Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Apple releases AirPods firmware update for almost all models
Apple releases AirPods firmware update for almost all models
“Ahead of new hearing aid features being made available for AirPods Pro 2 on Monday, Apple has released a new firmware update for AirPods 2, 3, Pro 1, and Max with Lightning port. At this moment, it’s unclear what’s new with this build. However, it’s likely about stability improvements.
That said, all of these AirPods, except for the original model, AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2, and AirPods Max with USB-C, are jumping from version 6A326 to 6F21.
These are the latest firmware available for each AirPods model:
- AirPods Pro (2nd gen) with MagSafe charger (USB-C): 7A305
- AirPods Pro (2nd gen) with MagSafe charger (Lightning): 7A305
- AirPods Pro (1st gen): 6F21
- AirPods (4th gen): 7A304
- AirPods (3rd gen): 6F21
- AirPods (2nd gen): 6F21
- AirPods Max (Lightning): 6F21
- AirPods Max (USB-C): 7A291
- AirPods (1st gen): 6.8.8
How to update AirPods firmware
There isn’t an official method to update your AirPods firmware. Since Apple says the new versions install when AirPods are connected via Bluetooth to your iPhone, the best option is to let both devices charge together for at least 30 minutes.
Tech. Entertainment. Science. Your inbox.
Sign up for the most interesting tech & entertainment news out there.
By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use and have reviewed the Privacy Notice.
To check your AirPods firmware version, you need to open the Settings app, open the Bluetooth menu, find your AirPods or Beats earbuds, and tap the “i” next to them to see the current version number.
If this process doesn’t work, you’ll have to wait until they update on their own, as Apple doesn’t let you manually install these firmware updates.
Interestingly, a few days ago, Apple accidentally released a beta firmware for AirPods Pro 2 to all users. Still, the hearing aid features are only available for users in the US and Canada using iOS 18.1.
If we discover anything new with this build, we’ll update this article.“
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite business is set to boom if Trump wins
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite business is set to boom if Trump wins
“The cutting-edge satellite system stands to gain billions of dollars more in contracts and subsidies as Trump favors space investment.
Elon Musk’s fast-growing satellite business Starlink could be poised to gain billions of dollars more in federal contracts and subsidies under a Donald Trump presidency, industry experts say, in a reflection of the world’s richest individual’s deepening financial stake in Washington politics.
Trump has cast himself as a space patron, pledging to unleash funds for national-security installations in orbit and slash red tape for Musk. Other Republicans have also telegraphed business upsides for Starlink, including pushing for the company to get a slice of a $42 billion pot of federal internet subsidies.
A presidential vote of confidence could help the standing of Starlink and its parent company, SpaceX, as they vie for billions of dollars in national-security contracts against rivals like Amazon in the coming years. Musk has struggled to reassure parts of the defense community that he is a trustworthy partner, even as industry experts say Starlink is rapidly building out an advanced satellite surveillance system on track to be the most powerful one in history.
Starlink, which is managed day-to-day by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, currently has some 6,400 working internet satellites in orbit, 10 times morethan its nearest rival, and separately a quiet but fast-growing surveillance satellite business.
One former SpaceX executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters involving a onetime employer, said a Trump administration would also be disposed to assist in green-lighting new launch sites for SpaceX, helping Starlink to continue rapidly expanding its satellite network to stay ahead of rivals.
“I think that’s one area where a Trump administration will be a little more sympathetic,” the executive said.
Musk’s shift to supporting Trump appears to be driven largely by conviction on social issues, according to people familiar with him who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his thinking. But the tech executive’s business empire also stands to benefit if Trump wins the election — potentially by a far larger amount than the billionaire has splashed out to support Trump’s campaign.
Musk has donated $75 million to his own super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection efforts and about $1 million more to another pro-Trump PAC. He also announced over the weekend that he would give away $1 million a day to a registered swing-state voter who signed a petition. Federal satellite contracts often run in the hundreds of millions of dollars or higher.
There is further revenue potential in the broader space contracting boom that Trump has promised, which could bring billions of dollars to SpaceX’s rocket business. Musk’s other companies, Tesla and X, could also benefit if Trump follows through with appointing him to lead a new “government efficiency commission.”
The satellite sector is notorious for thin margins, so it is unclear how profitable any new contracts would be for SpaceX. And Democrats and Republicans tend to be more aligned on space policy behind closed doors than public bluster would suggest. Still, the difference in tone on space and Musk has been marked.
Trump vowed at a rally over the summer to “make life good” for Musk, while President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been cool toward the entrepreneur. And while the Republican candidate’s election platform includes a pledge to promote investments in “near earth orbit” — the satellite realm dominated by Starlink — Harris’s campaign and the Democratic Party have not highlighted space policy beyond a general commitment to NASA and the International Space Station.
Space defense booster
Musk’s Starlink bloomed under Trump’s presidency. Republican officials took a chance on the mercurial tycoon and his newfangled satellites, which promised not only a new internet option for consumers but also a military and intelligence-gathering edge for the government.
As president, Trump was a booster for the space defense industry, signing the Space Force — a new military branch specializing in space operations — into existence in 2019 and elevating security hawks who urged the United States to militarize space ahead of rival nations. He also expressed personal admiration of Musk, trekking out to Cape Canaveral to watch a SpaceX rocket launch, and praising Musk as “a brilliant guy.”
Musk, for his part, initially expressed mixed views of Trump’s presidency. The SpaceX founder, who had leaned Democratic, quit two of Trump’s advisory councils in 2017 to protest the president’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. But he praised Trump’s establishment of the Space Force as “sensible,” saying it would help civilization expand into space.
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission authorized a fledgling Starlink in 2018 to launch a first tranche of 4,425 internet satellites, despite protest from rivals that such an unprecedented number would clutter the skies. It was an audacious decision: Starlink, an untested vendor, got a green light to nearly double the total number of satellites orbiting Earth.
“We were pushing the envelope,” said Evan Swarztrauber, a policy adviser to then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. “We were just trying to create the conditions for various technologies to be able to be rolled out. We didn’t know exactly how things would go.”
A satellite system like Starlink was revolutionary. Satellites were traditionally large and expensive, with the world’s largest constellations consisting of only a few hundred satellites. SpaceX’s breakthrough in developing rockets that could be reused for multiple launches made it possible to create a much larger network.
While Starlink was marketed as an affordable internet option for rural residents, defense officials appreciated its military utility from the early days. A strong data connection in previous dead zones opened new capabilities like streaming battlefield drone video back to headquarters or course-correcting missiles midflight.
“It doesn’t take a wizard to understand the military implications,” remarked the former SpaceX executive, who said Musk sometimes invoked China’s competitive threat in meetings with Pentagon officials.
The Pentagon was soon a customer, and before long Starlink was given the opportunity to dip its toe into surveillance work.
The Space Development Agency, a newly formed defense office, awarded SpaceX a $149 million contract in 2020 to build a first generation of tracking satellites that could detect hypersonic missile launches. SpaceX also began working on prototype spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, the Pentagon’s spy satellite division, during the Trump administration, Reuters reported this year. The Wall Street Journal reported the classified contract was valued at $1.8 billion.
The NRO declined to confirm the contract, citing national security considerations. Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the NRO, said in a public talk this month that the agency does not procure directly from Starlink, but did not say whether it works with the company indirectly.
Meink said rockets like SpaceX’s have made it feasible for the agency to build its largest spy satellite fleet ever, with more than a hundred payloads launched in the past 18 months.
“Why didn’t you do this earlier?” Meink said people sometimes asked him. “Well, launch costs were high, right? … Now it’s just come way down.”
Globe-girding surveillance
There’s been much hushed discussion in the space industry this year over Starlink’s plan to supplement its satellites for the internet with a second type in its secretive “Starshield” unit dedicated to surveillance.
Five industry experts told The Washington Post that Starlink appears to be the front-runner in building the first satellite system able to see all places on Earth continuously in high-definition, even as many details of the project remain unclear.
“You’re approaching a near real-time capability to see any spot on Earth,” said Michael Brown, former director of the Defense Innovation Unit, a Pentagon technology unit, of this next wave of satellites led by Starlink.
Alexandre Najjar, a consultant at Novaspace, forecasts that Starlink’s new earth-observation system will become the world’s largest next year.
Chris Quilty, founder of the research firm Quilty Space, estimates that state-of-the-art satellite systems today have a roughly 15-minute lag time — still long enough for a military target to relocate completely after being photographed.
If Starlink can build a system that provides closer-to-real-time global surveillance in the next few years, it could become an irreplaceable federal contractor. Its rivals fear SpaceX has the deep pockets to accept short-term losses until it runs them out of business.
“He could sustain a deficit for ages,” Najjar said. “They could do that long enough until the competition is gone.”
Such a reliance on Musk unnerves officials across party lines.
There’s been debate across the U.S. government over Musk’s reliability as a federal partner since 2022, when he declined a request from Ukraine to activate Starlink over Crimea to support an attack on a Russian fleet, saying it would make his company “explicitly complicit in a major act of war.” While Musk has since come around to more vigorous support of Ukraine’s military, U.S. defense officials ever since have foregrounded a goal of “diversifying” their satellite supply.
There’s a political dimension to the debate as well. After Musk endorsed Trump in July, the Harris campaign called Musk one of the “arrogant billionaires only out for themselves” and said such tycoons were “not what America wants or America needs.” One of the people familiar with Musk said he developed something of a “persecution complex” after repeated attacks and snubs from prominent Democrats.
Despite Starlink having no close rival right now in low-earth-orbit satellites in terms of technical capabilities, the Space Development Agency announced Wednesday that it has picked 18 other satellite makers along with SpaceX for its next military project. One of them is Kuiper, Amazon’s satellite division, which has not yet launched a functional network. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Clare Hopper, head of the U.S. Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office, said the Pentagon is working to put another $12 billion in low-earth-orbit satellite contracts on the table, up from her office’s current authorization of $1 billion. She said these contracts would not only go to Starlink but to a range of companies.
“We anticipate there to be more diversity of business,” Hopper said.
As for consumer internet, Starlink’s bread and butter, the company is fighting to be considered for tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies alongside established internet providers. The Biden administration has been wary, saying they must be judicious with taxpayer dollars and that Starlink has yet to reliably meet FCC-defined “broadband” speeds.
Republicans have accused the Biden administration of being biased against Musk. House oversight committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) has launched a probe into whether the FCC withheld a grant from Starlink improperly. Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr called his Democratic colleagues’ decision to keep Starlink from the grant “nothing more than regulatory lawfare against Elon Musk.”
Swarztrauber, the former FCC official, said Starlink is more likely to land federal internet subsidies under a Trump administration. Democrats traditionally view broadband more like a utility in which everyone deserves the same service, he said, while Republicans are more willing to let an eclectic patchwork of technologies shake out through market competition. The largest of these federal subsidy programs, the $42 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, has only just begun, with the next administration getting a say in fund distribution.
“I think there would be more willingness to incorporate Starlink into broadband expansion initiatives” under Trump, Swarztrauber said.
In a move that would ready the company for such an opportunity, Starlink this month filed another request with the FCC to expand its fleet to 29,988 satellites. There are around 10,000 satellites orbiting the Earth right now. Most of them are Starlink’s.“
Monday, October 21, 2024
Donald Trump keeps calling Kamala Harris stupid - The Washington Post
Trump keeps calling Harris ‘stupid,’ offending many voters
Speaking to a crowd in Erie, Pa., on the last Saturday in September, former president Donald Trump lambasted his Democratic opponent.
“Crooked Joe Biden became mentally impaired — sad — but Lyin’ Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way,” he said, mispronouncing the Democratic presidential nominee’s name as the crowd chuckled. “There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something missing.”
Ten minutes later, he offered an even blunter assessment, warning that the nation’s immigration system was being mismanaged by “stupid people like Kamala.”
“She’s a stupid person,” he said, before adding again, as if for emphasis: “Stupid person.”
Since Harris emerged on the top of the Democratic ticket in July, Trump has repeatedly attacked her intelligence — deriding her as a “dumb,” “mentally unfit,” “slow,” “stupid” and an “extremely low IQ person,” among other similar pejoratives.
To some of the former president’s fiercest supporters, he is simply articulating aloud their view of her. But for many voters, as well as experts, Trump’s sneering dismissiveness of Harris’s intellect reeks of racism and sexism.
If elected, Harris — who is Black and Indian American — would make history as the first female president, as well as the first female president of color, and Trump’s repeated jabs at her intelligence go beyond mere insults.
The attacks are particularly striking given Harris’s deeply accomplished résumé: former San Francisco district attorney, former California attorney general, former U.S. senator and now vice president. She has a bachelor’s degree from Howard University and a law degree from the University of California, and she was widely seen through polling and focus groups to have soundly bested him at their Sept. 10 debate.
“This lands differently when you do this to women of color, because you’re saying, ‘How dare you get out of the box I put you in,’” said A’shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, an organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office.
“There is a history in the United States about the perception of Black people, about the perception of Black women, that we’re not smart enough, that we’re not good enough, that you only get to where you are because of affirmative action,” she said. “So when you attack people of color, when you attack the vice president, you’re really showing that you have these biases.”
The Trump campaign rejected the notion that Trump’s questioning of Harris’s intelligence is in any way racist or sexist.
“Only dumb and low IQ individuals would be offended by that, expressing faux outrage because they need every excuse to explain away their insecure, miserable, and pathetic existence,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. “Being unintelligent has nothing to do with race or gender. It has everything to do with Kamala Harris being wholly unqualified to be President because of all the hurt and misery she has brought to America.”
Harris has raised her own questions about Trump’s acuity and fitness for the job, though with less stark language and name-calling. In an interview with journalist Roland Martin last Monday, Harris accused Trump’s staff of deliberately keeping him from the public, noting he had recently pulled out of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview, has refused a second debate with her and won’t release his medical records.
“Why is his staff doing that?” she asked. “And it may be because they think he’s just not ready. And unfit and unstable.”
Trump’s digs at Harris’s intelligence began to intensify almost as soon as President Joe Biden bowed out of his reelection bid on July 21 and endorsed her. The very next day, Trump described Harris as “Dumb as a Rock” in a social media post.
He has since continued to press the theme. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning, Trump described her as “a low IQ person” who is “not smart.” The night before, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Manhattan, Trump’s comedy roast included a gibe at Harris’s intellect.
“We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the white-tie crowd. “This is a person that has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”
During an interview Tuesday at the Chicago Economic Club, Trump said Harris “is not as smart as Biden, if you can believe it.” And last Monday, he took to social media to call on her to “pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility” and dismissed her recent appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” as “slow and lethargic.”
Trump’s attacks on her intelligence happen on an almost daily basis — and sometimes more than once a day. Trump described her as “dumber than hell” at the Detroit Economic Club on Oct. 10, and in Reading, Pa., on Oct. 9 warned, “People are realizing she’s a dumb person, and we can’t have another dumb president.”
He continued: “Somebody said to me — one of my people, a nice person, a staff person — said, ‘Sir, please don’t call her dumb. The women won’t like it.’”
Trump has struggled with both Black and female voters. An NBC News poll conducted earlier this month found women supported Harris by a 14-point margin, with 55 percent preferring her and 41 percent preferring Trump. The same poll found that Harris also overwhelmingly leads Trump among Black voters, with 84 percent preferring her to the 11 percent who prefer Trump — although Trump has improved his margins slightly among Black women, to the consternation of the Harris campaign and Democrats.
Trump has so far refused to heed advice to avoid bad-mouthing Harris’s intelligence — in part because, as one confidant put it, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share a candid insight, “he doesn’t respect her as a worthy opponent.”
The Harris campaign declined to respond to questions about Trump questioning her intelligence. Her team has largely followed the vice president’s posture: not leaning into the history-making nature of her bid as potentially the first woman of color to be president, while dismissing Trump’s broadsides as “the same old tired playbook” that has left Americans exhausted and ready for change.
Last week, Harris accused Trump’s staff of hiding him away, rhetorically asking a large crowd in Greenville, N.C.: “Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?”
Trump has long viewed himself as a counterpuncher — forcefully attacking anyone who goes after him, including his White male opponents. Trump, 78, repeatedly went after Biden, 81, over his alleged cognitive abilities, arguing that the president was not physically or mentally capable of serving a second term.
But Trump also has a rich history of sexist attacks, and he has reserved some of his most vituperative abuse for women of color. In 2018, Trump demeaned three Black female reporters in as many days, describing one as a “loser” and sneering at another, “You ask lots of stupid questions.” In 2019, amid a fight with House Democrats, Trump took to social media to encourage “The Squad” — a group of congresswomen of color — to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”
He has also attacked Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who is Black, as “low IQ Maxine Waters” and as “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”
For supporters of Harris, 60, the insults are deeply offensive and, they say, geared toward firing up Trump’s base.
“There’s an air of misogyny about it. There’s an air of racism about it,” said Kim Barbaro, 49, a Democrat from Ottsville, Pa., in rural Bucks County. “There’s a lot of dog whistles going on when he speaks, so I’m hoping we’ve reached the tipping point with it, because it’s gotten so intense.”
“We need to return back to decency. He’s an unkind human, and I’m not here for it,” she added.
Alexandra Moncure — a 35-year-old former Republican turned independent after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — took full-time leave from her marketing job in Manhattan to volunteer at one of Harris’s Pennsylvania campaign offices and said she believes Trump’s attacks on the vice president’s intelligence come “from a place of insecurity.”
“I think it’s one of his approaches in terms of how he activates his base to attack people — on gender, on race, on anything that he views as something that could detract from her,” Moncure said.
Marjorie Margolies — a former Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication — arrived in Congress during the first “Year of the Woman” in 1992, when four women won election to the Senate. She said she is astonished that a presidential candidate deliberately treats his female opponent this way.
“It boggles my mind that this is acceptable behavior,” she said. “I’m stunned, I’m appalled, and mostly I’m surprised that there are that many people out there who think that this is acceptable behavior. And I’m oh so sad.”
But, she added, she thinks Harris’s handling of this particular brand of insult has been masterful.
“She doesn’t want to give it too much air,” Margolies said. “She doesn’t want to give it a place to resonate. I think that is smart.”
Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, remain largely undaunted by this line of attack, with many agreeing with and encouraging it. Julie Apfelbaum, a Republican who attended Trump’s recent Coachella rally in Harris’s home state of California, said Trump’s criticisms of Harris are totally justified.
“She’s stupid,” said Apfelbaum, an insurance broker from the Thousand Oaks, Calif., area, before offering a mocking rendition of Harris speaking. “She gets done talking, and it’s like, ‘What did she say?’ She said a bunch of nothing. She does a word salad, like they say.”
Later in the Coachella rally, the audience punctuated Trump’s speech with shouted insults at Harris. One man stood up from his seat to yell that Harris was dumber than a rock. Someone responded that they shouldn’t insult rocks.
Hannah Knowles in Coachella, Calif.; Maeve Reston in Washington Crossing, Pa.; Marianne LeVine in Oaks, Pa.; and Jeremy Merrill and Clara Ence Morse in Washington contributed to this report."
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Chinese drone maker DJI sues Pentagon over ‘military’ design
Chinese drone maker DJI sues Pentagon over ‘military’ designation
The lawsuit reflects how the company is going on the offensive as it faces a congressional push to ban DJI’s drones from use in U.S. airspace.
“After attemptin to engage with the DoD for more than sixteen months, DJI determined it had no alternative other than to seek relief in federal court,” DJI said in a statement on Saturday.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The new suit comes in response to the Pentagon’s move to place DJI — the world’s largest drone maker — on a list of “Military Companies Operating in the United States” in 2022. That followed the Pentagon’s declaration that DJI products “pose potential threats to national security” in 2021 and barred their use by U.S. government agencies. The lawsuit claims those actions have inflicted “ongoing financial and reputational harm” on the company.
The lawsuit reflects how the company is going on the offensive as it faces a congressional push to ban DJI’s drones from use in U.S. airspace. The company’s woes deepened in August when the House Select Committee on China urged the Commerce Department to probe allegations of DJI seeking to dodge trade restrictions through the use of front companies.
Suing the Pentagon is the latest effort by a Chinese firm “to weaponize U.S. legal frameworks to undermine national security,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the nonprofit thinktank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Ultimately, this lawsuit is a dead-end for DJI.”
Josh Gerstein contributed to this story“
Thursday, October 17, 2024
Elon Musk removes X block button as users fear return of ‘creeps’
Musk removes X block button as users fear return of ‘creeps’
Elon Musk is facing a backlash after announcing that the block button on X(fomerly Twitter) will no longer prevent people from viewing posts.
The billionaire, who took over the social media app in 2022, said the update was long overdue, having previously claimed that the feature “makes no sense” and should be removed entirely.
“High time this happened,” Mr Musk wrote on X. “The block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, public post.”
His post received thousands of comments, with many X users fearing that the update will make X more toxic and open to harassment.
“With respect, I think this is a bad idea,” wrote X user Nzube Udezue, also known as the musician Zuby. “There are many reasons somebody may not want certain individuals from easily seeing all their public posts. There are some really bad actors on social media, sadly.”
Another user replied: “I don’t want the creeps I’ve blocked seeing my posts at all.”
It is not clear when X plans to roll out the update, though some users have reported that it has already come into effect for their accounts.
The update is one of a number of changes introduced to the app since Mr Musk’s acquisition nearly two years ago, with multiple organisations reporting that the takeover has coincided with a rise in hate speech.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League both found that racist slurs had increased newaly three times since October 2022, while the Institute of Strategic Dialogue reported that anti-semitic posts had doubled.
Separate studies have also reported a rise in misinformation, Islamaphopia, mysogynistic hate and anti-LGBT rhetoric on the platform, with media monitoring group GLAAD claiming in 2023 that X is “the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people”.