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The tech world was full of surprises this week, but you might have missed them in between Justin Bieber (almost) getting punched by Orlando Bloom and talks of a cease-fire in Gaza collapsing. Cops in Florida appear to be tracking Lyft rides; the NY Times says that Apple may be purposefully slowing down your iPhone; and a Wired writer figured out how to break into his neighbor’s apartment using his smartphone. Here are nine of the week’s most interesting tech stories that you might have missed, but definitely shouldn’t have.
Michael Thomsen is Complex's tech columnist. He has written for Slate, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, n+1, Billboard, and is author of Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men. He tweets often at @mike_thomsen.
Is Apple Intentionally Slowing Older iPhones in the Months Before New Models Release?
Every year a new iPhone comes out, and all of the existing models are demoted one level in the obsolete index. In theNew York Times this week, Sendhil Mullainathan looked into the data surrounding Apple’s now legendary program of "planned obsolescence" and found a peculiar twist: Mullainathan says that Internet searches for “iPhone slow” massively rise in the weeks and months surrounding the release of a new model, a remarkably steady annual surge that can be traced back to 2008 and the first official update of the iPhone. Doing a comparable search for the Samsung Galaxy revealed no significant spikes before releases of new models. Is Apple intentionally slowing down iPhones to get users to buy the new model?
Read the story here.
Physicist Chef Invents Ice Cream That Changes Color When You Lick It
As if ice cream weren’t good enough, a Spanish physicist turned chef, Manuel Linares, has managed a minor miracle: he discovered a way to make ice cream change colors every time you lick it. The ice cream responds to the change in temperature and pH levels from the acid on a person’s tongue. So far, the trick only works with one flavor, described as similar to tutti-frutti, but Linares claims to be busy on a new flavor which he promises will be filled with natural aphrodisiacs.
Read the story here.
An App to Break Into Your Neighbor’s House
Apple iPhones have changed a lot about the way we work, play and communicate, and it now appears they could change the way we steal. Reporting for Wired, Andy Greenberg describes a new app, KeyMe, that uses your phone’s camera to create a 3D scan of keys, which can later be used with a 3D printer to create a replica of those keys. The service was originally intended to prevent people from locking themselves out of their cars or homes by creating key scans registered to accounts, which could be downloaded and printed out from handy kiosks in bodegas and hardware stores, but the path to the criminal apocalypse is paved with promises of convenience and security.
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Geneticists Planning to Eradicate All the World’s Predator Species
British philosopher David Pearce has a plan called the Hedonistic Imperative. While it may sound like a never-ending Spring Break, the goal is to find a way to end all suffering on Earth, and not just for humans. One of his most immediate tasks is to use gene-editing techniques to eventually wipe out violent tendencies in the world’s most predatory creatures. “Getting rid of predation isn't a matter of moralising,” Pearce said in an interview with io9’s George Dvorsky. “A python who kills a small human child isn't morally blameworthy. Nor is a lion who hunts and kills a terrified zebra. In both cases, the victim suffers horribly. But the predator lacks the empathetic and mind-reading skills needed to understand the implications of what s/he is doing.”
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Zambia Gets Free Internet Coverage From a Facebook Backed NGO
This week Internet.org announced a new mobile app that would allow anyone within access of a cell signal in Zambia free access to the Internet, or at least a small portion of it. The Facebook-funded non-profit will use mobile data networks to send people with the app information about healthcare, job opportunities, and some basic local news, regardless of whether they pay for data. “We uncovered two main barriers to people connecting to the Internet,” Guy Rosen, product management director for Internet.org told Mat Honan. “The first is affordability. Getting a data plan is too costly for so many people. The second is awareness. People don’t know what they could get on the internet.”
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The Hard Realities of Being an App Developer
Behind the exciting success of Flappy Bird and Snapchat are grueling stories of trying to earn a living by developing apps. This week iOS developer Jared Sinclair offered a sober reminder with a blog post about the first year of work on his well-reviewed RSS reader app, Unread. Developed between July 2013 and February of 2014, Unread occupied a huge amount of Sinclair’s time, which he says took a real toll on his marriage and mental health. After an exciting first month of sales reaching $20,000, the last five months saw sales slow dramatically, taking until June to pass $30,000 in total. “After subtracting 40 percent in self-employment taxes and $350/month for health care premiums (times 12 months), the actual take-home pay from the combined sales of both apps is: $21,000, or $1,750/month,” Sinclair writes. That sum may be workable for a single twenty-something, but for everyone else, that’s a hard sum to pay rent, transportation, groceries, and utilities, and that's considering that Unread is a relative success compared to most App Store releases.
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Power Outages Dampen Twitter Voices In Gaza
This week RT picked up a story about Israel targeting many Gaza reporters and Internet activists, and how they experienced prolonged silences after Israel’s targeting of Gaza’s only power station, effectively knocking out 90 percent of the region’s electricity. Following one particularly popular Twitter voice, teenager Farah Gazan, RT notes how the prolific poster, whose posts were often retweeted tens of thousands of times and who was interviewed by NBC News, had been knocked offline for 24 hours because of the outage. If information is power, controlling its flow during times of military conflict is a strategic imperative. Knocking out the power source for the Internet could be an effective tactic to slow the wave of media accounts that have displayed Israel’s aggression.
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New Oculus Rift Kits Use Repurposed Screens from Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3
Convergence has long been the dream of tech and entertainment investors, but this week the convergence became a little more recognizable. An iFixit teardown of Oculus Rift, picked up by Geek’s Russell Holly, discovered the newest versions of the VR headset is built around the screen of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3. The partnership between Samsung and Oculus has been known for quite some time, but the literal interchangeability of the build materials is a surprise. In a way, it harkens back to the days of garage engineering, when the basic materials for technical wizardry were everywhere, but the skill to make something special required someone special.
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Cops Show Up After Woman Gets a Lyft in Florida
The legality of ridesharing services like Lyft and Uber is up in the air in Florida, with the government threatening to fine drivers as much as $800 for working for either service. This week travel blogger Keri Anderson decided to use Lyft in Florida to see how the service worked and was shocked when police showed up to meet her driver seconds after she’d gotten in the car. While Anderson was not charged with anything, the cop gave her driver citations totaling $600 and warned him that the police would be cracking down on “all your little Lyft friends.”
Read the story here.