This super creepy Tom Waits number pops into my head every time I read about another Apple content acquisition. For a billion-dollar project from one of the world’s biggest companies, the company’s upcoming streaming service is shaping up to be a strange collection of original content. Of course, I’m not really sure what I expected after Apple unleashed Carpool Karaoke and Planet of the Apps on the world. Neither were the kind of thing that imbues you with confidence in a company’s programming choices. I wrote a review of sorts of the former here, but was willing to give the…
Author: geekfenceblogger
The Office of Management and Budget reports that the federal government is a shambles — cybersecurity-wise, anyway. Finding little situational awareness, few standard processes for reporting or managing attacks, and almost no agencies adequately performing even basic encryption, the OMB concluded that “the current situation is untenable.” All told, nearly three quarters of federal agencies have cybersecurity programs that qualified as either “at risk” (significant gaps in security) or “high risk” (fundamental processes not in place). The report, which you can read here, lists four major findings, each of which with its own pitiful statistics and recommendations that occasionally amount…
AWS today announced that its Neptune graph database, which made its debut during the platform’s annual re:Invent conference last Novemberr, is now generally available. The launch of Neptune was one of the dozens of announcements the company made during its annual developer event, so you can be forgiven if you missed it. Neptune supports graph APIs for both TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL, making it compatible with a wide variety of applications. AWS notes that it built the service to recover from failures within 30 seconds and promises 99.99 percent availability. “As the world has become more connected, applications that navigate large, connected…
Apple announced today that it’s placed a straight-to-series order for Dickinson, a show that will star Hailee Steinfeld as poet Emily Dickinson. Steinfeld is an actress and singer who was Oscar-nominated for her performance in True Grit and more recently performed in Pitch Perfect 2 and 3. Dickinson, meanwhile, is generally considered one of the great American poets, but given her reputation as an eccentric recluse, her life doesn’t seem to be the stuff of great drama (a recent biopic was called A Quiet Passion). It sounds like this won’t be a standard biography, however — Dickinson is being billed as a…
Blockchain, cryptocurrencies and digital assets took center stage at the Code Conference today. During a panel, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said Bitcoin could end up becoming the “Napster of digital currency,” noting how Napster “showed us what’s possible, but in the end, it was Spotify and iTunes and Pandora that won the day because they engaged with regulators,” he said onstage at the Code Conference today. But it’s a bit of the Wild West out there regarding blockchain and cryptocurrency. In terms of when we’ll see regulation around cryptocurrencies and the blockchain, it will be years, Kathryn Haun, a professor…
Nvida launched a monster box yesterday called the HGX-2, and it’s the stuff that geek dreams are made of. It’s a cloud server that is purported to be so powerful it combines high performance computing with artificial intelligence requirements in one exceptionally compelling package. You know you want to know the specs, so let’s get to it: It starts with 16x NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. That’s good for 2 petaFLOPS for AI with low precision, 250 teraFLOPS for medium precision and 125 teraFLOPS for those times when you need the highest precision. It comes standard with a 1/2 a terabyte of memory…
Stitch Fix CEO Katarina Lake did not express much concern over Amazon and its entrance into fashion with Prime Wardrobe at the Code Conference today. Lake says that while she does think about Amazon, that Amazon offers a “fundamentally different” value proposition. With Amazon, Lake said, the value proposition is about having a “sea of choice.” With Stitch Fix,”in a lot of ways ours is almost the opposite,” she said. Stitch Fix is an e-commerce company that aims to figure out your personal style, and then send you a handful of items the company thinks you’ll like. As a side…
Coffee Meets Bagel scored a $12 million Series B this week. The round, led by U.K. VC firm Atami Capital, brings the popular dating app’s total up to just under $20 million since launching back in 2012. The San Francisco-based dating app has worked to distinguish itself from competitors like Bumble and Tinder by limiting the number of matches it offers during a 24-hour window. Late last year, it expanded its offering with a video feature, to add an extra dimension to profiles. This month, it introduced additional CMB Experiences to bring users together in the real world. Of course,…
Google is adding a small but useful feature to Google Calendar. Starting today, when you change or delete an event, a dialog box now pops up that allows you to attach a short message to the event to explain why you are making the change and what’s changing. Here is how this new feature will work: when you make a change, a dialog box will now pop up and allow you to enter a message for your guests. On the event page in Google Calendar itself — and in the email that alerts your guests of the change —…
Facebook’s Messenger Kids application, which allows children under 13 to chat with parents’ approval, is today rolling out a small, but notable change – it no longer requires that the children’s parents be Facebook friends with one another, in order for the children to connect. This solves one of the problems with the app’s earlier design, where it operated more like an extension of a parents’ own social circle, instead of one for their child. Of course, parents still have to approve every contact their child adds, as usual. As any parent understands, there are always going to be those…