AMC Theatres is raising the price of its subscription movie plan Stubs A-List — at least in a handful of states.
Rather than simply charging $19.95 per month across-the-board, AMC will soon offer differing prices to residents of different states. California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York will see the biggest increase, to $23.95 per month. Meanwhile, the cost will increase to $21.95 per month in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, plus Washington, D.C.
The price is supposed to stay the same every where. The increase will take effect on January 9, 2019, and AMC says that if you sign up before then, your price will hold for 12 months.
Of course, AMC launched the service after MoviePass helped to popularize the subscription movie ticket model — but since then, MoviePass has limited users to a rotating lineup of movies, something that competitors have taken advantage of. (Stubs A-List allows subscribers to purchase up to three tickets per week for any movie in any format in any AMC theater.)
“Our decision to keep the AMC Stubs A-List monthly price unchanged in 35 states, along with only a modest price adjustment in some key markets going in place in early 2019 will keep us in that sweet spot of successfully balancing profits and popularity,” said AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron in a statement.
Bahnhof’s page blocking access to Sci-Hub. (Screenshot: TechCrunch)
A little known fact about Swedes: when they get angry, they will often scribble down a note on paper — sometimes anonymously — and leave it where it will be seen, rather than confront a person face-to-face.
One extremely angry Swedish pro-freedom internet provider took that passive aggression to a whole new level.
On Thursday, Stockholm-based Bahnhof was ordered by a Swedish copyright court to block Sci-Hub, a pirate site dedicated to free access to academic papers and research. The site, operated by a Kazakh student Alexandra Elbakyan, has faced court orders and threats of site blocks across Europe, following lawsuits from academic publishers like Elsevier, which brought the most recent case.
Bahnhof was forced to block 20 domains associated with Sci-Hub, according to the company’s response to the court order.
Resigned to the fact that it was unlikely to win an appeal, the internet provider called the publisher “greedy opportunists,” and then blocked Elsevier’s own website in protest.
“Bahnhof opposes to censorship in every way, shape and form, but it looks like we won’t be able to dodge Elsevier’s blocking requirement,” the company said on a holding page that Bahnhof’s customers would see when trying to access Elsevier’s website. The internet provider put up the block “to make sure that they themselves also get a taste of the blocking they’re currently evoking against others.”
The page, featuring a dial-up modem sound and a retro late-1990’s font and layout, was a jab at what the internet provider sees as a regressive step in the internet’s history.
Elsevier, a Dutch academic publisher, has had Sci-Hub in its sights for years. The company sued its creator, Elbakyan, in 2015 as the site continued to grow in submissions and popularity. The site gave reporters and journalists, activists, the generally curious public — and even academics — access to expensive and paywalled content.
Sci-Hub now has more than 70 million academic papers and journals, helping millions to skirt Elsevier’s subscription costs — in some cases millions of dollars per year.
Many colleges and institutions have been critical of the academic publishing business. Harvard University specifically called out “certain publishers” in 2012 that the rising costs of subscriptions would render their ongoing contracts “untenable.”
“Their business model is also constructed in such a way that the universities and research institutes must pay even to access their own papers, because they have been published through Elsevier,” said Bahnhof.
Academics, too, have mixed views on Sci-Hub, though many have come out in support of the pirate site — despite its illegality — to promote free and open access to academic research. Dr. Holly Witteman, an associate professor in medicine at Université Laval in Quebec City, explained in a tweet thread earlier this year how academic papers are published.
(Spoiler alert: most academics aren’t paid.)
That $35 that scientific journals charge you to read a paper goes 100% to the publisher, 0% to the authors. If you just email us to ask for our papers, we are allowed to send them to you for free, and we will be genuinely delighted to do so. https://t.co/NHEfiOMLfG
“The reason most academic authors are delighted to share our papers is because it’s our job to create and share knowledge!” she said.
Elsevier spokesperson Tom Reller confirmed the publisher’s legal action, adding that Sci-Hub “infringes intellectual property rights on a massive scale.”
“The risks posed by Sci-Hub and other illegal sites are exacerbated by the way they operate: subverting authentication technology, and reportedly using stolen user credentials and phishing attacks,” the spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. “Sci-Hub’s illegal activities harm learned societies who are reliant on subscription income to support their important work; it is a threat to the scholarly communications ecosystem, the sustainability of high quality journals as well as the ability to invest in new journals and fields.”
Bahnhof’s interstitial page isn’t a hard block — users can click through to go to Elsevier’s website. “This page you are in front of right now is the result, this is what is expected in the future where private interests can regulate community information,” the page says.
“Is it really this way our judiciary should be used? No, we do not like either,” it adds.
Seemingly every industry is finding ways to use drones in some way or another, but deep underground it’s a different story. In the confines of a mine or pipeline, with no GPS and little or no light, off-the-shelf drones are helpless — but an Australian startup called Emesent is giving them the spatial awareness and intelligence to navigate and map those spaces autonomously.
Drones that work underground or in areas otherwise inaccessible by GPS and other common navigation techniques are being made possible by a confluence of technology and computing power, explained Emesent CEO and co-founder Stefan Hrabar. The work they would take over from people is the epitome of “dull, dirty, and dangerous” — the trifecta for automation.
The mining industry is undoubtedly the most interested in this sort of thing; mining is necessarily a very systematic process and one that involves repeated measurements of areas being blasted, cleared, and so on. Frequently these measurements must be made manually and painstakingly in dangerous circumstances.
One mining technique has ore being blasted from the vertical space between two tunnels; the resulting cavities, called “stopes,” have to be inspected regularly to watch for problems and note progress.
“The way they scan these stopes is pretty archaic,” said Hrabar. “These voids can be huge, like 40-50 meters horizontally. They have to go to the edge of this dangerous underground cliff and sort of poke this stick out into it and try to get a scan. It’s very sparse information and from only one point of view, there’s a lot of missing data.”
Emesent’s solution, Hovermap, involves equipping a standard DJI drone with a powerful lidar sensor and a powerful onboard computing rig that performs simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) work fast enough that the craft can fly using it. You put it down near the stope and it takes off and does its thing.
“The surveyors aren’t at risk and the data is orders of magnitude better. Everything is running onboard the drone in real time for path planning — that’s our core IP,” Hrabar said. “The dev team’s background is in drone autonomy, collision avoidance, terrain following — basically the drone sensing its environment and doing the right thing.”
As you can see in the video below, the drone can pilot itself through horizontal tunnels (imagine cave systems or transportation infrastructure) or vertical ones (stopes and sinkholes), slowly working its way along and returning minutes later with the data necessary to build a highly detailed map. I don’t know about you, but if I could send a drone ahead into the inky darkness to check for pits and other scary features, I wouldn’t think twice.
The idea is to sell the whole stack to mining companies as a plug-and-play solution, but work on commercializing the SLAM software separately for those who want to license and customize it. A data play is also in the works, naturally:
“At the end of the day, mining companies don’t want a point cloud, they want a report. So it’s not just collecting the data but doing the analytics as well,” said Hrabar.
Emesent emerged from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, an Australian agency not unlike our national lab system. Hrabar worked there for over a decade on various autonomy projects, and three years ago started on what would become this company, eventually passing through the agency’s “ON” internal business accelerator.
Data collected from a pass through a cave system.
“Just last week, actually, is when we left the building,” Hrabar noted. “We’ve raised the funding we need for 18 months of runway with no revenue. We really are already generating revenue, though.”
The $3.5 million (Australian) round comes largely from a new $200M CSIRO Innovation fund managed by Main Sequence Ventures. Hrabar suggested that another round might be warranted in a year or two when the company decides to scale and expand into other verticals.
DARPA will be making its own contribution after a fashion through its Subterranean Challenge, should (as seemly likely) Emesent achieve success in it. Hrabar was confident. “It’s pretty fortuitous,” he said. “We’ve been doing underground autonomy for years, and then DARPA announces this challenge on exactly what we’re doing.”
We’ll be covering the challenge and its participants separately. You can read more about Emesent at its website.
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is laying down the law — literally. Today, Herrera’s office announced a $2.25 million settlement with two property owners in the city. The landlords, Darren and Valerie Lee, ran “an illicit hotel chain during San Francisco’s housing crisis rather than lawfully renting the units to residential tenants,” Herrera’s office wrote in a press release.
As part of today’s settlement, the Lees are not allowed to rent out any of their units as short-term rentals until at least May 2025. The property owners must also pay the city $2.25 million to cover the costs of the investigation and other penalties.
Herrera first sued the owners in April 2014 after the two evicted tenants from their property and proceeded to use that property for short-term rentals. The Lees settled in May 2015 for $276,000 but then went on to violate a court-authorized injunction that prohibited them from continuing to offer any of their properties as short-term rentals. As part of a two-year investigation, Herrera’s office found that the Lees violated the injunction more than 5,000 times in the first 11 months of the injunction. In that time, according to Herrera’s office, the Lees booked more than $900,000 in short-term rentals and made a profit of $700,000.
It was only after this rash of later violations was uncovered that the Lees finally stopped their illegal conduct. To ensure that the Lees did not get to keep their ill-gotten gains — and to send a message to anyone else considering this scheme — Herrera filed a motion in court to enforce the injunction in May 2018, prompting today’s settlement. The $2.25 million settlement will cover the costs of the investigation and fund future consumer protection enforcement, including of the City’s short-term rental law.
As part of city law, San Francisco requires property owners renting out units for less than 30 days to register with the city’s office of short-term rentals, as well as be a permanent resident of that unit. Airbnb, however, did not take that new law well. In June 2016, Airbnb filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco aiming to block the law from going into effect that coming August. Fast-forward to May 2017, and Airbnb settled its lawsuit with the city.
The settlement required Airbnb to supply the city with a monthly list of all homes listed on Airbnb, along with information to enable San Francisco to confirm that the unit is registered. At that time, there were only 2,100 short-term rental hosts registered in San Francisco, but more than 8,000 listed on Airbnb.
In the case concerning the Lees, the city attorney’s office said none of the 14 units in question were ever registered with the city.
I’ve reached out to Airbnb and will update this story if I hear back.
The Supreme Court today offered moral support for net neutrality activists and a soft setback for the current FCC’s agenda by declining to revisit a major case supportive of the 2015 rules. It essentially sets in stone the fundamental legality of those rules — not good PR for the agency that just rolled them back with questionable justification.
In a list of orders circulated today (PDF), the Court briefly noted the denial of a writ of certiorari, the official procedure by which a higher court requests the records of a lower court and after further argument passes its own judgment. Four Justices are required to vote yea in order for the case to be accepted — and that wasn’t the case here.
Why even try to have the Supreme Court hear a case that was decided long ago, about a rule that’s no longer in effect, rendering the decision moot? Because legal support for a strong net neutrality rule is kryptonite to the broadband industry.
Broadband and cable providers want to erase any evidence that the 2015 rules were ever acceptable at all. A coalition of these industries filed the petition to have the case reheard based on the idea that since the FCC had changed its mind on things, any decision resting on its previous determinations should be revisited — and, they hoped, eliminated.
Three Justices — Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch — voted in favor of the petition, at least in that the D.C. court’s decision should be vacated and the cases mooted. That would essentially have meant removing the original net neutrality rule’s most high-profile legal buttressing, since that decision strongly supported the legality of the rule. It wouldn’t change anything on its own, but today’s FCC would sure like to be able to say that the rule they repealed was not supported by the courts. Unfortunately, it was, and it will remain so.
Newly minted Justice Kavanaugh did not participate in the process, likely because he had no opportunity to. But funnily enough, he already heard this case — on the D.C. circuit, where he issued a truly embarrassing decision that was soundly rebutted by Judge Srinivasan.
Today’s rejection by the Supreme Court solidifies the decision made by the D.C. judges and denies the FCC a tool in its ongoing campaign to discredit the 2015 rules. Commissioner Rosenworcel, however, who helped create and pass those rules, applauded the decision.
It wasn't enough for this @FCC to roll back #NetNeutrality. It actually petitioned the Supreme Court to erase history and wipe out an earlier court decision upholding open internet policies. But today the Supreme Court refused to do so.
In case you haven’t heard, polls will open Tuesday morning across the U.S. for the 2018 midterm elections. It’s a big deal, so go vote.
And this year, there are more free ways to get to the polls than ever before thanks to a variety of non-partisan “get the vote out” campaigns from ride-hailing, bike-sharing and scooter companies.
Here’s a handy list.
By bike
Motivate, one of the largest bike-share operators in North America, has launched an Election Day campaign to give people in nine urban areas access to free bikes for the day.
Motivate operates Citi Bike in New York & Jersey City; Divvy in Chicago; Bluebikes in the Boston metro area; Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C.; Nice Ride Minnesota in Minneapolis; Ford GoBike in the San Francisco Bay Area); BIKETOWN in Portland, Oregon; and CoGo in Columbus, Ohio.
Riders across almost every Motivate system can use the code BIKETOVOTE in their local bike-share app to access a free day pass. In Chicago, Divvy riders must use the code VOTE18 to access the free day pass.
Portland has a vote-by-mail system. But BIKETOWN riders can use the code BIKE2VOTE to access 30 minutes of free ride time on November 6.
Lime is also offering free access to its fleet of electric bikes on Election Day. Users just need to enter the code LIME2VOTE18 to unlock any of its shared bikes or electric bikes.
Los Angeles’ bike-share program, Metro Bike Share, will also offer free rides on November 6. Use the promo code 1162018 at any kiosk to get your free 30-minute ride. The promo code is good for one Single Ride. Rides are $1.75 per 30 minutes thereafter.
By car
Depending how far you are from the polls, these ride-hailing offers could be free. At least one way.
Uber is giving $10 off a single ride to the polls on Election Day on the most affordable Uber option available in your city (Express POOL, POOL or UberX, in that order). To access, open the app and then tap menu > payment > add promo code. Enter the promo code VOTE2018. Users should then request their ride using Uber’s polling place locator, right in the Uber app.
Uber’s promotional offer is not available for rides from polling locations and is not available at all in Michigan, Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories.
Lyft is working with Vote.org, Nonprofit Vote, TurboVote and other organizations to distribute codes to those who need them. The ride-hailing company is offering 50 percent off rides and free rides in underserved communities.
To claim your 50 percent off promo code, click on this link and then enter your ZIP code. You’ll see the promo code in your app on Election Day. Promo codes are valid for 50 percent off any standard ride to a polling location on Election Day, up to $5.
By public transit
A number of transit agencies in some of the country’s largest cities are offering free rides, including Houston, Dallas, Tampa and San Antonio. This year, the Los Angeles Metro system, which serves more than 1.3 million passengers daily, is joining in.
LA metro transit is offering free bus and train rides on Election Day. LADOT, Long Beach Transit, Baldwin Park Transit, Pasadena Transit and Santa Clarita Transit in the Los Angeles area are among those offering free rides. Paratransit customers will also receive free rides to and from their polling place.
By scooter
Lime is offering free access to its fleet of electric scooters on November 6. Users enter the same code, LIME2VOTE18, to unlock any of its scooters, or its shared and electric bikes. The free rides to and from your polling location last up to 30 minutes and are available in more than 100 cities across the U.S.
Skip Scooters, which operates in San Francisco, Portland and Washington, D.C., is offering $5 rides to the polls.
You vote. You tweet. You get $5 in ride credit.
Ride a Skip to vote on November 6th, then follow us and tweet a photo of your "I Voted" sticker with the hashtag #SkiptothePolls. We'll DM you with a $5 promo code for using your voice. #DoYourParthttps://t.co/lJ9RQusfm0
After raising $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation a few weeks ago, Instacart is doubling down on expanding its talent pool to square up against Amazon and others with ambitions in online grocery ordering and delivery.
The company has appointed Varouj Chitilian as it first VP of engineering and Dave Sobota as its first VP of corporate development — both of whom were poached from Google. On top of this, on Friday Instacart also quietly announced that it was making an acquihire, picking up the entire team behind the mobile app analytics startup MightySignal to join their engineering group.
Chitilian started last week after 12 years at Google and had been a director of engineering working most recently on consumer payments services like Google Pay, and on advertising services before that.
Sobota is also a longtime Google veteran, and he’ll be joining Instacart on November 12 after 13 years with the search giant. At Google, he also held a corporate development role and has a background as an M&A lawyer.
In both cases, the hires underscore how Instacart continues to ramp up its executive team both to continue expanding its footprint in North America — Instacart says that its service now works with 15,000 stores and 70,000 ‘shoppers’ in 4,000 cities and is accessible by 70 percent of US customers — as well as to build more services to serve areas where it is already active.
They also come in the wake of Instacart hiring GoFundMe and LinkedIn vet David Hahn as its Chief Product Officer in May; PR supremo Dani Dudek as chief communications officer in July; and Mark Schaaf, another Google vet, as CTO in September. (Chitilian will be reporting to Schaaf, while Sobota will report to COO Ravi Gupta.)
Instacart has positioned itself as a non-competitive partner to grocery stores in the US that want to provide an online shopping and delivery experience to customers, but might lack the infrastructure and technical firepower to build something like that in-house.
Both Instacart and these grocery chains have a common rival, Amazon, which is not only natively a digital commerce company, with all the logistics firepower that comes with that, but it has specifically made huge leaps in its own food delivery ambitions, first when it launched its own Prime-friendly Pantry and Fresh lines, and second when it acquired and expanded Whole Foods. (That’s before you consider what it’s doing in physical stores and its restaurant and meal-kit delivery businesses.)
So even with partners in the grocery world — Instacart has secured partnerships with branches of Walmart in the US and Canada, Kroger, ADLI, Sam’s Club, Albertsons and more — Instacart is still locked in a race on the other side of its marketplace as it works to convince consumers to opt for online purchasing and deliveries, and then to use Instacart and its partners instead of Amazon.
In that regard, the tech and products that Instacart builds — and the partnerships it strikes with partners and potential acquisitions — will be crucial to getting this right, and building a substantial business that will be valuable in the long run.
That’s where the MightySignal team acquihire also comes in. Instacart is not saying much about what the six will be working on at the company, except to note that they will be a part of the Growth team and will “build customer engagement-focused product features that delight new and existing Instacart customers across the U.S. and Canada.”
Shane Wey, the co-founder and CEO of MightySignal who is now a director of engineering at Instacart, declined to say what will happen to the MightySignal product.
Voting in the U.S. can be confusing. By design, every state is different. On top of that, disinformation meant to discourage voting is rampant this election. Cut through the noise, arm yourself with the facts and vote. We’ve got resources to help you.
1. Fill out a sample ballot for your state
If you’re not voting absentee or by mail, it’s helpful to have an idea of everything that’s on the ballot before you head into vote in person. Before you head to the polls, you can fill out a sample ballot through When We All Vote or an even more comprehensive one on Ballotpediarepresenting your state and local races online. Best yet, you can print, email or screenshot that and take it in with you to have a reference for your IRL voting experience so that you don’t get overwhelmed.
2. Know your rights
With rampant disinformation actively discouraging some people from going to the polls, it’s vital that you know your rights on Tuesday. Nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org offers a guide to common problems encountered at polling places. Run into trouble? Call the Election Protection Hotline at 866-687-8683 for help. Whatever you do, don’t get discouraged — there are volunteers and organizations that can help sort things out.
If you aren’t yet registered to vote but decide that you’d like to (do it!), 18 states and the District of Columbia offer same-day registration that allows you to register and vote at the same time. Be prepared to provide an official ID and prove your residency with a utility bill, though be sure to look up the specific requirements of your state before you show up.
Figuring out where to vote and getting there is half the battle. Vote.org provides a useful polling place locator so you can look up the nearest place to cast your vote. This is important. “Polling locations are assigned by residential address,” USA.gov explains. “You should go to your assigned location since your name will not be on the roster at any other location. Your polling place may change from one election to the next, so check before you go to vote.”
If you try to vote at a polling place that isn’t the one you are assigned, you might have to fill out a provisional ballot. Provisional ballots are for “a voter whose eligibility to vote cannot be proven at the polls on Election Day” and Ballotpedia has a full guide to state by state practices for counting votes by provisional ballot. Be sure to check your state’s guidelines and proceed with caution — some states will not count a provisional ballot cast in the wrong precinct. The ACLU also provides a polling place guide as well as other state-specific resources worth a look.
4. Get to the polls
If you know where you need to be but are worried about getting there, a few tech transportation companies are running election day promos. The bike sharing company Motivate will offer free rides for anyone in the Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Jersey City, New York City, Portland, Minneapolis and Washington D.C.
If you need a ride to the polls, Uber users in the U.S. can cash in on a $10 ride credit using the code “VOTE2018”. For election day, Lyft partnered with Buzzfeedto provide 50% off of rides using a special zip code-specific promo code and will also provide free rides to people in some underserved communities in partnership with some nonprofit partners including Voto Latino, Urban League affiliates, the National Federation of the Blind, Faith in Action, League of Women Voters, and the Student Vets of America. To check on those rides, check out or get in touch with the relevant organization.
And again, if you have any issues at the polls you can call Contact the Election Protection Hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE and the Department of Justice Voting Rights Hotline (800-253-3931).
Augmented reality is certainly the gimmick du jour these days. Case in point: ABC News is covering tomorrow’s U.S. midterms using a custom-made 360-degree stage and AR technology. The media organization posted a behind-the-scenes look at its glitzy and over-the-top “Election Headquarters” AR-powered stage on its Sunday political affairs program “This Week,” and today published a 360-degree video of the stage to Facebook.
The set itself took around six months to build and seven weeks to load into the studio, says ABC. That’s a lot of work considering that the set is temporary — it will be taken down around a week after the election.
It’s pretty massive, too. The set’s parts were being manufactured in Wilmington, North Carolina, which was impacted by the hurricane. The supplies for the stage’s large, ring boundaries were on some of the last trucks out of the city, but the rest of it was created piecemeal — filling eight tractor-trailers with more than 25,000 square feet of scenery, notes ABC.
As part of our comprehensive coverage of the high-stakes 2018 midterms elections, ABC News has designed a custom 360-degree stage complete with an augmented-reality experience.Take a sneak peak at this behind-the-scenes 360 video of the set during rehearsal, and tune in tomorrow at 4:30 pm ET at abcnews.com/live and 8pm ET on ABC News for complete election results and analysis. https://abcn.ws/2QqGZGc
Meanwhile, the augmented reality portion took a year of planning, designing and programming, including 700 to 1,000 hours of data testing. The graphics required approximately 36,000 lines of computer code and more than 1,000 AR tracking markers to be placed within the set, according to ABC News Director of Graphics Operations Tamar Gargle and Creative Director Hal Aronow-Theil.
“We have had consultants from three vendors: Astucemedia, who are our graphics and creative consultants; Vizrt, for the graphics engines and graphics tracking; and Mo-Sys, the camera-tracking system,” Gargle said, in a statement released by ABC News this afternoon.
ABC says the goal is to give viewers data without having to cut away to full-screen graphics.
Instead, the system will project AR images through the combination of an optical tracking system mounted to studio cameras that communicate with the real-time 3D graphics system.
“There is a web of tracking markers, essentially reflective stickers, that have been applied to the lighting grid and the set pieces that are in the ceiling. The tracking system uses those markers in conjunction with sensors attached to the cameras to calculate where the camera is in ‘space’,” explained Gargle. “This data is sent to our graphics system, which maps the graphics to the proper place in ‘real’ space so it appears that the graphic is in the room.”
Included in the augmented display is a 3D image of the U.S. Capital and the seats within the House and Senate, showing real-time election result data.
This is not the first time ABC has experimented with using AR for news coverage.
The company tried AR when covering the British royal wedding earlier this year, and did an AR medical story on “Good Morning America” to show a 3D view of a heart, to help people understand heart disease.
However, it’s not clear that using AR to show off election results actually helps people better understand the data — especially when compared with something like giving people a look inside a human heart, which can be harder to visualize.
In fact, the technology, glitz and glamour used here could end up being a distraction — a way to draw in viewers more attracted to a spectacle, at a time when politics itself is one. If anything is needed, it’s a reverse from over-the-top media showmanship to one where news is reported with a little more gravity and a little less pizzazz.
Apple has rolled out watchOS 5.1.1, less than a week after the company pulled its immediate predecessor, watchOS 5.1, following reports that the software was bricking some Apple Watches.
The update also includes bug fixes for the Walkie-Talkie app and an additional issue where some Activity rewards were not displayed.
watchOS 5.1 initially went out Tuesday alongside iOS 12.1 but was quickly withdrawn after some had complained that their Apple Watch failed to load after installing the software update. Apple confirmed the buggy update affected a “small number” of customers — without elaborating — but that, “any customers impacted should contact AppleCare, but no action is required if the update installed successfully.”
watchOS 5.1.1 comes with all the trimmings of watchOS 5.1 — but with some new additions, including Group FaceTime audio calls, new emoji, and a range of new watch face options.
The update also comes with security updates and patches, including several nasty vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to gain kernel-level privileges.
