Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Google was currently working on a "dramatic redesign" of its Android OS -- one that embraces the "notch" made popular by the iPhone X. A couple weeks after that report was published, Mobile World Congress was happening, and the biggest trend among Android OEMs was the introduction of a notch in their smartphones. The Verge's Vlad Savov argues that Android smartphone manufacturers are straight up copying the iPhone's design with "more speed and cynicism" than ever before.

Should Android original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) adopt the iPhone's display notch? A display notch can offer a greater screen-to-body ratio, for example, but lower overall aesthetic value. It can also create a headache for developers who need to update their apps to account for the notch that eats into the actual display area. What are your thoughts on display notches? Should Android OEMs adopt the iPhone X's display notch in their devices?

If you're not a fan of notches for aesthetic reasons, you may like the solution that OnePlus has come up with. The company will soon be launching their notch-equipped OnePlus 6 smartphone, but will allow OnePlus 6 owners to "hide" the device's notch via software. Users will have the option to black out the background of the notifications and status bar if they so desire.

Apple might be working on touchless gesture control and curved screens for future iPhones, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. From a report: The control feature would let iPhone users perform some tasks by moving their finger close to the screen without actually tapping it. The technology likely won't be ready for consumers for at least two years, if Apple chooses to go forward with it, a person familiar with the work said. Apple has long embraced new ways for humans to interact with computers. Co-Founder Steve Jobs popularized the mouse in the early 1980s. Apple's latest iPhones have a feature called 3D Touch that responds differently depending on different finger pressures. The new gesture technology would take into account the proximity of a finger to the screen, the person said. Apple is also developing iPhone displays that curve inward gradually from top to bottom, one of the people familiar with the situation said. That's different than the latest Samsung smartphone screens, which curve down at the edges.

rh2600 writes: Four days ago, Apple's latest macOS 10.13.4 update broke DisplayLink protocol support (perhaps permanently), turning what may be hundreds of thousands of external monitors connected to MacBook Pros via DisplayLink into paperweights. Some days in, DisplayLink has yet to announce any solution, and most worryingly there are indications that this is a permanent change to macOS moving forward. Mac Rumors is reporting that "users of the popular Mac desktop extension app Duet Display are being advised not to update to macOS 10.13.4, due to 'critical bugs' that prevent the software from communicating with connected iOS devices used as extra displays." Users of other desktop extensions apps like Air Display and iDisplay are also reporting incompatibility with the latest version of macOS.

Last week, Apple introduced a refreshed 9.7-inch iPad with Apple Pencil support. iFixit has published its teardown of the device this morning, and as The Verge points out, schools won't like how difficult it is to repair. From the report: The takeaway from all this is that the new iPad isn't going to be any easier to repair than prior generations, which were already borderline unrepairable. If an iPad breaks, there's almost no chance that a district will be able to repair it in-house; whereas on cheaper Chromebooks, there's a possibility an IT team could open them up to make some basic fixes. It's a weak point that it's hard to see Apple ever addressing. And since schools aren't exactly forgiving environments for a lent-out device, how well the iPad holds up to drops and dings, and how expensive it is to fix, are bound to be factors in a school's decision on which devices to adopt. Mac Rumors highlights the key findings from iFixit's teardown: The new iPad's lack of waterproofing, non-replaceable charging port, zero upgradeability, and use of glue throughout the internals added up to a "repair nightmare." iFixit then pointed towards the HP Elite x2 1012 G1 tablet, which got a perfect repairability score of 10 out of 10, summarizing that "Apple's 'education' iPad is still a case of won't -- not can't." One of the iPad's advantages in terms of repairability comes in the form of its digitizer panel easily separating from the display. iFixit pointed out that in the event that either component should break, repair will be easier for schools and educators. The sixth-gen iPad has the same battery as the previous model, with 32.9 Wh capacity. iFixit noted that while this allows Apple to reuse existing manufacturing lines to reduce waste, the battery is still locked behind a "repair-impeding adhesive" that greatly reduced the iPad's repairability score. Apple has provided easy battery removal before, in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, but iFixit hasn't seen anything like it since. Ultimately, iFixit gave the 2018 iPad a repairability score of 2 out of 10, favoring the fairly easy repair options of its air-gapped, non-fused display and digitizer glass, but taking marks off for its heavy use of adhesive and sticky tape.

"Apple has hired Google's chief of search and artificial intelligence (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), John Giannandrea, a major coup in its bid to catch up to the artificial intelligence technology of its rivals," reports The New York Times. Giannandrea will run Apple's overall "machine learning and AI strategy," reporting directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. From the report: The hire is a victory for Apple, which many Silicon Valley executives and analysts view as lagging its peers in artificial intelligence, an increasingly crucial technology for companies that enable computers to handle more complex tasks, like understanding voice commands or identifying people in images. "Our technology must be infused with the values we all hold dear," Mr. Cook said Tuesday morning in an email to staff members obtained by The New York Times. "John shares our commitment to privacy and our thoughtful approach as we make computers even smarter and more personal." Mr. Giannandrea, a 53-year-old native of Scotland known to colleagues as J.G., helped lead the push to integrate A.I. throughout Google's products, including internet search, Gmail and its own digital assistant, Google Assistant.

He joined Google in 2010 when it purchased Metaweb, a start-up where he served as chief technology officer. Metaweb was building what it described as a "database of the world's knowledge," which Google eventually rolled into its search engine to deliver direct answers to users' queries. (Try googling "How old is Steph Curry?") During Mr. Giannandrea's tenure, A.I. research became increasingly important inside Google, with its primary A.I. lab, Google Brain, moving into a space beside the chief executive, Sundar Pichai.

Apple is planning to use homegrown custom-built processors in its Mac line of computers, ditching Intel, the processors by which powers Apple's current line of computers, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The company could make the switch to its own chips as early as 2020, the report said. From the report: The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple's devices -- including Macs, iPhones, and iPads -- work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition.

The shift would be a blow to Intel, whose partnership helped revive Apple's Mac success and linked the chipmaker to one of the leading brands in electronics. Apple provides Intel with about 5 percent of its annual revenue, according to Bloomberg supply chain analysis. Intel shares dropped as much as 9.2 percent, the biggest intraday drop in more than two years, on the news.

A week after Apple CEO Cook said "some well-crafted regulation is necessary " in light of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and that Apple was better off than Facebook because it doesn't sell user data to advertisers, Facebook's CEO has struck back. In an interview published on Monday, he said: "You know, I find that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib. And not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people . . . I don't at all think that means that we don't care about people. To the contrary, I think it's important that we don't all get Stockholm syndrome, and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me."

Thinknum has noticed that Apple has been on a Siri-related hiring spree in recent months, with 161 positions listed as of the end of March. There's been an uptick ever since summer 2016, but there was a distinct surge in February of this year. From a report: Nearly all of the new positions are for engineers, and it's notable that some of those spots are meant to tackle Siri's relative weakness in general questions. There are entries for Siri software engineers tackling "General Knowledge" and the "Knowledge Graph," for instance. Other notable recruiting efforts include a machine learning scientist as well as multiple engineers to address areas like Proactive Intelligence (Siri's ability to anticipate info you might need), the SiriKit developer framework and speech generation.

With the latest release of macOS High Sierra, Apple has officially delivered on a couple of items in the works since WWDC 2017 last June. macOS 10.13.4 brings the external GPU (eGPU) support that lets developers, VR users gamers and anyone else in need of some extra oomph to plug in a more powerful graphics card via Thunderbolt 3. From a report: While that may not make every underpowered laptop VR ready, it certainly makes staying macOS-only more palatable for some power users. Another notable addition is Business Chat in Messages for users in the US. Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and others have tweaked their services to enable customer service linkups and now Apple has its version available on the desktop. With it, you can interact with business representatives or even make purchases. Other tweaks include waiting for the user to select login fields before autofilling password information in Safari, a smoke cloud wallpaper that had previously been restricted to the iMac Pro and a Safari shortcut for jumping to the rightmost tab by pressing Command-9. Further reading: Gizmodo.

Apple is launching a major privacy push, with software updates across all its devices to introduce new data privacy information immediately, with an updated website offering new privacy management tools to follow in May. From a report: Thursday's updates (macOS 10.13.4, iOS11.3 and tvOS 11.3) are prompted by the enormous new European data protection regulation GDPR, and have been in the works since at least January. But they come at a good time for the company, whose head Tim Cook has been merrily capitalising on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, publicly rebuking Mark Zuckerberg over the social network's business model. For users of the company's devices, the biggest change will be the introduction of a unified data privacy iconography, which now shows up alongside detailed information about how Apple uses personal data for its various first-party services. "Apple believes privacy is a fundamental human right," the company will tell every user the first time they turn on their devices after the update, "so every Apple product is designed to minimise the collection and use of your data, use on-device processing whenever possible, and provide transparency and control over your information."

Apple has unveiled a partnership with Northwestern University and public schools to help teachers bring programming and other forms of computer science into Chicago-area classrooms. "The trio will set up a learning hub at Lane Tech College Prep High School that will introduce high school teachers to Apple's Everyone Can Code curriculum," reports Engadget. "They'll also have the option to train in an App Development with Swift course to boost the number of high school-oriented computer science teachers. Teachers will also have options for in-school coaching and mentorship to make sure they're comfortable with the curriculum when they're in front of actual students."

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: macOS High Sierra users are once again impacted by a major APFS bug after two other major vulnerabilities affected Apple's new filesystem format in the last five months. This time around, according to a report from Mac forensics expert Sarah Edwards, recent versions of macOS High Sierra are logging encryption passwords for APFS-formatted external drives in plaintext, and storing this information in non-volatile (on-disk) log files.

The issue, if exploited, could allow an attacker easy access to the encryption password of encrypted APFS external volumes, such as USB thumb drives, portable hard drives, and other external storage mediums. This bug goes against all well-established Apple development and security rules, according to which apps and utilities should use the Keychain app to store valuable information, and should definitely avoid storing passwords in cleartext. Video 1, and 2.

The small city of Elk Grove, California received more than 2,000 erroneous 911 calls from Apple devices at an Apple repair facility. The months-long issue is yet to be resolved. From a report: Between October 20, 2017 and February 23, 2018, the police department in Elk Grove, California received 2,028 calls on its 911 lines originating from the Apple facility -- an average of 16 calls per day. At one point in January, the calls from the Apple factory were so frequent that they tied up every single one of Elk Grove's six 911 lines, according to public documents reviewed by Business Insider. "They lit us up like a Christmas tree," one dispatcher wrote in in an email to other dispatchers. It was obvious to Elk Grove police that the 911 calls were not real emergencies, but rather, the equivalent of accidental "butt dials," mysteriously ringing the city's hotline on an assembly-line scale.

For whatever reason, many of the iPhones being repaired at the Apple facility were going rogue and dialing 911. But for city officials trying to stop the nuisance and to ensure that a critical emergency resource was not overburdened, fixing the problem has not been easy. Despite crediting Apple for being responsive to their pleas for help, Elk Grove officials have been frustrated by the company's inability to fix the problem. At one point, officials even discussed the possibility of getting the state government involved and sending police to the factory.

At its education event in Chicago today, Apple introduced a refreshed 9.7-inch iPad with Apple Pencil support. "The updated iPad will be available in Apple stores today, in silver, space gray, and a new gold finish," reports The Verge. "The tablet will include Touch ID, an HD FaceTime camera, 10 hours of battery life, an 8-megapixel rear camera, LTE option, and Apple's A10 Fusion chip." From the report: Apple previously lowered the price of its 9.7-inch iPad last year, with a base model starting at $329, but today it's going a step further for students. Apple is offering the new iPad to schools priced at $299 and to consumers for $329. The optional Apple Pencil will be priced at $89 for schools and the regular $99 price for consumers. This is obviously not the $259 budget iPad pricing that was rumored, but it does make it a little more affordable to students and teachers. This new iPad will be a key addition to Apple's lineup as it seeks to fight back against Google's Chromebooks. Apple's iPads and Mac laptops reigned supreme in U.S. classrooms only five years ago, accounting for half of all mobile devices shipped to schools in 2013. Apple has now slipped behind both Google and Microsoft in U.S. schools, and Chromebooks are dominating classrooms with nearly 60 percent of shipments in the U.S. Apple had some other non-hardware, education-themed announcements at its event today. "Apple demonstrated Smart Annotation, which allows teachers to mark up reports in Pages directly, and the company promised new versions of its iWork apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote that support the Apple Pencil," reports The Verge. "Teachers will also be able to use Macs to create digital books for their classrooms, and Apple is building a books creator into the Pages app." The company also announced a new augmented reality app called Froggipedia that lets students virtually dissect frogs using an Apple Pencil. The free iCloud offering for students has also been bumped up from 5GB to 200GB.

The FBI did not have the technical capability to access an iPhone used by one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino shooting, a Justice Department watchdog has found. ZDNet: A report by the department's Office of Inspector General sheds new light on the FBI's efforts to gain access to the terrorist's phone. It lands almost exactly a year after the FBI dropped a legal case against Apple, which had refused a demand by the government to build a backdoor that would've bypassed the encryption on the shooter's iPhone. Apple said at the time that if it was forced to backdoor one of its products, it would "set a dangerous precedent." Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people in the southern Californian town in December 2015. The 11-page report said that the FBI "had no such capability" to access the contents of Farook's encrypted iPhone, amid concerns that there were conflicting claims about whether the FBI may have had techniques to access the device by the time it had filed a suit against Apple. Those claims were mentioned in affidavits in the court case, as well as in testimony by former FBI director James Comey.

Foxconn, the Taiwan-based company best-known for manufacturing Apple products announced that one of its subsidiaries (Foxconn Interconnect Technology) is purchasing U.S.-based Belkin for $866 million in cash. "Belkin owns a number of major brands, including Linksys and Wemo," notes Android Police. From the report: The buyout would make Foxconn a major player in consumer electronics, instead of just a contract manufacturing company. Belkin primarily sells phone/tablet accessories, but also manufactures networking equipment like routers and Wi-Fi range extenders. The company also sells a range of smart home products under the Wemo brand. According to The Financial Times, the purchase is subject to approval from the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment. In other words, there is a very real chance the acquisition could be blocked. President Trump blocked Broadcom's acquisition of Qualcomm earlier this month, based on advice from the committee.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Maybe Acer knows what Apple is up to tomorrow, maybe not. Regardless the information and communication tech company announced today the world's first Chrome OS tablet made for the education market, the Chromebook Tab 10. Designed for use in K-12 classrooms, the 9.7-inch tablet could potentially add to Google's Chromebook lead in the US education market and take some of the wind out of Apple's education-focused press conference on March 27. [...] Acer's new tablet, which will sell for $329 in April, is built around a 2048x1536-resolution IPS touchscreen with 264 pixels per inch. A durable Wacom EMR stylus comes standard and stores in the tablet's chassis that's only 0.39-inch thick (9.98 mm). Running on a Rockchip OP1 processor, 4GB of memory and 32GB of storage, the Tab 10 fully supports Google Play giving schools access to educational Android apps.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In November 2016, around seven hours after Abdul Razak Ali Artan had mowed down a group of people in his car, gone on a stabbing spree with a butcher's knife and been shot dead by a police officer on the grounds of Ohio State University, an FBI agent applied the bloodied body's index finger to the iPhone found on the deceased. The cops hoped it would help them access the Apple device to learn more about the assailant's motives and Artan himself.

This is according to FBI forensics specialist Bob Moledor, who detailed for Forbes the first known case of police using a deceased person's fingerprints in an attempt to get past the protections of Apple's Touch ID technology. Unfortunately for the FBI, Artan's lifeless fingerprint didn't unlock the device. In the hours between his death and the attempt to unlock, when the feds had to go through legal processes regarding access to the smartphone, the iPhone had gone to sleep and when reopened required a passcode, Moledor said. He sent the device to a forensics lab which managed to retrieve information from the iPhone, the FBI phone expert and a Columbus officer who worked the case confirmed. That data helped the authorities determine that Artan's failed attempt to murder innocents may have been a result of ISIS-inspired radicalization.

Where Moledor's attempt failed, others have succeeded. Separate sources close to local and federal police investigations in New York and Ohio, who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to speak on record, said it was now relatively common for fingerprints of the deceased to be depressed on the scanner of Apple iPhones, devices which have been wrapped up in increasingly powerful encryption over recent years. For instance, the technique has been used in overdose cases, said one source. In such instances, the victim's phone could contain information leading directly to the dealer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Grayshift, a company that offers to unlock modern iPhones for as little as $50 each, has caused a buzz across law enforcement agencies, with local police already putting down cash for the much sought-after tech. Now, it appears a section of the U.S. State Department has also purchased the iPhone cracking tool, judging by procurement records reviewed by Motherboard. Grayshift's iPhone product, dubbed GrayKey, can unlock devices running versions of Apple's latest mobile operating system iOS 11, according to marketing material obtained by Forbes. An online version of GrayKey which allows 300 unlocks costs $15,000 (which boils down to $50 per device), and an offline capability with unlimited uses is $30,000. According to a recent post from cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes, which obtained leaked details on GrayKey, the product itself is a small, four inch by four inch box, and two iPhones can be connected at once via lightning cables. Malwarebytes adds that the time it takes to unlock a device varies depending on the strength of the user's passcode: it may be hours or days. Notably, Grayshift includes an ex-Apple engineer on its staff, Forbes reported.

On March 6, the State Department ordered an item from Grayshift for just over $15,000, according to a purchase order listing available on the U.S. government's public federal procurement data system. The listing is sparse on details, putting the order under the generic label of "computer and computer peripheral equipment." But Motherboard confirmed that the Grayshift in the State Department listing is the same as the one selling iPhone cracking tech: the phone number of the vendor in both the purchase order and documents Motherboard previously obtained detailing a GrayKey purchase by Indiana State Police is the same. The "funding office" for the Grayshift purchase was the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, according to the procurement records. The Bureau acts as the law enforcement and security arm of the State Department, bearing "the core responsibility for providing a safe environment for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy," the State Department website reads.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Zuckerberg should have heeded what he heard from the late Steve Jobs eight years ago. Then, when the social network had a measly half-billion users, Jobs spoke at The Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD conference, where Zuckerberg was in the audience, waiting to be interviewed himself, and described what privacy meant. Journalist Walt Mossberg asked Jobs his thoughts on recent privacy issues around Facebook (which at the time was revamping its privacy controls after criticism it was forcing people to share data) and Google (which was literally recording private wifi information), and whether Silicon Valley looks at privacy differently than the rest of the world.

"Silicon Valley is not monolithic," Jobs responded, "We've always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley." Apple, for instance, does not leave it up to developers to decide whether to be dutiful about warning users that their apps are tracking their location data, instead forcing pop-ups on users to alert them that an app is tracking them, and to turn off that ability if they don't want. "We do a lot of things like that, to ensure that people know what these apps are doing," he added. It's a stance his successor, Tim Cook, still holds. Mossberg then asked Jobs if that applied to Apple's own apps in the cloud. Here's what Jobs said: "Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly. I'm an optimist; I believe people are smart, and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data." If the company had been more forthright about how developers could take data shared with them by Facebook users and sold to third parties, it may not have been in the mess it's in today. Additionally, TechCrunch reports that Zuckerberg was warned about app permissions in 2011 by European privacy campaigner and lawyer Max Schrems. "In August 2011, Schrems filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission exactly flagging the app permissions data sinkhole (Ireland being the focal point for the complaint because that's where Facebook's European HQ is based)."

"[T]his means that not the data subject but 'friends' of the data subject are consenting to the use of personal data," wrote Schrems in the 2011 complaint, fleshing out consent concerns with Facebook's friends' data API. "Since an average facebook user has 130 friends, it is very likely that only one of the user's friends is installing some kind of spam or phishing application and is consenting to the use of all data of the data subject. There are many applications that do not need to access the users' friends personal data (e.g. games, quizzes, apps that only post things on the user's page) but Facebook Ireland does not offer a more limited level of access than 'all the basic information of all friends.'" [...] "The data subject is not given an unambiguous consent to the processing of personal data by applications (no opt-in). Even if a data subject is aware of this entire process, the data subject cannot foresee which application of which developer will be using which personal data in the future. Any form of consent can therefore never be specific," he added. It took Facebook from September 2012 until May 2014 and May 2015 to implement changes and tighten app permissions.