AppleMagazine #526

Susan Goodell needed help. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Goodell, CEO of the El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank, would look out the window at the long line of clients picking up the food available that day, while she and others answered calls from others who couldn’t travel to a distribution point. “We were getting just horrible phone calls from our seniors, from people with disabilities, people who were COVID-positive and couldn’t leave their homes to get food,” Goodell said. “We were distributing food here at the site and other sites from about 6 a.m. till about 7 at night. Then, at the end of the day, the staff would pack up food and deliver it to people’s homes.” So, earlier this year, when the food delivery service DoorDash approached…

Job candidates rarely know when hidden artificial intelligence tools are rejecting their resumes or analyzing their video interviews. But New York City residents could soon get more say over the computers making behind-the-scenes decisions about their careers. A bill passed by the city council in early November would ban employers from using automated hiring tools unless a yearly bias audit can show they won’t discriminate based on an applicant’s race or gender. It would also force makers of those AI tools to disclose more about their opaque workings and give candidates the option of choosing an alternative process — such as a human — to review their application. Proponents liken it to another pioneering New York City rule that became a national standard-bearer earlier this century — one that required chain restaurants…

Samsung is planning to build a $17 billion semiconductor factory outside of Austin, Texas, amid a global shortage of chips used in phones, cars and other electronic devices. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has scheduled a press conference this week to make an economic announcement; he is expected to unveil the Samsung investment at that time, according to a person familiar with the plan who wasn’t authorized to speak about it publicly ahead of the official announcement. News of the Samsung announcement was reported earlier by the South Korean news agency Yonhap. The chip shortage has emerged as both a business obstacle and a serious national-security concern. Short supplies of semiconductors kicked off by COVID-era shutdowns have hampered production of new vehicles and electronic devices for more than a year. New questions of…

Apple announced it is suing Israel’s NSO Group, seeking to block the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire company from breaking into Apple’s products, like the iPhone. Apple said in a complaint filed in federal court in California that NSO Group employees are “amoral 21st century mercenaries who have created highly sophisticated cyber-surveillance machinery that invites routine and flagrant abuse.” Apple said NSO Group’s spyware, called Pegasus, had been used to attack a small number of Apple customers worldwide. “State-sponsored actors like the NSO Group spend millions of dollars on sophisticated surveillance technologies without effective accountability. That needs to change,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. NSO Group has broadly denied wrongdoing and said its products have been used by governments to save lives. “Pedophiles and terrorists can freely operate in technological…

In the US alone, the cell phone repair sector is worth an estimated $4 billion with thousands of repair stores existing to help fix iPhones, iPads, and more. Apple’s Self Service Repair program could revolutionize the sector and put the power back into consumers’ hands. INTRODUCING SELF SERVICE REPAIR In recent years, Apple has made it clear that consumers should have their smartphones and tablets fixed by an Apple professional, for fear of having their device broken or tampered with. The company went one step further with iOS 15. If you had your screen repaired by a third-party service provider or a company that wasn’t part of Apple’s authorized repair scheme, Face ID was rendered useless. A number of high-profile organizations rightfully protested the move, and after some backlash the Cupertino company…

NASA launched a spacecraft Tuesday night on a mission to smash into an asteroid and test whether it would be possible to knock a speeding space rock off course if one were to threaten Earth. The DART spacecraft, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a $330 million project with echoes of the Bruce Willis movie “Armageddon.” If all goes well, the boxy, 1,200-pound (540-kilogram) craft will slam head-on into Dimorphos, an asteroid 525 feet (160 meters) across, at 15,000 mph (24,139 kph) next September. “This isn’t going to destroy the asteroid. It’s just going to give it a small nudge,” said mission official Nancy Chabot of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the project. Dimorphos orbits a much…