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The unusual process will see the company sell its consoles directly through its own US page.But the option to do so will be limited to people who received an invitation, with the process shrouded in mystery and exclusivity.Read moreIt invited users to submit a form including their PlayStation Network ID to be in with a chance to receive an invitation through the process. It did not say how it would select those to receive the invitation, but noted that the selection is “based on previous interests and PlayStation activities”.Anyone who was chosen through that process should now have received an email with the full instructions, allowing them to take part in the process. People who signed up through the form but did not receive an email were not selected, Sony has said.The invitations cannot be passed on or sold to anybody else, even if those people have already successfully bought consoles through other online shops.Still, having that invitation does not actually guarantee a console. Sony noted that there will only be limited consoles and that they will be given out on a first-come-first-served basis when the pre-orders open.The pre-orders will actually open at 10am pacific time, or 6pm in the UK.

Users in the country will be stopped from downloading the video app as well as WeChat.If a deal is not struck by 12 November, the app will be fully banned, and using as well as downloading the app will be illegal, according to the order from the US Department of Commerce.Donald Trump and the US government have threatened to ban the app amid accusations that their Chinese owners mean that American data could be put at risk.People who already have the app installed will still be able to use it as normal after 20 September. But they will not be able to download new updates, which could quickly mean the app’s functionality will break, since developers will not be able to fix bugs or make changes.Officials will also not look to ban Google and Apple from offering the app through their stores in other countries.After 12 November, it will be illegal in the US not only to distribute TikTok through app stores but also to provide the underlying internet infrastructure that powers it, or to allow its code to be accessible. That would effectively amount to a complete ban, with users unable to access the app at all.WeChat will be entirely banned from 20 September, the order said.Read moreThe decision comes after threats from the US government that the app would be banned if it could not be sold to a US company.Silicon Valley tech firm Oracle has been reported to have won that battle, but the deal is yet to go through. The ban could be scrapped if that deal is successfully completed, Reuters reported, citing US commerce officials.Donald Trump said yesterday that his administration had spoken to Walmart and Oracle about a possible deal, but that there had been no substantial change in the situation.”We’re making a decision. We spoke today to Walmart, Oracle. I guess Microsoft is still involved,” Trump told reporters at the White House before leaving for a visit to Wisconsin.”We’ll make a decision, but nothing much has changed. We’ll make a decision soon.”In early August, Mr Trump signed an executive order that set a deadline of 20 September for the sale of TikTok. In recent remarks, the president had said there would be no extension of that order – though he also falsely suggested that the deadline would come on 15 September.The executive order said that if the deadline was reached and the app was still under Chinese ownership, the US would ban “any transaction by any person” with Bytedance, TikTok’s owners. Legal experts have speculated on whether the ruling would legitimately allow a ban, but the Trump administration has been clear that was the intention of the document.Watch moreThe executive order alleged that apps “developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States” before going on say specifically that “at this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok”.It accused the app capturing “vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories” as well as censoring content on behalf of the Chinese government and helping with the country’s disinformation campaigns.TikTok and its parent company Bytedance – which offers a separate version of the app in China – have repeatedly denied those accusations.

Two asteroids have shot past the Earth this week, coming closer to the planet than the Moon – and more close encounters are expected during the rest of the year.The first asteroid, called 2020 RD4, was between three and seven meters wide.It passed 94,000 kilometers (58,500 miles) away on 14 September.This is approximately one third the distance between the Earth and the Moon, which are 384,400 kilometers apart.A second asteroid, called 2020 RF3, passed by only a few hours later.Read moreIt was between five and 11 meters wide, shooting by the planet at a distance of approximately 106,000 kilometers (65,700 miles).The space debris was recorded by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks and predicts asteroids.Neither bodies came near the record for the closest asteroid to pass by the Earth, which was broken in August by asteroid 2020 QG, which came just 1,830 miles over the southern Indian Ocean, but are indicative of how many objects come by the planet safely every day.Within the next two months, many more objects are expected to pass by the planet, although only one will get as close to our planet.Between now and the end of the year only one – asteroid RZ6 – will get closer to the Earth than our Moon.It will pass by on 17 September, but is a staggering 27 meters wide between its most distant points.However, this is still relatively small; an asteroid called PM7, expected to pass by at the end of the month, is an astonishing 200 meters wide.Nasa says the asteroid only has a 0.41 per cent chance of hitting the Earth.

The Apple Watch will come without its charging plug, Apple has said – and the iPhone 12 is likely to do the same.The company will continue to ship the wire and small puck that sits on the back of the Watch while it is charging. But it will no longer sell the small brick that plugs into a wall socket and allows that USB wire to be plugged in for charging.Apple said it had made the decision for environmental reasons. Given that so many people already have the chargers from previous phones, watches and other devices, it does not feel the need to increase its environmental footprint by including the plug within the box, it said.Lisa Jackson, Apple’s head of sustainability, said that it had made the decision because it’s “not what we make, but what we don’t make that counts”. He said that the change would be the equivalent of having 50,000 fewer cars on the roads.Excluding the charging plug also presumably cuts down the cost of making the Watch, as well as allowing for a reduction in the size of the box needed to ship it.Watch moreRumours have already suggested that Apple will make the same move with the upcoming iPhone 12. The decision to remove it from the Apple Watch could indicate those rumours are true, and all of the arguments apply equally to removing the plug from the box of the iPhone too.Apple says its 18-watt power adapter through its store, for £29 each.In addition to coming without the brick, rumours suggest that the iPhone 12 – or the four phones likely to come under that name – will include an entirely new design, a LiDAR sensor for mapping 3D environments, as well as other improvements.

Garmin has launched a new smartwatch, the Forerunner 745, that will tell you when to work out.It is the first of the company’s trackers that not only gathers data while out running, but uses that information to recommend whether and how intensely its owner should exercise.In addition to those tools, the watch brings a host of features, including a blood oxygen monitor. A similar feature is already present in many of Garmin’s higher-end watches, and has just been introduced to the Apple Watch with the new Series 6.The blood oxygen sensor, which Garmin calls Pulse Ox, is intended to allow people to see how well they are sleeping, and whether they have adjusted to changes in altitude. The watch is intended to be worn all the time to collect such information, as well as to power other features such as the “Body Battery” tool which can show an estimate of how run down its owner is.The Forerunner 745 replaces the 735XT, Garmin’s triathlon watch that has not been updated for four years. As such, it brings a variety of features that have been present in other, more recently released Garmin watches, such as music storage and contactless payments, as well as new fitness tools.Read moreIt also adds features that have not been present in other watches from the company: it can now recognise track workouts specifically to gather better location data, as well as being able to suggest how intensely people should work out or if they should take a rest day.As well as releasing the new watch, Garmin also revealed its new HRM-Pro, a heart rate tracker that goes around the chest. It can also monitor running metrics such as cadence, cycling information such as how long you spend standing, and can go under water for tracking while swimming.

Nasa believes it has found the first ever planet to be closely orbiting around a white dwarf, the leftover of its once Sun-like star.Some researchers had previously believed that such a search would be fruitless, given that the creation of the white dwarf was expected to destroy any planets that came too close.But new data from Nasa’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and its retired Spitzer Space Telescope appear to indicate that the planet known as WD 1856 b is intact and in close orbit around its star.The huge planet – much larger than the star that it orbits around – could offer a hint at what the future of Earth might look like, as well as prompting excitement about the possibility of life on other, similar planets elsewhere in the universe.”WD 1856 b somehow got very close to its white dwarf and managed to stay in one piece,” said Andrew Vanderburg, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The white dwarf creation process destroys nearby planets, and anything that later gets too close is usually torn apart by the star’s immense gravity.”We still have many questions about how WD 1856 b arrived at its current location without meeting one of those fates.”Watch moreUsually, when a star like our Sun runs out of fuel, it starts to swell up, going to hundreds of thousands of times its previous size, and turns into a cooler red giant. The gas is then thrown out into space, which causes it to shrink down again, casting out 80 per cent of its mass and leaving the remnants behind in the form of a white dwarf.When that happens, anything that is nearby is usually engulfed and burned away. If WD 1856 b was as close to the star as it is today, it would have suffered the same fate – but researchers speculate that it actually began about 50 times further away, and was pulled in.”We’ve known for a long time that after white dwarfs are born, distant small objects such as asteroids and comets can scatter inward towards these stars. They’re usually pulled apart by a white dwarf’s strong gravity and turn into a debris disk,” said co-author Siyi Xu, an assistant astronomer at the international Gemini Observatory in Hilo, Hawaii, which is a program of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab.”We’ve seen hints that planets could scatter inward, too, but this appears to be the first time we’ve seen a planet that made the whole journey intact.”WD 1856 b is thought to be no more than 14 times the size of Jupiter, based on the information they were able to gather as it passed in front of the star, as well as the age of the white dwarf itself. Further research is required to confirm that conclusion and allow scientists to decisively know that they have spotted the first such example of a planet in close orbit around a white dwarf.But it has already led researchers to speculate that if planets are able to survive that dramatic journey, there may be more rocky, Earth-sized planets waiting out there to be found – and that the conditions in orbit around a white dwarf could be favourable to alien life.”Even more impressively, Webb could detect gas combinations potentially indicating biological activity on such a world in as few as 25 transits,” said Lisa Kaltenegger, the director of Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute and an author on the paper.”WD 1856 b suggests planets may survive white dwarfs’ chaotic histories. In the right conditions, those worlds could maintain conditions favorable for life longer than the time scale predicted for Earth. Now we can explore many new intriguing possibilities for worlds orbiting these dead stellar cores.”An article describing the research, ‘A Giant Planet Candidate Transiting a White Dwarf’, is published in Nature today.

The sun has entered a new “solar cycle”, Nasa has said.Officially named “Solar Cycle 25”, it signals that there will be an increase in space weather that could have effects for technology on Earth as well as astronauts in space.The finding will be key to ensuring that the world is ready to deal with the various problems and complications that can come as a result of that change in space weather, experts said.“There is no bad weather, just bad preparation,” said Jake Bleacher, chief scientist for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters. “Space weather is what it is – our job is to prepare.”The solar minimum that marks the end of the previous cycle actually happened in December 2019, Nasa said. But the variability of the Sun means that knowing for sure can take months.As the Sun heads into its new cycle, it could lead to dramatic events on the surface – giant explosions such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections. Those can spew “light, energy and solar material” into space, Nasa noted.“We keep a detailed record of the few tiny sunspots that mark the onset and rise of the new cycle,” said Frédéric Clette, the director of the World Data Center for the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations, which works to track those sunspots.“These are the diminutive heralds of future giant solar fireworks. It is only by tracking the general trend over many months that we can determine the tipping point between two cycles.”Scientists expect that activity will rise until July 2025, when the Sun reaches its next predicted maximum.They noted that this cycle is expected to be comparable to the previous cycle, which was below average. But that does not mean there are not risks, researchers said.“Just because it’s a below-average solar cycle, doesn’t mean there is no risk of extreme space weather,” said Doug Biesecker, a solar physicist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “The Sun’s impact on our daily lives is real and is there.”

Apple is about to roll out major updates for the iPhone and all of its other major products.The new versions of the operating systems will come tomorrow, 16 September, the company said.As well as iOS 14, for the iPhone, new versions of iPadOS, WatchOS, and the operating system for the Apple TV will be released at the same time.iOS 14 brings a host of new features to the iPhone, including a redesigned home screen that allows apps to be hidden away when they are not in use.

Apple has launched a new line-up of iPads, including a redesigned version of the Air.It borrows from the look of the newer iPad Pro, which have square sides and no home button on the front.The Touch ID fingerprint sensor that was in that home button has been moved into the power button, Apple said. On the Pro, that problem was overcome with the addition of Face ID facial recognition, but that will not be present in the new iPad Air.But otherwise the Air now includes almost every feature from the Pro line-up. The more expensive iPad also includes Apple’s LiDAR sensor – a depth-sensing technology rumoured to be coming to the iPhone 12 – as well as an extra normal camera and a slightly larger and faster display.The new tablet makes use of new Apple chips that allow it to be 40 per cent faster than the previous model, the company says. That A14 chip is the first of Apple’s processors to use the 5nm process, which Apple said allowed for the chips to be made in ways that “challenge the law of physics”.Aside from the increased performance, the new Air will include new colours such as a green and pink. And it will now work with other devices, such as Apple’s own Smart Keyboard.Apple also updated the cheapest iPad – just called the iPad – with new Apple Pencil features and faster chips.

Apple has unveiled a host of new and updated products, including a revamped range of iPads, Apple Watches and a workout platform.The ‘Time Flies’ event was held at the same time of year that Apple typically announces its latest iPhone, though there was not a single mention of the iPhone 12.Apple had previously mentioned in a call to investors that its flagship device would be delayed by “a few weeks”, but it is still not clear when the launch will take place.It was the first big product reveal since the coronavirus pandemic and despite being presented from Apple Park in California, the entire event took place virtually through an online stream on its website.Show latest update
1600196171Watch the whole event here:[embedded content]Anthony Cuthbertson15 September 2020 17:551600154565Hello and welcome to The Independent’s coverage of Apple’s “Time Flies” event, which begins at 6pm UK time (or in just under 10 hours).Andrew Griffin15 September 2020 08:221600161107Is the iPhone 12 coming today? The short answer is: nobody outside of Apple can know for sure. But our best guess is no.Andrew Griffin15 September 2020 10:111600161154Andrew Griffin15 September 2020 10:121600163020UK parliamentary committee accuses Apple of ‘refusing to answer questions on environmental sustainability and repairability of its products’To mark the launch of the new products today, the UK’s Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) has accused Apple of failing to answer questions “on its environmental record and repairability of its devices”.The company was asked to participate in an inquiry into electronic waste but cancelled its appearance at late notice, the committee said. Its chair, Philip Dunne, said he had written to Tim Cook to request an explanation but is “yet to receive a substantive reply”.“Apple has made more than two billion iPhones – a phone for every person in the whole of Africa and Europe. Today, as Apple unveils its next generation of gadgets, my Committee continues to wait for answers on what the company is doing to tackle its environmental footprint,” Mr Dunne said in a statement.“With the speed at which new devices are brought to market, tech companies drive consumers to buy new products rather than prolonging the life of their existing items. It can also be very difficult to repair electronic devices, with many companies making it almost impossible – or if possible, very expensive – for consumers to have the ability to fix themselves. As a result, we’re seeing a throwaway society for electronics, and tech companies must take responsibility for the environmental impact that this causes. A circular economy with repair and recycling at its heart is crucial if we are to tackle the climate emergency.“Apple appears to have a positive story to tell regarding its efforts on climate change. But its unwillingness to answer my Committee’s questions has led us to believe its environmental obligations is not taken seriously enough.”Andrew Griffin15 September 2020 10:431600168680Late rumours about the iPhone 12Rumours are still coming in about the iPhone(s) 12, at this late* stage: reliable Apple analyst Ming-chi Kuo reports that the new phones won’t have the fast 120Hz refresh rate that had been rumoured. That has the effect of making the screen look smoother, and is already in place on a variety of other flagship phones – but the new report says that Apple has abandoned it for battery life reasons, presumably pushing it back into next year.(Obviously, as before, we don’t know how late these rumours are: this could be announced in just a few hours. Or it could not be announced for another few weeks!)Andrew Griffin15 September 2020 12:181600172914If you’ve ever wondered what an Apple-designed face mask might look like, employees have shared pictures of their in-house facewear.This one shared by Reddit user Dualjpg shows a clean and simple design that you might expect from the tech giant.