Enlarge / Lyft will switch its map provider from Google to Here. (credit: Lyft)

The ride hailing company Lyft is changing up its maps, which until now have been powered by Google. Lyft will now use Here instead. Lyft says the switch means a better search database for places and addresses as well as more accurate predicted arrival times—two important things for a ride hailing company to get right.

“Over the past six months, we have worked in collaboration with Lyft to implement and test our robust destination catalog that helps riders get to more destinations in cities across North America. Our services are now enriching the Lyft network, spearheading innovation in the rideshare industry,” said Here CEO Edzard Overbeek.

There may be other motivations for the switch. According to Lyft’s head of rideshare, Ashwin Raj, the switch will “improve the efficiency of our marketplace,” but the press release also explicitly mentions keeping user data private.

Enlarge / MuseScore (the website) offers access to hundreds of thousands of sheet music arrangements. MuseScore (the application) allows easy editing and modification, MIDI playback, and more. (credit: Muse Group)

The MuseScore app itself is licensed GPLv3, which gives developers the right to fork its source and modify it. One such developer, Wenzheng Tang (“Xmader” on GitHub) went considerably further than modifying the app—he also created separate apps designed to bypass MuseScore Pro subscription fees.

After thoroughly reviewing the public comments made by both sides at GitHub, Ars spoke at length with Muse Group’s Head of Strategy Daniel Ray—known on GitHub by the moniker “workedintheory”—to get to the bottom of the controversy.

Enlarge / White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki speaks during the daily press briefing at the White House on July 20, 2021, in Washington, DC. Psaki acknowledged that a White House staffer has tested positive for COVID-19, and there have been other recent breakthrough cases of vaccinated staff members. (credit: Getty | Drew Angerer)

Multiple White House staff members and an aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have tested positive for the pandemic coronavirus despite being fully vaccinated, Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed in a White House press briefing Tuesday.

The confirmation came after reports that the Pelosi staffer and one White House official tested positive after they attended the same reception at a DC hotel last Wednesday, according to a report from Axios. Additionally, the Pelosi staffer was in contact with a delegation of Texas Democrats who had come to the US Capitol last week in an effort to thwart a GOP voting bill. Six of the more than 50 Texas Democrats have since tested positive for the pandemic coronavirus.

The infected Pelosi staffer had not been in direct contact with the speaker recently, and the infected White House official had not been in direct contact with the president recently, Axios reported.

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The Windows vulnerability came to light by accident on Monday when a researcher observed what he believed was a coding regression in a beta version of the upcoming Windows 11. The researcher found that the contents of the security account manager—the database that stores user accounts and security descriptors for users on the local computer—could be read by users with limited system privileges.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Erik Pronske Photography)

President Joe Biden today said he will nominate Jonathan Kanter to be the assistant attorney general in charge of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. Kanter is an attorney known for his criticism of Google and will take over the antitrust division as it considers a Biden plan to reverse harmful mergers and break up monopolies.

Kanter “is a distinguished antitrust lawyer with over 20 years of experience” and has been “a leading advocate and expert in the effort to promote strong and meaningful antitrust enforcement and competition policy,” the White House announcement said.

US Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) applauded the nomination in a statement. “For years, Jonathan Kanter has been a leader in the effort to increase antitrust enforcement against monopolies by federal, state, and international competition authorities. His deep legal experience and history of advocating for aggressive action make him an excellent choice to lead the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division,” Klobuchar said.

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  The front of the MagSafe Battery Pack. [credit:
  Apple
  ]

Apples new MagSafe Battery Pack for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro is now available for in-store pickup, and the first online orders have arrived at buyers’ doorsteps.

If you’re in the market to buy the battery pack, you can either buy one online and see it shipped to you in the coming days or weeks (depending on where you live) or go to your local Apple Store and purchase one. Availability will, of course, depend on location, as will COVID-19 safety procedures at a given Apple Store.

Apple’s website offers multiple ways to find out if your nearest retail location has the battery pack in stock. For example, if you’re in the US, the online store page for the product attempts to automatically detect your ZIP code, or you can enter your ZIP code manually. The product page will then say whether the battery pack is available at the closest location.

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  The Freedom Phone, with a very political selection of default apps. [credit:
  Freedom Phone
  ]

“Nobody elected Mark [Zuckerberg] or Jack [Dorsey] to be the arbiters of truth in America,” declares a man over a chorus of triumphant horns. “Yet they still thought it was OK to ban a sitting president from their platforms. If they censor the president, they’ll censor anyone. Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg censored MLK or Abraham Lincoln. The course of history would have been altered forever!”

That’s the sales pitch for “The Freedom Phone,” a $500 smartphone aimed at the MAGA crowd. Just as we saw with Gab, Parler, and Voat, the Freedom Phone is the latest attempt to build an alternate tech platform for right-wingers, but this time with a smartphone instead of social media. When the phone was announced back in March, its tagline was “a phone made for conservatives, by conservatives.” The device is being hawked by Erik Finman, the self-described “world’s youngest bitcoin millionaire.” The phone is supposed to ship in August.

The phone’s feature set is about what you would expect. The company (which seems to also be called “Freedom Phone”) claims to have made an “uncensorable app store” that won’t ban Gab and Parler the way Google and Apple did. “FreedomOS” is a “free-speech first” operating system that the company claims to have developed, and it says the hardware is “comparable to the best smartphones on the market.” Based on the information that Freedom Phone has released so far, almost none of that seems to be true.

Apple is getting ready to introduce a redesigned iPad mini, according to a new report from 9to5Mac.

Though Apple updated the iPad mini with a faster processor and Apple Pencil support in late 2019, the basic design of the device has not changed nearly since its introduction back in 2012.

Like so many Apple leaks, the article cites anonymous “sources familiar with the matter,” so caution was advised. That said, 9to5Mac articles with similar language have turned out to be accurate in the past.

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The biggest Internet service providers and their trade groups spent $234.7 million on lobbying and political donations during the most recent two-year congressional cycle, according to a report released yesterday. The ISPs and their trade groups lobbied against strict net neutrality rules and on various other telecom and broadband regulatory legislation, said the report written by advocacy group Common Cause.

Of the $234.7 million spent in 2019 and 2020, political contributions and expenditures accounted for $45.6 million. The rest of it went to lobbying expenditures.

Comcast led the way with $43 million in lobbying and political contributions and expenditures combined during the 2019-2020 cycle, the report said. The highest-spending ISPs after Comcast were AT&T with $36.4 million, Verizon with $24.8 million, Charter with $24.4 million, and T-Mobile with $21.5 million.

Enlarge / The Humankind hand slams down on Denuvo in this week’s latest story of DRM woe. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

For years, PC gamers have wondered out loud whether antipiracy solutions like Denuvo get in the way of game performance, since the solutions tend to operate in the background in search of piracy-related flags. Denuvo-related game tests in the wild have ranged from inconclusive to damning.

This week, that debate gets worse for the makers of Denuvo: a video game developer has made the rare move of abandoning the DRM platform for its upcoming game’s PC version—and it squarely blames Denuvo-related performance issues for the decision.

Amplitude Studios, a French studio known for PC-exclusive 4X strategy games, had previously announced that its next game, Humankind, would ship with a Denuvo implementation in August 2021. This prompted a post titled “The day Amplitude broke my heart” on Amplitude’s official forum, with a fan declaring their love of prior Amplitude strategy games and then expressing their disappointment that Humankind had a Denuvo tag on its Steam page.

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Today’s Dealmaster is headlined by a big discount on Apple’s iPad Air, as the 4th-generation tablet is currently down to $500 at Amazon and Best Buy. That’s $100 off Apple’s MSRP and roughly $50 off the average street price we’ve seen on Amazon over the past few months. Either way, the discount marks the lowest price we’ve tracked for the device from a mainstream retailer.

Note that this deal applies to the entry-level model with 64GB of storage; if you’re wanting to step up to the higher-capacity 256GB model, that version is on sale for $650, another all-time low price.

We gave the iPad Air high marks in our review last November, calling it “the best pick from Apple’s lineup for most people who can afford it.” The recent introduction of new 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models, both equipped with Apple’s blazing M1 chip, has introduced a few more wrinkles, but generally speaking, the Air remains the closest thing to a “just right” option in Apple’s current iPad lineup.

Enlarge / A barge carrying the Olympic Rings crosses Tokyo Bay. (credit: Getty | Valery Sharifulin )

Olympics organizers said Tuesday that the tally hit 71, including 31 international travelers who had arrived in Tokyo to compete or work at the games, the Associated Press reports. The count also includes Olympic-accredited contractors and volunteers in Japan who have tested positive for the pandemic coronavirus.

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But despite their role in facilitating communications for billions of people, Facebook executives refused to commit resources to understand the extent to which COVID-19-related misinformation pervaded its platform, according to a report in The New York Times.

Early in the pandemic, a group of data scientists at Facebook met with executives to propose a project that would determine how many users saw misleading or false information about COVID. It wasn’t a small task—they estimated that the process could take up to a year or more to complete—but it would give the company a solid understanding of the extent to which misinformation spread on its platform.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

We’re in phase three of our machine-learning project now—that is, we’ve gotten past denial and anger, and we’re now sliding into bargaining and depression. I’ve been tasked with using Ars Technica’s trove of data from five years of headline tests, which pair two ideas against each other in an “A/B” test to let readers determine which one to use for an article. The goal is to try to build a machine-learning algorithm that can predict the success of any given headline. And as of my last check-in, it was… not going according to plan.

I had also spent a few dollars on Amazon Web Services compute time to discover this. Experimentation can be a little pricey. (Hint: If you’re on a budget, don’t use the “AutoPilot” mode.)

We’d tried a few approaches to parsing our collection of 11,000 headlines from 5,500 headline tests—half winners, half losers. First, we had taken the whole corpus in comma-separated value form and tried a “Hail Mary” (or, as I see it in retrospect, a “Leeroy Jenkins“) with the Autopilot tool in AWS’ SageMaker Studio. This came back with an accuracy result in validation of 53 percent. This turns out to be not that bad, in retrospect, because when I used a model specifically built for natural-language processing—AWS’ BlazingText—the result was 49 percent accuracy, or even worse than a coin-toss. (If much of this sounds like nonsense, by the way, I recommend revisiting Part 2, where I go over these tools in much more detail.)

Enlarge / The biggest impediment to EV adoption appears to be cost of ownership, according to EY’s 2021 Mobility Consumer Index. (credit: Carlos Sanchez Pereyra/Getty Images)

Electric vehicles are increasingly breaking into the mainstream. According to a new survey conducted by EY, 41 percent of consumers planning to buy a car say their next vehicle will be a plug-in. And they’re mainly making that decision because of the environmental impact.

EY surveyed 9,000 consumers across 13 countries (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, the UK, and the US) in June of this year as part of its Mobility Consumer Index. The last time the firm conducted this survey, in September 2020, just 30 percent said their next car would be either a battery EV or plug-in hybrid EV.

Where do BEVs beat ICE?

EV adoption is moving faster in some places than others. In China, for example, 48 percent say their next car will be an EV, and only 43 percent say it will have an internal combustion engine (with 3 percent looking for a hydrogen fuel cell EV and the remaining 5 percent saying they are unsure). Sweden’s numbers are near-identical, with a matching 48 percent wanting an EV.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto | Getty Images)

Apple has come under pressure to collaborate with its Silicon Valley rivals to fend off the common threat of surveillance technology after a report alleged that NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware was used to target journalists and human rights activists.

Amnesty International, which analyzed dozens of smartphones targeted by clients of NSO, said Apple’s marketing claims about its devices’ superior security and privacy had been “ripped apart” by the discovery of vulnerabilities in even the most recent versions of its iPhones and iOS software.

“Thousands of iPhones have potentially been compromised,” said Danna Ingleton, deputy director of Amnesty’s tech unit. “This is a global concern—anyone and everyone is at risk, and even technology giants like Apple are ill-equipped to deal with the massive scale of surveillance at hand.”