Hasta La Gadget!

If you guys can recall, there was a zero day vulnerability discovered within iOS that prompted Apple to issue an emergency security update that patched iOS to iOS 9.3.5, something that you definitely should download if you haven’t done so already. It also seems that the vulnerability affected OS X computers.

This is why today Apple has released updates for Safari 9 and OS X El Capitan and Yosemite that should address these issues. In case you’re unfamiliar, the zero day bugs called “Trident” were used to create a spyware called Pegasus. On affected iOS devices, it could be used to access personal data, and the same for Mac computers.

We’re not sure why it took Apple longer to release the OS X version compared to the iOS version, but we guess better late than never. Also oddly enough the patch is targeting El Capitan and Yosemite versions of the operating system, which has us wondering does that mean older builds of OS X are safe? Or will Apple release patches for them later?

In any case if you own an iOS or OS X devices, you’ll want to get your hands on the patches ASAP, lest someone figures out that you’re not protected.

Apple Issues OS X Security Patch For Zero Day Vulnerability , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Back in July when Pokemon GO was first launched, its initial success had many believing that the game had the potential to make $1 billion a year. We know, that is a huge sum of money that many developers probably never get to see, and if you’re wondering if the game could reach those levels, it seems like it is on track.

According to a report from Sensor Tower, they are reporting that Pokemon GO has managed to make $440 million to date, which means that if things keep going the way they do, we wouldn’t be surprised if the game managed to double that amount by the end of the year, or maybe it could even hit the $1 billion mark.

The report notes that Pokemon GO is no longer the number one grossing app in some countries, but apparently it still manages to pull $4 million in worldwide net revenue on a daily basis! Several years ago we reported that Candy Crush was making more than half a million a day which was already impressive, but that number just pales in comparison to this.

We should point out that while the game is still making a ton of money, they are also appearing to be losing their daily player base. Last we checked, the game lost several million daily active players, but it is possible that the numbers we are seeing now are the normalized figures. In any case what do you guys think? Will Pokemon GO be able to pull in $1 billion by the end of the year?

Pokemon GO Has Reportedly Made More Than $440 Million , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

All religions, except some forms of Buddhism, recommend prayer.

From the Latin precare, which means to beg, prayer is just that: begging, pleading, imploring a God, or some other otherworldly figure, such as a saint.

If your heart is made of penetrable stuff, seeing people in prayer will move you to tears. Why? Because prayer is perhaps the single most communicative gesture a person may enact, encompassing, as it does, all the hopes and wishes, all the longings and desires, of the entire human race, collapsed into the feeling and utterance of private or public begging.

Do you realize that most people you see, sometime during the course of their seventeen hours of daily wakefulness, beg the otherworld for something? If someone earnestly begged you for something, on their knees and in a pitiable tone, wouldn’t you be moved? Wouldn’t you, moreover, if it were in your power to do so, grant the request?

It would depend, you say, on what was being begged for. People beg for guidance in major and minor life choices. Would you grant your guidance? People beg for health, for themselves and for children and for friends and family. Would you give them health? People beg for their lives. Would you extend their lives? People beg for forgiveness. Would you forgive? People beg saints to intercede with even higher powers. Would you intercede?

Some ancient currently dead religions and some mystical variations of current living religions devise formulaic prayers for various uses and stitch and bind them together into prayer books. This religious sensibility invests each word of a prayer with efficacious power, so that the formula of the prayer cannot be deviated from without enervating the effect. In this view, God and the saints are persnickety judges of proper form.

Philosophical theologians have always been bothered by the notion that human emotion and words, evinced in the begging of prayer, can alter an immutable being such as God. Unchangeableness was supposedly one of God’s perfect attributes, but if God answered a prayer, God would have been moved to…change. This was deemed a problem. The problem was solved through this clever construction: prayer does not move or change God but it puts the petitioner in a position to be moved or changed by God.

Smoke and mirrors.

It’s no matter though because plainly most prayers go unanswered, having neither moved God, nor the saints, nor the supplicant. Were you to guess a billion prayers go unanswered for every one that is, you’d probably have a rough estimate of the reality.

You yourself might always respond to a beggar, but obviously others will not.

A priest I know had a dream wherein the Pope witnessed God unresponsive to prayer. The priest’s shrink said the woman in the dream was none other than God. Here is the dream:

The Pope watched a woman who was purported to be wise as she stood behind a curtain. People sat on the other side of the drape and were unable to see her. They importuned her about many things, for she was said to be powerful and generous and sapient and in possession of much knowledge. She did not answer all the people, however. At first she seemed to answer only those who called her by her correct name. Her correct name was Azra. But some called her Ella, and some called her Kiro, and some called her Brett, and some called her Lupe, and some called her Charise, and other names. She appeared not to answer questions from those who misnamed her. Later, she ceased answering those who did not evince enough emotion in the vocal delivery of their requests. She seemed to require passion in each query. Later still, she apparently answered only those requests that interested her, and these were few indeed. Finally, seemingly pococurante, she responded to no one. Brow to brow the Pope demanded of the woman why wisdom should be parsimonious and mute in the face of beggars. The woman responded in Latin: Taciturnitas stulto homini pro sapientia est. “For a dim person, silence is a substitute for wisdom.”

Then the priest awoke. He subsequently left the Church. He married his shrink and is now busking on the Santa Monica promenade.

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Mozart has yielded some incredible insights about the human condition: the capacity for love, the capacity for forgiveness, the capacity to live beyond oneself. So, maybe it’s ok that the aggressively-jaded, unabashedly-sexist Così fan tutte doesn’t do much, if anything, to illuminate the human experience. The plot is basic: Two young men (Ferrando and Guglielmo) are challenged by an older dandy to test the fidelities of their fiancées (Fiordiligi and Dorabella – a pair of overly-emotional sisters); they’ll announce they are leaving for war, then return in disguise to try to seduce each other’s bride with the help of their sprightly maid. After some consternation, the two women eventually give in to the magnetic (it’s a Così joke) visitors. But at the end, the men, wounded by the very betrayal they set out to prove, reveal their identities to the humiliated women. There is some semblance of forgiveness between the couples who eventually pair off as they were before. What is obviously conceived as a light, Neopolitan farce comes across to us today as unnerving, even despite Lorenzo da Ponte‘s sparkling libretto.

Così was one of the two Mozart operas presented in full at Alice Tully Hall as part of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, a summer-long celebration of Mozart’s music and beyond. There were high expectations for this Così, a concert performance of Christophe Honoré‘s fascinating and lauded Aix-en-Provence production that set Mozart’s airy “comedy” in Italian-occupied Eritrea and played with the dynamics of interracial love, exploitation, and racism when the two suitors “depart” for war and return in blackface as African mercenaries. And onstage, there were no disappointments. The only disappointment was what wasn’t onstage, i.e. virtually any semblance of the hyped and potent Aix production. Though what remained was a sleek, motile presentation (by Annette Jolles) that put all the due focus on Mozart’s music and left no ambiguity about the bitterness underneath the opera’s thin, insouciant veneer.

Louis Langrée, Mostly Mozart music director, lead the jubilant and responsive Freibourg Baroque Orchestra in a svelte but rich reading of the opera that was equally supportive of the singers and orchestra. It made sense that they moved as a unit, though, because this was the same cast of unilaterally exceptional singers that made the rounds in Aix and Edinburgh. From Joel Prieto‘s easily-produced, powerful voice that still maintained beauty of tone (his “Aura Amorosa” was a masterclass in legato) as Ferrando, to Nahuel DiPierro‘s supple baritone as Guglielmo, to Rod Gilfry‘s surprisingly firm, suave bass-baritone as Don Alfonso, the nobleman who pushes Ferrando and Guglielmo into the charade, in the style of Thurston Howell III, the men excelled. No less successful, though, were the ladies, lead by an absolutely sterling Kate Lindsay as Dorabella who melded a beautiful, velvety voice with a sincere (but ubiquitous, in this cast) attention to text and delivered a hotly persuasive “È amore un ladroncello.” She was complemented by the technically-gifted Lenneke Ruiten as Fiordiligi who, despite a more brittle-sounding voice, wielded enormous personality. Her “Come scoglio,” though not without hiccups, was fiery and exciting and her “Per pieta, ben mio, perdona” was devastatingly sincere. The cast was rounded out by the superb Sandine Piau as Despina who sang and acted with aplomb and spunk.

In their first Mostly Mozart performance, Musica Sacra, here pared down to a mere dozen, made a larger sound than their number would imply.

This was Così, straightforward and unaltered. While it would have been great to see Honoré’s provocative production, what arrived at Lincoln Center was a musical presentation of the highest quality. And at a festival dedicated to exhorting the music of who many consider the greatest composer who ever lived, this made a mighty strong argument and one couldn’t ask for more.

All photos by Richard Termine

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Date: ‎‏ ‏August 30, 2016‎
No: ‎‏ ‏‎563-LR-1301‎

The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau
Prime Minister of Canada
‎80 Wellington Street ‎
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2‎

Dear Prime Minister:‎

It is with a sense of urgency that I write to you regarding the detainment and ‎imprisonment of my fellow compatriot and yours, Iranian-Canadian professor and ‎scholar, Dr. Homa Hoodfar.‎

The recent news of Dr. Hoodfar’s hospitalization after being in solitary confinement in ‎prison has once again shaken our community’s beliefs in international human rights and ‎justice. Dr. Hoodfar has been held in an Islamic Republic prison without due process, or ‎access to her lawyer and her family.‎

The news of Dr. Hoodfar reminds us of another Iranian – Canadian woman, Zahra Kazemi, ‎who in 2003 was tortured and killed while illegally detained by the regime’s secret police. ‎We hope that Dr. Hoodfar does not meet the same tragic fate at the hands of the ‎theocratic judiciary.‎

The election of a so-called moderate president of the theocratic state has only resulted to ‎an increase in the number of executions carried out against Iranian dissidents and those ‎fighting for a more just and democratic society in Iran. Although Dr. Hoodfar is not an ‎activist, the arbitrary detainment of an internationally renowned scholar speaks to the ‎brutal nature of this regime.‎

Currently, another Iranian resident of Canada, Saeed Malekpour, has been imprisoned for ‎more than 8 years by the regime, far from his family in Canada and without any due ‎process.‎

The Islamic Republic should not be allowed to act with impunity against the human rights ‎of its own citizenry as well as the citizenry of other countries. ‎

I trust that your government will do everything in its power to guarantee the safe return ‎of Dr. Hoodfar and Saeed Malekpour and that you will continue to raise the issue of ‎human rights in the international community and demand that the Islamic Republic be ‎held accountable for its abysmal human rights record and violations of international laws, ‎treaties and conventions.‎

Sincerely,

Reza Pahlavi
President of the Iran National Council for Free Elections

Cc: Honourable Stephen Dion
Cc: Excellency Banki Moon

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