After a light weekend there has been a lot of very interesting things the last few days, so much so that the Android 11 beta didn’t even make the cut today. Here are a few things that caught my interest in the first part of this week.
The Right Approach to Using Fitness Trackers
I wrote about Fitness tracking, and what I consider the right approach to using them after an article was published recently about how they can be inaccurate in many situations.
Telus Launches 1.5 Gigabit internet plan for some reason
Telus has announced a new internet plan for customers in western Canada called PureFibre 1.5 Gigabit Internet. As that would suggest, the speed on that plan is 1.5 Gigabit download. Interestingly, the upload speed is “only” 940 megabit, which makes this only PureFibre plan Telus offers that does not have symmetrical upload and download speeds.
This is almost certainly a response to Shaw’s recent announcement of a 1 gigabit internet plan from a few weeks ago, and a way for Telus to maintain their ability to claim the fastest home internet plans. I’m all for better internet, but a plan like this is very excessive and unnecessary for most people. Equipment that can actually take advantage of a speed over 1 gigabit is very expensive. Telus didn’t immediately make clear whether or not the advanced Wifi modem they offer even supports that kind of speed, though I would assme it does. However, based on other devices on the market, the modem can get 1.5 gigabit from the internet, but can’t actually send more than 1 gigabit to any individual device. We really are at a point where the technology isn’t capable of supporting the speeds.
I can’t really recommend anyone actually spend the $165/month Telus is charging for this plan. It is too much, and nothing can take advantage of it. It only exists for Telus to say they are faster than Shaw.
Bell will trial using AI to block spam calls
We all hate spam calls, so this is good news. Bell has received approval from the CRTC to conduct a 90 day trial for a system that will use artificial intelligence to monitor telecommunications traffic to “flag anomalies” in an attempt to stamp out spam calls. This is just a trial to see how well this method works, but every little bit helps.
Twitch flooded by copyright claims for old clips
Video streaming service Twitch has received a massive number of copyright takedown notices on older clips on the service. Twitch mostly serves as a livestreaming platform where videos are not stored long term, but users watching the stream can create “clips” of videos, usually 30 second snippets to capture something interesting/good/funny that happened in the video. Those clips do live on in channels. Over the past weekend, the service was flooded with a very large number of takedown notices from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) which is the governing body of the music industry in the US. The RIAA is the association that successfully sued services like Napster out of existence in the early 2000’s when music piracy was at its height. The organization has apparently now turned to Twitch.
There is a much longer conversation about copyright here, and most of this is around US law, which is another thing entirely, but this has become a big issue for Twitch creators overnight. These clips are not created by the Twitch streamer themselves, but rather people watching the video. This has the potential to get very messy very fast.
Reliable sources say Apple will announce a processor shift to ARM at WWDC
There will be a lot more to say about this once there are official details at WWDC in less than 2 weeks, but this is still a big story. Apple is apparently planning to announce the beginning of the transition to Apple designed ARM processors for its Mac computers, with the first products being released in 2021. Currently Mac computers all run Intel processors, like virtually every personal computer in the world. It still isn’t clear what this transition will look like, and whether or not every Mac will eventually run on an ARM processor or whether or not this will be for certain types of devices. I’ll have more to say on this once the details all hit.
The company that makes batteries for Tesla in China has spoiled details on the “Million Mile Battery”
Electric vehicles are the future, and one of the key components on making them cheaper and more sustainable than traditional gas vehicles is battery technology. Boiled down to the simplest terms, the batteries in electic vehicles are just advanced versions of batteries found in devices like phones and laptops, just obviously much larger. That means they are also subject to the battery wear we see on phones and laptops. This means that over time, the total capacity of the battery will decrease, which will reduce range in an electric vehicle. Tesla doesn’t specifically state the longevity of their batteries, but the Telsa Warranty in Canada states that the battery should hold 70% of its capacity after 8 years or 192,000km, whichever comes first. Tesla has invested billions of dollars into researching improvements in battery technology to improve the situation, and the “million mile battery” is something we’ve been hearing about for years. Tesla had been rumoured to hold a Battery Day event this spring to detail advances in the million mile battery, but that was apparently pushed back because of COVID-19. However the company that makes Telsa batteries for the Chinese market has released a lot of details on this million mile battery, stating that this battery could be warrantied for sixteen years or 1.24 million miles (almost exactly 2 million kilometers). This has the potential to mean the battery could last the entire lifetime of the vehicle, instead of potentially needing to be replaced.