Trying to get an up close and personal look at the solar system's gas giants is a tricky and dangerous journey. From a report: Jupiter, like the other gas giants, doesn't have a rocky surface, but that doesn't mean it's just a massive cloud floating through the vacuum of space. It's made up of mostly helium and hydrogen, and as you move from the outer layers of the atmosphere toward the deeper parts, that gas grows denser and the pressures become more extreme. Temperatures quickly rise. In 1995, NASA's Galileo mission sent a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere; it broke up at about 75 miles in depth. Pressures here are over 100 times more intense than anything on Earth. At the innermost layers of Jupiter that are 13,000 miles deep, the pressure is 2 million times stronger than what's experienced at sea level on Earth, and temperatures are hotter than the sun's surface. So clearly, no human is going to be able to venture too far down into Jupiter's depths. But would it be safe to simply orbit the planet? Perhaps we could establish an orbital space station, right? Well, there's another big problem when it comes to Jupiter: radiation. The biggest planet in the solar system also boasts its most powerful magnetosphere. These magnetic fields charge up particles in the vicinity, accelerating them to extreme speeds that can fry a spacecraft's electronics in moments. Spaceflight engineers have to figure out an orbit and spacecraft design that will reduce the exposure to this radiation. NASA figured this out with the triple-arrayed, perpetually spinning Juno spacecraft, but it doesn't look as if this would be a feasible design for a human spacecraft. Instead, for a crewed spacecraft to safely orbit or fly past Jupiter, it would have to keep a pretty significant distance away from the planet.

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Apple today seeded the first public betas of upcoming iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14 updates to its public beta testing group, two weeks after first providing the updates to developers after the WWDC keynote.

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Apple is rolling out updates today to the iWork apps for Mac. These updates bring YouTube and Vimeo integration to Numbers and Pages, in addition to captions and titles to images, videos, and more.

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Apple today released iOS and iPadOS 13.4 prerelease software for public beta testing ahead of commercial release this fall.

Apple has made the iOS 13.6 golden master available to developers today. The update comes with new features like improved support for downloading and installing system updates, the all-new Apple News+ Audio content, as well as the exciting CarKey feature.

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Days after it was rumored that Apple might not ship a charger with its next iPhone, Samsung is copying that, too. According to a new report from South Korea, future Samsung phones may not ship with a charger. From a report: Samsung ships hundreds of millions of smartphones every single year. Dropping the charger from even half of its lineup is going to result in major cost reductions for the company. It may also enable the company to price its affordable devices even more aggressively. According to the report, Samsung is discussing plans to exclude the charger from the box components for some smartphones. If it decides to go ahead with this, we might see the first Samsung phones to ship without a charger starting next year.

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Apple will release the first public beta of iOS 14 to testers today. iOS 14 brings new features such as widgets, the App Library, and more. The iOS 14 public beta will be available this afternoon for testers.

Update: The first public betas of iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, macOS 11 Big Sur, and tvOS 14 are now available.

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The UK retail arm of Apple paid just $7.7m in taxes last year despite raking in almost $1.7bn in sales, according to the company's latest accounts. From a report: Revenue at Apple Retail UK, which operates 38 of the company's stores in the UK, rose by more than 15% in the 12 months to 28 September. But after costs and expenses of around $1.7bn, the firm reported before-tax profits of just $47m, slashing its tax bill significantly. In a statement describing itself as "the largest taxpayer in the world," Apple said that it always paid the taxes that it owed.

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Taking advantage of the iPhone's TrueDepth camera, the software makes real-time facial animation capture accessible to all developers.

Tesla's Elon Musk said the carmaker is on the verge of developing technology to render its vehicles fully capable of driving themselves, repeating a claim he's made for years but been unable to achieve. From a report: The chief executive officer has long offered exuberant takes on the capabilities of Tesla cars, even going so far as to start charging customers thousands of dollars for a "Full Self Driving" feature in 2016. Years later, Tesla still requires users of its Autopilot system to be fully attentive and ready to take over the task of driving at any time. Tesla's mixed messages have drawn controversy and regulatory scrutiny. In 2018, the company blamed a driver who died after crashing a Model X while using Autopilot for not paying attention to the road. Documents made public last year showed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had issued multiple subpoenas for information about crashes involving Tesla vehicles, suggesting the agency may have been preparing a formal investigation of Autopilot.

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Today’s best deals include Woot’s 1-day sale, Apple’s space gray Wireless Keyboard, and iPhone SE at $5 per month. Hit the jump for all that and more.

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Epic Games is out with an update today that sees the launch of a new iOS app for game developers to improve virtual production. The Live Link Face app for iPhone and iPad lets game devs capture facial expressions in real-time and see them applied live to characters in Unreal Engine.

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Microsoft today published technical details about a new security feature that will soon be part of Windows 10. From a report: Named Kernel Data Protection (KDP), Microsoft says this feature will block malware or malicious threat actors from modifying (corrupting) the operating system's memory. According to Microsoft, KDP works by giving developers access to programmatic APIs that will allow them to designate parts of the Windows kernel as read-only sections. "For example, we've seen attackers use signed but vulnerable drivers to attack policy data structures and install a malicious, unsigned driver," Microsoft's Base Kernel Team said today. "KDP mitigates such attacks by ensuring that policy data structures cannot be tampered with." Microsoft says this new technology was developed with security in mind but that it also has other applications, such as anti-cheat and digital rights management (DRM) software.

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Apple today released new Develop in Swift and Everyone Can Code curricula, plus a new online course for teachers.

Improve your app organization by temporarily hiding those forgotten pages of apps on the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad in just a few minutes, with help from our tutorial.

UK universities are testing a new online teaching link for students in China -- which will require course materials to comply with Chinese restrictions on the internet. From a report: It enables students in China to keep studying UK degrees online, despite China's limits on internet access. But it means students can only reach material on an "allowed" list. Universities UK said it was "not aware of any instances when course content has been altered." And the universities' body rejected that this was accepting "censorship." A spokeswoman said the project would allow students in China to have better access to UK courses "while complying with local regulations." But in a separate essay published by the Higher Education Policy Institute, Professor Kerry Brown of King's College London cautioned of the risk of universities adopting "self-censorship" when engaging with China. MPs on the foreign affairs select committee have previously warned against universities avoiding "topics sensitive to China," such as pro-democracy protests or the treatment of Uighur Muslims. Chinese students have become an important source of revenue for UK universities, representing almost a quarter of all overseas students - and Queen's University Belfast is chartering a plane to bring students from China this autumn.

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Apple has long offered free school Swift programs intended to help students learn to code. It is now supplementing these with a new program geared to help both educators and parents teach app development using Swift.

Apple currently offers two different programs, Everyone Can Code and Develop in Swift …

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If you need support for a product you’ve bought, getting in touch with the company on WhatsApp could soon be as simple as using your iPhone camera to scan a QR code on the receipt …

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Security researchers say a smartwatch, popular with the elderly and dementia patients, could have been tricked into letting an attacker easily take control of the device. From a report: These watches are designed to help patients to easily call their carers and for carers to track the location of their patients. They come with their own cellular connection, so that they work anywhere. But researchers at U.K.-based security firm Pen Test Partners found that they could trick the smartwatch into sending fake "take pills" reminders to patients as often as they want, they said. "A dementia sufferer is unlikely to remember that they had already taken their medication," wrote Vangelis Stykas in a blog post. "An overdose could easily result." The vulnerabilities were found in the back-end cloud system, known as SETracker, which powers the smartwatch.

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