TLDR 2020-10-14

Netflix has removed free trials across its markets. There are still no contracts, cancellation fees, or commitment requirements for the service. The option has been disappearing from markets around the world since last year. Netflix reached nearly 193 million global subscribers in March. Disney+ also removed its seven-day free trial option in June.

Apple has announced the new range of iPhones. All the new iPhones have 5G capability. The new iPhone 12 has a new case design and it features Apple's A14 chip, two camera lenses, and magnets on its back. The iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max feature a LiDAR sensor that will give the phone better AR capabilities and better quality low-light images. They will also feature an additional camera telephoto lens aimed at serious photographers. The iPhone 12 Pro will have a 6.1-inch screen and start at $999, and the iPhone 12 Pro Max will have a 6.7-inch display and will cost $1,099 for the basic model. An iPhone 12 Mini was announced. It will have a 5.4-inch screen and will be priced starting at $699. The new iPhones won't include a charger or headphones in the box. A new MagSafe charger was announced that can charge the iPhone and Apple Watch at the same time. More announcements are in the article.

Optogenetics is a technology that uses light of different frequencies to control the brain. It has been used to incept memories in mice, decipher brain signals that lead to pain, reverse depression, overwrite memories, and more. Unfortunately, the treatment requires gene therapy and brain surgery to implant optical fibers into the brain. A team of researchers has unveiled an upgraded version of optogenetics that doesn't require surgery. It can be used to reprogram the brains of mice with light pulses that pass through the skulls of mice. The new technique still requires gene therapy, as it is the key to making neurons respond to light.

A tidal disruption event (TDE) is when a star strays too close to a supermassive black hole and tears apart, forming a rotating ring of matter around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays and visible light. Astronomers have recently recorded a TDE, managing to capture data before dust and debris obscured their view. The nature of the emissions from black holes has been previously debated, and this is the first direct evidence showing the source of the emissions. A 25-second artistic animation of a star being sucked into a black hole is available in the article.

Klio is an ecosystem built by Spotify for its large-scale audio intelligence systems. It is an ecosystem for processing audio or binary files at scale. Klio jobs are opinionated data pipelines in Python built upon Apache Beam, tuned for audio and binary file processing.

This course teaches you how to work with the UDP and TCP internet protocols in real-world scenarios. It teaches students to build small networking applications inside the browser using Rust. No previous knowledge of network programming is required, but students should have some experience with Rust syntax.

Usenet, launched in 1980, is a discussion system similar to today's message boards where people talk about everything. It is still active today. A user recently uploaded some of the oldest Usenet posts available to the internet to the Usenet Archive for anyone to browse. The Archive currently hosts 317 million posts from 10,000 unique Usenet newsgroups. There have been other attempts at archiving Usenet posts as future historians and researchers would benefit significantly from the content.

The new iPad Pro's LiDAR scanner makes augmented reality a lot more accurate and stable. It allows the iPad to obtain a precise map of its surroundings, enabling developers to create immersive AR experiences. Developers who use ARKit will automatically get the benefits of the newly improved hardware. Hopefully, innovative apps that take advantage of this technology will be created as more developers learn how to use the technology. The iPad Pro also has new sensors, cameras, and processors, making it a powerful multi-purpose device.