News - page 1031

An online petition asking Instagram to reverse its decision to get rid of chronological order in users’ feeds has gathered almost 50,000 signatures in a day.

The request emerged after the photo-sharing platform announced yesterday that it intends to switch to algorithm-based ordering “based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting, and the timeliness of the post.”

User resistance has been immediate, fierce, and completely opposed, surprising no one.

Next month, St. Bartholemew’s Hospital in London will live-stream an operation, letting anyone with virtual-reality goggles see the procedure from any angle.

Dr. Shafi Ahmed, the colorectal and laparoscopic surgeon who will perform the surgery, has broadcast from the O.R. before using Google Glass. But this will be the first time a stream will include 360-degree video that will let viewers observe from any angle.

“You’ll be with me in the operating theater,” he said.

Googlebot, the giant webcrawler that Google uses to scan webpages and update its index, is ditching its iPhone disguise to become an Android.

Rather ironically, the tool has been masquerading as an Apple device running iOS 8.3 for years, but it will soon become a Nexus 5X running Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow to become more efficient.

Researchers have just discovered a new malware threat for iOS devices that uses Apple’s own FairPlay DRM system as a delivery vector.

Dubbed “AceDeciever” by the researchers, the malware in question can technically infect any type of iOS device, jailbroken or not, if a user downloads a third-party app.

The FBI will be greeted by protestors when it faces off against Apple at the U.S. District Courthouse in Riverside, CA on March 22nd.

Fight for the Future — the same group that rallied at Apple Stores across the country last month — is organizing another protest against the FBI’s federal court order compelling Apple to weaken security in iOS so the government can hack the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone 5c.

Two-factor authentication is super secure, but incredibly annoying when you’re in a hurry. LastPass, one of the front-runners in password managers on desktop and mobile, might have the solution with a new mobile app that will simplify the login process to LastPass, which can then manage your many web accounts with ease.

Instead of entering a passcode to get into LastPass, you can have its new mobile Authenticator app send a simple verify button that will let you sign in with one tap. Here’s a quick video to see how it works.

The iPhone 7 Plus may boast more storage than any smartphone Apple’s ever created, if the company uses a tiny new chip by SanDisk that packs 256GB of flash storage.

Photos of the new chip destined for smartphones surfaced on an Italian tech blog comparing them to the old 64GB NAND flash chip SanDisk made for Apple in the past.

Check out how little the new chip is next to the old 64GB model:

AliveCor, the groundbreaking medical tech company which makes an iPhone case for predicting strokes, is embracing the world of the Apple Watch.

The company’s forthcoming Kardia Band is an Apple Watch accessory which will augment the wearable’s existing heart monitor with the addition of an FDA-approved, voice-activated electrocardiogram that can analyze your heart rate and email it directly to your physician.

The invites are out and the rumors are in. Apple’s first event of 2016 is going down March 21, when the company will loop fans in on some shiny new products coming soon to Apple Stores.

Apple is expected to introduce a new 4-inch iPhone aimed at budget customers and people who want to be able to hold their smartphone with one hand, but a new 9.7-inch iPad that’s every bit as impressive as the iPad Pro could steal the show (along with some other new goodies).

Here’s what to expect from Apple’s big event.

The iPhone’s prominent (and, dare we say it, somewhat ugly)  antenna bands have been a staple of Apple’s handsets for a few years now. However, a new photo — allegedly leaked by Apple device maker Foxconn — shows off Cupertino’s more minimal approach with the upcoming iPhone 7.

What do you think?

Apple has spoken up about the European Union investigation into its Irish tax affairs, telling a panel of E.U. investigators that it pays “every cent of tax” it owes in the country, and that it gets no advantage whatsoever compared with other companies.

Apple is doubling down on its beliefs about user privacy, by working on a new encryption method that will mean it can no longer decode user information stored in iCloud.

Almost 19 months after the mass leaking of naked celeb photos known as “The Fappening,” a man has been arrested for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — and faces up to five years in prison as a result.

The latest Internet outrage upon us: Instagram is killing chronological order.

The photo-sharing platform announced the change today in a blog post and says that the update will let you users “see the moments they care about first.” Reaction to the news is predictably negative, considering that time has served us well as a measurement of change so far, and users don’t see any compelling reason to change that now.

Apple Watch was never designed to be a singular product, according to Jony Ive, but a whole fashionable system in its own right. Not just in a functional sense, either, as part of an Apple tech ecosystem.

In an interview with Mashable’s Christina Warren, Ive points out the form that enriches the Apple Watch function.

“I think we found that by being able to change the strap,” said Ive, “not just change the color but the design — and the designs change profoundly — that we could start to introduce a new look in combination with different watch faces and user interfaces.”

Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell said the FBI threw “all decorum to the winds” in its latest federal court filing, but in the company’s official response today it has vowed it does not “intend to response in kind.”

The iPhone-maker says in its latest filing that the FBI’s claim that it exhausted all viable investigative alternatives is false because it improperly reset the iCloud password before consulting Apple. The company also admits that it didn’t take a public stance on privacy and encryption until the release of iOS 8.

The latest Google Transparency Report shows that since January 23, 77 percent of all requests to its servers have used encrypted connections.

The numbers on the new report are current as of February 27, and the company says it’s “working hard” to achieve full encryption across all of its services.

Apple’s upcoming fashion exhibition at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art is set to open in May, but if you can’t make it to the Big Apple to see which designer pieces Jony Ive and Co. hand-picked as examples for how technological advancements have altered fashion, the museum has given a sneak peek at some of the weird and wonderful gowns that will be on display.

The exhibit will feature over 100 pieces made from the 1880’s up to 2015, including gowns from icons like Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, Christian Dior, Miuccia Prada, Yves Saint Laurent, and more.

Take a look at some of the pieces coming to the Manus x Machina exhibit:

Commentary on the encryption battle between Apple and the U.S. government might have received its strangest metaphor yet.

Stewart Baker, who used to serve as a counsel for the National Security Agency, appeared on a panel at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin this week. During the discussion, he said that Apple’s current, outspoken position in favor of privacy is a recent development and compared it to the sort of PR-driven whitewashing that Hollywood studios have used to promote actresses as “innocent” and “pure.”

“Who remembers Tim Cook before he was a virgin?” Baker said, paraphrasing composer Oscar Levant’s barb at ’60s everygirl Doris Day.

It got a little less polite from there.

Before Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computers, he was just a super-nerdy kid who loved to operate HAM radios. In a new video interview detailing the most formative moments in his totally geeky life, Woz explains how he went from tinkering with electronics to teaching himself binary by 5th grade, and then made a machine that played tic-tac-toe in 6th grade.

Woz eventually got so good with machines that he could design a mini-computer in two days. Those skills led to his creation of the Apple II computer, which put his and Steve Jobs’ fledgling company on the map.

Watch as Woz recounts his childhood obsession with computers, during the humble beginnings of Silicon Valley, below:

Your Android apps are going to get an iOS-style makeover soon, thanks to new design guidelines from Google.

Mostly concerned with the bottom of Android apps, Google is looking to have its developers place a bar across the bottom of their apps that will let users navigate between different sections of the app, just like iOS currently does.

Google Inbox’s awesome Smart Reply feature, which was launched on mobile back in November, is now available on the web.

The feature is already being used for 10 percent of all replies on Android and iOS — and it’s just as good in your browser.

Apple is not quite done tinkering with OS X 10.11.4 before its public release.

The company seeded the seventh beta of OS X 10.11.4 to developers this morning, a little over a week after Apple released the last beta for the desktop operating system.

The iPhone 7 may come with a Smart Connector if photos of what appears to be an early iPhone 7 Plus unit can be believed.

Photos of the alleged iPhone 7, leaked by a Chinese website, show Apple integrating a dual-lens camera into the design of the rear case. If the case is accurate, it looks like Apple won’t be ditching its protruding camera lens this year.

If you’re a movie fan, you may well have visited the website Letterboxd at some point — giving you a fun way of tracking your movie-watching, built around a neat social network premise.

Today Letterboxd finally got around to launching its official mobile app, bringing the service to iPhones everywhere. Trust us, if you’re a cinema lover, this is a “must download!”