an FBI hostage team, performing “high-speed low passes” in an effort “to flush them” from their position. “We were then blind,” Mazel added.

The drones weren’t just used to disorientate the FBI, though. According to Mazel, they were the crew’s eyes in the sky, pushing video to YouTube so the wider group could keep tabs on the FBI’s movements. This was an organized operation, too. Apparently, the drones were brought into the area specifically to disrupt the FBI’s rescue efforts. Other specifics of the incident remain “law-enforcement sensitive,” Mazel said, but this is just one of many more elaborate ways drones are now being used by criminals.

Surveillance is a big part of it. Criminals have taken to watching police stations to identify witnesses and other friends of the law, as well as casing out facilities to find security holes they may be able to exploit in a robbery. A group in Australia uses drones to watch port authority staff. If they get too close to one of the gang’s contraband-filled shipping containers, a fire or theft report is called in to redirect attention. Border scouts and drug muling drones continue to be a problem, too. Just a few months ago, Chinese law enforcement said they’d shut down a smartphone smuggling ring that was responsible for illegally transporting nearly $80 million in handsets.

It’s a game of cat and mouse at the moment. While there is plenty of development going into anti-drone measures, the tech typically can’t be deployed quickly or safely in many reactive scenarios. The FAA is hoping tighten the screw on criminals with stricter regulations. In addition to having to register your drone, the FAA is exploring the idea of a remote identification system whereby drones would be required to broadcast a unique ID linking them to their owner.

Ford put forward its idea for such a system last month. The automaker believes anti-collision lights on drones could have the added function of flashing a unique code that could be read by a mobile app. Instead of requiring drones to broadcast a radio signal or similar, this system would be cheap to implement and could potentially be retrofitted to existing models.

Source: Defense One

How to Remove Third-Party Accounts Like Facebook From Your Mac

With the release of iOS 11, Apple nixed its built-in integration with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Vimeo, a feature that allowed iPhone and iPad users to store their third-party account information and access it within apps that needed to use those services.

Apple has yet to remove the equivalent feature from macOS, although this is likely to change in a future version. In the meantime, this article shows you how to manually remove third-party accounts like Facebook from your Mac, which some users may find a germane step in light of the recent data scandal.

Note that the following guide only deletes associated third-party accounts at the system level of your Mac – you’ll still be able to access your Facebook account and related data by logging into Facebook.com (where you can delete your account permanently) or via the official iOS app, for example.

How to Remove Third-Party Accounts From macOS

Click the Apple symbol () in the menu bar on your Mac’s desktop and select System Preferences….

Click the Internet Accounts preference pane.

Click an account in the left column that you want to remove.

Click the minus (–) button at the bottom of the column.
Click OK in the “Are you sure..?” dialog.

You may be asked if you want to keep any contacts related to the account stored in your iCloud Contacts. To nuke those too, click Delete from Mac.

Related Roundups: macOS High Sierra, macOS 10.14Tag: Facebook
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