Apple this week released iOS 13.3 to the public, which includes a new Communication Limits feature for Screen Time. A new report from CNBC, however, explains that the feature doesn’t exactly work as it’s designed to.

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An anonymous reader writes: Cisco on Wednesday outlined new details behind its strategy to build next-generation internet technology. As a set up for what it dubs its 'Internet for the Future' strategy, the networking giant announced a multi-year plan for building and investing in 5G internet technology, including silicon, optics and software. On the silicon side, Cisco announced Silicon One, a new switching and routing applications specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for the 5G internet era. The programmable networking chip is designed to provide significant improvements to performance, bandwidth, power efficiency, scalability and flexibility, according to Cisco. Cisco said the first first generation of the chip, Q100, surpassed the 10 Tbps routing milestone for network bandwidth. In addition to the silicon, Cisco also outlined its focus on the optics space. As port rates increase from 100G to 400G, optics become a larger portion of the cost to build and operate internet infrastructure. To account for that, Cisco said its qualification program tests its optics and non-Cisco optics to comply with industry standards, and invests organically to make sure that its router and switch ports rates continue to increase. Cisco also announced plans to offer flexible consumption models for Silicon One that were first established with its optics portfolio, followed by the disaggregation of the Cisco IOS XR7 software. The Silicon One architecture will integrate into its new 8000 series carrier class routers, which is powered by Cisco's new IOS XR7 operating system. The OS will provide faster download speeds and security improvements, Cisco said. According to the report, Cisco is currently working with Comcast and NTT Communications on ongoing deployments and trials of the 8000 series.

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Over the course of nearly 9 hours (so far), the Democrats have made exceptional points regarding the illegality of Donald Trump's actions. As expected, the Republicans continue to plug their ears and squeeze their eyes shut and silently sing "la la la la can't hear you la la la la" while ignoring all facts being laid out in front of them. Oh, and they have a few poster boards with memes. That is what they brought to the hearing to defend Donald Trump.

Rep. Eric Swalwell and Rep. Cicillini always give absolutely stellar monologues when given the microphone, but they had a truly powerful 2 for 1 back and forth that needs more attention. Here is what was said:

CICILLINI: The idea that Donald Trump was leading an anti-corruption effort is like Kim Jong-Un leading a human rights effort. It's just not credible. It's just not credible. And we have facts that will demonstrate that. For example, at the very time you claim he's interested in ferreting out corruption in Ukraine, he proposed cutting by more than 50% anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine. Here is an article "Trump administration sought billions of dollars of cuts in aid fighting corruption and elsewhere."

He proposed deep cuts. That's not evidence of a serious effort to fight corruption. In addition to that, in a letter to the Chairman of Foreign Affairs, on behalf of the Secretary of Defense, dated May 23rd, 2019, long before the July call.

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For this segment of our 2019 Holiday Gift Guide, we put together a thoughtful collection of great gift ideas for the gamers on your list.

Apple has avoided steep 15% tariffs on the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook – at least for now. The US has reportedly reached a limited trade deal with China that will ease the tensions between the two countries, preventing new tariffs and rolling back some existing tariffs.

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Ammalgam shares a report from The Redmond Cloud: Microsoft is refreshing its Windows logo and the icons for many of the operating system's apps. While Microsoft already announced new icons for the Office suite, Microsoft is now redesigning more than 100 icons across the company with new colors, materials, and finishes. We can see a softer modernized design based on their Fluent Design set of principles. You can see the new Windows logo in the images here. This is all part of a bigger push to modernize Microsoft's software and services under the Fluent Design set of principles. These aren't huge changes but slight flourishes to existing icons to make them look congruent when viewed in a series or set. This also seems like part of an attempt to clean up inconsistent icons in the Microsoft Windows OS. Microsoft's icon work is gradual and will continue throughout 2020. Jon Friedman, corporate vice president of design and research at Microsoft, announced the changes in a Medium post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British exit polls are virtually never wrong by more than a dozen seats or so, which means it’s almost certain that Labor suffered an enormous defeat today. Naturally, since everything is about us us us, the question is: what does this mean about us?

In particular, what does it mean that Jeremy Corbyn led Labor to its biggest defeat in decades? For those of you who haven’t been following closely, Corbyn is no neoliberal shill. He is an unabashed lefty socialist who campaigned on an unabashed lefty socialist platform. No triangulating or “Tory lite” for him. He was out to prove that Labor could win by promising the voters a soaring lefty agenda filled with taxing the rich, taking back control of privatized industries, free college, huge infrastructure spending, more money for health care, and so forth.

The result was a mind-boggling defeat. So what does this tell us about American presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders? You’ll probably be hearing a lot of things like this over the next few days:

From people who like Bernie and Liz: Britain is different. In particular, this election was mainly a referendum on Brexit, which overwhelmed every other topic. Corbyn was hurt more than anything else by being wishy washy on Brexit, and there’s just no American counterpart to this. What’s more, Corbyn was also hurt by Labor centrists slagging him and by smears that he was anti-Semitic. You just can’t draw any lessons for American Democrats from a British election that was so different from ours in so many ways.

From people who prefer centrist candidates: Brexit was roughly a 50-50 proposition among the British electorate, but Corbyn got less than a third of the vote. It’s pretty obvious that the vote against him was about far more than Brexit. And don’t kid yourself by listening to special pleading about smears and chaos on the left. That’s the normal stuff of elections, and American candidates will have to deal with the same thing. Corbyn lost because he was a hard left candidate, and the same thing will happen if Democrats nominate one of their own.

There’s some truth to both of these, but I suspect there’s more truth to the second one. The American and British electorates have voted quite similarly for the past several decades, putting in office Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump as against Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Johnson. Given the similarities between BoJo and Trump, as well as the obvious salience of immigration politics in both countries, I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much to worry about.

According to Forbes, Google has sent 1,494 device identifiers to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to help them investigate arsons carried out across Milwaukee, Wisconsin, throughout 2018 and 2019. "The requests, outlined in two search warrants obtained by Forbes, demanded to know which specific Google customers were located in areas covering 29,387 square meters (or 3 hectares) during a total of nine hours for the four separate incidents," the report says. "Unbeknownst to many Google users, if they have 'location history' turned on, their whereabouts are stored by the tech giant in a database called SensorVault." From the report: To investigators, this kind of "geofence" demand is useful, allowing them to go through the data trove provided by Google, look for devices of interest such as a known suspect's phone and ask for more personal information on the user of that mobile. But it's also the kind of search that's been making pro-privacy folk anxious over the last year. Such data grabs, also referred to as "reverse location searches," see the police give Google a timeframe and an area on Google Maps within which to find every Google user within. Google then looks through its SensorVault database of user locations, taken from devices running the tech giant's services like Google Maps or anything that requires the "location history" feature be turned on. The police then look through the list, decide which devices are of interest to the investigation and ask for subscriber information that includes more detailed data such as name, email address, when they signed up to Google services and which ones they used. It's unclear whether or not Google handed over any identifying information, but to Jerome Greco, a public defender in the Digital Forensics Unit of the Legal Aid Society, it's a sign that geofence warrants are overly broad and endanger user privacy. "The number of phones identified in that area shows two key points," he tells Forbes. "One, it demonstrates a sample of how many people's minute-by-minute movements Google is precisely tracking. "Two, it shows the unconstitutional nature of reverse location search warrants because they inherently invade the privacy of numerous people, who everyone agrees are unconnected to the crime being investigated, for the mere possibility that it may help identify a suspect." For what it's worth, Forbes did obtain a search warrant that indicates Google is trying to fight back against overly broad government requests, "but still appears to be handing over innocent people's information as well as legitimate suspect data."

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The UK exit polls show a major win for the Tories – up 51 seats, while Labour is down 71 seats. The history of the poll is that it can be wrong, but not wrong by that much.

Here’s a thread to discuss those results. Since this whole Brexit thing began, I’ve been following UK politics a bit, and it is a puzzle how Labour kept the almost universally hated Corbyn as leader. I guess that will change, if the country still exists once Johnson and the Brexiteers are done with it.

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Apple has acquired UK-based Spectral Edge in an effort to improve iPhone photography.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Today at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, Samsung Electronic's President Young Sohn revealed the company has sold 1 million foldable Galaxy Fold smartphones. Estimates from October pegged sales at that time at 500,000 units. "And I think that the point is, we're selling [a] million of these products," Sohn said. "There's a million people that want to use this product at $2,000." Today's conversation at Disrupt Berlin focused around growth through innovation. Sohn commented on the sales number while explaining Samsung's process of releasing products to get feedback. He said, in part, if they kept devices like the Fold in labs, they wouldn't get the input they needed.

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The Apple Card's Daily Cash back reward is temporarily double. The Apple Card gives you better debt management tools, but the goal is still for you to spend.

The exit poll for the British election has just been released. Here’s the projection:

• Conservatives: 368
• Labor: 191
• SNP: 55
• Lib Dems: 13
• Other: 26

If the exit poll is accurate, the Conservatives won 56 percent of the seats in Parliament, a considerable increase over their current position. This means Boris Johnson will remain prime minister and Brexit will go forward.

Apple says it's working on a Screen Time Communication Limits bug that allows kids to talk to people they shouldn't be allowed to.

Apple has acquired a startup in the UK that develops technology designed to improve smartphone photography. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple has acquired Spectral Edge for an undisclosed sum.

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If it can keep Donald Trump out of the way, Congress can avoid a government shutdown on Dec. 21, and possibly even avoid having to do another stopgap spending bill. The chairs of the House and Senate appropriations committees have reached an agreement "in principle" on $1.37 trillion in government funding bills.

The agreement came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Appropriations Chair Nita Lowey, and Senate Appropriations Chair Richard Shelby met with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, so whatever they agreed on has his approval, apparently. Both chambers are expected to hold floor votes next week on at least two "minibus" packages, rather than the usual omnibus that includes all 12 necessary spending bills.

Thursday afternoon, the keeper of the House floor schedule, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, said, "It is my hope that we will consider those appropriations bills on the floor on Tuesday; perhaps a series of minibus packages to fund all of government for the remainder of the fiscal year." But that might be getting slightly ahead of things. As of Wednesday, there were still at least 100 open items, and no agreement on border wall spending.

One bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, will definitely be done, with its funding for parental leave for federal workers. It's on the Senate schedule for early next week, and Trump has said he will sign it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission plans to designate 988 as the short dialing code for the United States' suicide-prevention hotline. Much like 911 for general emergencies, 988 could be dialed by anyone undergoing a mental health crisis and/or considering suicide. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can already be reached at 1-800-273-8255 (or 1-800-273-TALK), but the FCC today gave preliminary approval to a plan that would make 988 redirect to that hotline. The commission's unanimous vote approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks public comment on the plan. Once the NPRM is published in the Federal Register, there will be a 60-day period for taking public comments, and the FCC would finalize the plan after considering the public input. It could take another 18 months after that to implement 988 nationwide, depending on what requirements the FCC imposes on phone providers. [...] The proposal would require all telecommunications carriers and interconnected VoIP providers to support 988 on their networks within 18 months, the FCC said. But the FCC noted that it is "seek[ing] comment on all aspects of implementation, including whether a longer or shorter timeframe would be needed to make 988 a reality." Based on the comment-period length and proposed implementation time frame, 988 would be implemented nationwide sometime in late 2021.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has rejected famous YouTuber PewDiePie's mobile game, "Poopdie", from the App Store.

Apple Pay and Express Transit will be available in the Washington, D.C. metro area sometime in 2020.

One of the lasting legacies of the Republicans turning into Trump’s party is that formerly mild-mannered middle-of-the-road Republicans feel they can just let loose with whatever bullshit and lies they feel like excreting. Here’s an example from Rochester, where Republican State Senator Joe Robach, who kept getting elected in a Democrat-majority district, has decided to retire:

“There’s a fight going on even inside the Democratic Party, between the radical far left and mainstream Democrats, that’s not news to anybody, that’s being played out in Washington and New York and California are leading that movement,” Robach said. “That’s also permeated the New York Senate, we have people openly espousing for Communism, something I don’t favor.”

This is from a guy who was part of a legislative body that couldn’t even get marijuana legalization done. But I’m guessing a diet of Fox News and white resentment (is that redundant?), plus the prospect of losing his seat, has soured Robach, so he just lashes out.

There’s a huge dose of IOKIYAR involved here, too. Since the tone and tenor of Trump and Fox News has been adopted wholesale by the Republican Party, and Trump in particular is flooding the zone with just horrible, hateful rhetoric, the media tends to give these kinds of outbursts a pass. They are, after all, dog bites man. If we call a particular Republican initiative “fascist” or “racist”, then the perfumed hankies come out in the press, so none of them will have to inhale the putrid stench of partisanship.

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