TLDR 2019-05-22

Huawei's App Gallery, self-driving postal delivery

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Big Tech & Startups

Huawei has been building a Play Store alternative in plain sight (2 minute read)

Huawei’s App Gallery has been available on Huawei devices for a while now as an alternative to Google’s Play Store. It appears that Huawei had plans for the likely scenario that they had to stop doing business with Google, as is the situation at the moment. While the US ban on companies dealing with Huawei will damage the business, it will not completely stop developers from distributing apps to Huawei users. Using Huawei’s App Gallery, developers now have a marketplace targeted to Huawei users, with 50 million users in Europe alone.

Apple tried to buy Tesla for more than it’s currently worth a few years ago, report says (2 minute read)

Apple offered to buy Tesla at around $240 per share back in 2013. Tesla’s share price has just dipped below the price that Apple was willing to pay for the company six years ago. Both Apple and Google had intentions of purchasing Tesla. Tesla has recently raised billions in funds from the market, so it is unlikely it will be looking at selling anytime soon.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Self-driving trucks begin mail delivery test for U.S. Postal Service (2 minute read)

The US Postal Service started a two-week test transporting mail across three states using self-driving trucks. A safety driver and an engineer will ride with each vehicle to ensure that the test drives run smoothly. The test will involve five round trips that will take about 45 hours each to complete. It is unclear whether mail delivery will continue with the self-driving trucks after the test. No tax dollars were spent on the project. The US is currently facing a driver shortage as the current workforce ages and new drivers are becoming more difficult to recruit. Self-driving trucks would reduce costs while solving the driver shortage issue.

Self-Proclaimed Satoshi Craig Wright Files US Copyright Registrations for BTC White Paper (1 minute read)

Craig Wright, an Australian entrepreneur who claims to be the creator of Bitcoin, has filed copyright registrations for the original Bitcoin white paper. He claims he is the original author of the white paper and Bitcoin code. The Copyright Office receives registrations without verification, and there are no official avenues to challenge a registration. Wright has been steeped in controversy since he has been trying to establish himself as the creator of Bitcoin, which he believes has been ‘bastardized’ by protocol developer groups.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Launching Today: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers (7 minute read)

The Wolfram Engine for Developers implements the full Wolfram Language as a software component that can be plugged into any standard software engineering stack. Developers have access to the full Wolfram Knowledgebase through a free subscription to the Wolfram Cloud. Wolfram Language is designed to be so simple that people would take it for granted that their computer is able to identify objects in images, solve equations, or complete many other tasks. The Wolfram Engine for Developers is free to use for all pre-production and open source projects.

Awesome WASI (GitHub Repo)

This repository contains a collection of things regarding WebAssembly WASI ecosystem. It contains general resources, WASI-compatible runtimes, utilities, WASI programs, articles, podcasts, and resources in Japanese.
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Miscellaneous

Hobbling Huawei: Inside the U.S. war on China’s tech giant (15 minute read)

Many governments fear that if Huawei were to supply the world’s 5G infrastructure, it would give China an unprecedented opportunity to attack critical infrastructure and compromise intelligence sharing with allies. This could have severe military consequences if anyone was ever in a war with China. Huawei continues to maintain that it is a company independent of the government and that it has never been asked to cooperate with any spying operations. It claims that it would refuse these requests if asked. While Huawei may be being truthful at present, vulnerabilities could be easily introduced through software updates, and it is possible that Huawei may be forced to deploy these updates in the future.

Apple tweaks its troubled MacBook keyboard design yet again, expands repair program (2 minute read)

Apple has announced that all MacBooks with the butterfly mechanism will be fully eligible for Apple’s Keyboard Service Program, as long as the model was first sold within the last four years. The keyboard has been redesigned using new materials in the new MacBook Pros announced today. Many Macbooks have been seeing issues with their keyboards and Apple has only recently started to acknowledge the problem. The new keyboard redesign will not be available for older models.
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