There are a lot of reasons to use a VPN, even if your internet habits aren’t the type to trigger government surveillance. Maybe you want to watch geoblocked sports or avoid run-of-the-mill Wi-Fi snooping. Your privacy concerns count, too. But VPN tech can be tricky to sort through, and VPN companies may not be inclined to steer you straight. That’s prompted members of Congress to call for an investigation of that whole industry. CNET’s Rae Hodge gets into all that, and she has a request as well: “I am also calling for VPN reviewers to do better at investigating the VPNs they review.” 

Her article is among the many in-depth features and thought-provoking commentaries that appeared on CNET this week. So here you go. These are the stories you don’t want to miss.  

ExpressVPN Is a Case Study in Why VPN Reviews Require More Legwork

Commentary: Members of Congress are right to ask the FTC to investigate the VPN industry.   

Marvel’s Visual Effects Artists Speak Out About Intense Working Conditions

A real secret war is taking place behind the scenes with overworked, underpaid and underappreciated visual effects artists.

Risky Business: Parents, Beware When You Make Your Kids Into Influencers  

Kids are being exploited online every day — sometimes at the hands of their parents.

Scientists Peer Through Warped Space, Identify 12-Billion-Year-Old Dark Matter

These halos from the early universe could lead to a new era of cosmology.   

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 4 and Z Fold 4 Need to Make These Changes

Commentary: High prices, limited custom software and design quirks still make foldables a tough sell. But that could shift at the Aug. 10 Samsung Unpacked event.  

Why ‘The Orville: New Horizons’ Deserves More Attention

Commentary: It’s the sci-fi series that “out Star Treks” Star Trek. 

Social Media and Chronic Illness: An Impact That Transcends a Screen

Online interaction has played an instrumental role in chronic illness awareness and advocacy. Here’s how people are using social media platforms to make a difference.    

How NASA’s Mars Rover, and a Mohawk, Changed My Life

Curiosity touched down on Mars a decade ago, setting a new course for human exploration — and my career.

Finally, Somebody Made a Great Show About Lego

The charming Australian version of Lego Masters improves on the US show in every conceivable way, and it’s free on Tubi.  

The post 9 Great Reads From CNET This Week: VPNs, Marvel, Dark Matter and More first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

It seems like just yesterday that 5G was barely emerging from the wings, a breakthrough technology that started out in a very few phones and on only a sprinkling of city blocks, with a host of “yeah, but” limitations. Now it’s here and almost… ordinary.

It’s a step up for sure, and it’s so much easier to come by now. But is it something you really need right this very moment in your very next phone? CNET’s Lisa Eadicicco delves into that complicated topic and lays out the reasons for and against. Meanwhile, Mike Sorrentino has some advice for the last remaining holdouts using 3G phones.

Those articles are among the many in-depth features and thought-provoking commentaries that appeared on CNET this week. So here you go. These are the stories you don’t want to miss.

Your Next Phone Really Doesn’t Need 5G… Yet

5G or no 5G? The answer depends on a few factors, like your budget, which carrier you have and how long you plan to hold onto your new phone.

What’s Next For Webb? Scientists Have Already Queued to Use NASA’s New Telescope

Astronomers are getting their hands on JWST data. Here’s what you can expect to see in the near future.  

I’m an Apple Fitness Plus Addict Without an Apple Watch

Commentary: Apple’s platform has transformed my relationship with exercise, but the focus on Watch metrics is out of sync with my fitness goals. 

When Your 3G Phone’s Disconnected, Here Are Your Options

As 3G service ends in the US, we ask the major carriers if disconnected customers still have to pay and if free phones are still available.  

High Gas Prices Are Revving Up This Online Anti-Car Movement  

An online community questions society’s obsession with automobiles.

Ms. Marvel Creators Talk Identity, Culture and That Surprise Ending  

“Along the way people are learning so much about our faith and our culture,” says executive producer Sana Amanat. 

Did the Webb Space Telescope Find the Oldest Galaxy Ever? Maybe but It’s Complicated

The galaxy is probably the most distant ever found, but it’s not the oldest — it’s probably the youngest!

Exercising After COVID-19: How I’m Continuing My Weight Loss at Home 

I was keen not to let COVID-19 disrupt my workout regime more than necessary. Here’s what I did.   

Why Fiber Is the Key to Getting Faster 5G Everywhere

The government’s $42.5 billion investment in physical broadband infrastructure could be a game-changer for getting 5G to more places, from suburbs to rural communities.

The post 9 Great Reads From CNET This Week: 5G Phones, Webb Telescope, Apple Fitness and More first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

It’s been 15 years since the iPhone arrived on the scene, and Apple’s smartphone is still going strong. It’s the backbone of the company’s earnings, a key product in the Apple ecosystem and a boon companion to millions of people. 

This week we’ve been looking to both the past and the future. CNET’s Connie Guglielmo recounts watching Steve Jobs on stage at the iPhone’s 2007 debut, and we’ve also resurfaced Kent German’s review of that original iPhone. Lisa Eadicicco, meanwhile, delves into the emerging tech that’s likely to continue the iPhone’s evolution, Patrick Holland looks at how the phone fits with Apple’s software and services, and Ian Sherr assesses the tech industry’s efforts to get a little of that mojo for themselves.

Those articles are among the many in-depth features and thought-provoking commentaries that also appeared on CNET this week. So here you go. These are the stories you don’t want to miss.

The iPhone’s Future Could Depend on These Breakthrough Technologies

Apple’s smartphone is turning 15. Experts say technologies like lidar and AI will define its future.

The World’s Biggest NFT Festival vs. the Crypto Crash of 2022

Major crypto coins are down nearly 70% from the beginning of the year — but you wouldn’t be able to tell that at NFT.NYC.

Period-Tracking Apps Are Just the Beginning of Post-Roe Data Concerns  

Experts say it’s not just apps focused on reproductive health that could put people in danger.

Buying Groceries Online: Is It Cheaper Than Shopping In-Store?

We investigated whether it’s less expensive to buy groceries through Amazon Fresh, FreshDirect or a popular brick-and-mortar grocery store. The answer was surprising. 

Debate Streamers Are Talking People Out of Dangerous Conspiracy Theories

The newest tool against misinformation online is people who love to argue. 

Billions Behind a Lunar Dream: Why NASA’s Mega Moon Rocket May Prove ‘Unsustainable’   

Commentary: Let’s talk about the fiscal footprint of NASA’s latest lunar endeavor, Artemis.   

Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Shouldn’t Need an FE Model: Here’s Why

Commentary: Samsung’s Galaxy S21 FE struggles to stand out in the company’s broad phone lineup. 

Congress’ Bid to Rein In Big Tech Needs a Push Over the Finish Line 

With a little more than a month left before Congress goes on summer break, it’s do or die for lawmakers looking to impose new regulations on tech giants.

State and Local Activism Needs You: Where to Start  

Commentary: Grassroots lobbying and volunteer opportunities abound. Here’s how to step up and what to expect.  

The post 9 Great Reads From CNET This Week: iPhone at 15, NFTs, Privacy Post first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO and CDC websites.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek spoke publicly on Sunday about the controversy that’s blown up over the Joe Rogan podcast and COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, sparked by an ultimatum from famed rocker Neil Young.

Ek said in a blog post that doctors, scientists and Spotify subscribers have raised questions about the company’s policies and the “lines we have drawn between what is acceptable and what is not.” He acknowledged that Spotify hasn’t been transparent about its policies regarding content that it hosts.

“It’s become clear to me that we have an obligation to do more to provide balance and access to widely-accepted information from the medical and scientific communities guiding us through this unprecedented time,” Ek said.

Spotify has a $100 million deal as the exclusive platform for Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, which in the past year has hosted a number of conspiracy theorists and people who oppose vaccines. These guests have spread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and unproven treatments for the disease.

COVID-19 vaccines have been proven safe and effective against severe disease, hospitalization and death.

Later on Sunday, Rogan weighed in on the misinformation issue as well. In a nearly 10-minute video shared in an Instagram post, he pledged that he would try to balance controversial viewpoints with other perspectives to guide himself and listeners to a “better point of view.”

“I’m not trying to promote misinformation, I’m not trying to be controversial,” Rogan said. “I’ve never tried to do anything with this podcast other than just talk to people and have interesting conversations.”

In his blog post, Ek didn’t mention Rogan or Young by name. But both are central to the uproar over the content that Spotify, the world’s largest music streaming service by subscribers, presents to its listeners and the responsibilities that go along with that.

Earlier this month, a letter from more than 250 medical professionals, professors and researchers called on Spotify to stop the spread of COVID misinformation on its platform and pointed specifically to Rogan’s podcast. Since then, more than a thousand other professionals have signed the letter.

Then on Jan. 24, Young gave Spotify a choice: It could host his music or Rogan’s podcast, but not both. Last week, Young’s albums and songs disappeared from the music service.

On Saturday, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell said she, too, would remove all her music from Spotify over Rogan’s podcast.

Along the way, the hashtag #DeleteSpotify began trending on social media, and people said they were canceling their Spotify subscriptions. 

“SPOTIFY has become the home of life threatening COVID misinformation,” Young wrote in another letter posted to his website on Wednesday, in which he also called on other artists and record companies to move off the Spotify platform. “Lies being sold for money.”

In his blog post on Sunday, Spotify’s Ek said he’s looking to strike a balance between supporting creator expression and protecting the safety of the service’s listeners.

“It is important to me,” Ek said, “that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”

What Spotify’s doing

Ek noted that Spotify has had rules and policies in place for years but hasn’t been transparent about them, which led to questions about their application to serious issues including COVID-19.

Spotify is taking three steps, Ek said:

• It’s publishing its long-standing platform rules designed to guide creators, “from those we work with exclusively to those whose work is shared across multiple platforms.” Now posted in Spotify’s online newsroom, they’ll live permanently on the main Spotify website and are being localized into various languages.  
• It’s working toward adding a content advisory to any podcast episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19. The advisory will direct listeners to Spotify’s COVID-19 hub, which includes news reports from ABC News, Politico, the BBC World Service and others.
• It will begin testing ways to highlight the platform rules in its creator and publisher tools to raise awareness around what’s acceptable and help creators understand their accountability for the content they post.

In his Instagram post, Rogan said he agrees with Spotify’s intention to put a disclaimer at the start of controversial podcasts, particularly those related to COVID, that tells listeners to speak with their physicians and that the opinions expressed are contrary to the consensus of experts.

“Also, I think if there’s anything I’ve done that I could do better is have more experts with differing opinions right after I have the controversial ones,” Rogan said. “I most certainly would be open to doing that.”

Spotify’s platform rules address issues such as dangerous, deceptive and illegal content, the penalties applied to rule breakers and how to report an issue.

Among the examples it gives of dangerous content is false or deceptive information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health, including falsely asserting that AIDS, COVID-19 or cancer are a hoax or not real, falsely suggesting that vaccines approved by local health authorities are designed to cause death, or encouraging people to purposely get infected with COVID-19 in order to build immunity to it.

In the past two years, there have been more than 374 million cases of COVID-19 around the world and more than 5.6 million deaths, according to the coronavirus resource center at the Johns Hopkins University.

Public health agencies have made it clear that COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at reducing the impact of the coronavirus, and other public health measures like masking and social distancing have helped slow the spread COVID-19.    

Spotify didn’t immediately respond to a request for additional comment.

CNET’s Oscar Gonzalez contributed to this report.

The post Joe Rogan COVID misinformation: Spotify won’t censor, says CEO first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

If you just received a new iPhone 12, Apple Watch or iPad, you might not have gotten immediate satisfaction — Apple was having some iCloud issues. That’s likely the result of a large volume of people trying to set up or update iCloud accounts following the gift-giving of the Christmas holiday. 

The issue started early on Christmas Day, according to the iCloud account and sign-in entry on Apple’s system status page. More than a day later, as of late morning PT Saturday, the Apple system status page indicated that the issue with the storage service remained “ongoing.” But by 2 p.m. PT Saturday, the iCloud issue was marked “resolved.” No specifics were given about how widespread the problems might have been, only that “some users were affected.”

The company also noted issues with Apple ID sign-in. In a Twitter reply later on Christmas Day to the query of an Apple user looking to set up an iPad and a HomePod Mini, Apple Support acknowledged problems, saying the company was “experiencing a high capacity at this time which is impacting your ability to set up iCloud.” The Apple Support tweet said to “please try back in a couple of hours.”

The holidays are typically a busy time for device activations as people unwrap gifts of phones, tablets, smartwatches, smart speakers and other electronics and look to get them set up right away.

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.

See also: Apple One subscription bundle: Everything included and how to sign up now

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The post Apple iCloud issues follow Christmas activation rush first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

When I was a kid and it came time for family snapshots, my dad was always heads-down. Chin to chest, eyes locked onto a camera grasped in both hands at waist height. Left hand to steady, right hand to work the controls.

This was no point-and-shoot. Not like the plastic Kodak Instamatic 44 I would receive as a 12th birthday present, or the double-lensed, autofocusing iPhone 11 I carry now. It was a solid, serious, fascinating machine: a Yashica-D twin-lens reflex.

And it was ungainly as hell. The way the viewfinder reversed the image left to right. The buttons and knobs. The heft. That posture.

Think of it as a squat, upside-down periscope.

That was a long time ago now. My dad stopped using that camera by the end of the ’70s, around the time I was heading off to college, but it took a lot of photos over the preceding two decades. Picnics. Holidays. Definitely not action shots.

I’ve been rummaging through some of those photos, and lots more besides, thinking about those distant days and about my dad, Howard. He died in July at the age of 85, having outlived my mom by four years, which isn’t something he’d expected. He was still on his home turf in Portland, Maine, where he’d been born and lived most of his life. We were able to have a small graveside service for him, amid the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus.

The photos run the gamut: Dad as a kid in the 1930s and ’40s, with a mischievous grin. Dad in the Marines. Dad and mom, married in college already and living in an 8-by-28 trailer. Dad at his desk in the basement, working his adding machine. Onward through me and my sister and brother, and the grandkids, too. Many of the pictures are in photo albums, lovingly curated by my mom with hearty captions; others are in frames, or loose in envelopes and folders. We scanned some. The grandkids, mostly in their teens, took photos of the photos with their phones. We all posted a smattering on Facebook and Instagram.

The accessibility of mobile phones and social media platforms like Instagram make it hard to remember how much of an effort it was, not so many years ago, to take and share photos. To remember the delayed gratification: Finishing the roll that was in the camera (sometimes many weeks), sending out the film to be developed and returned (a few days to a week or more). Only then would you know for sure whether eyes were open or the lighting was as good as you thought it was.

Watching my dad take pictures, I was learning about the role of cameras and photos even before I was really thinking about it. And I was starting to learn about who my dad was.

The camera

Besides the photos, I do still have that Yashica-D, a less-familiar camera type from one of a proliferation of Japanese camera makers at midcentury. It’s always been a touchstone for me.

I don’t know why my dad had that particular camera. It was just always there. It’s not like he was into photography in any deeper way. He didn’t have a darkroom or a tripod or any books about Ansel Adams. He didn’t do landscape shots or set up formal portraits. He didn’t pack the Yashica when we hiked up Mount Katahdin during my brief tenure as a Boy Scout. Just family snapshots, mostly around the house, with a camera that seemed… quite a handful.

Long before phones started sprouting multiple cameras, the Yashica-D, as befit a twin-lens reflex design, had a pair of lenses. The upper one was just for sighting, and the lower was for actually taking the picture, letting the light through the shutter to the film inside. That top lens was essentially the same thing as the viewing port on a range-finder camera, only with the same optics as the main lens. Two little dials let you set the shutter speed and aperture. The focus knob on the right side moved the whole double-lens housing in and out. 

The viewfinder glass always seemed a little dim, but here’s a neat feature — there’s a magnifying glass that pops out from the collapsible hood mechanism atop the camera so you can get a better sense of the focus. 

Given its vintage (it hit the market in 1958), the Yashica-D was all mechanical. No batteries, no electronics.

But there was the flash attachment: a stubby arm that stuck out from the left side, with a shiny metal reflector that fanned out into a full circle. A single naked flashbulb sat in the middle, and when you’d taken your flash photo, you pressed a button to eject the bulb — the hot, hot bulb — onto a seat cushion or into the hands of a daring child.

It was a stolid and imposing box, in metallic black and gray, but it also held mysteries. The reflection and refraction of light. Calculating the exposure. The roll film that had to be handled just so, with no accidental exposure to light. 

And more than that: What was it like to be a grownup who could possess such a thing? What was it like to be a dad — my dad?

I was fascinated with his photos from his service as a Marine in Korea, just a few months after the 1953 armistice that ended the fighting there. They were in an album tucked up on a shelf in my parents’ closet (the same one where they stashed the Christmas presents), and I’d pull it down sometimes. The album, with its dark Japanese landscape art on the front, was itself an object of enchantment, representing a different world far from my cozy suburban den.

But it was also the pictures of the men: young men, many of them — like my dad — barely out of high school, yet seemingly so grown up. They were already finding their way in the world, clad in the battle fatigues that signaled a readiness to go into harm’s way. There was my dad, one of them. It was his life before I came along, but also the life that pointed the way to the family he would eventually start.

Later in life

By about 1980, my Dad wasn’t using the Yashica much anymore. At some point in the ensuing decade he switched over to a radically trimmer and simpler Kodak Disc camera — not all that different in its dimensions from today’s smartphones. Whatever it got right in terms of portability and ease of use, though, it had a serious drawback: teeny, tiny negatives, which meant that even a small print would be grainy as hell.

Meanwhile, I was well into my Serious Photography phase. Getting ready to head off to college, I’d spotted a Canon AE-1 in the used camera display at the photo shop where my dad was dropping off film to be developed. I was more than ready to shed my childhood Instamatic and start taking photos like a pro. Like a grownup. It felt like I was on the threshold of unlocking important doors, finding clues to the mysteries of life.

In a few small ways, I outdid my dad. I had a camera bag full of lenses. I learned how to develop film and print photos in a darkroom. I earned money taking pictures for the college’s media office.

I never did use the Yashica, though, not in any meaningful way. Which is a shame: Its medium-format film, with negatives more than double the size of the 35mm film my SLR used, would have been terrific for portraits. My use of the camera was pretty much limited to the times my dad gave me a shot at it when I was a kid, but like the sip or two of beer he let me try way back when, I just wasn’t ready for it.

Showing by example

Dad wasn’t a techie or even particularly handy. We had a few screwdrivers, pliers, a hammer, a handsaw. (He was of the mindset that you hire professionals to do home repairs.) He and I did have a twice-yearly ritual of changing all the tires on our two cars — snow tires on in the fall, off in the spring. So he did show me the ways of the auto jack, tire iron and lug nuts.

He also taught me how to drive a stick shift, on a 1972 Datsun 510. It was the car he drove daily on his short commute to the bank. I bonded with that car, with its boxy-sporty look (in fire engine red), bucket seats and four-on-the-floor stick, with the independence it foretold and, more subconsciously, with it being dad’s car.

He wasn’t the chatty type, or given to lecturing. He mostly showed by example — how to be steady, honest, a family man. 

And he had that camera, that impassive, fascinating Yashica.

Over the years, both dad and I migrated to simpler cameras — point-and-shoots from Samsung, Sony, Canon, even a low-end Leica — in the wind-down of the film era and the dawn of the digital. It wasn’t the machinery that was important as much as it was the record of the family and being in the moment.

Now my sons tease me about always trying to find the perfect angle with my smartphone camera. (Well, yes, of course. Is there any other way?) Theirs is the world of Snapchat streaks and Instagram poses and cloud archives.

My dad only ever got as far as a flip phone, and that pretty much entirely just for calling, and only when the landline wasn’t handy, which it almost always was. I don’t think he ever tried taking a photo with it.

My brother and sister and I did from time to time try to sell my dad on the fun and practicality of having a smartphone. On one of those occasions, a few years back, I took a few selfies with him, after he’d whupped me as usual at cribbage. We’re shoulder to shoulder, all smiles, and his head is up, his gaze steady, his eyes looking straight into the camera.

See also: Best camera gear and cameras in 2020: Canon, Nikon and more

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The post The camera that taught me how to see the world first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

The year 1995 could really be counted as year zero of the digital world we live in today.

Amazon, Craigslist and eBay all launched. Microsoft took its first significant plunge into the stirring waters of the World Wide Web. The PlayStation made its North American debut. Toy Story, the first all-CGI movie, hit the big screen. Future YouTube star Logan Paul was born.

People were going online in ever greater numbers. According to a Times Mirror Center survey in mid-1995, about 24 million Americans used a home computer on any given day, with about 12 million subscribing to an online service, up from 5 million six months earlier. There were massive jumps in the number of websites — from about 2,700 in 1994 to 23,500 in 1995, and from there past 257,000 a year later.

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And there was no shortage of smart, ambitious people looking to ride that wave, and many more toiling away in the vast reaches of technology, science and culture.

Here’s a look back at some of the big names of that year.

Bill Gates 

In 1995, one person more than any other embodied tech for the world at large: Bill Gates, CEO and co-founder of Microsoft. He was undeniably geeky. He was relentlessly competitive. His Windows operating system dominated PCs, and it had a big, big moment in August of that year with the splashy launch of Windows 95. Looking to appeal to the growing number of home computer users, Microsoft unleashed a $300 million promotional campaign anchored by the Rolling Stones song Start Me Up.

Gates, then 39, also had his eye on cyberspace, with two notable products that debuted at the same time: the Internet Explorer browser and the web portal MSN.

Behind the scenes, Gates was grappling with a sea change that he referred to in an internal memo as the “internet tidal wave.” Dated May 26, the missive laid out Gates’ plan for the continued world domination of Microsoft and Windows. “The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981,” Gates wrote. “I believe the Internet will become our most important promotional vehicle and paying people to include links to our home pages will be a worthwhile way to spend advertising dollars.”

He rounded out the year with the November publication of the bestseller The Road Ahead, which expanded on the ideas in the memo and talked of a future full of online services and “wallet PCs” that don’t sound all that different from what we carry around with us today.

What he’s doing now: No longer at Microsoft, he heads up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, focusing on philanthropic endeavors like educating low-income students and combating malaria and other infectious diseases — especially COVID-19 right now. Typically the richest person in the world or a close runner-up, he occasionally releases a list of favorite books.

Marc Andreessen  

Among the threats to Microsoft that Gates identified in his memo was Netscape, “a new competitor ‘born’ on the Internet,” whose browser had a 70% usage share. Founded in 1994, Netscape held an IPO in August 1995, and it was a doozy — shares more than doubled in price on the first day of trading, valuing the company at nearly $3 billion, and they kept rising dramatically through the end of the year. Thus began the dot-com bubble, as investors fixated on tech startups as get-rich-quick opportunities. 

The public face of Netscape was 24-year-old co-founder Marc Andreessen, who in college had co-developed the breakthrough Mosaic browser, the starting point for Netscape’s own Navigator. Such was Andreessen’s fame that he would be featured (barefoot, clad in jeans and a polo shirt, sitting on a thronelike chair) on the cover of Time magazine on Feb. 19, 1996, for its cover story, “The Golden Geeks” — “They invent. They start companies. And the stock market has made them INSTANTAIRES.” 

But soon enough, Netscape got steamrollered by Microsoft, and in 1998, it was acquired by AOL on its road to irrelevance.

What he’s doing now: Venture capital stuff through Andreessen Horowitz. He sits on the boards of a number of companies, including Facebook.

Jerry Yang and David Filo

The internet was a novelty for most people in 1995, and someone had to help them find their way around. Or two someones: a pair of Stanford University grad students named Jerry Yang and David Filo, who a year earlier had created a directory called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” You don’t remember that? How about Yahoo, then? That was the new name they gave the service, which they incorporated in March of 1995. That year, they also added a search engine function to Yahoo.

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In the fall of that year, CNET met up with Yang and Filo at their modest offices. “Maybe 10 computers are doing all the work here,” Yang said, and they’d just installed a T3 line, which could handle 45Mbps transmissions. Every day, they were adding between 500 and 1,000 sites to their listings.

“We consider ourselves a couple of yahoos,” said Filo. “It’s pretty fitting [for] the site and the internet in general.”

“Fun, discovery, finding information — that’s what Yahoo’s all about,” Yang said. “We’re going to have to really stay on top of the internet because it’s going to change really fast.”

And did it ever.

What they’re doing now: Very rich, very low-profile.

Jeff Bezos

If you were poking around the internet in 1995, you might’ve stumbled across a novelty: an online bookstore that had gone into service in July, billing itself as “Earth’s largest book store.” It was run by a Seattle startup named Amazon.com, headed by one Jeff Bezos, 31, who had ditched his job as a VP at a Wall Street hedge fund. The first book sold? “Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.” By the end of the year, Amazon had customers around the country and much of the world. 

About 18 months after Amazon opened for business, Bezos gave CNET a tour of its very low-tech warehouse. He talked about how he picks novels to read, showed off a website that’s about as jazzy as a card catalog and got revved up extolling Amazon’s pricing strategy. “We decided, in addition to discounting the bestsellers, let’s also discount the best books, so we discount every book, every week, that’s reviewed in The New York Times by 30%,” he says. “There are little things here, like we have customers review books, and we select a winner every month.”

What he’s doing now: Often clocks in as the richest man in the world (just ahead of Gates). Still running Amazon, and looking to conquer both the grocery business and outer space as well.

Kevin Mitnick

The term “hacker” started out with a benign definition: It described computer programmers who were especially adept at solving technical problems. By the mid-1990s, however, it was widely used to refer to those who turned their skills toward breaking into computers, whether for mild mischief or criminal gain. Which brings us to Kevin Mitnick. In February 1995, the FBI arrested the 31-year-old, a high-profile fugitive wanted on charges that he “electronically attacked” companies including Novell, Sun Microsystems and Motorola. He eventually pleaded guilty to wire and computer fraud charges and spent five years in prison. 

In 2009, Mitnick talked to CNET about how and why he did what he did. Through both social engineering and actual hacking, he got to Motorola’s development servers, where he found the source code for all of its cellphones. “I wasn’t interested in selling the source code or doing anything with it. It was more about the challenge of getting it,” he said. “It really was about the trophy.”

What he’s doing now: Runs a cybersecurity consulting firm and writes books, billing himself as “the world’s most famous hacker.”

Hollywood’s young stars

As regular folks were getting nervous about hacking, Hollywood took notice. The year 1995 brought us not one, but two movies looking to cash in on that anxiety.

One was Hackers, starring Jonny Lee Miller, 26, and Angelina Jolie, 20, in which teenage hackers break in to the computers of a giant corporation and get mixed up in an embezzlement scheme. Michael WIlmington of the Chicago Tribune described the characters as “a new breed: computer whizzes who specialize in using their home machines to break into forbidden territory, classified information networks. They’re a ’90s phenomenon — a product of the New Age and its information highway.” 

The other was The Net, starring Sandra Bullock, 31, fresh off her leading role in the popular bomb-on-a-bus thriller Speed. As an America’s sweetheart of a movie star, she’s a more relatable, empathetic hacker than those gnarly teens, a cybersecurity specialist who stumbles into a secret FBI site, with predicaments to follow. What’s novel is how much the bad guys can learn about her from records online, even way back then. Mick LaSalle, in the San Francisco Chronicle, said this: “It’s about how our lives revolve around computers and how it’s possible to manipulate information to erase or alter a person’s identity.”

What they’re up to today: Bullock: Most recently starred in Netflix’s 2018 hit Bird Box. Jolie: Active in humanitarian initiatives, with movie projects in the works. Miller: Just finished seven seasons as a modern Sherlock Holmes in Elementary. Both Bullock and Jolie are now Academy Award winners.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs didn’t always work at Apple, the company he co-founded in the early, early days of personal computing. After being fired from Apple, he spent more than a decade in exile, from 1985 to 1997, but he wasn’t lounging about. He ran Next, first making very high-end computers and then focusing on software. He also was the primary investor in and later owner of the animation studio Pixar, which had some big moments in the final weeks of 1995, the year Jobs turned 40. One was the release of Toy Story, the first full-length computer-animated movie and a wildly popular one at that. The other was a smash success of a different kind, an IPO that raised $140 million and made Jobs a billionaire. (For good measure, he also took on the titles of president and CEO.)

In Time magazine’s “Golden Geeks” story from early 1996, Jobs talked about ambition. “The thing that drives me and my colleagues at both Apple and Pixar,” he said, “is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don’t quite know how to get it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it’s within your grasp. And it’s worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence.”

Steve Jobs died in October 2011 at the age of 56.

Craig Newmark 

While Yang and Filo were creating a directory to the internet writ large, Craig Newmark was starting out with a more local focus. An East Coaster transplanted to San Francisco, where he was working as a programmer at investment company Charles Schwab, in 1995 he created an email list of social events in the area that might appeal to folks working in the software business. It was known as Craigslist. The next year, it became a website, and though it didn’t start expanding to other cities till 2000, the beginning of the end was in sight for the classified ads business, a key source of revenue for newspapers. 

“I really didn’t know what I was creating,” Newmark told CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt last year. But the activity came naturally. “The internet wasn’t that much of a surprise to me in terms of what it was doing, what it could do and all that. Because, science fiction. Because, nerd.”

What he’s up to now: Doing philanthropic work. Trying to help journalism stay afloat. Craigslist, meanwhile, looks much as it did in the ’90s.

James Gosling 

In the early 1990s, a team at Sun Microsystems set to work on developing a new computer language, looking ahead in part to a new era of consumer electronics. That language would become known as Java, and its inventor was James Gosling. The basic idea: a program could be written once and then be able to run on a variety of computing devices without having to be customized. It debuted in May 1995, as Gosling was turning 40.

In an interview with CNET’s Stephen Shankland a decade later, Gosling described the project as “an exercise in science fiction. You never really know which way the world is going to go.” As it turned out, the world went for Java in a big way. But things also got complicated. Gosling continued: “Java has become a central part of many gigantic, mission-critical systems. … When you’ve got large banks clearing hundreds of billions of financial transactions every night, small bugs have big consequences. Early on, we could do all kinds of crazy stuff, but now we have to worry hard about who we actually affect.”

What he’s doing now: Distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services. In 2019, Gosling was named a Computer History Museum fellow for his work on Java.

Stephen Hawking

For the generation that came of age with the internet as a part of their daily lives, Stephen Hawking represented science. He was a man of immense learning and accomplishment, along with a spirit unbound by his severe physical limitations. He launched into the public consciousness in a big way with the 1988 publication of A Brief History of Time. A film version of the book debuted in 1992, and Hawking made an appearance in a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where he played a holographic version of himself. Throughout the 1990s, much as in the decades before and after, he focused his work life on theoretical physics, cosmology and related topics.

In September 1995, at 53, Hawking divorced his wife Jane and married Elaine Mason, one of his nurses.

Hawking wasn’t always bullish on the future of technology. In 1994, he addressed Macworld Expo in Boston, one of the leading computer trade shows of the era. He took note, rather dismally, of the emergence of a dark side of connected computing: “I think computer viruses should count as life,” he said, comparing them to parasites exploiting the metabolism of their hosts. “I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.” Two decades later he also cautioned on the future of artificial intelligence, saying ” I fear that AI may replace humans altogether.”

Stephen Hawking died in 2018 at the age of 76.

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While we’re still awaiting official word on the iPhone 11, expected in September of this year, there’s already advance word on what to expect from the 2020 edition of the iPhone. And the latest on that is that all three versions of the 2020 iPhone should have 5G capabilities, according to a new report.

Analyst Ming-chi Kuo had earlier predicted that two of the three iPhones that’ll be unveiled in 2020 would be 5G-ready. Now, according to a new report obtained by MacRumors, Kuo expects all three phones will support 5G.

Kuo said that having 5G across all three models will help Apple better compete against lower-cost Android phones that have 5G support. All three new models, Kuo said, will likely support both the mmWave and sub-6GHz versions of 5G, according to the MacRumors report.

That’s a big deal. With superfast, low-latency 5G networks just starting to go into service, the pressure will be on Apple to keep pace with other phone makers, including Samsung and LG, that have already brought their first 5G devices onto the market. At the moment, there are only a handful of markets offering only limited 5G coverage, but the new networks will become more and more widespread as 2020 unfolds.

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The expectation has always been that Apple wouldn’t have a 5G iPhone for this year’s iPhone 11 cycle, having been stymied by a dispute with Qualcomm that kept it a step or two behind. But the company took a big stride forward last week when it acquired Intel’s smartphone modem business in a $1 billion deal.

Kuo noted that the acquisition should give Apple more resources for developing 5G iPhones. Even so, the 2020 iPhones will likely use modem chips from Qualcomm, with Apple’s own modem chips not appearing in the phones till 2021, according to MacRumors.

Prices for 5G Android smartphones, Kuo wrote, will decline to prices from $249 to $349 in the second half of 2020, and that the phones at the price will support only sub-6GHz capabilities.

“But the key is that consumers will think that 5G is the necessary function in 2H20,” he wrote, according to the MacRumors report. “Therefore, iPhone models which will be sold at higher prices have to support 5G for winning more subsidies from mobile operators and consumers’ purchase intention.”

Sub-6GHz 5G networks aren’t as fast as those using mmWave technology, but the signals travel farther and can penetrate barriers such as walls and glass that stop short-range mmWave signals.

Neither Apple nor Kuo, through his firm TF International Securities, responded immediately to a request for comment.

Originally published at 2 p.m. PT.Update, 2:34 p.m.: Adds background on Apple and 5G, and more details from Kuo’s report.

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When 5G arrives in force, it won’t just be for you. It’ll be for the robots, too.

Or maybe more precisely, for you and the robots working together. That was the point of one of the demonstrations Thursday at Verizon’s 5G lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a knee-high humanoid robot trundled up and down several steps and along the length of a wooden platform. It’s a scale model of a person-size robot intended to help rescue people trapped in life-threatening situations.

You may have heard that 5G networks are fast, but there’s more to it than that. They’re also all about low latency — getting rid of the lag time that can make 4G and older networks stutter or just not be up to high-intensity tasks.

“With 5G, the robot and the operator can communicate instantly,” said Yan Gu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

But 5G, like that little robot, still has a lot of growing to do.

Long hyped, the next-generation wireless technology is only now just starting to find its way into the real world. In the US, Verizon and AT&T, the nation’s two biggest wireless carriers, have switched on mobile 5G networks in only a small handful of locations. Sprint just turned on its network in four cities at the end of May, right about the same time that wireless carrier EE became the UK’s first 5G provider.

Verizon customers looking to experience the zippiness of 5G right now will have to head to Chicago or Minneapolis, and then find the right street corners — plus buy one of the very few 5G-capable phones out there at the moment. By the end of this year, you won’t have to look quite so hard. Verizon plans to double the coverage area in those two cities, and also drop 5G into 30 additional cities. (In addition, the company has a 5G home service in Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento, California.)

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CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt tested the performance of the Chicago network with a Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, and found it “insanely fast.” She downloaded Season 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — 10 hours of 4K footage — in less than 5 minutes, and the nearly 2-hour movie Wine Country in just over 8 seconds, blowing away a 4G phone working on the same tasks.

More than speed

There’s a lot more to 5G than giving you instant gratification on your phone.

“If the only thing we could do with 5G is faster downloads, we’ve missed the boat,” Nicki Palmer, Verizon’s head of product and technology development, said at the demo Thursday. “5G needs to be different.”

The bigger goal, Palmer said, is to enable whole new experiences — in education, for instance, transporting someone who’s studying glaciers to an actual glacier via virtual reality or a holographic experience that’s not possible today.

Which brings us back to low latency, a key part of the whole package that is 5G. When the next generation matures eventually, a whole array of technologies will be able to blossom in ways that today’s 4G networks don’t allow — cars communicating with each other and with sensors on a highway or city streets at speed, for instance. The internet of things becomes a lot more than just you checking in with your Nest thermostat or an August smart doorbell. Soldiers and first responders get better, faster situational awareness.

Or your doctor could do surgery on you while a specialist thousands of miles away looks on and provides expertise in real time.

Platforms from remote surgery to mixed reality and autonomous cars are expected to thrive. “They just get better with 5G,” said Christian Guirnalda, director of Verizon’s 5G Labs.

To help drive that point home, Verizon’s demo before a group of journalists showcased a small array of projects experimenting with 5G in health care, manufacturing and public safety, tapping into the company’s Ultra Wideband service. It was a showcase of winners of the company’s 5G Robotics Challenge and other partners working in the Cambridge facility.

The Cambridge lab, set in a colonial-style brick building on a leafy side street nestled next to the Harvard University campus, is one of five that the company’s currently operating. The others are in New York; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; and Palo Alto, California.

With a Verizon 5G small cell lurking overhead, software maker Proximie, based in Bedford, Massachusetts, demonstrated its cloud-based, augmented reality-capable telemedicine platform on a high-resolution screen with multiple livestreams — as many as three upload and six download streams running at about 10 to 12 megabits per second each.

A Proximie product manager moved her hand across a blank tabletop in front of a camera, and the screens showed the hand overlaid on a cutaway model of a mock patient’s midsection. It illustrated how a doctor in LA could provide AR input to a surgeon performing an operation in New York without lag or dropped signal. The system could also allow, say, radiology images to be matched up with the view of the patient.

“Once it’s rolled out, it’s gonna change the game,” said Auri Vizgaitis, Proximie’s lead software architect.

Patience needed

And there’s the rub. It’s likely to be well into 2020 before 5G offers anything approaching widespread coverage. Carriers are still in the early days of building out their networks, starting with metropolitan areas. Even there, many of the deployments feel like souped-up Wi-Fi hotspots.

Never mind how long it might take 5G to get out into the suburbs and rural areas.

And then there’s the question of what type of 5G signals are available. Verizon, like AT&T, has focused on what’s known as millimeter wave spectrum, which is fast but has a limited range and can have trouble with walls and even foliage. Carriers in Europe and Asia, along with Sprint and T-Mobile in the US, have been using sub-6GHz airwaves for slower but more reliable coverage.

Over time, Palmer said, Verizon will incorporate other 5G spectrum into its service.

Here’s another thing that the teams at Thursday’s demo are looking forward to with 5G: Devices in the field — like UMass Lowell’s rescue robot — won’t have to pack a lot of computing power themselves, meaning they can be lighter and enjoy longer battery life. They’ll be relying on “edge computing,” servers elsewhere that can do heavy-duty work, like handling HD video and sensor processing.

“5G lets us get more computing off the device,” said Rahul Chipalkatty, CEO of Boston-based robotics software maker Southie Autonomy.

But even with these industrial applications in mind, there’s still a spot for 5G-enabled smartphones. Pittsburgh-based robotics company RealBotics demonstrated how 5G could help get factory employees up to speed on managing robots, through a combination of smartphone speed, low latency, HD video and augmented reality via edge computing.

The advances these companies are envisioning — highly capable autonomous cars, far-flung surgeons collaborating in real time, the internet of things working in high gear — are the future that 5G’s been dangling in front of us for a while now, and probably will for some time still to come.

“It will exist at some point in the future,” said Palmer. “This lab is about how do you innovate on top of that network.”

Originally published June 1, at 5 a.m. PT.Update, June 3 at 7:18 a.m.: Added more background information.

Correction, June 1 at 3:27 p.m.: The initial version of this story misstated the number of Verizon’s 5G labs. There are five total.

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Priscilla Chan wants to make it clear that Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are two different things, despite family ties.

Chan, a pediatrician and co-founder of the philanthropic initiative with her husband, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. addressed that boundary Tuesday in an interview on CBS This Morning. (Editors’ note: That show and CNET are both part of CBS.) 

Asked whether 2018 had been a tough year, given the scandals that rocked Facebook, she made a distinction between the two entities.

“Mark and his team [have] done a great job at Facebook,” she said, “but for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative we also want to make sure that we are making good choices and being good stewards of the opportunity.”

Asked whether the initiative’s good-works projects offer an opportunity to whitewash some of Facebook’s problems, she said: “Frankly there are a lot easier ways to build up PR than trying to tackle education reform or criminal justice reform.”

In a second part of the interview, which aired Wednesday, Chan spoke about a training program at an Oklahoma prison.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative declined to comment beyond what Chan said during the interview. Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Chan and Zuckerberg launched the initiative in late 2015, pledging to push for progress in education, science, justice and community outreach. Most audaciously, it has set a goal of eliminating disease by the end of the century, investing $3 billion in that effort over the next decade. The initiative, which is a limited liability company instead of a nonprofit foundation, is funded on the whole by Zuckerberg’s Facebook shares.

But these are troubled times for Facebook. Over the course of 2018, the mammoth social network was beset by turmoil, from the Cambridge Analytica privacy uproar to a massive data breach to revelations of data-sharing deals that may have violated a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. In April, Zuckerberg spent nearly 10 hours over two days testifying before Congress about how his company handles the data of its more than 2 billion users, how it deals with election interference and whether it has a bias against conservative points of view.

Those rough waters have spilled into 2019. On Tuesday, a committee of the UK Parliament issued a report that likened Facebook to “digital gangsters” operating outside the law. (The Chan interview for CBS This Morning was recorded before that report came out.)

Teaching coding to inmates

On Wednesday, Chan discussed a program, backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, that teaches computer coding to inmates at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud, Oklahoma.

“We need to be giving people who are incarcerated the cutting-edge skills,” she said, to prepare them for the workforce after their release.

The 18 woman enrolled in the program are learning languages including HTML and JavaScript, as part of a yearlong course to become software engineers.

Chan said she believes tech companies are ready to hire former inmates who are motivated and have the necessary skills.

“There are so many jobs that need to be filled today,” she said. “I think there’s an incredible appetite for people with the right training to do the right job.”

On Tuesday, Chan said that neither she nor Zuckerberg has any political ambitions.

As to whether Facebook or the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will ultimately have a greater impact on society, Chan said, “Too soon to say.”

First published Feb. 19 at 8:28 a.m. PT.Update, 10:34 a.m. PT:  Added response from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Update, Feb. 20 at 7:11 a.m. PT: Added information from the Wednesday segment about teaching computer coding to inmates at an Oklahoma prison.

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