firehose

Apple

Apple has been continuously improving its Maps app and data since the service was launched in iOS 6, but for city dwellers one core weakness remains: a lack of public transit directions. Apple Maps will suggest third-party transit apps for use on particular systems, but doing it that way requires hopping between apps with inconsistent designs and features just to find out where you're going.

A pair of Apple job listings spotted by MacRumors indicates that the company is working to improve this situation. The Maps Public Transit Engineering Manager and Maps Public Transit C++ Software Engineer job listings mention "the next generation of Maps services" and call Public Transit "one of the most anticipated features of Apple Maps." It's not exactly a confirmation that public transit directions are coming to Maps, but the listings strongly suggest that Apple is working to implement the feature—the Transit Routing team will apparently be responsible for "build[ing] the world's best Transit Routing platform at massive scale."

Public transit directions were last a part of iOS in version 5, back when Apple was still using Google Maps data to power the app. As Google and Apple have gotten more competitive, Apple has worked to distance itself somewhat from Google's services. Google Maps and other Google-made apps are all available for download in the App Store, however, and Apple still uses Google as its default search provider in iOS 7.

When it comes to picking early winners or losers in the console wars, holiday season sales (or pre-sales) data is of limited use. There’s enough demand for both Sony and Microsoft’s new consoles that both companies will likely sell through whatever inventory they manage to put on store shelves before Christmas, as healthy pre-order data suggests. The company that pulls out to an early sales lead this year will likely be the one with better production and distribution capacity, not the one with any inherent long-term advantage in the marketplace.

But amid these inevitable sellouts, there is one way to get an idea of which console actually has more early demand behind it: the online resale market. There, Sony’s PlayStation 4 is seeing a slightly higher markup for launch-day pre-orders than the Xbox One, both in real dollar and percentage terms.

To figure out just how much demand was driving value for both systems, I headed over to eBay and started compiling sales price figures for completed auctions. To make sure it was an apples-to-apples comparison, I omitted any auctions that included additional bundled software or hardware past the core package and any systems that were not launch-day pre-orders. I looked at data for auctions finishing between October 20 and 26, inclusive, to smooth out any day-to-day variations stemming from when auctions were listed. I also ignored auctions that didn’t meet a reserve or Buy It Now price.

Steam now has more than 65 million active accounts. The figure marks a 30 percent rise in players over the last year. The video game digital download platform also boasts daily peak concurrent users of more than six million.

Steam has six million daily concurrent users

By far Steam's most played game is Dota 2, with more than 500,000 daily peak concurrent players. The free-to-play game saw official release this year after a long beta period, and as the sequel to the hyper-popular Defense of the Ancients mod, was quickly exposed to an existing fanbase: all of whom need a valid Steam account before playing the game.

Steam is now ten years old. Valve used its tenth anniversary as a cue to sail into uncharted waters, announcing a new operating system, game controller, and range of gaming PCs in the same year its two major console competitors are releasing new machines. In contrast to Steam's figures, Microsoft's Xbox Live has 48 million accounts — around half of whom reportedly paid extra for a gold subscription to play online in 2010 — and Sony's PlayStation Network claims 110 million.

The service is ten years old this year

These networks are not direct analogs of Steam: where Valve's platform is built around the digital distribution of games themselves, Sony and Microsoft's still focus on providing an online ecosystem for games obtained through physical media. But these new figures do suggest that Steam doesn't have to worry about being eclipsed: its users on their own are numerous enough to make the service a worthy competitor. Combine those 65 million accounts with League of Legends' 32 million active and World of Tanks' 45 million registered, and PC gaming looks strong, even in the face of new console challenges.

Amazon is launching its own literary journal, as the company's publishing arm continues to expand into just about every major market out there. The journal, called Day One, will feature a single piece of short fiction and a single poem in every issue. Issues will be published weekly, and — naturally — they'll only be sold digitally. Amazon is initially offering a yearly subscription for $9.99, and though it'll later be raised up to $19.99, at either price Amazon will be significantly undercutting the cost of most highly regarded literary journals, which largely don't have the resources Amazon does to allow them to operate at such a low cost.

But while price is a war that Amazon can easily fight and win, quality will be its biggest battle. Because literary journals are publishing different authors every issue, they're generally regarded by the quality of work that they're able to bring in — with quality work bringing about further quality work down the road. If Amazon can begin to curate and publish quality content in its journal, it could also help to bolster the company's own literary publishing imprint, Little A, which so far has just over a dozen novels to its name. Literary journals aren't usually seen as being among the more profitable ventures out there though, but with Amazon's prominence, it may be able to bring in a broader audience than traditional print journals can manage.

Healthcare.gov has been racked with technical problems since the site's launch, but a new vulnerability may have unintentionally exposed users. Last week, researcher Ben Simo reported that the sites Password Reset function was vulnerable to social engineering, and that by manipulating the site, an attacker could deduce whether a given username was in use and what email address was associated with that username. The vulnerability was reportedly fixed on Monday, but for days after its reporting, crucial user info was exposed to anyone with rudimentary web skills.

The email exposure may sound minor, but it's crucial info for healthcare fraudsters, who may seek to target citizens as they enter the exchange. It's also a bad sign for the overall design of the site, since the hack in question is relatively simple to execute or predict. On Twitter, the researcher was careful to note that he did not hack any Healthcare.gov accounts, but deduced the vulnerability from observing publicly available documents and disclosed it in the spirit of public safety.

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

An Apple support document describing the company's new iCloud Keychain makes a surprising claim that it can sync passwords across devices without ever storing them in the cloud.

If true, this would be an important advance in password management, allowing users to create long, complicated passwords on one device and have the passwords automatically sync to their other devices, but without storing data on Apple's servers.

Today, most password managers sync data across devices by storing the data in a cloud service. There are ways to sync passwords directly among devices without cloud storage—for example, with a Wi-Fi sync option in the latest versions of 1Password. However, this requires some extra steps that reduce the convenience a good password manager offers.

An underwater railway tunnel is now open between the eastern and western parts of Istanbul. The tunnel is the world's first to connect two continents: travelling under the waters of the Bosphorus strait, it joins the Asian and European halves of Turkey's largest city together. It's also the world's deepest underwater railway tunnel, sitting 190 feet (58 meters) below the surface of the Bosphorus.

The tunnel connects Asia and Europe under the Bosphorus

The BBC reports the project was first thought up by an Ottoman sultan in the 1860s, but received more timely backing from current prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Work on the project started in 2004, but was delayed by archaeological digs after the remains of a Byzantine fleet was discovered in the area. The railway — named 'Marmaray' for the nearby sea of Marmara, and capable of carrying 75,000 people per hour in both directions — was finally inaugurated yesterday, on the 90th anniversary of the Turkish republic's creation.

The tunnel is 8.5 miles long, but the distance under the Bosphorus itself is fairly short: only 0.8 miles. It was completed with help from Japan, who sent engineers to the country, and added $1 billion to the project's $4 billion budget. Previously, the Bosphorus could only be traversed by ferry, or on one of two bridges. The AFP news agency reports that two million people — in a city of 16 million — cross those bridges each day, leading to terrible congestion. Istanbul's mayor, Kadir Topbas, said the new tunnel will "soothe" that congestion.

Construction was delayed by an ancient submerged Byzantine fleet

But the project has also come under fire inside Turkey. The country sits on a fault line, and the tunnel doesn't have an electronic earthquake warning system. The Guardian quotes Rıza Behçet — an engineer who worked on the project — as saying he "would not get on the Marmaray metro line, and nobody else should either." Other complaints have been aimed at Erdogan directly. The prime minister was once mayor of Istanbul, and his far-reaching development plans for the city — including a third airport, a third bridge over the Bosphorus, and a second tunnel — have faced protests in the past: most notably in June of this year when police violently dispersed protesters attempting to stop the urbanization of one of Istanbul's few parks.

Design

When Pro met Air

Apple's laptop design isn't perfect — the MacBooks still have sharp edges that dig into my wrists, and the silver aluminum chassis picks up dings and discolorations too easily for my liking — but it's close. It's consistent, too: the MacBook look hasn't changed in years. Still as sturdy and minimalistically handsome as ever, the 13-inch Pro is largely unchanged from last year's model.

It still has a big, roomy, class-leading glassy trackpad, with responsive gestures and two-finger scrolling. It also still has a roomy, clicky black keyboard, with a customizeable backlight and slightly more travel than the MacBook Air. Neither has changed in years, and neither really needs to — other manufacturers still need to catch up. I do wish Apple would upgrade its speakers: audio comes through the Pro's keyboard, and is tinny and shallow.

The port arrangement is the same as the 15-inch model, and the same as last year's 13-inch Pro: with two Thunderbolt 2 ports, two USB 3.0 jacks, a headphone jack, and an SD card slot, there's little want for more anyway. All that's technically new is a second hole for a second microphone, which Apple says is for noise cancellation; I can't say for sure that it works, but it definitely doesn't make anything worse.

Slowly, the Pro appears to be inching downward toward the Air lineup. This year's model is a little thinner than last year's — 0.71 inches rather than 0.75 — and weighs 3.46 pounds instead of 3.57. It's only a hair thicker than the Air, and about a half-pound heavier; it's not nearly the sacrifice the 15-inch model is.

Give and take

In exchange for the slight extra weight over the Air, the 13-inch Pro offers a gorgeous, 13.3-inch, 2560 x 1600 display. It's no longer the only beautiful display on the market — the Toshiba Kirabook, the Acer Aspire S7, the Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus, and a handful of other notebooks offer equally stunning screens — but it's absolutely gorgeous. It's essentially taking a 1280 x 800 display and displaying four pixels in each spot, and the result is clear text, crisp lines and details, and a screen you really don't want to take your eyes off.

The problem is simple real estate — 1280 x 800 isn't that much screen space. I can see more on my 13-inch, 1440 x 900 Air than on the 13-inch Pro (though everything on the Pro is far nicer to look at). You can set the resolution to a maximum of 1680 x 1050, but it makes text squint-incudingly tiny, and since the display can't pack an even number of pixels into that resolution things look a little blurrier as well. And there are plenty of icons, websites, and apps that still haven't been updated for this new high-res world, and the things that haven't been optimized look pretty terrible. But be all that as it may, I'd trade the Air's screen for the Pro's without a moment's hestitation.

My only concern with making that swap would be that the Air's processor and graphics card can't handle pushing that many pixels. Last year's Pro barely even could. But this year, the Pro's much more ready for the task.

The MacBook Middle

Considering the 13-inch MacBook Pro in the same class as the 15-inch model I reviewed last week is almost unfair. That machine was a beast, a gaming and productivity powerhouse — the 13-inch Pro is not. My review unit is powered by a 2.4GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, one of the latest-generation Haswell chips, along with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of solid-state storage. Configured this way, the 13-inch Pro costs $1,499; for $1,299 you get the same processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. You can also upgrade to 512GB of storage and a 2.6GHz processor for $1,699, and there are configurations up to 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM. Since this is a computer you'll have for a while, and since none of the components are easily upgraded, it's worth spending a little more now.

One thing you can't customize are Intel's Iris graphics, which are responsible for constantly powering the 13-inch Pro's pixel-rich display. As with last year's model, I noticed a distinct difference between it and the Iris Pro-powered 15-inch Pro, and especially compared to the larger model with discrete graphics (an Nvidia chip that isn't an option at 13 inches). Heavy websites like The Verge stutter occasionally, in a way that's so familiar to my Air as to be unnoticeable, but that can't compare to the buttery smoothness of the larger Pro. I was able to play two 1080p videos side by side without issue, but a third would occasionally make another jerk through a few frames.

In everyday use, the Pro feels roughly like my Air. With a GeekBench score of 6,303, it's also far closer to the Air (6,057) than to the larger Pro (13,503). It's just perfectly competent and efficient, and that's plenty. It boots in about 15 seconds, and resumes from sleep almost instantly. My daily routine involves a dozen or so tabs, YouTube, Rdio, occasional gaming or Netflix, and perpetual Command-Tabbing between ten or fifteen apps. It handles all of that, and even some image or video editing, without a problem.

I could even play Portal 2 (on the subway or anywhere else) without problem at medium settings, though it's not a particularly intensive game. At high settings, Bioshock Infinite stuttered badly enough to give me a headache, but it became playable at lower settings before graphics got too bad. The Witcher 2 was basically unplayable any way I sliced it. During all three games, the Pro got a little warm and very loud, which almost never happened otherwise. This is not a gaming laptop, and any serious gamer should look to Windows machines anyway — from the Alienware 14 to the Razer Blade, true gaming power, and most of the games, are reserved for Windows users. But for everything from movie watching to movie making, the 13-inch Pro holds up nicely.

I never had the overwhelming sense of power I got from the 15-inch model, as if I could solve world hunger or topple foreign governments with the spare processing cycles in my computer. And if you want a device with headroom, that's going to be plenty powerful for years to come, the 13-inch Pro probably still isn't your best option. But for most people, for most uses, what in practice amounts to a MacBook Air with Retina display is an excellent idea.

And here's the best part: even with all those pixels, the 13-inch MacBook Pro still lasted 10 hours, 7 minutes on the Verge Battery Test. That may not be the 13 hours and 29 minutes the Air lasted, but it's more than almost any other laptop, and more than enough to last you a cross-country flight's worth of movies or through a day-long meeting. Part of that is due to the ultra-efficient Haswell chips, part due to the power improvements in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, but whatever the reasons, the net result is a Retina MacBook that can last all day and then some.

Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifies before Congress on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

The new health insurance marketplace Healthcare.gov went down again this morning, the latest hiccup in a month of technical problems. The timing could not have been worse for the administration: Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius was in the middle of testifying before Congress.

"Let's put the screenshot up,"  Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said, referring to an image of the error message on Healthcare.gov today that reads, "The system is down at the moment."

"This is what is happening right now with the website," Blackburn said. "We've had somebody in the back trying to sign on. It is down. It is not working."

The error is the result of a problem in a data center operated by Verizon's Terremark, Sebelius says. The data center failed over the weekend, putting Healthcare.gov out of service for several hours.

Verizon's data center had an "additional problem... and it continues on."

The administration announced Monday morning that the problem was resolved, but the site has continued to experience intermittent downtime. Verizon had an "additional problem" on Tuesday "and it continues on," Sebelius told Blackburn.

Healthcare.gov is the primary way for Americans to get health insurance, which is now a requirement under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). However, the site has had bugs and errors since its launch on October 1st, preventing many people from signing up. The administration has extended the law's deadlines for buying health insurance as a result.

Administration officials are now being held accountable for the glitchy website, an aspect of the law that was undeniably bungled.

Other complaints raised by Congress, including anecdotes about rising costs and cancelled plans, are easier to defend. The administration can say that average prices are lower even if some people are now paying more. And to the second point — that President Barack Obama said people could keep their insurance and now some have had their plans canceled — the administration can say that the law included a grandfather clause specifically so that insurance providers would not be required to cancel old plans. Some providers decided to cancel plans anyway, forcing some Americans to seek new insurance. But providers have always been able to cancel plans at a whim, Sebelius testified.

The website is a different story. The numerous glitches, which at first prevented people from even creating an account, made the site virtually unusable for tens of thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of people. 

The site cost $174 million, Sebelius testified

The administration says the federal site has had more than 20 million visits, but only around 700,000 people have submitted applications through the federal and state marketplaces. The administration says it will not release the number of people who have successfully enrolled in plans through Healthcare.gov until mid-November.

At least one government contractor, QSSI, testified that the administration was warned that there were issues with the website weeks before launch. Sebelius testified that the administration spent about $118 million on the website itself and about $56 million on supportive infrastructure.

The White House is now in damage control, promising to fix the website by November 30th. So far, no one has been fired, but there have been calls for Sebelius's resignation. "Hold me accountable for the debacle," Sebelius said today in response to a question from Representative Blackburn. "I'm responsible."