In This Issue

News

Schiller steps down as marketing boss at Apple & iMac hardware refresh

Apple marketing executive and 33-year employee Phil Schiller is stepping down from his gig as marketing boss and will handle App Store and Apple Events. He's also now an "Apple Fellow", joining people like Alan Kay, Bill Atkinson and Steve Wozniak as remaining on the Apple payroll, but not having a formal title or specific job. Greg (Joz) Joswiak is now the senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. Meanwhile, Apple released tweaked 27" iMacs with slightly faster CPUs, better GPUs, 1080p webcam and no more goddamn shitty Fusion drives. Interestingly there's now a $750 option to have the screen come with a matte "nano-texture" coating like the fancy Pro Display XDR.

Twitter investigated by FTC again, Google probed by EU again

Twitter disclosed in an investor document that it's been under FTC investigation since October "after it had linked a database of its users' personal information, which it had for security purposes, with a system used by advertising partners". They took the phone number you gave them for two-factor authentication and let advertisers use it to target you with ads. Yuck, that's not what I gave you my phone number for! Across the Atlantic, Google's getting probed by the EU over its planned acquisition of Fitbit. The EU is worried about "potential outcomes for the advertising market", "effects of the deal on the digital healthcare sector" and "potential for Google to lock competitors out of access to Android users". Thatโ€™s a lot of concerns.

Victoria dumped COVIDSafe & Woolworths makes their own contact tracing tool

Disease riddled Victoria stopped using COVIDSafe as a tool for contact tracing because "the public health unit felt that for a period of time, because they hadn't found value in it in those early cases", according to former federal CMO Brendan Murphy. They're using it now, but yeah, at some point COVIDSafe was more of a distraction than a benefit. On the topic of COVID-19 related apps, Woolworths has developed a QR-code based system where you can voluntarily "check-in" at 11 stores before you enter, so if there's an outbreak at the store you're notified. If the trial goes well it'll be rolled out to all their stores. Woolworths also has a feature on their website called Q-Tracker that lets you see how busy a store is so you can avoid the filthy masses.

Not News

Jackpotting ATMs looks like a heap of fun

One of my earliest memories of a "fuck that was cool" scene in a movie was the bit in Terminator 2 where little boy Connor plugs an Atari portable computer into an ATM, presses a few keys, waits a few seconds and manages to get the ATM to spit out cold hard cash before riding off on a sweet dirt bike with his mate. Almost 30 years later and it looks like someone's figured out how to do that for real. Diebold Nixdorf had to send out an alert to operators of its ATMs that people are drilling holes into the machines, hooking up a "black box" (usually an Arduino of Raspberry Pi that pretend to be the ATM's computer) and getting the ATM to spit out up to "40 bills every 23 seconds". Sickkkkk.

Bargains

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