Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York released an order Friday that suggests he would not issue a government-sought order to compel the tech giant Apple to unlock a customer’s smartphone.
But before he can rule, the judge said, he wants Apple to explain whether the government’s request would be “unduly burdensome.”
Frank, the host of the parenting podcast The Longest Shortest Time, wanted from the show’s beginning to reach listeners when they need help the most. The podcast is released every other week at 3:00 a.m., that depressing in-between parenting hour when the morning is both too close and still very far away. And The Longest Shortest Time has an iPhone app that draws listeners into the podcast by letting them record responses to questions from directly within the app. Those responses are then woven into future episodes of the show.
With a free app for iOS, Sunshine wants to be the gold standard for weather accuracy. It hopes to achieve this ambitious goal by using altogether different meteorological instruments: People, iPhones, algorithms, and the draw of community and gamification. The app needs your location to work correctly, but the tradeoff is receiving hyper-local weather reports—Sunshine calls them “Nowcasts”—and becoming part of the data-aggregation process.
I had been invited to the opening night of Thorpe Park's Fright Nights, the UK's premier haunted amusement park. Finally I could use my Apple Watch not to track my fitness, but to see if plummeting "beyond vertically" on the Saw roller coaster into a pitch-black hole on a dark and moonless night with the sound of demented clowns in the distance would actually raise my heart rate.
Cities are everywhere. Billions of us live in them, and many of us think we could do a better job than the planners. But for the past 26 years dating back to the original SimCity, we've mostly been proving that idea false.
We've traveled through time and space to build on alien worlds, in ancient civilizations, and in parallel universes—laying down roads, zoning land, playing god, and cheating our way to success in a vain attempt to construct a virtual utopia. And now, here, I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour through the history of the city-building genre—from its antecedents to the hot new thing.
“There are people who love floppy disks,” he tells me, giving the example of a court reporter who uses the format for sheer convenience and force of habit. “There’s a large embroidery company that does 500 jobs a day,” he goes on. “They could do that on a hard drive — except their machinery doesn’t work with a hard drive.”
Therein lies the biggest reason that floppy disks are still in demand in some corners of industry. “In the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of industrial machines were built around floppy disks, which were high-tech of the time,” he tells me. “They were built to last fifty years.”
Today marks the first time I've used the new Safari mute-sounds-in-an-unknown-tab feature. Guess which is the offending site? Hint: the ex-magazine that does not have a CamelCase name.
~
Thanks for reading.