According to a newly published support document, Apple says the new iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max will present customers with a warning if the devices are unable to verify a genuine display after a screen repair job. “If you need to replace your iPhone display, it’s important for certified technicians who use genuine Apple display parts to repair it,” the page reads. “Replacements not performed by Apple, authorized service providers, or certified technicians might not follow proper safety and repair procedures and could result in improper function or issues with display quality or safety.” The Verge reports: Apple goes over a laundry list of problems that could arise if your display is swapped the wrong way or with a non-genuine part, such as multi-touch problems, issues with screen color accuracy and brightness, or True Tone failing to work properly. “Additionally, repairs that don’t properly replace screws or cowlings might leave behind loose parts that could damage the battery, cause overheating, or result in injury.” The company isn’t afraid of nagging customers about this, either. Apple says that a notification will appear on the affected iPhone’s lock screen for 4 days after a problem is first detected, then it’ll move to the main settings menu for 15 more days. After all that, it gets pushed away to Settings -> General -> About. According to Apple, this new measure only applies to its brand new iPhones and not previous models. Even if it can’t be verified as genuine, the display isn’t prevented from functioning normally by iOS.

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Source: Slashdot – Apple’s New iPhones Will Warn You If They Can’t Verify a Replaced Screen

Chinese police have arrested a fugitive who’d been on the run for 17 years, after they used drones to spot his cave hideout. The BBC reports: The 63-year old, named Song Jiang by the police, had been jailed for trafficking women and children but escaped from a prison camp in 2002. He had been living in a tiny cave cut off from human interaction for years. Yongshan police received clues about Song’s whereabouts in early September, they said on their WeChat account. Those clues led them to the mountains behind his hometown in Yunnan province in south-west China. After regular searches failed to find anything, authorities sent additional drones to help the officers. The drones eventually spotted a blue-colored steel tile on a steep cliff as well as traces of household rubbish nearby. According to the police, the man had been living in seclusion for so long that it was difficult for him to communicate with the officers. He has been sent back to jail.

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Source: Slashdot – Fugitive On Run For 17 Years Found Living In Cave By a Drone

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: In a move that puts California on a collision course with the NCAA, Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill effectively allowing college athletes in the state to earn compensation for the use of their likeness, sign endorsement deals and hire agents to represent them. The governor signed the measure in a segment released Monday by Uninterrupted, a sports programming company co-founded by LeBron James. Newsom proclaimed the move as “the beginning of a national movement — one that transcends geographic and partisan lines.”

California is the first state to pass such a law, which is to take effect on Jan. 1, 2023. That marks a significant shift from the current policies enforced by the NCAA, collegiate sports’ national governing body, which generally renders student-athletes ineligible to accept compensation for “the use of his or her name or picture to advertise, recommend or promote directly the sale or use of a commercial product or service of any kind.” And the NCAA Board of Governors pushed back hard against the bill at the time of its passage in the Legislature, saying that it would leave the playing field for universities of different sizes radically uneven. “Collegiate student athletes put everything on the line — their physical health, future career prospects and years of their lives to compete. Colleges reap billions from these student athletes’ sacrifices and success but, in the same breath, block them from earning a single dollar,” Newsom said in a statement. “That’s a bankrupt model — one that puts institutions ahead of the students they are supposed to serve. It needs to be disrupted.”

In response, a 22-member panel composed mostly of university presidents and athletic directors said in a letter: “Right now, nearly half a million student-athletes in all 50 states compete under the same rules. This bill would remove that essential element of fairness and equal treatment that forms the bedrock of college sports.”

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Source: Slashdot – California Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes To Profit

VC fund A16z’s Benedict Evans writes: We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups — there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares. Instead of a flat grid of cells, a dumb list of files, and a dumb list of little text files (which is what email really is), we get some kind of richer canvas that mixes all of these together in ways that are native to the web and collaboration. Then, we have another new wave of productivity company that addresses a particular profession and bundles all of the tasks that were spread across spreadsheets, email and file shares into some new structured flow.

[…] A few years ago a consultant told me that for half of their jobs they told people using Excel to use a database, and for the other half they told people using a database to use Excel. There’s clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning. Of course, this is the cycle of life of enterprise software. IBM mainframes bundled the adding machines you see Jack Lemmon using below, and also bundled up filing cabinets and telephones. SAP unbundled IBM. But I’d suggest there are two specific sets of things that are happening now.

First, every application category is getting rebuilt as a web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there’s almost no native PC application that can’t be rebuilt as a web app. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time (this could be done with a native PC app, but in practice generally won’t be). So, we have some generational changes, and that also tends to create new companies. But second, and much more important — everyone is online now. The reason we’re looking at nursing or truck drivers or oil workers is that an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring ‘roughnecks’ in a mobile app would have sounded absurd — now it sounds absurd if you’re not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.

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Source: Slashdot – We Are in the Middle of a Wave of Interesting New Productivity Software Startups