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The Looks-Good Edition Saturday, May 23, 2020

The Apple-Google Contact Tracing System Won’t Work. It Still Deserves Praise., by Jennifer Daskal and Matt Perault, Slate

The Apple and Google initiative responds to a widespread push to use digital contact tracing to support the fight against the virus. But what looks good on a whiteboard in a product planning meeting may look very different once it’s being used by hundreds of millions of people. With respect to digital contract tracing, success depends on at least four factors—four factors that suggest the Apple and Google system is not likely to be particularly effective in meeting the stated public health goals.

Amazon Wants To Build Your Favorite Podcast, by Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg

In recent months, Audible, the audiobook service owned by Amazon.com Inc., has been meeting with talent agencies and producers to discuss acquiring potential new podcast projects—or, in the terminology that Audible prefers, “Audible Originals.” Audible is offering anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million dollars per show, according to people familiar with the matter, more than every competitor except Spotify Technology SA.

Stuff

iOS Bug Preventing Some Apps From Opening With 'This App Is No Longer Shared' Message, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

People impacted by the issue have been able to fix their apps by deleting the app that’s not working and reinstalling it. Offloading the app rather than deleting it may also work to fix the problem.

Develop

Is This The End Of Productivity?, by Sam Blum, Vox

Amid the pandemic, that creeping sense of meaninglessness has some workers arriving at the same conclusion as Connolly: Isolation, she says, has been an experience of “waking up and realizing that you’ve spent so much of your time working. Is that really what you want to do with your life?”

Notes

How iPhone Hackers Got Their Hands On The New iOS Months Before Its Release, by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Motherboard

That’s almost eight months before the expected official release of iOS 14, given that Apple usually publishes the new iOS in September along with the announcement of new phones. Sometimes, screenshots and descriptions of new features leak before the official reveal. This time, however, an entire version of the operating system has leaked and is being widely circulated among hackers and security researchers.

Motherboard has not been able to independently verify exactly how it leaked, but five sources in the jailbreaking community familiar with the leak told us they think that someone obtained a development iPhone 11 running a version of iOS 14 dated December 2019, which was made to be used only by Apple developers. According to those sources, someone purchased it from vendors in China for thousands of dollars, and then extracted the iOS 14 internal build and distributed it in the iPhone jailbreaking and hacking community.

Apple, Other Tech Companies Condemn Warrantless Browser Searches, by Mike Peterson, AppleInsider

A coalition of tech companies, including a group that represents Apple, is calling on Congress to protect user browser history from warrantless searches.