
Thumbs Up..
..for the guy in the photo shaking the invisible mans hand.
Tim Cook has made a bid to colonise the wrists of fashionistas everywhere by holding a series of promotional events for the Apple Watch in the world's most fashionable city. Sadly, he didn't manage to get a place in London and had to make do with Paris instead. Apple ditched the usual "town hall" approach of its product …
One of our clients are doing their Christmas do at Madame Tussauds. The blurb says something about celebs looking on as you dine on your sumptuous meal (yeah right!), and I was wondering how odd it would look to be surrounded by plastic-faced dummies.
Then I see a picture of Lagerfeld and Wintour, the autons of the fashion world, and realise that it'll be just like being at a real celeb bash.
I don't understant it. They're both pretty old (late 60s or 70s?), and sure they have no wrinkles on their faces. But guys, we can still see your necks. And anyway, even the youngest of smoothest faced children doesn't have a shiny plastic fizzog like that. Although I suppose plastic is the wrong word. Paralysed into immobility, would be better.
My theory is that this is what Saddam did with his WMDs. The UN didn't get all of his botulinum toxin in the 90s, and it's not been found since, so I suspect it's all gone into celebrity faces...
Aren't they telling everybody from Ed Miliband (lost points there, Ed) on up to reference "real people" these days?
It reinforces my idea that there is only one man doing creative advertising in the whole world, he has one idea at a time and all the franchisees copy it and apply it.
I'm thinking of setting up a cosmetic surgery business giving wrinkles to young celebs. The idea being to distinguish them from the weird, old celebs who've basically had their faces ironed smooth with botox. Then the young ones can prove that their smooth good looks are 'real' and 'natural' by sporting just one, strategically placed and attractive laughter line.
I do wish Keith Richards could have been in the first picture, to give a nice contrast...
Workers at an Apple Store in Towson, Maryland have voted to form a union, making them the first of the iGiant's retail staff to do so in the United States.
Out of 110 eligible voters, 65 employees voted in support of unionization versus 33 who voted against it. The organizing committee, known as the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE), has now filed to certify the results with America's National Labor Relations Board. Members joining this first-ever US Apple Store union will be represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).
"I applaud the courage displayed by CORE members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory," IAM's international president Robert Martinez Jr said in a statement on Saturday. "They made a huge sacrifice for thousands of Apple employees across the nation who had all eyes on this election."
A crack in Apple's walled garden appeared yesterday as the iPhone vendor opened up an option for alternative in-app payment processing within apps distributed in South Korea.
The commission levied by Apple for in-app transactions, which can be up to 30 percent, has long irked app developers. Epic Games famously went before US courts to protest Apple's rules and lost.
South Korea's lawmakers, however, took matters into their own hands and targeted Google and Apple with a law requiring both to open their app stores to third party payment options. Google made its update at the beginning of the year, effectively cutting its service fee by four percent.
One of Apple's most senior legal executives, whom the iGiant trusted to prevent insider trading, has admitted to insider trading.
Gene Levoff pleaded guilty to six counts of security fraud stemming from a February 2019 complaint, according to a Thursday announcement from the US Department of Justice on Thursday.
Levoff used non-public information about Apple's financial results to inform his trades on Apple stock, earning himself $227,000 and avoiding $377,000 of losses. He was able to access the information as he served as co-chairman of Apple's Disclosure Committee, which reviewed the company's quarterly draft, annual report and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.
Democrat lawmakers want the FTC to investigate Apple and Google's online ad trackers, which they say amount to unfair and deceptive business practices and pose a privacy and security risk to people using the tech giants' mobile devices.
US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) and House Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA) requested on Friday that the watchdog launch a probe into Apple and Google, hours before the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for individual states to ban access to abortions.
In the days leading up to the court's action, some of these same lawmakers had also introduced data privacy bills, including a proposal that would make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.
Apple has introduced a game-changer into its upcoming iOS 16 for those who hate CAPTCHAs, in the form of a feature called Automatic Verification.
The feature does exactly what its name alludes to: automatically verifies devices and Apple ID accounts without any action from the user. When iOS 16 ships later this year, it will eliminate the frustrating requirement to select all the stops signs in a photo or decipher a string of characters.
The news was mentioned at Apple's 33rd annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) along with the usual slew of features designed to enhance the functionality of iPhones.
Not many people are talking about Apple's recent WWDC from an enterprise standpoint. But identity and machine management tool maker JumpCloud says a "shim" to connect "the login to the device through to the Safari browser" is a notable development.
JumpCloud provides identity services, which is why chief strategy officer Greg Keller zeroed in on the feature, which his company details further in its latest IT trends report.
The result, said Keller, was "an even more powerful login experience into these devices."
A security flaw in Apple's Safari web browser that was patched nine years ago was exploited in the wild again some months ago – a perfect example of a "zombie" vulnerability.
That's a bug that's been patched, but for whatever reason can be abused all over again on up-to-date systems and devices – or a bug closely related to a patched one.
In a write-up this month, Maddie Stone, a top researcher on Google's Project Zero team, shared details of a Safari vulnerability that folks realized in January this year was being exploited in the wild. This remote-code-execution flaw could be abused by a specially crafted website, for example, to run spyware on someone's device when viewed in their browser.
Another day, another legal claim against Apple for deliberately throttling the performance of its iPhones to save battery power.
This latest case was brought by Justin Gutmann, who has asked the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to approve a collective action that could allow as many as 25 million Brits to claim compensation from the American technology giant. He claims the iGiant secretly degraded their smartphones' performance to make the battery power last longer.
Apple may therefore have to cough up an eye-popping £768 million ($927 million), Gutmann's lawyers estimated, Bloomberg first reported this week.
Apple's Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) in Safari has implemented privacy through forgetfulness, and the result is that users of Twitter may have to remind Safari of their preferences.
Apple's privacy technology has been designed to block third-party cookies in its Safari browser. But according to software developer Jeff Johnson, it keeps such a tight lid on browser-based storage that if the user hasn't visited Twitter for a week, ITP will delete user set preferences.
So instead of seeing "Latest Tweets" – a chronological timeline – Safari users returning to Twitter after seven days can expect to see Twitter's algorithmically curated tweets under its "Home" setting.
A woman in the US has been charged with murder after she allegedly tracked down her boyfriend using an Apple AirTag and ran him over after seeing him with another lady.
Gaylyn Morris, 26, found her partner Andre Smith, also 26, at Tilly’s Pub in an Indianapolis shopping mall with the help of the gadget in the early hours of June 3, it is claimed.
A witness said Morris had driven up to him in the parking lot and inquired whether Smith was in the bar, stating she had a GPS tracker that showed he was inside, according to an affidavit [PDF] by Detective Gregory Shue. Morris, the witness said, subsequently spotted Smith within the establishment.
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