Month: June 2020

Enlarge / Minneapolis police fire tear gas at those protesting the May 25 death of George Floyd. (credit: Chad Davis / Flickr)

Millions of law enforcement documents—some showing pictures of suspects, bank account numbers, and other sensitive information—has been published on a website that holds itself out as an alternative to WikiLeaks, according to a security news website KrebsOnSecurity.

DDOSecrets, short for Distributed Denial of Secrets, published what it said were millions of documents stolen from more than 200 law enforcement groups around the country. Reporter Brian Krebs, citing the organization National Fusion Center Association (NFCA), confirmed the validity of the leaked data. DDOSecrets said the documents spanned at least a decade, although some of the dates in documents suggested a timespan twice as long.

Dates on the most recent documents were from earlier this month, suggesting the hack that first exposed the documents happened in the last three weeks. The documents, which were titled “BlueLeaks,” were published on Friday, the date of this year’s Juneteenth holiday celebrating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the Confederacy. BlueLeaks had special significance in the aftermath of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating a handcuffed Black man to death when the officer placed his knee on the man's neck for 8 minutes and 45 seconds.

At today's 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple dropped the first teaser trailer for Foundation, a new TV series for Apple TV adapted from Isaac Asimov's seminal Foundation series of novels. The new show, which stars Jared Harris and Lee Pace, had already begun filming when the global pandemic shut down production in March. The teaser offers our first glimpse of what this highly anticipated series will look like, as well as a few peeks behind the curtain on set.

(Mild spoilers for the first book in the Foundation series below.)

The series started out as eight short stories by Asimov that appeared in Astounding Magazine between 1942 and early 1950, inspired in part by Edward Gibbons' History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The first four of those stories were collected, along with a new introductory story, and published as Foundation in 1951. The next pair of stories became Foundation and Empire (1952), with the final two stories appearing in 1953's Second Foundation. Asimov's publishers eventually convinced him to continue the series, starting with two sequels: Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986). Next came a pair of prequels: Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993), the latter published posthumously. (Asimov died in 1992.)

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook starts the WWDC 2020 keynote.

Today, Apple made one of its biggest announcements in years: that Macs will begin to transition away from Intel processors. The company also outlined plans for new versions of iOS, macOS, and watchOS. But while those were the headlining changes, there are a bunch of smaller announcements that are worth looking into.

We're not listing every little feature in iOS right now—that's for the review later this year, after all—but we will flag a few of the bigger standalone announcements that we didn't get to during our event coverage. We'll start with tvOS, which is getting its biggest software update in a good long while.

tvOS gets expanded multi-user support and picture-in-picture

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  This is the panel used for multi-user switching. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]

tvOS, the software that drives Apple TV set-top-boxes, is getting what might be its most substantial new version since 2017. The headlining feature is arguably expanded multi-user support, though Apple has not been crystal clear on exactly what that support will entail yet. Still, expanding that has been one of the most requested features for the Apple TV, so we're looking forward to seeing more.