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Friday, 28 February 2020

Facebook Makes Using Its Messenger App Simple Again

Facebook’s redesign for its Messenger app proves two things: 1) Facebook’s leaning hard into its Stories format after the feature’s success on Instagram; and 2) Yes, those chatbots really were the worst.

March Game Developers Conference Postponed Due to Coronavirus Concerns

The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) that was set to take place from March 16 to March 20 in San Francisco, has been postponed until "later in the summer," event organizers announced today.

After close consultation with our partners in the game development industry and community around the world, we've made the difficult decision to postpone the Game Developers Conference this March.

Having spent the past year preparing for the show with our advisory boards, speakers, exhibitors, and event partners, we're genuinely upset and disappointed not to be able to host you at this time .

We want to thank all our customers and partners for their support, open discussions and encouragement. As everyone has been reminding us, great things happen when the community comes together and connects at GDC. For this reason, we fully intend to host a GDC event later in the summer. We will be working with our partners to finalize the details and will share more information about our plans in the coming weeks.

GDC is the latest event to be canceled due to concerns over the COVID-19 coronavirus, and the announcement comes after many major companies had dropped out of the event. Sony, EA, Microsoft, Blizzard, Unity, and Epic had all said they would not attend.

GDC is one of the biggest gaming conferences in the world, last year attracting approximately 27,000 attendees. The event takes place every spring at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

All paid registrants who signed up to attend GDC will receive a full refund within four to six weeks. Presentations from conference speakers and awards recipients that would have been given at GDC will be made available for free online. Some of the GDC 2020 talks, the Independent Games Festival, and the Game Developers Choice Awards will be streamed on Twitch on March 16 to March 20.

The postponement of GDC comes just a day after Facebook announced that its F8 developer conference has been canceled. F8, which was set to take place on May 5 and 6, was going to be held at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California, which is the same venue Apple uses for WWDC.

WWDC typically takes place in June, with this year's dates likely to be right around June 8 to June 12. Given that Facebook has canceled its May event, it's possible that Apple is considering a similar move. Other major upcoming events in California that are still happening as of this time include E3 in June and Google's I/O conference, set to take place in May.

Earlier this year, Mobile World Congress, a major trade show that takes place in Spain, was canceled, and multiple other events have been shuttered due to coronavirus concerns. The Geneva International Auto Show was canceled today, as were Baselworld and the Geneva watch show, both of which focus on watches.

Several Disney parks, including Shanghai Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland Tokyo Disneyland, and Tokyo DisneySea are also closed.

GDC's postponement announcement was released just after health officials in California confirmed a second case of community spread COVID-19 in the United States caught by a 65-year-old woman who had not traveled and who had not come in close contact with anyone who had the virus.

The second instance of community spread COVID-19 was found in Santa Clara County, which is where Apple's campuses in Cupertino, California are located. The first case of unknown origin, announced earlier this week, was found in Solano County in Northern California.

Tag: COVID-19

This article, "March Game Developers Conference Postponed Due to Coronavirus Concerns" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Is This a Joke?

In the wake of a carpet-bomb of Bloomberg-sponsored memes, The New York Times reported rumblings of nervous activity over at Facebook HQ this week. Several meme accounts, including previous FyreFest shills FuckJerry, had mobilized into an entity called “Meme 2020”; Bloomberg appeared on dozens of feeds with millions…

U.S. Carriers Facing $200M in Fines for Selling Customer Location Data

As expected, the United States Federal Communications Commission today proposed fines against the four major wireless carriers in the United States for improperly sharing and selling real-time customer location information without taking "reasonable measures" to protect against unauthorized access to the data.

In a statement [PDF] released today, the FCC says that T-Mobile should pay the most, while Sprint should pay the least. T-Mobile faces a proposed fine of more than $91 million, while the FCC wants AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint to pay over $51 million, $48 million, and $12 million in fines, respectively.

The fines vary based on the length of time that each carrier sold access to its customer location information without safeguards and the number of entities to which each carrier sold access.

Along with the proposed fines, the statement from the FCC admonishes the four carriers for disclosing customer location data without authorization to third-party entities.

"American consumers take their wireless phones with them wherever they go. And information about a wireless customer's location is highly personal and sensitive. The FCC has long had clear rules on the books requiring all phone companies to protect their customers' personal information. And since 2007, these companies have been on notice that they must take reasonable precautions to safeguard this data and that the FCC will take strong enforcement action if they don't. Today, we do just that," said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. "This FCC will not tolerate phone companies putting Americans' privacy at risk."

All four of the major U.S. carriers sold customer geolocation information to data aggregators like LocationSmart and Zumigo, with those companies then reselling the data to third-party location-based service providers. The data was ultimately provided to law enforcement officials, bounty hunters, bail bondsman, and more.

The FCC says that though exact practices varied, each carrier relied heavily on contract-based assurances that the location-based services providers they worked with would get consent from the customer before accessing the customer's location information, which did not happen.

Carriers had "several commonsense options to impose reasonable safeguards," but ultimately "failed to take the reasonable steps needed to protect customers from unreasonable risk of unauthorized disclosure."

The fines proposed by the FCC today are not final and each carrier will be provided with an opportunity to respond and provide evidence and legal arguments before final fines are imposed.

Tags: Sprint, T-Mobile, FCC, AT&T, Verizon

This article, "U.S. Carriers Facing $200M in Fines for Selling Customer Location Data" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Disney World Returns Fully Working iPhone 11 to Family Weeks After Device Sank to Bottom of Seven Seas Lagoon

A family from Montana has both Apple and Disney to thank for ensuring their recent vacation ended magically after all.

In early October, parents Lisa and Jacob Troyer took their daughter Sophie on a weeklong trip to Disney World to "fulfill a little girl's dream." While there, they took in the Florida sun, went on rides, met Halloween-themed Disney characters, and had all of the fun that one could possibly imagine.

From left to right: Jacob, Sophie, and Lisa Troyer
One not so fun moment came on the final evening of the trip. After attending Mickey Mouse's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party at Magic Kingdom and waiting for a ferryboat to depart the park, Lisa's brand new iPhone 11 fell out of her bag and landed right into the Seven Seas Lagoon, a small body of water in front of Magic Kingdom where Disney operates water-based transportation.

With the iPhone sinking to the bottom of the lake and it being late at night, Lisa believed the chances of getting the device back would be slim.

"I was upset to have lost my phone, and the pictures I had taken that evening of Disney's Halloween party, which had been the main event for our trip," said Lisa. "Our six-year-old daughter was particularly devastated, as pictures of her and Jack Skellington would never materialize; instead, they sat at the bottom of a lagoon."

Seven Seas Lagoon
The next day, Lisa provided her contact information to a Disney World employee, who informed her that the resort had a team of scuba divers that retrieved lost goods every so often. Lisa's hopes remained low, and upon returning to Montana, she purchased a new phone and her family moved on with life as usual.

Almost two months later, Lisa received some missed calls from the Orlando area. Figuring it was a telemarketer, she ignored them. Then came a call from her father-in-law, who let her know that Disney had found her iPhone.

Lisa says the Disney employee mailed the phone to her and, despite being submerged for quite some time, she found the device to be completely functional. "I was able to retrieve all of the pictures from our Disney Halloween night, and besides some sand in my case and a little algae on the cover, the phone seems no worse for the wear," she said, noting that the device was only protected by a thin silicone case.

Lisa's recovered iPhone 11
Impressed with the iPhone 11's water resistance, Lisa wrote about her experience in an email to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who thanked her for sharing the story. Her husband Jacob then relayed the story to MacRumors.

Lisa says her husband has always been "a very devoted Apple product user," revealing that one of the very first gifts he bought for her was the original iPad. She had purchased an iPhone 11 just a few days before traveling to Disney World, and thanks to its water resistance, her family now has photos that will last a lifetime.

Related Roundup: iPhone 11

Tag: Disney

Buyer's Guide: iPhone 11 (Neutral)

This article, "Disney World Returns Fully Working iPhone 11 to Family Weeks After Device Sank to Bottom of Seven Seas Lagoon" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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from MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors - All Stories https://ift.tt/383WdJ2