TLDR 2019-07-01

Jony Ive, Apple's chief design officer since 1996, will leave Apple later this year to form an independent design company. LoveFrom will count Apple as one of its primary clients. Ive has worked on all major Apple products, including the design of Apple retail stores. He had a close working and personal relationship with Steve Jobs and has largely maintained a private life despite his high profile.

President Trump has announced that the rules against US companies trading with Huawei have been relaxed and that US companies may continue to sell products to the Chinese manufacturer. The restrictions on Huawei trading back to the US are still in place. This may change at the end of the trade talks, but Trump has not indicated which way the decision will fall. Huawei has recently announced that its latest handsets will have access to Android Q, the next version of the operating system.

All but three of the 60 Starlink broadband satellites launched last month are in contact with SpaceX’s network of ground stations. The company is now ready to start the next round of testing, which includes streaming videos and playing online games via satellite. Most of the satellites have reached their intended 550-kilometer altitude, with the others soon to join them. Two satellites will be intentionally deorbited to simulate an end-of-life disposal scenario. As it is the first satellite system to operate in the Ku-band and communicate with US ground stations, SpaceX is able to be the first to select the frequencies used for this purpose. Other companies have launched Ku-band satellites. However, as their ground stations were not based in the US, they were not able to claim ‘first choice’ status with the FCC.

Bitcoin soared 39 percent this week to $13,852, the highest it has been since January 2018. However, it dropped more than $1,800 after it hit its peak, with large swings continuing throughout the week. Large exchanges such as Coinbase experienced system dropouts due to the high volume of traffic they experienced. Facebook’s recent announcement of their Libra cryptocurrency appears to have helped bring attention back to Bitcoin. Many cryptocurrency related companies saw a rise in stock prices this week.

BytePS is a distributed training framework that supports TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, and MXNet. It can run on either TCP or RDMA networks. BytePS is high performing and can run at double the training speed compared with Horovod and NCCL. A step-by-step tutorial, as well as a best practice guide for optimal performance, is available.

URL pages works by storing the entire contents of a webpage in the URL. This means that the page will exist as long as the URL is valid. The main page takes the encoded data from the URL and decodes it to be displayed for the user. The editor encodes the page into a URL format which can be shared. It is suggested that users use a link shortening service as links can get quite long. A bookmarklet is available that encodes existing pages into the URL pages format. URL pages is a proof of concept project, and not all pages will display correctly when converted.

The internet has changed from a group of individuals publishing content to vast digital empires controlling sections of the internet and wielding large amounts of power. These companies that own platforms used by millions of people around the world are able to moderate and control the content that users see, resulting in the manipulation of discussion, misinformation in news, interference with political affairs, and more. The Declaration of Digital Independence is a set of nine principles that lays out strict rules for how data and content on the internet should be handled. Rather than being controlled by large corporations, the internet should be controlled by a decentralized network of individuals. People can sign to show their support for the document.