iOS 14 Leaks; Facebook Tests Cross-Posting to Instagram; Google Maps New Hidden Feature; EV News From Tesla & Ford

More on iOS 14, thanks to some code leaked to 9to5mac.com. Apparently, the new iPad Pro will have a 3 lens camera, as an earlier rumor touted. It will include a time of flight 3D sensor in addition to a wide angle lens, ultra wide lens, and telephoto. The time of flight sensor will enable a new augmented reality app, which is designed to give users more info about the world around them via AR. The iPhone 9 will use Touch ID, as previously thought. It was already believed that Apple was working on a new Apple TV box, but the iOS 14 leak also indicates a new remote which may not rely on Siri so much, and may be less expensive. The long rumored AirTag item trackers appear in the software update. A new wrinkle: the AirTags will be able to be set up in bulk through iOS and there will be a user replaceable battery was the Tile trackers have. Also— the top new iPhone models will be able to track AirTags via augmented reality, and the AirTags will be able to play a sound to help in locating them!

Facebook is testing out an option to cross-post Stories to Instagram, instead of just allowing importing Instagram items to Daddy Facebook. According to techcrunch.com, this could save both social media managers and average users time, while letting them maximize views of content they create. It may be that the apps will sync up the ‘already viewed’ status of cross posted material, so you don’t end up seeing a rerun over on the other platform of something already viewed. You have been able to cross post Instagram content since October 2017, so this is not unexpected…although some complain that it is just a continuation of the ‘Facebookization’ of Instagram. Look for the platform to continue to unify its Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram Direct chat features, too…all with end-to-end encryption….something governments, law enforcement, and spies have been harping about. Facebook may see it as a way to make it tougher for governments to try to break up Facebook.

Like many complex apps, Google Maps contains Easter eggs you may not be aware of. Bgr.com says a new one in Maps pulls together features from a couple other Google apps….Lens and Translate. Right now, it’s only on Android, but apparently the new feature integration will let you see the physical menu of a restaurant with Lens and flag popular dishes. Even cooler, if you are traveling overseas (ok, maybe after the coronavirus wave is under control or there’s a vaccine), Translate will do its thing so you will know what the dishes in other languages are.You can even train it to personalize restaurant recommendations to match with dishes you prefer.

On Monday, Tesla announced they had built their 1 millionth EV, a Model Y. Model Y shipments are expected this month, according to CNET.com. Some buyers have already gotten delivery confirmations. Over at Ford, there are now Mustang Mach-E reservations from all 50 states. No numbers were released, but Ford expects to build about 50,000 in the first full year of production and looks to sell out of them. Ford did release a map showing that Rapid Red is the most popular color, followed by Carbonized Gray and Infinite Blue. The majority of the EVs are optioned with all-wheel drive and extended range battery, which Ford estimates will give a range of about 270 miles. If you want one, it’s a $500 refundable deposit to reserve a Mach-E.

Amazon Selling Cashierless Tech To Others; Twitter Tags Manipulated Biden Vid + Dorsey Stays CEO; Apple Watch 6 May Get Blood Oxygen Detection; Gates Foundation Targets COVID- 19 Detection

Amazon is offering its cashier less tech, which they have dubbed ‘Just Walk Out’, to other retailers. Cnet.com reports that Amazon has cut deals on the swipe and go shopping, which eliminates check out lines and registers, with several retailers so far. No names have been released, nor has the cost or timeline for implementing the system in other retail stores. Amazon does have a facility in LA which is several times larger than the one just opened in Seattle where they are trialing the tech.

Twitter has slapped a ‘manipulated media’ tag on a doctored video of Joe Biden that was shared by White House social media director Dan Scavino, then retweeted by Donald Trump. According to theverge.com, its the first use by Twitter of the tag to indicate fake media. Greg Shultz, Biden’s campaign manager, sent a heated statement to Facebook for NOT taking similar action on an obviously fake video. Twitter rolled out its ban on faked media March 5th. It covers ‘synthetic’ and manipulated media ‘likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm’, including sophisticated deepfakes as well as other content which has been deceptively edited.

In other Twitter news, the platform has cut a deal with conservative activist group Elliott Management. The firm had been trying to push out CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter will buy back $2 billion worth o stock and name a couple new board members: one from Elliott and another from Sliver Lake, and investment firm that is putting a billion into Twitter to help fund the buybacks. The new board members will be part of a committee evaluating ‘the CEO succession plan,’ which should be revealed by year’s end.

Tim Cook has always looked to make the Apple Watch more of a health monitor. Now, it looks like the Series 6, due out this Fall, will have blood oxygen detection, and a better ECG. Appleinsider.com notes that the watch already has fall detection and heart rate monitoring features. Regarding the oxygen, if a wearer’s blood oxygen level drops below healthy levels, generally considered to be 95-100% saturation, the can lead to heart health issues or even cardiac arrest. The Watch’s detector will send the wearer a push notification if it finds a level below 95%. The Watch already has an ECG monitor built into the Digital Crown, but it has been somewhat limited. It will return inconclusive results if the heart rate is too high. the improved version will allow Electrocardiograms with a wider range.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is readying to fund at-home testing kits for the novel coronavirus in Seattle. Geekwire.com says plans aren’t final yet, but kits might be available in the ‘coming weeks,’ and would quickly identify where the disease is spreading. The tests are an offshoot of the Seattle Flu Study, a two year old research institute at the University of Washington, which is funded by Bill Gates’ private office to the tune of $20 million. Gates has been sounding the alarm for years about the rise of an unchecked epidemic that could result in over 10 million deaths and be a once in a century pandemic, and now his concerns and funding of research may pay off by saving millions of lives.

Microsoft Asks Seattle & SF Bay Employees- Work From Home; GM Reveals New EV Platform; Twitter tests ‘Fleets’; Coronavirus Spread Via Cash

Microsoft has asked employees located around Seattle and in the San Francisco Bay Area to work from home most of March due to the coronavirus. Businessinsider.com says this policy will be in place until March 25th, and that Microsoft will review it then and decide if it should be extended or lifted. Ten of the 11 deaths from the COVID-19 virus have been in the Seattle area, and Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley, now has at least 14 confirmed cases of the virus.

General Motors rolled out around a dozen products yesterday to investors, underscoring the auto maker’s seriousness about moving to an electric future. According to theverge.com, GM showed a new modular EV platform with an improved battery pack called Ultium. The platform is intended to be flexible enough to work with a number of different vehicle types and shapes. the new batteries are unique due to the “large-format, pouch-style cells,” as opposed to cylindrical cells, which GM says enables them to be stacked vertically or horizontally inside the battery pack. These batteries will offer power ranging from 50 to 200 kWh, which could allow for a driving range up to “400 miles or more.” Motors designed in-house will support front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, and performance all-wheel drive applications. GM has added aluminum to their battery mix, which reduced the cobalt content by 70%. They are striving to get the costs under $100/kWh, which is kind of the magic bullet amount to make EVs completely compatible with gas cars. Tesla will reportedly show off a new battery system next month that hits this level.

Twitter is testing out a version of Stories it calls ‘Fleets.’ Techcrunch.com reports that the testing is beginning in Brazil. Unlike Tweets, Twitter’s new Fleets can’t receive Likes, Replies or Retweets. And they’ll disappear entirely after 24 hours. The ephemeral posts aren’t private, but they are less accessible…you have to visit a person’s public profile to set them (even if you don’t follow them.) the Fleets won’t circulate Twitter’s network, or show up in Search or Moments, and they can’t be embedded on an external website. Fleets are intended to be ‘text centric,’ but you will be able to add photos, GIFs, and videos…although there are no editing tools for them. Videos will be limited to 2:20, or 512MB.

The WHO says cash may be spreading the coronavirus, COVID-19. Businessinsider.com reports that people should use contactless payments whenever possible, and wash hands or use hand sanitizer after handling cash, especially before eating. China has already indicated it would destroy cash from highly impacted areas in that country. The World Health Organization says the virus could remain on money for days after being exposed to it. This gives new meaning to ‘filthy lucre!’

Seattle Amazon Employee Tests + for Coronavirus; 14.1 Inch MacBook Pro Coming; Facebook-New Anti-Spam Tool; Google Cancels I/O

An Amazon employee in Seattle has tested positive for coronavirus. Geekwire.com reports that the person went home sick February 25th, and later tested positive for COVID-19. Amazon has notified other employees who came into close contact with the infected individual. The employee worked in Amazon’s Brazil building at 400 9th Ave N, near downtown.

Well reputed analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says 6 new Apple products are coming this year with mini-LED displays, including a 14.1 inch MacBook Pro. In a story picked up by 9to5mac.com, Kuo also says they will release mini-LED screens in a 12.9 inch iPad Pro, a 27 inch iMac Pro, 16 inch MacBook Pro, a 10.2 inch iPad, and a 7.9 inch iPad. No release dates, but Kuo says the iMac Pro will drop 4th quarter. Why mini-LED screens? Apple is interested in adopting mini-LED screen panels for the rich wide color gamut, high contrast ratios, high dynamic range, and localized dimming. mini-LED is also believed to result in thinner panels that are more power-efficient, and they do not suffer from burn-in like OLED.

Trying to get rid of fake accounts is a perpetual game of whack-a-mole for social media like Facebook. Now, zdnet.com says Facebook engineers have cooked up a more efficient machine learning tool which has already helped the platform to kill 6.6 billion fake accounts in the past year. Facebook notes that there are additional millions of attempts to create fake accounts daily that they are able to block. They call the tech behind the takedown tool Deep Entity Classification. It looks for the “deep features” of each account, which are the behavioral patterns of profiles, rather than the direct characteristics of an account. In other words, instead of only registering details like the creation date of an account or the number of friend requests it has sent, DEP also looks at all of the properties of the profiles, groups or pages that a particular user has made contact with. It can reportedly catalog up to 20,000 unique features per account, and gives them a way to squash fake accounts that is super hard to reverse engineer. Of course, spammers will take this as a challenge!

Due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, Google won’t hold its I/O 2020. According to 9to5google.com, Google is looking at some sort of alternative format, like doing events and interactive learning sessions online. Since they already have been streaming all the keynotes and sessions on YouTube, it may be that they can announce an alternative I/O pretty quickly….stay tuned.

Amazon Expands Same Day Delivery, Waymo Raises $2.25 Billion to Scale Up; Facebook Pulls out of SXSW; Browser Extension Adds Masks

Amazon is expanding same day delivery services with a series of mini warehouses. It’s expected that some Prime members will be able to get deliveries within hours of ordering. Amazon has quietly built smaller versions of its fulfillment centers closer to customers in Philadelphia, Phoenix, Orlando and Dallas to bolster same-day delivery in those areas. They claim they will offer over 3 million items for same day delivery from the mini centers. When you go to order, you will see a ‘Today by’ tag on items eligible for the service. Overnight delivery will also be available. If something is ordered before midnight, they say it will be delivered by 8AM the next day. The ‘mini’ centers are about a tenth the size of a normal Amazon fulfillment center.

Alphabet subsidiary Waymo has raised $2.25 billion as the autonomous vehicle division begins to scale up operations. According to venturebeat.com, the financing came from Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Mubadala Investment Company (the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi), as well as auto parts supplier Magna International, Andreessen Horowitz, auto retail giant AutoNation, and Alphabet itself. It’s an initial close on the company’s first round of funding.

Facebook has now bailed out of SXSW in Austin over concerns about coronavirus. They had previously cancelled their own F8 developer conference in the Bay Area. Theverge.com says Google and Microsoft just today cancelled two smaller conferences, although both are still on for their major developer conferences coming up in May. The Game Developers Conference, which was cancelled in February, has been postponed to sometime this summer. Date to be announced. **Update: Google will not hold an in-person I/O in May. They will hold a series of online events.

You can never be too safe! A new browser extension will put a face mask on every face it detects on the internet. According to businessinsider.com, it’s a proof of concept…so expect it to slow your browser way down. The extension is a creation of web developer Moritz Klack. A mask on every face on web pages is probably as effective as actually wearing masks to prevent the COVID-19 coronavirus…although experts say the masks do prevent infected people from spreading germs as widely.

Samsung Cancels Vietnam Event; Apple Cams Affected by C. Virus; Walgreens App Leak; Facebook Expands 3D Photo Feature

South Korea’s Samsung has started building a $220 million research and development center in Vietnam, the Vietnamese government said on Monday. Businessinsider.com reports that a ground-breaking ceremony, scheduled for this past Saturday, was canceled because of a virus outbreak that led to travel restrictions on South Koreans.
Construction of the center in Hanoi will be completed by the end of 2022, Samsung Vietnam said in a statement, adding that the center will employ between 2,200 and 3,000 people. Samsung is the single largest foreign investor in Vietnam, with investments totaling $17 billion.

Apple continues to be affected by the coronavirus outbreak around the world. Reuters reports this weekend that LG Innotek, which supplies camera modules for the iPhone, has been forced to shut down one of its factories due to a worker contracting the virus. According to 9to5mac.com, both Samsung and LG Innotek have been forced to shut down factories in South Korea over the weekend. The closure of the LG Innotek factory is more important to Apple, as LG Innotek supplies camera modules for the iPhone. Whether or not that means it will reopen on Tuesday after disinfection remains to be seen. More than anything, this situation underscores that even though Cook thinks the the situation is “under control” in China, supply chain disruptions to Apple are still possible as coronavirus becomes a global problem.

Walgreens, the second-largest pharmacy chain in the US, says its mobile app contained a bug that exposed the personal details of some of its users. Cnet.com says the leak, described as “an error within the Walgreens mobile app personal secure messaging feature,” exposed details such as first and last name, prescription details, store number, and shipping addresses, where available for a week in January. Walgreens said it fixed the bug on the day it learned of the error, which was January 15th. The company did say that sensitive drugs prescription details were only exposed for a small percentage of the total users who were affected. The app’s messaging feature has temporarily been disabled.

Imagine if every photo in your Facebook news feed looked alive, like something out of a Harry Potter universe newspaper. That’s the reality Facebook is moving toward with a new feature that makes 3D photos available to everyone, according to mashable.com. First launched in 2018, the feature let people give their photos the appearance of a “moving” 3D background, provided the source image was shot using some manner of portrait mode. Now, the company confirms that portrait mode photos are no longer necessary. With the help of artificial intelligence, your boring, old 2D photos can now join the 3D party as well. Any photo you have, no matter how old, should play nice with Facebook’s newly upgraded 3D photos.