NEWS
Apple launches a bug bounty program
Apple has decided to launch a bug bounty program. These sorts of schemes are common for many tech companies - you find a security fault in their software and they give you money for that hard work. Apple is very late to the party in implementing theirs, but have kicked it off during a speech at the Black Hat conference today. The largest bounty Apple will pay out is $200,000 if you manage to find a vulnerability in the secure boot firmware of any of their products, a sign of how seriously Apple takes this sort of bug.
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Gwyneth Paltrow is gonna be on Apple's TV show about apps
In not so cool Apple news, their TV show in development, "Planet of the Apps" (what an awful name) has apparently recruited Gwyneth Paltrow as a mentor for the contestants, alongside the gigantic douchebag that is will.i.am and Gary Vaynerchuk - a man who I thought died 10 years ago. I can't wait for this show to come out, so I can mercilessly mock it, then immediately regret doing so after I realise I never made a fucking TV show, who am I to publicly criticise these people?
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Apple gets 100 influential designers to side with it in court over Samsung
How much Apple news in one issue of the Sizzle is too much Apple news? I hope it isn't three, because this is worth a mention. Samsung is arguing that $399m of the $598m it paid Apple for ripping off its designs (back in 2012!) is unfair and it shouldn't have to pay it or pay as much. Apple has managed to get over 100 prestigious designers, like Calvin Klein, Paul Smith and Alexander Wang, the design director for Bentley Motors and others to say that no, Apple does deserve the entire thing and the shape of things is important and worth money. You can read the entire brief Apple gave the US Supreme Court.
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Facebook to weed out clickbait in everyone's feed
Facebook is tweaking its news feed algorithm again, this time to weed out clickbait headlines. Users have told Facebook that the "celebrity did something, you don't believe what happened next!" style of headlines in articles shits them, so Facebook built a system that looks at the headline of a link and the content of the link to determine it's clickbaityness. If it's a stupid headline, the link will appear lower in Facebook user's feeds and hence, get less clicks, hopefully leading to websites ending the use of such headlines.
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Dropbox releases betas of iOS and Android version of Paper
Dropbox's attempt to create a collaborative word processor is now out for iOS and Android. Paper is still in beta, but anyone can give it a shot. If you're looking for an Evernote replacement, Paper may be it, now that there's native mobile apps for it. I don't mind the look of Paper to be honest - I can see it being popular with workplaces that have already adopted Dropbox as a filesharing solution as they can use the same login. But it's also got stiff competition from Google and Microsoft. Definitely worth looking in to if you're always on the hunt for new productivity tools.
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COOL SHIT
Pics of an iPhone 7 test unit
Here's a *fourth* fucken Apple story, because there's too many interesting things I wanted to share. This one though, isn't that important. It's just a leak of the iPhone 7's design. This looks like a pretty recent testing phone from Apple, probably pilfered off a factory line (they'd have to be building the final product now in order to have 10m+ ready for sale on day one in late-September). It looks pretty much the same as the iPhone 6s, with a bigger camera lens and *shock* no headphone socket. I dunno if I want this iPhone unless the camera is balls out amazing.
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Huawei P9 review
Speaking of balls out amazing smartphone cameras, Ausdroid has a review of the Huawei P9. It's that phone with two cameras on it, made in partnership with Leica. Apparently it's not that amazing though. A very good camera, but not a standout category leader. The Samsung Galaxy S7 takes a better picture. Fine phone though, just not, like, the best.
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Raspberry Pi 3 boot firmware tweaked & booting off LAN coming to be a thing
The Raspberry Pi foundation has been hard at work tweaking the boot modes available in the firmware of the Raspberry Pi 3 and this has lead to the ability for the Raspberry Pi 3 to boot off a network. It's still in beta, but pretty damn cool. The only thing cooler would be topping it off the ability to power itself over PoE without any additional hardware - 100% plug and play solution! There's a HAT for the Pi to operate off PoE though, if you're interested.
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Here endeth the sizzle (until Monday!)
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Today's subject line is from Chinese Bombs, by Blur. Like The Sizzle? Tell your friends!