TLDR 2018-12-11

China's iPhone ban 📱, Google+'s early shutdown 😑, solar geoengineering 🌞

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Big Tech & Startups

Court orders China sales ban on older Apple iPhones in Qualcomm case (2 minute read)

A Chinese court has granted Qualcomm an injunction against Apple in a patent infringement case. The patents affect all devices sold with iOS 11 or earlier, so all iPhones from the 6S through the X. The iPhones are currently still on sale in China, Qualcomm has to file a complaint to the enforcement tribunal to get the ban enforced, and Apple will have a chance to appeal. Apple says "Qualcomm's effort to ban our products is another desperate move by a company whose illegal practices are under investigation by regulators around the world."

Google will shut down Google+ four months early after second data leak (1 minute read)

Google discovered a vulnerability in Google+ that impacted 52.5 million users, who could have had their name, email, occupation and age exposed to developers even if the account was set to private. The vulnerability was discovered during an internal audit, and was live for just 6 days, Google doesn't think anybody exploited it, but they have decided to shut down Google+ early, in April 2019 rather than August 2019 as previously announced. They will also be shutting down the Google+ API within the next 90 days.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Harvard scientists will soon send chemicals into the atmosphere to test whether a last-ditch planet-hacking plan could keep Earth habitable (5 minute read)

Harvard scientists are testing a radical plan to combat global warming: in 2019 they will spray particles into a small part of the sky to help reflect some of the sun's rays back into space. This sort of thing has been observed to work in nature, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 in the Philippines, it released enough sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to bring down the planet's temperature by 0.5 degrees Celsius for 1.5 years. Skeptics say solar geoengineering could harm the ozone layer, disrupt wildlife ecosystems, and lead to military use of weather-altering tech.

Scientists identify vast underground ecosystem containing billions of micro-organisms (3 minute read)

Researchers at the Deep Carbon Observatory have been conducting a 10-year study of subterranean life on Earth; it turns out there is way more than previously thought. They estimate that despite extreme heat, no light, little nutrition and intense pressure, there are between 15 billion and 23 billion tons of micro-organisms living underground. No matter how deep scientists dig, they keep finding more life; they've already dug down 5 kilometers. Some micro-organisms live for thousands of years, barely moving except with shifts in tectonic plates, while others don't use any energy from the sun, relying on chemical processes to produce methane to replace or repair broken parts. One researcher says "We must ask ourselves: if life on Earth can be this different from what experience has led us to expect, then what strangeness might await as we probe for life on other worlds?"
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Practical AI (Github Repo)

This is a cool Github repo by an Apple AI researcher that contains IPython notebooks that walk you through everything you need to know about AI, starting with "What's a notebook?" all the way through implementing computer vision algorithms. The repo isn't finished yet, it looks like he's still working on some of the more advanced topics like building recommendation systems, but what he has so far is really awesome and he's been updating it pretty much daily.

Frontend Weekly (Newsletter)

Frontend Weekly is a well curated list of articles, tutorials, and tools about front end web development (with an emphasis on Javascript). If you're one of the trendy people who like to keep up with the latest frameworks and tools, this is a great resource.

Awesome UI Component Library (Github Repo)

I was looking around for a good React component library to use for the TLDR website, when I stumbled upon this excellent curated list. It has a fairly comprehensive list of UI component libraries for React, Vue, Angular, Ember, and Mithril, and each library comes with a description and a Github star count.
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Miscellaneous

Ungrabbed (Web Tool)

This is a cool site that periodically puts out a list of good domain names that aren't taken. For example today they put out a bunch of one word .ai domains, like kept.ai and fossil.ai that (as I'm writing this) are still available. Pretty cool site if you like to window shop domains.
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