An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: More cities in Asia and Europe are seeking to link up with each other and the global air travel network. The Mitsubishi Regional Jet, the first airliner built in Japan since the 1960s, began certification flights last month in Moses Lake, Washington, to satisfy that demand. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd.'s new airliner is testing the skies just as rivals are moving to sell off their manufacturing operations for jets with up to 160 seats. Boeing is set to buy 80 percent of the Embraer SA's commercial operations in a joint venture, while Bombardier last year sold control of its C Series airliner project to Airbus SE and is exploring "strategic options" for its regional-jet operations. At stake, particularly in the market for jets with fewer seats, is $135 billion in sales in the two decades through 2037, according to industry group Japan Aircraft Development Corp. With few seats and smaller fuselages, regional jets are a different class of aircraft from larger narrow-body planes such as Boeing's 737 or Airbus's A320. The MRJ has a range of about 2,000 miles, while a smaller variant can haul up to 76 people for about the same distance. A longtime supplier of aircraft components to Boeing, Mitsubishi Heavy is developing the MRJ to emerge from its customer's shadow. After spending at least $2 billion over more than a decade, the manufacturer is looking to get its jet certified and start deliveries to launch partner ANA Holdings. Mitsubishi expects to have the plane ready for customers next year, a timetable that will test the company, said Mitsubishi Aircraft President Hisakazu Mizutani.

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BlackBerry announced today that it will officially shut down the consumer version of BlackBerry Messenger next month. The company, however, is developing a new messaging app for iOS users to take its place.  more…

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Netflix is establishing an NYC production hub that will include six sound stages in Brooklyn and an expanded office in Manhattan's Flatiron District. "It should create 'hundreds of jobs' (including 127 executive, marketing and production development roles) over the next five years, and should foster up to $100 million in investments, according to Governor Cuomo," reports Engadget. From the report: The sound stages will also have the capacity for "thousands" of jobs, Cuomo said, although that's likely to vary widely based on what's in production at any given time. Not surprisingly, there are financial incentives attached to the move. The state is offering up to $4 million in tax credits over 10 years, although those are contingent on Netflix's ability to both create the 127 promised office jobs and keep the 32 existing positions.

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Twitter has long been the social network of choice for Apple executives to post updates on, but newly appointed SVP of Retail + People Deirdre O’Brien has chosen Instagram to share photos of retail updates.

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Welcome to our Daily Deals column, where we round up the best tech deals from around the web. Here you'll find discounts on everything from Apple products to accessories, video games and more. But you better hurry, these prices won't be around forever!

Instagram is seemingly considering a major shift in functionality. According to code found within the Instagram app, the company has considered hiding the number of likes a post gets. Instead, the interface focuses on who liked the image.

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AmiMoJo writes: It's time to buy a new chair so I'm turning to Slashdot for recommendations. The Herman Miller Aeron seems to be the go-to, much like the Model M for keyboards, but I've heard that there are some other good options on the market. I need something that is comfortable and durable -- too many chairs get squeaky and loose because I can't sit still and keep shifting my weight around. Many are difficult to maintain as well, e.g. the screws attacking the back are often under plastic attached with very stiff clips so you can't easily give them a quick tighten. What does Slashdot recommend for my posterior? It's been more than a decade since readers sought recommendations for a quality chair for desktop coding, or back-friendly chairs. In fact, it's been almost two decades since a user inquired about the perfect computer chair. Hopefully office chairs have improved in quality/design since then...

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed denying China Mobile USA's application to offer telecom services in the U.S., saying the Chinese government-owned company poses a security risk. The FCC is scheduled to vote on an order to deny the application at its open meeting on May 9, and Pai yesterday announced his opposition to China Mobile entering the U.S. market. "After reviewing the evidence in this proceeding, including the input provided by other federal agencies, it is clear that China Mobile's application to provide telecommunications services in our country raises substantial and serious national security and law enforcement risks," Pai said. "Therefore, I do not believe that approving it would be in the public interest. I hope that my colleagues will join me in voting to reject China Mobile's application." China Mobile filed its application in 2011, and has repeatedly complained about the government's lengthy review process. According to Pai's announcement, China Mobile's application sought authority "to provide international facilities-based and resale telecommunications services between the U.S. and foreign destinations." In simpler terms, the company was seeking "a license to connect calls between the United States and other nations" and "was not seeking to provide domestic cell service and compete in the country with businesses like AT&T and Verizon," The New York Times wrote yesterday. An FCC official told reporters that such calls "could be intercepted for surveillance and make the domestic network vulnerable to hacking and other risks," the Times wrote.

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Apple’s recently-announced settlement with Qualcomm didn’t come cheap, according to UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri. In a research note released Thursday, Arcuri said the iPhone-maker likely paid between $5 and $6 billion to put a stop to the bevy of legal...

Come next Monday, the iPhone maker will be celebrating Earth Day by featuring apps and games on App Store that help people honor the Earth and live sustainably.

MoviePass users apparently hit the exits en masse after it scaled back the number of movies users could see each month. From a report: The flailing cinema-subscription provider has seen its subscriber rolls plunge from a peak of more than 3 million to just 225,000 in under a year, according to a new report. The numbers were reported by Business Insider, which cited "internal data" it had obtained. Asked for comment, a MoviePass spokeswoman declined to confirm the subscriber figure. In June 2018, MoviePass claimed it had signed up more than 3 million subscribers for its $9.95 monthly plan, which let customers see one movie every single day. But that proved unsustainable, and MoviePass was forced to change that to a three-movies-per-month plan. In August 2018, MoviePass began to convert subscribers on annual subscription plans to the three-movies-per-month subscription plan, by giving annual subscribers the option to either cancel or refund their annual subscription or continue on the new three-movies-per-month subscription plan.

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Apple today has updated its TestFlight beta testing application to version 2.2.1. While not a major update, the new version does include some nice enhancements for developers and beta users. Here is everything that’s new in today’s update.

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If we're going to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we'll need an energy revolution. But there's a big problem. Making that future a reality will, among other things, require a lot of batteries: batteries to charge our electric cars; batteries to store solar power collected while the sun's up and wind power harnessed when it's gusty out. And as a new report by researchers at the University of Technology Sydney warns, that's likely to drive demand for the metals used to build green batteries -- as well as wind turbines and solar panels -- through the roof. From a report: In other words the clean tech boom is, at least in the short term, likely to fuel a mining boom. And that won['t come without cost. "We already know about the environmental, social, and human rights impacts extraction is posing to front line communities right now," Payal Sampat, mining program director at Earthworks, which commissioned the new report, told Earther. "It's kind of unimaginable to think about... how it would be considered sustainable to scale up those impacts that many fold and still be reaping benefits." Much like our smartphones and computers, the high-tech energy infrastructure of tomorrow requires a host of metals and minerals from across the periodic table and the planet. The lithium-ion batteries used in EVs and energy storage require not just lithium, but often cobalt, manganese, and nickel. Electric vehicle engines rely on rare earths, as do the permanent magnet-based generators inside some wind turbines. Solar panels gobbles up a significant share of the world's supply of tellurium, and gallium, along with a sizable fraction of mined silver and indium. Most renewable technologies demand heaps of copper and aluminum.

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Will you celebrate the planet next Monday by recording at least a 30-minute workout on your Apple Watch? Not even if doing so will net you special stickers and virtual medals?

Citing lackluster financial performance, IBM is halting development and sales of a product that uses its Watson AI software to help pharmaceutical companies discover new drugs, news outlet Stat reported on Thursday, citing a person familiar with the company's internal decision-making. From the report: The decision to shut down sales of Watson for Drug Discovery marks the highest-profile retreat in the company's effort to apply artificial intelligence to various areas of health care. Last year, the company scaled back on the hospital side of its business, and it's struggled to develop a reliable tool to assist doctors in treating cancer patients. In a statement, an IBM spokesperson said, "We are focusing our resources within Watson Health to double down on the adjacent field of clinical development where we see an even greater market need for our data and AI capabilities." Further reading: IBM Pitched Its Watson Supercomputer as a Revolution in Cancer Care. It's Nowhere Close (September 2017); IBM Watson Reportedly Recommended Cancer Treatments That Were 'Unsafe and Incorrect' (July 2018).

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Apple literally used explosives to create an avalanche scene for the recent "Don't Mess With Mother (Nature)" footage that you'd be hard-press to believe was shot with an iPhone XS.

This week Benjamin and Zac discuss 9to5Mac’s scoops on iOS 13’s dark mode, multiple window apps and panels, redesigned volume HUD, macOS 10.15’s project sidecar, Apple’s possible plans to unify Find My Friends and iPhone, potential hardware tracker accessories, Apple’s settlement with Qualcomm and what it means for 5G iPhones, and much more.

9to5Mac Happy Hour is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play Music, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

Sponsored by Capterra: Visit Capterra.com/HappyHour today and join the millions of people who use Capterra each month.

Sponsored by Luna Display: Get an exclusive 10% discount on Luna Display, the only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless second display for Mac. Go to www.lunadisplay.com and enter promo code HAPPY at checkout.

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https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/04/9to5Mac-Happy-Hour-04-18-2019.mp3

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Last month, Facebook revealed that millions of Instagram and Facebook passwords were stored in plaintext and were accessible by engineers. Now, the company has issued an update on the situation, revealing that the situation is worse than it originally stated.

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The detailed report highlights all the advances Apple's made in helping preserve our environment and making its products more environment-friendly and way more energy-efficient.

Last month, Facebook disclosed that hundreds of millions of users on its platform had their account passwords stored in plain text -- in some cases going back to 2012 -- and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees. Today, the company quietly updated that blog post to reveal that Instagram users are also impacted. It said, in the update: Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users. We will be notifying these users as we did the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed.

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