Tech News Today For September 15, 2016
T-Mobile warns you NOT to upgrade to iOS 10 if you have an iPhone 6, 6 Plus or an iPhone SE. CEO John Legere tweeted that there have been connectivity problems that Apple is working on fixing. Read more at CNet.com.
In other Apple news, if you haven't ordered your iPhone 7 Plus or your Jet black iPhone 7, don't bother waiting in line tomorrow. Apple says there won't be any available in the stores for walk-in customers.
Yes, at this point, we’ve talked the Note 7 story to death, but this bit of news deserves at least a mention. The device has been officially recalled by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission as of their announcement earlier today. They had been working with Samsung to issue the recall for the past week. CPSC chairman Elliot Kaye says that replacement units should be accessible to consumers at retail locations beginning Tuesday September 21. Consumers can go to the Samsung site and enter identifiers from their device into the site to determine if theirs needs replacing which is likely in the US as an estimated 97% of those Note 7’s shipped to the US will require replacement. Read more at wsj.com.
A big effort in the entertainment industry during recent years has been analyzing the representation of women in films in comparison with on-screen time of male actors, as the industry seeks to improve equity between the two. Normally, the process is time consuming and painstaking for a researcher to complete who has to sit there and watch, listen, analyze, and notate it all by hand, but The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University is producing a tool with funding from Google.org to make this analysis automated. The software took two years to develop aided by Google’s rapidly advancing machine learning systems, and now allows for a 90 minute film to be completely analyzed in around 15 minutes with a high level of accuracy. Read more at nytimes.com.
This is why we can't have nice things! LynkNYC launched free Wi-Fi kiosks with built-in tablets in New York this year to much fanfare, but now they're scaling back what they offer. Why? Because some people were using them to look at porn. Also, people were using them to watch too much Netflix, hanging out around them too much, drinking and doing drugs. In general they weren't really "bridging the digital divide" as Mayor Bill DeBlasio had hoped. The kiosks aren't going away yet, but they will no longer provide web browsing as they look for ways to solve the current problems. Read more at mashable.com.
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