Apple is producing new content about Snoopy and other Peanuts characters

Apple has signed a deal with DHX Media that will see the Canadian broadcaster producing new shows, specials and short films about Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang. That includes exclusive short-form content for Apple starring astronaut Snoopy, aimed at getting kids excited about STEM.

Peanuts was created by Charles Schulz, who wrote and illustrated the popular comic strip for five decades, starting in 1950. The characters moved to television in the 1960s with “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” followed by a long list of specials. And they recently returned to the big screen in the computer animated “Peanuts Movie,” which grossed $246 million worldwide.

DHX acquired a controlling stake in the rights to Peanuts last year (the remaining 20 percent stake is still held by the Schulz family).

Apple, meanwhile, has been lining up lots of new content for its upcoming streaming service. Apparently one of its goals is to keep things family-friendly, so Peanuts seems like a good fit. Not that this will be the only children’s programming on Apple — the company has also enlisted Sesame Workshop to produce original content.

By the way, if you only know Peanuts secondhand, through Snoopy dolls or other merchandise, it’s worth revisiting the early strips (restored to print by Fantagraphics), which are among the finest ever made. There, you can fully appreciate Schulz’s art, as well as his pitch-perfect ability to mine humor from Charlie Brown’s bleak outlook and constant heartbreak.

Netflix will create a ‘story universe’ based on the work of Roald Dahl

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Review: Nomad leather AirPod Rugged Case

In my never-ending quest to wrap everything in brown leather, I’m pleased with this AirPod case from Nomad. It’s simple: just a plastic case covered with brown (or black) leather. But I like it.

This will be short.

The Nomad AirPod Rugged Case adds a little character to the sterile AirPod housing. Instead of medical-grade white, the case covers the AirPods in pleasant leather.

The case does two things. One, it makes your AirPod case stand out from the rest, ensuring a friend doesn’t mistake your AirPods for their AirPods. Two, the leather adds nice texture to the case, making it a bit easier to grasp.

That’s it. Short. For $29.99, the Nomad AirPod Rugged Case is a lovely upgrade for the AirPods.

[gallery ids="1757797,1757799,1757798,1757822"]

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Influential Apple analyst cuts iPhone shipment estimates

TF International Securities Apple analyst extraordinaire Ming-Chi Kuo delivered a less than stellar iPhone forecast this week with the straight forwardly titled note, “2019 iPhone shipments likely to be under 190 million units.” The letter puts the number of Apple handsets well below previous analyst predictions of 212 million for next year.

Kuo is largely regarded as the most influential analyst for the company, both with regards to sales figures and a stellar track record of predicting future products, thanks in part to relationships with Apple suppliers. His forecasts have the ability to impact Apple stock, which has already take a hit this past quarter.

“The increase in orders of legacy iPhone models cannot offset the decline of XR and XS series shipments because of the low season impact,” Kuo writes in the note. The analyst also singles out the XR, which many anticipated would be a hit for the company, courtesy of a considerably low price point.

Of course, Apple’s not alone in this. The smartphone industry has been seen an overall decline this past year. After years of explosive growth, things have begun to slow for many. In February, Gartner noted its first year-over-year decline since it began tracking the category. A perceived lack of upgrade worthy features have contributed to a slow down.

That could ultimately be reversed, in part, by the arrival of 5G. A small number of companies have committed to bringing the technology to handsets next year, with Apple’s 5G handset expected to arrive in 2020.

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Influential Apple analyst cuts iPhone shipment estimates

TF International Securities Apple analyst extraordinaire Ming-Chi Kuo delivered a less than stellar iPhone forecast this week with the straight forwardly titled note, “2019 iPhone shipments likely to be under 190 million units.” The letter puts the number of Apple handsets well below previous analyst predictions of 212 million for next year.

Kuo is largely regarded as the most influential analyst for the company, both with regards to sales figures and a stellar track record of predicting future products, thanks in part to relationships with Apple suppliers. His forecasts have the ability to impact Apple stock, which has already take a hit this past quarter.

“The increase in orders of legacy iPhone models cannot offset the decline of XR and XS series shipments because of the low season impact,” Kuo writes in the note. The analyst also singles out the XR, which many anticipated would be a hit for the company, courtesy of a considerably low price point.

Of course, Apple’s not alone in this. The smartphone industry has been seen an overall decline this past year. After years of explosive growth, things have begun to slow for many. In February, Gartner noted its first year-over-year decline since it began tracking the category. A perceived lack of upgrade worthy features have contributed to a slow down.

That could ultimately be reversed, in part, by the arrival of 5G. A small number of companies have committed to bringing the technology to handsets next year, with Apple’s 5G handset expected to arrive in 2020.

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Popular avatar app Boomoji exposed millions of users’ contact lists and location data

Popular animated avatar creator app Boomoji, with more than five million users across the world, exposed the personal data of its entire user base after it failed to put passwords on two of its internet-facing databases.

The China-based app developer left the ElasticSearch databases online without passwords — a U.S.-based database for its international customers and a Hong Kong-based database containing mostly Chinese users’ data in an effort to comply with China’s data security laws, which requires Chinese citizens’ data to be located on servers inside the country.

Anyone who knew where to look could access, edit or delete the database using their web browser. And, because the database was listed on Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases, they were easily found with a few keywords.

After TechCrunch reached out, Boomoji pulled the two databases offline. “These two accounts were made by us for testing purposes,” said an unnamed Boomoji spokesperson in an email.

But that isn’t true.

The database contained records on all of the company’s iOS and Android users — some 5.3 million users as of this week. Each record contained their username, gender, country and phone type.

Each record also included a user’s unique Boomoji ID, which was linked to other tables in the database. Those other tables included if and which school they go to — a feature Boomoji touts as a way for users to get in touch with their fellow students. That unique ID also included the precise geolocation of more than 375,000 users that had allowed the app to know their location at any given time.

Worse, the database contained every phone book entry of every user who had allowed the app access to their contacts.

One table had more than 125 million contacts, including their names (as written in a user’s phone book) and their phone numbers. Each record was linked to a Boomoji’s unique ID, making it relatively easy to know whose contact list belonged to whom.

Even if you didn’t use the app, anyone who has your phone number stored on their device and used the app more than likely uploaded your number to Boomoji’s database. To our knowledge, there’s no way to opt out or have your information deleted.

Given Boomoji’s response, we verified the contents of the database by downloading the app on a dedicated iPhone using a throwaway phone number, containing a few dummy, but easy-to-search contact list entries. To find friends, the app matches your contacts with those registered with the app in its database. When we were prompted to allow the app access to our contacts list, the entire dummy contact list was uploaded instantly — and viewable in the database.

So long as the app was installed and had access to the contacts, new phone numbers would be automatically uploaded.

Yet, none of the data was encrypted. All of the data was stored in plaintext.

Although Boomoji is based in China, it claims to follow California state law, where data protection and privacy rules are some of the strongest in the U.S. We asked Boomoji if it has or plans to inform California’s attorney general of the exposure as required by state law, but the company did not answer.

Given the vast amount of European users’ information in the database, the company may also face penalties under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which can impose fines of up to four percent of the company’s global annual revenue for serious breaches.

But given its China-based presence, it’s not clear, however, what actionable repercussions the company could face.

This is the latest in a series of exposures involving ElasticSearch instances, a popular open source search and database software. In recent weeks, several high-profile data exposures have been reported as a result of companies’ failure to practice basic data security measures — including Urban Massage exposing its own customer database, Mindbody-owned FitMetrix forgetting to put a password on its servers and Voxox, a communications company, which leaked phone numbers and two-factor codes on millions of unsuspecting users.

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Prisma’s new AI-powered app, Lensa, helps the selfie camera lie

Prisma Labs, the startup behind the style transfer craze of a couple of years ago, has a new AI-powered iOS app for retouching selfies. An Android version of the app — which is called Lensa — is slated as coming in January.

It bills Lensa as a “one-button Photoshop”, offering a curated suite of photo-editing features intended to enhance portrait photos — including teeth whitening; eyebrow tinting; ‘face retouch’ which smooths skin tone and texture (but claims to do so naturally); and ‘eye contrast’ which is supposed to make your eye color pop a bit more (but doesn’t seem to do too much if, like me, you’re naturally dark eyed).

There’s also a background blur option for adding a little bokeh to make your selfie stand out from whatever unattractive clutter you’re surrounded by — much like the portrait mode that Apple added to iOS two years ago.

Lensa can also correct for lens distortion, such as if a selfie has been snapped too close. “Our algorithm reconstructs face in 3D and fixes those disproportions,” is how it explains that.

The last slider on the app’s face menu offers this feature, letting you play around with making micro-adjustments to the 3D mesh underpinning your face. (Which feels as weird to see as it sounds to type.)

Of course there’s no shortage of other smartphone apps out there on stores — and/or baked right into smartphones’ native camera apps — offering to ‘beautify’ selfies.

But the push-button pull here is that Lensa automatically — and, it claims, professionally — performs AI-powered retouching of your selfie. So you don’t have to do any manual tweaking yourself (though you also can if you like).

If you just snap a selfie you’ll see an already enhanced version of you. Who said the camera never lies? Thanks AI…

Prisma Labs’ new app, Lensa, uses machine learning to automagically edit selfies

Lensa also lets you tweak visual parameters across the entire photo, as per a standard photo-editing app, via an ‘adjust’ menu — which (at launch) offers sliders for: Exposure, contrast, saturation, plus fade, sharpen; temperature, tint; highlights, shadows.

While Lensa is free to download, an in-app subscription (costing $4.99 per month) can let you get a bit more serious about editing its AI-enhanced selfies — by unlocking the ability to adjust all those parameters across just the face; or just the background.

Prisma Labs says that might be useful if, for example, you want to fix an underexposed selfie shot against a brighter background.

“Lensa utilizes a bunch of Machine Learning algorithms to precisely extract face skin from the image and then retouching portraits like a professional artist,” is how it describes the app, adding: “The process is fully automated, but the user can set up an intensity level of the effect.”

The startup says it’s drawn on its eponymous style transfer app for Lensa’s machine learning as the majority of photos snapped and processed in Prisma are selfies — giving it a relevant heap of face data to train the photo-editing algorithms.

Having played around with Lensa I can say its natural looking instant edits are pretty seductive — in that it’s not immediately clear algorithmic fingers have gone in and done any polishing. At a glance you might just think oh, that’s a nice photo.

On closer inspection you can of course see the airbrushing that’s gone on but the polish is applied with enough subtly that it can pass as naturally pleasing.

And natural edits is one of the USP’s Prisma Labs is claiming for Lensa. “Our mission is to allow people to edit a portrait but keep it looking natural,” it tells us. (The other key feature it touts is automation, so it’s selling the time you’ll save not having to manually tweak your selfies.)

Anyone who suffers from a chronic skin condition might view Lensa as a welcome tool/alternative to make-up in an age of the unrelenting selfies (when cameras that don’t lie can feel, well, exhausting).

But for those who object to AI stripping even skin-deep layers off of the onion of reality, Lensa’s subtle algorithmic fiddling might still come over as an affront.

This report was updated with a correction after Prisma told us it had decided to remove watermarks and ads from the free version of the app so it is not necessary to pay for a subscription to remove them

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Tumblr’s back in the App Store following porn ban announcement

Tumblr is back. Sort of. The social blogging platform reappeared on Apple’s App Store this week, some three weeks after being pulled over child pornography concerns. Ten days ago, the company adopted a scorched earth response to the issue, announcing a blanket ban on adult material as part of a “better, more positive Tumblr.”

The move appears to have paid off on one front, at least. The iOS version has returned to Apple’s hallowed halls with a version history noting that “this particular update[…]includes changes to Tumblr’s Community Guidelines, which prohibit certain kinds of content from being shown on Tumblr.”

I.E. the dirty stuff.

I just went through the 12 most recent pages of my Tumblr archive and these were the only three photos flagged. Two photos of me fully clothed and a picture of my vase ¯_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/dUG5K8lbCy

— Erika Moen (@ErikaMoen) December 3, 2018

The app is still listed as “17+” for “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes/Frequent Intense Sexual Content or Nudity.” The ban is intended to go into full effect on December 17, but the ploy appears to have had the intended effect. Tumblr has already begun flagging adult material via algorithm, leading to some pretty hilarious misfires.

On a more serious side, however, the company’s plans have been a source of consternation among artists and sex workers who have thrived on the platform. It has also led many to speculate that the kinder, gentler, more sanitized Tumblr could ultimately spell doom for the service, moving forward.

Tumblr is owned  by the same parent company as TechCrunch. We’ve reached out to representatives for comment on the new version of the app.

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