Technology

The President has officially named Geoffrey Starks as his pick to fill the FCC Commissioner role left open by Mignon Clyburndeparture. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai confirmed the news, rumored over the past few weeks, in a statement.

&I congratulate Geoffrey Starks on his forthcoming nomination to serve as a Commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission,& said Pai. &He has a distinguished record of public service, including in the FCCEnforcement Bureau, and I wish him all the best during the confirmation process.&

Starks isn&t exactly a well known figure, but in public service thatactually something of a compliment. He has worked in the FCCEnforcement Bureau for three years and is currently one of several assistant bureau chiefs. Previously he was at the Justice Department, which makes sense, as the Enforcement Bureauresponsibility is &to investigate and respond quickly to potential unlawful conduct.&

Itunclear as yet what his position is on the various measures currently being addressed by the FCC, from net neutrality to the revamping of media regulations.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly settled on Starks as long as a couple months ago, the interim no doubt being spent on due diligence, cultivating endorsements, and so on. The Senate will have to confirm Starks, but thereno timeline on that yet. Commissioners generally serve five-year terms.

The FCC is kept at an uneven split between the two parties, ideally 3:2 in favor of the current administration. At the moment it has three Republican Commissioners and one Democrat, Commissioner Clyburn having left just a few weeks ago.

I&ve asked the FCC for more information on Starks and no doubt his nomination will trigger considerable scrutiny by press and politicians alike.

With WWDC a couple of days out, we&re coming up on one year since Apple first showed off its glitzy answer to the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers. It took more than 8 months from then for the HomePod to finally hit shelves, and it took up until a couple of days ago for all the promised functionality to arrive.

Four months since launch, itclear Apple delivered some awesome hardware, but there are plenty of features I want to see the HomePod pick up when Apple comes to the stage at its annual developer conference to talk iOS 12. For all the criticisms levied against the device, the most weighty has been the fact that there isn&t even a vague reason to consider buying the speaker unless you are an Apple Music subscriber. For Apple Watch users who want to listen to non-Apple Music tunes the same is true to a lesser degree.

At the very least, the company needs to introduce some functionality to third-party music services through SiriKit that opens up voice commands to play specific songs and user playlists while leaving premium functionality for Apple Music where users can say stuff like &play more songs like this,& and &play something I&d like,& etc., etc. No one is expecting the Apple hardware to be designed around listening to Spotify, but itfrustrating and confounding that Apple won&t play ball at all.

Apple Music has 50 million subscribers, including those on three-month free trials. Spotify has 170 million monthly active users, 75 million of which are paying for the Premium service. Thatan awfully big chunk of music fans to be ignoring. As nice as I think the HomePod is, ita bold (and misguided) strategy to think itenough to convince entrenched Spotify playlist lovers that they just need need need to switch so they can buy this $349 speaker.

To be fair, the company seems to have had enough struggles making the speaker work for its own ambitions. Airplay 2 was announced at WWDC last year and was only released a few days ago with the functionality that brings stereo playback to users that have a couple of HomePods.

iOS 12 would be an opportune time for Apple to showcase that the HomePod is open for business to third-party developers — though hopefully in a way thatmore gated than the gimmick dump that Alexa Skills has become. Siri has been pretty light on third-party action for a while now, but it made some notable strides in iOS 11, though that functionality has largely been screen-dependent and thus not available to the HomePod. Ittime to change that, or at least share how they plan to improve the experience over the next year.

Apple hardware giving preferential treatment to Apple services isn&t exactly a surprising turn for the company, but building a smart speaker that asserts fantastic audio as its central premise while ignoring any shred of support for playing songs from the most popular streaming service seems a little anti-consumer and out of Applebest interests, as well. Ittaken Apple long enough to bring Siri to the rough place itat now on the iPhone, hopefully they can speed up the progress on HomePod and Apple Watch to make life easier for third-party integrations on devices that have so much unrealized potential.

What a difference a day — one with a public lament — makes. Today the CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov announced that the messaging app is updating again on iOS, putting to a close a six-week freeze, where Apple had stopped allowing Telegram to ship newer versions of the app globally, even while continuing to allow the app to live in the App Store and allowing push notifications to those who already had it installed. Apple has also confirmed to us that itnow allowing updates of the app again.

&Amazing news & Apple has just successfully reviewed our latest update for Telegram iOS, and we were able to ship a new version with long awaited fixes and improvements to the AppStore,& he wrote earlier today.

The change in course comes just one day after Durov announcedthere were some glitches in the app after the release of iOS 11.4 because Apple had stopped letting Telegramdevelopers ship iOS updates globally. The lack of updates also meant the app was not compliant with GDPR regulations.

But what is still not completely clear is why Apple blocked the updates in the first place, nor what happened in the last 24 hours to change things.

Durov has claimed the freeze on updates was tied to the Russian governmentattempts to crack down on it: it came directly in the wake of regulator Roskomnadzor (RKN) reportedly writing to Apple to request it to remove the app from the App Store, and to stop allowing push notifications from the app for those who had already installed it. (In fact, RKN only released its statement about this days ago.)

However, Apple never removed the app, nor did it comply with the request to stop push notifications, even as it seemed to stop allowing Telegram to push updated versions.

&Apple has been preventing Telegram from updating its iOS apps globally ever since the Russian authorities ordered Apple to remove Telegram from the App Store,& he wrote yesterday. Google&s, Microsoftand AppleMac app stores were not affected through all of this.

We have reached out to Telegram to see if it can explain the change of course. Apple has declined to comment specifically on this point.

The development today is the latest in a many-weeks saga that started with RKN announcing a ban on Telegram after the app refused to provide it with a way of viewing the encrypted messages on the app.

Russian law requires any apps or services operating in Russia to provide a way to monitor data in the app or service in question, by hosting servers in the country or providing other means of data access. Itmandates this in the name of national security, although many third parties have disputed the requirement, and some like Telegram have said that apart from the ideological opposition to the rule, it would be impossible for the company to provide such keys.

Durov had run afoul of authorities with his previous company, the social network Vkontakte.com, over freedom of expression on the site, and that was part of the motivation for building Telegram in such a way.

Telegramsolution for the last several weeks has been towork around the issueby appealing to people to use VPNs to access the service, and also by hopping on different IPs at hosting companies sympathetic to its attempt to continue offering its service without sharing data with Russian authorities.

Up to now, services like AWS and Google Cloud Platform have not asked Telegram to stop the hops, even despite some of the side effects: the IP hopping had the unintended consequence of RKN knocking out entire swathes of IP addresses to stop Telegram, rising tosome 19 million IP addresses at its peakand causing a number of other services to go down, including some of Googleitself. The situation has alsoled to a number of protests, with the app and the story going viral in the process.

Telegram has some 200 million users globally, with around 14 million users in Russia.