Tag Archives: developers

Accessories, AI, Apple, Apple Services, Apple TV+, Apple Watch, Breaking News, FaceTime, iOS 15, iPad, iPhone, Mac, macOS 12 Monterey, OS Software, Tech, WWDC2021

iOS 15: It’s not just about the new Weather Animations, there’s a lot more

Video

For what seems like a long time many of us have been living inside our iPhone, immersed in a metaverse of our digital lives.

And the deeper into Apple’s walled garden we are submerged, the more monumental the yearly OS upgrades become. That’s because, when you are in a digital life, we’ll, lots of things are worse than the “real” world. The sensual experience is built of fractions of the full sensory bandwidth of life.

But there’s one thing about the metaverse, the fact that, since it’s artificial and human engineered, it can, and does, improve.

In the case of Apple’s universe, the yearly upgrades and constant, sometimes nearly imperceptible changes in a thousand different parameters add together, over time, and suddenly, the world comes alive with vibrant, super sensual satisfaction …

Sure, the weather animations just got sent to a 3rd convolution level of better-ness, that’s true. But add this to all the thousands of better feelings and deeper interactions with yourself and the spirit of ourselves, and you will find: the future

Photo credit: Apple

WWDC 2021 was a pure upgrade fest with a lot of detail to sift through

We are in the middle of our ongoing coverage of the Apple event and all that was revealed. There are so many features and so many important details and interdependent uses for this features that it can be more easily digested in bites.

What we are witnessing is the growing interdependence and interoperability of iOS 15, iPad OS 15 and macOS 12 Monterey, particularly with the built in apple apps they all have built in.

Safari, though still with slight variations between the three OSs, is becoming more powerful everywhere, FaceTime got a huge upgrade in the new systems, and utilities connected to iCloud such as the Find My network are also extensively revamped.

While some find the sheer width and breath of Apple’s hardware, software and services conceptually off-putting, it is, at this early stage of the monumental changes that are being wrought by Apple Silicon, a wonder to behold how all the various products and underlying software for those products is evolving in a way that is constant and deep.

As put forth in articles published by Lynxotic years ago the changes that are underway are vast and were conceived and put into motion based on Steve Jobs’ core concepts for the future of Apple many years ago. And Tim Cook and the rest of Apple have not deviated from that vision, in fact are reaping benefits on behalf of users that could barely be imagined a decade ago.

One bite we’ve started to delve into is the dual and interdependent features from macOS Monterey; Airplay to Mac and Universal control. It turns out that compete interoperability for Airplay to Mac is still in the future, the list of the various models and vintages that it functions on is as follows:

  • 2018 or later MacBook Pro or MacBook Air
  • a 2019 or later iMac or Mac Pro
  • an iMac Pro
  • the 2020 Mac mini

As you can see this is a fairly exclusive list. What is most conspicuously missing is the possibility to use and older mac, such as a 2018 27” 5k iMac to take advantage of the beautiful screen.

Universal Control, meanwhile appears to work with most devices that run on iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey. It allows you to a single mouse and keyboard and flow from ‌iPad‌ to Mac and back, pretty much as you would imagine using the cursor and keyboard for either, and, thankfully there is no setup required.

FaceTime just got a Facelift

FaceTime’s big jump ahead is somewhat more complex since the iPhone, iPad (various models of both) and the mac each have a UX and screen size that varies, as well as different computing advantages. One interesting note on the various technical enhancements, pretty much across the board from what was announced at WWDC 2021, M1 chips and Apple Silicon based devices get the biggest boost from all the new capabilities.

Rather than being a marketing ploy, at least so far there’s no evidence of that kind of approach, this is an organic by product of the underlying “big picture” goal – to unify the experience and potential of the three device categories even as they cross pollinate one-another.

All the various, and gradually hard to list, OS flavors, macOS 12 Monterey, iOS 15, iPadOS 15, tvOS 15, watchOS 8 and all the various accessories that benefit from the upgrades such as AirPods pro spatial audio, HomePod mini liaison with Apple TV 4k and tvOS 15, as well as SharePlay where FaceTime can allow multiple users to share streaming audio or video content for a synchronized experience.

Please stay tuned for the many articles to come that will further dive into the changes and improvements that are on the way, free of charge, for Apple users with this massive roll-out that will culminate in fall 2021.

As per Apple:

Redesigned Weather and Notes Apps

Weather includes more graphical displays of weather data, full-screen maps, and dynamic layouts that change based on conditions. Beautifully redesigned animated backgrounds more accurately reflect the sun’s position and precipitation, and notifications highlight when rain or snow starts and stops. Video animation below:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/videos/apple-iphone12pro-ios15-weather-app/large_2x.mp4

Notes adds user-created tags that make it easy to quickly categorize notes, and mentions allow members of shared notes to notify one another of important updates. An all-new Activity view shows the recent history of a shared note.

Notes adds user-created tags that make it easy to quickly categorize notes in line with relevant content:

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Cutting Edge, Observation, Politics, Tech

Why Web Scraping Is Vital to Democracy

Photo Credit / Fabio / Unsplash

Journalists have used scrapers to collect data that rooted out extremist cops, tracked lobbyists, and uncovered an underground market for adopted children

By: The Markup Staff

The fruits of web scraping—using code to harvest data and information from websites—are all around us.

People build scrapers that can find every Applebee’s on the planet or collect congressional legislation and votes or track fancy watches for sale on fan websites. Businesses use scrapers to manage their online retail inventory and monitor competitors’ prices. Lots of well-known sites use scrapers to do things like track airline ticket prices and job listings. Google is essentially a giant, crawling web scraper.

Scrapers are also the tools of watchdogs and journalists, which is why The Markup filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court this week that threatens to make scraping illegal.

Web Scraping with Python: Collecting More Data from the Modern Web

The case itself—Van Buren v. United States—is not about scraping but rather a legal question regarding the prosecution of a Georgia police officer, Nathan Van Buren, who was bribed to look up confidential information in a law enforcement database. Van Buren was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which prohibits unauthorized access to a computer network such as computer hacking, where someone breaks into a system to steal information (or, as dramatized in the 1980s classic movie “WarGames,” potentially start World War III).

In Van Buren’s case, since he was allowed to access the database for work, the question is whether the court will broadly define his troubling activities as “exceeding authorized access” to extract data, which is what would make it a crime under the CFAA. And it’s that definition that could affect journalists.

Or, as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it during Monday’s oral arguments, lead in the direction of “perhaps making a federal criminal of us all.”

Investigative journalists and other watchdogs often use scrapers to illuminate issues big and small, from tracking the influence of lobbyists in Peru by harvesting the digital visitor logs for government buildings to monitoring and collecting political ads on Facebook. In both of those instances, the pages and data scraped are publicly available on the internet—no hacking necessary—but sites involved could easily change the fine print on their terms of service to label the aggregation of that information “unauthorized.” And the U.S. Supreme Court, depending on how it rules, could decide that violating those terms of service is a crime under the CFAA.

“A statute that allows powerful forces like the government or wealthy corporate actors to unilaterally criminalize newsgathering activities by blocking these efforts through the terms of service for their websites would violate the First Amendment,” The Markup wrote in our brief.

What sort of work is at risk? Here’s a roundup of some recent journalism made possible by web scraping:

  • The COVID tracking project, from The Atlantic, collects and aggregates data from around the country on a daily basis, serving as a means of monitoring where testing is happening, where the pandemic is growing, and the racial disparities in who’s contracting and dying from the virus.
  • This project, from Reveal, scraped extremist Facebook groups and compared their membership rolls to those of law enforcement groups on Facebook—and found a lot of overlap.
  • Reveal also used scrapers to find that hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes should have never been charged to Detroit residents who then lost their homes through foreclosure.
  • The Markup’s recent investigation into Google’s search results found that it consistently favors its own products, leaving some websites from which the web giant itself scrapes information struggling for visitors and, therefore, ad revenue. The U.S. Department of Justice cited the issue in an antitrust lawsuit against the company. 
  • In Copy, Paste, Legislate, USA Today found a pattern of cookie-cutter laws, pushed by special interest groups, circulating in legislatures around the country.
  • Reuters scraped social media and message boards to find an underground market for adopted children whose parents, who had usually adopted the children from abroad, decided the children were too much for them. A couple featured in the piece was later convicted of kidnapping as a result of the investigation.
  • Gizmodo was able to use similar tools to find the probable locations of tens of thousands of Ring surveillance cameras.
  • The Trace and The Verge, using scrapers, found people using an online market to sell guns without a license and without performing background checks.

This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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