Catalyst is Apple's framework that enables developers to easily bring existing iOS apps to the Mac, while SwiftUI is a new, Swift-based technology that makes it easy for developers to create one app that runs on all of Apple's platforms. Jason Snell from Macworld highlights the slow, invisible transition of these new technologies. From the report: Catalyst, which arrives this fall, will allow developers who are well-versed in the vagaries of writing iOS apps to use those skills to write Mac apps. This will most commonly take the form of bringing iPad apps to the Mac, with additions to make them feel more like native Mac apps, but it's more than that -- it provides iOS developers with a familiar set of tools and access to an entirely new platform, and it makes the target for professional apps across Apple's platforms broader by including both the iPad and the Mac. iOS apps are currently built to run on devices running Apple-designed ARM processors, and if the rumors are true, that's another transition waiting to happen. But given that all Mac and iOS developers are already using Apple's Xcode tools to develop their apps, I suspect that the pieces have been put in place for a fairly simple transition to a new processor architecture.

And then there's SwiftUI, which may be a harder concept for regular users to grasp, but it's a huge step on Apple's part. This is Apple's ultimate long game -- an entirely new way to design and build apps across all of Apple's platforms, based on the Swift language (introduced five years ago as yet another part of Apple's long game). In the shorter term, iOS app developers will be able to reach to the Mac via Catalyst. But in the longer term, Apple is creating a new, unified development approach to all of Apple's devices, based in Swift and SwiftUI. Viewed from this perspective, Catalyst feels more like a transitional technology than the future of Apple's platforms. But we're talking about the long game here. Transitional technologies are all a part of the long game. Catalyst will bring those apps to the Mac. iOS and Mac developers will pick up Swift and SwiftUI. Mac apps can integrate iOS stuff via Catalyst. iOS apps can integrate Mac stuff for use on the Mac. And all developers can begin experimenting with SwiftUI, building new interfaces and replacing old ones in a gradual process. "And then we'll turn around sometime in the 2020s and realize that all of this talk of UIKit and AppKit and Catalyst is behind us, and that our apps are written in Swift with interfaces created using SwiftUI," Snell writes in closing. "It will have all changed due to Apple's slow and steady pace of iterative, continuous improvement. The long game never stops, and it can be hard to see that you're even in it."

Credit scores have a long history of prejudice. "Most changes in how credit scores are calculated over the years -- including the shift from human assessment to computer calculations, and most recently to artificial intelligence -- have come out of a desire to make the scores more equitable, but credit companies have failed to remove bias, on the basis of race or gender, for example, from their system," writes Rose Eveleth via Motherboard.

While credit companies have tried to reduce bias with machine learning and "alternative credit," which uses data like your sexual orientation or political beliefs that isn't normally included in a credit score to try and get a sense for how trustworthy someone might be, Eveleth says that "introducing this 'non-traditional' information to credit scores runs the risk of making them even more biased than they already are, eroding nearly 150 years of effort to eliminate unfairness in the system." From the report: Biases in AI can affect not just individuals with credit scores, but those without any credit at all as non-traditional data points are used to try and invite new creditors in. There is still a whole swath of people in the United States known as the "unbanked" or "credit invisibles." They have too little credit history to generate a traditional credit score, which makes it challenging for them to get loans, apartments, and sometimes even jobs. According to a 2015 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau study, 45 million Americans fall into the category of credit invisible or unscoreable -- that's almost 20 percent of the adult population. And here again we can see a racial divide: 27 percent of Black and Hispanic adults are credit invisible or unscoreable (PDF), compared to just 16 percent of white adults.

To bring these "invisible" consumers into the credit score fold, companies have proposed alternative credit. FICO recently released FICO XD, which includes payment data from TV or cable accounts, utilities, cell phones, and landlines. Other companies have proposed social media posts, job history, educational history, and even restaurant reviews or business check-ins. Lenders say that alternative data is a benefit to those who have been discriminated against and excluded from banking. No credit? Bad credit? That doesn't mean you're not trustworthy, they say, and we can mine your alternative data and give you a loan anyway. But critics say that alternative data looks a lot like old-school surveillance. Letting a company have access to everything from your phone records to your search history means giving up all kinds of sensitive data in the name of credit. Experts worry that the push to use alternative data might lead, once again, to a situation similar to the subprime mortgage crisis if marginalized communities are offered predatory loans that wind up tanking their credit scores and economic stability.

Sales of LG's new 5G smartphone looked uncertain this week after the firm said it was unable to narrow differences with Qualcomm to renew a chip license deal that is due to expire this month. From a report: In a U.S. court filing late on Tuesday, the South Korean firm opposed Qualcomm's efforts to put a sweeping U.S. antitrust decision against it on hold, arguing setting the ruling aside could force it into signing another unfair deal. "If Qualcomm does not participate in negotiations with LGE in accordance with the Court's Order, LGE will have no option but to conclude license and chipset supply agreements once again on Qualcomm's terms," LG's filing in the federal court in San Jose, California said. The lack of clarity over a new license deal raises concerns over the rollout of LG's newly launched 5G smartphones, crucial for the loss-making handset maker to boost flagging smartphone sales and catch up with Samsung.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from ZDNet argues that "the expensive and abusive pharmaceutical industry needs to open up to improve everyone's health." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Now, I know little about creating and testing drugs. Here's what I do know: Open source and data produces better results than proprietary methods. In technology, the field I know best, almost every company -- including open source poster-child enemy Microsoft -- has embraced open source. Why? Because it works better than the short-sighted proprietary approaches. It's not just programming that benefits from open source. Cars now run Linux under the hood. Energy and electricity transmission managers are moving to open source. Most of the movies you love are made with open-source programs. Heck, even contract law is going open source.

I'm far from the only one to conclude that open-source methods are needed to break what amounts to broken pharmaceutical research methodology and drug price gouging. Open Source Pharma, an organization devoted to building on existing initiatives to develop an alternative, comprehensive, open-source pharmaceutical system, is leading the way. Dr. Manica Balasegaram, executive director for the Access Campaign of Medecins Sans Frontieres, aka Doctors Without Borders, explained: "There is something rotten in the kingdom of biomedical R&D... That the system is inefficient is probably difficult to dispute. It works in silos, encourages a protectionist, proprietary approach, promotes duplication, multiplies failure, is costly, and importantly, is directed at markets and not at public health needs. The consequences are fatal." Open source can revolutionize our hunt for better, more affordable medicine. It has everywhere else. It can in medicine, too. "We need to fundamentally let go of thinking that there is only one possible business model," says Balasegaram. "We need alternatives. Open source R&D is the key." Since the biomedical field is dominated by big companies with an iron grip on IP, Balasegaram admitted: "Promoting the concept of sharing will be tough. Sharing, however, is a difficult and somewhat scary idea to promote. It sounds suspiciously 'radical.' However, when one takes into account that this has been done in other areas, we need to rethink our reservations."

Huawei is reportedly displaying advertisements on the lock screen of its smartphones, seemingly without warning or any sort of announcement. Huawei says that it's doing no such thing. "The ads are not initiated by Huawei. We encourage individuals to check app settings, or follow publicly available directions on how to remove lock screen ads," Huawei said in a statement to Digital Trends. From the report: According to Huawei, the ads are stemming from some third-party services or apps, and not from Huawei itself. For comparison, Huawei pointed to a similar issue that affected Samsung phones about a year ago. That said, it doesn't seem to add up -- after all, the ads are being placed in Huawei's Magazine cycle of wallpapers, and it seems highly coincidental that a number of Huawei users would all experience the same issue on the same day without users of other phones running into the same problem.

A number of users on Reddit reported finding advertisements on their lock screen. One user, who goes by the username Quacksnooze, posted a screenshot of a Booking.com ad that suddenly appeared on their phone. Other users reported getting ads as well. According to the Reddit thread, four images related to Booking.com were added to the Huawei phone's wallpaper rotation, meaning that they would start showing up as wallpapers like any other image. The images could be manually deleted, but it's possible more could be added in the future. You can also get around the issue by not using Huawei's Magazine lock screen wallpaper, but that's a bit of a frustrating solution.

The data market has become the engine of the internet, and privacy policies we agree to but don't fully understand help fuel it. From a report: To see exactly how inscrutable they have become, I analyzed the length and readability of privacy policies from nearly 150 popular websites and apps. Facebook's privacy policy, for example, takes around 18 minutes to read in its entirety -- slightly above average for the policies I tested. Then I tested how easy it was to understand each policy using the Lexile test developed by the education company Metametrics. The test measures a text's complexity based on factors like sentence length and the difficulty of vocabulary. To be successful in college, people need to understand texts with a score of 1300. People in the professions, like doctors and lawyers, should be able to understand materials with scores of 1440, while ninth graders should understand texts that score above 1050 to be on track for college or a career by the time they graduate. Many privacy policies exceed these standards.

[...] The vast majority of these privacy policies exceed the college reading level. And according to the most recent literacy survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, over half of Americans may struggle to comprehend dense, lengthy texts. That means a significant chunk of the data collection economy is based on consenting to complicated documents that many Americans can't understand. [...] Airbnb's privacy policy, on the other hand, is particularly inscrutable. It's full of long, jargon-laden sentences that obscure Airbnb's data practices and provides cover to use data in expansive ways. Things weren't always this bad. Google's privacy policy evolved over two decades -- along with its increasingly complicated data collection practices -- from a two-minute read in 1999 to a peak of 30 minutes by 2018.

Game Builder is a new video game from Google that allows you to create simple Minecraft-style games for yourself and others to play through. "The game lets you drag and drop characters and scenery into an empty sandbox to construct your world, then use preset commands to string together how things interact," reports The Verge. "It's free to play and available on both Windows and macOS." From the report: The game comes from Area 120, Google's incubator for experimental projects (some of which have quickly disappeared, others of which have made their way into other Google products). Game Builder has actually been available through Steam since November 1st last year (it already has 190 reviews, with a "every positive" score), but Google only publicized it today, which is certain to get a lot more people playing. Game Builder has a co-op mode, so multiple people can build a game together at once. You can also share your creations and browse through the games made by others. The interaction system works with "if this then that" logic, and players can craft their own interactions with JavaScript if they're familiar with it.

Cloudflare's Project Galileo, which offers free high-tier DDoS protection service to journalists, dissidents, civil liberties groups and other at-risk groups, turned 5 years old this week. From a report: The project currently serves over 600 accounts. An LGBT protection group in the Middle East, for example, does important work on a shoestring budget and cannot possibly afford to block the outsized number of attacks it could face from governments and even citizens. Project Galileo isn't the only commercial cybersecurity service offered to at-risk groups, but it is one of the first and the most successful. "Project Galileo originally started from a failure to live up to what was originally our mission to make a better internet," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Codebook. Further reading: Cloudflare's Five-Year Project to Protect Nonprofits Online (Wired).

Yubico said today it plans to replace certain hardware security keys because of a firmware flaw that reduces the randomness of cryptographic keys generated by its devices. From a report: Affected products include models part of the YubiKey FIPS Series, a line of YubiKey authentication keys certified for use on US government networks (and others) according to the US government's Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). According to a Yubico security advisory published today, YubiKey FIPS Series devices that run firmware version 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 contain a bug that keeps "some predictable content" inside the device's data buffer after the power-up operation.

This "predictable content" will influence the randomness of cryptographic keys generated on the device for a short period after the boot-up, until the "predictable content" is all used up, and true random data is present in the buffer. This means that for a short period after booting up YubiKey FIPS Series devices with the affected 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 versions will generate keys that can be either recovered partially, or in full, depending on the cryptographic algorithm the key is working with for a particular authentication operation.

Operating a drone in Japan while drunk could lead to a year in prison thanks to new legislation. From a report: The law, passed by the country's parliament this week, seeks to rein in growing use of the unmanned aerial vehicles. Those found to be intoxicated while flying a drone could also face a fine of up to 300,000 yen ($2,765). The law covers drones weighing more than 200g (7oz) and also puts limits on where drones can be flown. "We believe operating drones after consuming alcohol is as serious as (drink) driving," a Japanese transport ministry official told the AFP news agency. As well as fines over drunken use, the legislation also levies fines on pilots who perform dangerous stunts with their drone. Those caught quickly plunging the craft towards crowds could face fines of up to 500,000 yen.

hackingbear writes: Huawei has told Verizon that the U.S. carrier should pay licensing fees for more than 230 of the Chinese telecoms equipment maker's patents and in aggregate is seeking more than $1 billion, a person briefed on the matter said on Wednesday. Verizon should pay to "solve the patent licensing issue," a Huawei intellectual property licensing executive wrote in February, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier. The patents cover network equipment for more than 20 of the company's vendors including major U.S. tech firms but those vendors would indemnify Verizon, the person said. Some of those firms have been approached directly by Huawei, the person said. The patents in question range from core network equipment, wireline infrastructure to internet-of-things technology, the Journal reported. The licensing fees for the more than 230 patents sought is more than $1 billion, the person said. Huawei has been battling the U.S. government for more than a year. National security experts worry that "back doors" in routers, switches and other Huawei equipment could allow China to spy on U.S. communications. Huawei has denied that it would help China spy.

India plans to have its own space station in the future and conduct separate missions to study Sun and Venus, it said on Thursday, as the nation moves to bolster its status as a leader in space technologies and inspire the young minds to take an interest in scientific fields. From a report: India's space agency said today that it will begin working on its space station following its first manned mission to space, called Gaganyaan, in 2022 -- just in time to commemorate 75 years of the country's independence from Britain. The government has sanctioned Rs 10,000 crores ($1.5 billion) for Gaganyaan mission, it was unveiled today. "We have to sustain the Gaganyaan program after the launch of the human space mission. In this context, India is planning to have its own space station," said Dr Kailasavadivoo Sivan, chairman of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). ISRO is India's equivalent to NASA. "While navigation, communication, and earth observation are going to be the bread and butter for us, it is missions such as Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan, and Gaganyaan that excite the youth, unite the nation, and also pave a technological seed for the future." The ambitious announcements come a day after the space agency said it will launch a lunar mission on July 15 this year in an attempt to become only the fourth nation to land on the moon.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After being ripped to shreds by angry users, Google engineers have promised this week that the upcoming changes to Chrome's extensions system won't cripple ad blockers, as everyone is fearing. Instead, the company claims that the new extension API changes will actually improve user privacy and bring speed improvements. Furthermore, Google also promised to raise a maximum limit in one of the upcoming APIs that should address and lay to rest the primary criticism brought against the new extensions API by developers of ad blockers during the last six months.

Microsoft released a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build this week featuring the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. WSL 2 includes a real Linux kernel that lets you run more Linux software on Windows and with better performance than WSL 1. From a report: This is part of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 18917, released on June 12, 2019. It's part of the fast ring of updates. You can experiment with it today, although you'll have to join the Windows Insider program and get unstable builds of Windows 10 on your PC. Microsoft's Windows Command Line blog offers more information about WSL 2, complete with an install guide, list of user experience changes, and more documentation. To install WSL 2 on the latest insider build, run the following command in a PowerShell window launched with Administrator permissions: Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName VirtualMachinePlatform.

The distributed denial of service attack that hit Telegram Wednesday came from China, the secure messaging app's founder said. Pavel Durov's tweet suggested that the country's government may have done it to disrupt protests in Hong Kong. From a report: In a DDoS attack, an online service gets bombarded with traffic from networks of bots, to the point where it's overwhelmed and legit users get frozen out. In an explanation Wednesday, Telegram compared it to an "army of lemmings" jumping the line at a McDonald's and making innumerable "garbage requests." Durov said, "IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated on Telegram). This case was not an exception." Tens of thousands took to Hong Kong's streets to oppose a government plan that'd allow extraditions to mainland China. People are worried that it would bring the semiautonomous former British colony under the Chinese government's thumb. These protesters relied on encrypted messaging services, which let them mask their identities from Chinese authorities, to communicate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Futurism: During a Tuesday shareholder meeting, Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted that the electric car company has a design for a submarine car -- and it sounds like something straight out of a 70s James Bond movie. When asked if the company would ever consider such a thing, according to Business Insider, Musk answered: "Funny you should mention that we do have a design for a submarine car like the one from 'The Spy Who Loved Me.'"

In the 1977 spy thriller Musk referred to, a 1976 Lotus Esprit sports car transforms itself into an amphibious submarine and can be seen exploring the bottom of the ocean. Musk loved the scene so much that he reportedly bought a Lotus Esprit in 2013 for just shy of a million dollars. "I was disappointed to learn that it can't actually transform," Musk told shareholders. "What I'm going to do is upgrade [my own Lotus] with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real." He did however admit that the market for an amphibious Tesla "would be small. Small, but enthusiastic."

Slashdot reader Meg Whitman shares a report from The Register: A "highly skilled IT professional" has lost his fight to be paid his unused vacation days as well as a non-trivial bonus, after a judge stuck to a law he admitted was outdated. Matthew White joined Hewlett-Packard in 2013 and left in July 2015, just months before the company split into HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). After quitting, he was stunned when the U.S. mega-corp, citing HPE's new policies, refused to hand over extra pay he felt was contractually due. Hewlett-Packard had enticed White with a sweet contract that offered a signing bonus, base salary, regular bonuses, and a benefits program. But after he quit, he was left without his unused vacation pay and a $10,000 bonus he felt he was entitled to. [...]

HPE decided that, under the law, White could only get hold of the relevant policies if he turned up, in person, to the company's official human resources headquarters -- which is on the other side of America in California, roughly 2,500 miles away. White felt this was ridiculous given that HP, sorry, HPE is not only a massive organization with HR people all over the United States, but that it was a technology company with countless employees working across the world, often at home, and that the policies are likely readily available in an internal cloud. The judge had some sympathy for that view. "This part of the statute may indeed need reworking for today's world where cloud-based digital records are replacing physical file folders located in a physical location, where employees work at home -- sometimes remotely from any head office or regional office -- and where worldwide companies like HP assign HP personnel for an entire country or region, or even outsource various HP responsibilities." Yet the judge still decided against the techie.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A constellation of eight microsatellites has harvested data that -- if folded into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) weather models -- could have sharpened forecasts of several recent hurricanes, including Michael, a category-5 storm in October 2018. But progress was hard-won for scientists on NASA's $157 million Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), who discussed early results at a meeting last week, just as another Atlantic hurricane season kicked off. With its flotilla of satellites crisscrossing the tropical oceans, CYGNSS can see through the thick clouds of cyclones. The satellites collect radio signals beamed from standard GPS beacons after they bounce off the ocean's surface. The reflections are influenced by sea's roughness, which depends on wind speed. But a month after launch in December 2016, the team noticed the GPS signals were wavering.

The U.S. military runs the GPS system, and in January 2017, it began to boost the radio power on 10 of its GPS satellites as they passed over a broad region centered on northern Syria. The power boosts, which can thwart jamming, have recurred without warning, each lasting several hours. The swings don't interfere with other scientific uses of GPS. But they threw off the constellation's measurements of high winds by 5 meters a second or more -- the difference between a category-2 and category-3 hurricane. After 2 years of work, the CYGNSS team has compensated by reprogramming its satellites on the fly. The satellites carry large antennas to catch reflected GPS signals, but they also have small antennas that receive direct GPS signals, for tracking time and location. The team repurposed the small antennas to measure the signal strength of the GPS satellites, making it possible to correct the wind speed measures

Facebook obtained personal and sensitive device data on about 187,000 users of its now-defunct Research app, which Apple banned earlier this year after the app violated its rules. TechCrunch reports: The social media giant said in a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal's office -- which TechCrunch obtained -- that it collected data on 31,000 users in the U.S., including 4,300 teenagers. The rest of the collected data came from users in India. "We know that the provisioning profile for the Facebook Research app was created on April 19, 2017, but this does not necessarily correlate to the date that Facebook distributed the provisioning profile to end users," said Timothy Powderly, Apple's director of federal affairs, in his letter. Facebook said the app dated back to 2016.

These "research" apps relied on willing participants to download the app from outside the app store and use the Apple-issued developer certificates to install the apps. Then, the apps would install a root network certificate, allowing the app to collect all the data out of the device -- like web browsing histories, encrypted messages and mobile app activity -- potentially also including data from their friends -- for competitive analysis. In Facebook's case, the research app -- dubbed Project Atlas -- was a repackaged version of its Onavo VPN app, which Facebook was forced to remove from Apple's App Store last year for gathering too much device data. Just this week, Facebook relaunched its research app as Study, only available on Google Play and for users who have been approved through Facebook's research partner, Applause. Facebook said it would be more transparent about how it collects user data.

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) on Wednesday, Netflix shared details of its plans to develop its original shows into video games. Hollywood Reporter reports: Among the program of upcoming games, Stranger Things 3: The Game was highlighted, described by Netflix as "an adventure game that blends a distinctively retro art style with modern gameplay mechanics to deliver nostalgic fun with a fresh new twist." Playing as a character from the show, the user will be tasked with solving puzzles and battling the Mind Flayer. Dave Pottinger, CEO and co-founder of BonusXP, shared that the game will feature old-school graphics.

Two characters from the game were revealed at the panel: Max, who will exhibit karate kicks and the ability to add fire damage to those kicks; and Eleven, described by Chris Lee, director of Interactive Games at Netflix, as "the most powerful character in the game" -- she will have psychic push power. The game will launch on July 4 and be available on Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One and other consoles. In addition, a special announcement was made at the panel about a Stranger Things mobile hybrid RPG/puzzle game that will launch in 2020. The game is a collaboration with Next Games, which is based out of Helsinki, Finland. Stranger Things isn't the only show that's planning to have its own game. "Netflix show The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is also set to become a 'turn-based tactics' game challenging fans to recruit an army and act as their commander in a series of campaign battles," the report adds. "No specific date was mentioned, but the game will launch this year on various consoles."