Brian Fung, CNN: Five US senators are set to reintroduce legislation Wednesday that would block companies including TikTok from transferring Americans’ personal data to countries such as China, as part of a proposed broadening of US export controls. The bipartisan bill led by Ore … | Continue reading
Faiz Siddiqui and Jeremy B. Merrill, Washington Post: The crash in North Carolina’s Halifax County, where a futuristic technology came barreling down a rural highway with devastating consequences, was one of 736 U.S. crashes since 2019 involving Teslas in Autopilot mode — far mor … | Continue reading
Mia Sato and Jay Peters, the Verge: In an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the “noise” and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventua … | Continue reading
Alex Pareene, Defector: We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance … | Continue reading
The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence: As part of our ongoing transparency efforts to enhance public understanding of the Intelligence Community’s (IC) work and to provide insights on national security issues, ODNI today is releasing this declassified IC report … | Continue reading
Brendan O’Connor, Inkstick: But not forever. Moore’s Law is not a natural law, but a prediction based on production capacities, capital flows, and the availability of highly exploitable labor. There are limits: political and economic as well as physical. “At some point, the laws … | Continue reading
Jon Keegan and Joel Eastwood, the Markup: If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital ad industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to … | Continue reading
If a movement’s knee-jerk contrarianism demands a fair and balanced approach to the smoke and soot causing the worst air quality in the world, that ideology just plain sucks and the morons promoting it should be ashamed. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Arnold Kim, writing at MacRumors in 2008: Dozens of Apple patent applications were published today revealing research that Apple had done in 2007 on many topics encompassing future versions of Mac OS X. The most intriguing is a series of patent applications which describe a “Mult … | Continue reading
Christian Selig: Eight years ago, I posted in the Apple subreddit about a Reddit app I was looking for beta testers for, and my life completely changed that day. I just finished university and an internship at Apple, and wanted to build a Reddit client of my own: a premier, custo … | Continue reading
David Smith, the Guardian: It was the day his life changed forever. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on mass surveillance by the US government, he traded a comfortable existence in Hawaii, the paradise of the Pacific, for indefinite exile in Russia, now a pariah in much of th … | Continue reading
Jonathan Yerushalmy and Alex Hern, the Guardian: On Monday, after months of discussions, threats and warnings, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) took aim at the most powerful force in the world of cryptocurrencies. The US financial watchdog accused the crypto exchan … | Continue reading
Apple: Mac Pro delivers the groundbreaking performance of M2 Ultra, plus the versatility of PCIe expansion, taking the most demanding workflows to the next level. While the Intel-based Mac Pro started with an 8-core CPU and could be configured up from there, every Mac Pro has App … | Continue reading
Imogen West-Knights, the Guardian: It is strange to think of Guinness World Records – a business named after a beer company, which catalogues humanity’s most batshit endeavours – as the kind of entity that could sell out. At first glance, it seems like accusing Alton Towers or Pi … | Continue reading
The mid-2010s Mac slump is catching up to the unlucky purchasers, including yours truly. MacOS Sonoma drops support for the 2017 iMac, which was the latest model when I bought it just over four years ago. Not necessarily surprising, but it is unfortunate to experience the lingeri … | Continue reading
There is certainly plenty to talk about from WWDC this year, but the privacy and security updates are not to be missed. One notable highlight: App Privacy Improvements New tools give developers more information about the data practices of third-party software development kits (SD … | Continue reading
Antonio G. Di Benedetto, the Verge: While I often prefer a universal solution over a proprietary connector, here’s the thing — Apple’s band release button beats the hell out of fiddling with little spring bars and jeweler’s tools. Instead, you just press a near-invisible button, … | Continue reading
I received more feedback than I had expected on my recent link to an article about people who routinely — and often permanently — share their live location with friends, and I thought it was worth highlighting here. A reader sent me this by email, which I am publishing with permi … | Continue reading
Rebecca Jennings, Vox: Friends sharing their real-time locations with each other is a pretty recent facet of modern life. Though apps like Foursquare have been around since the dawn of the smartphone age, mass location sharing was only introduced around 2017, when Google rolled o … | Continue reading
Lesley Fair, of the U.S.’ Federal Trade Commission: Many consumers who use video doorbell and security cameras want to detect intruders invading the privacy of their homes. Consumers who installed Ring may be surprised to learn that according to a proposed FTC settlement, one “in … | Continue reading
Daryna Antoniuk, the Record: Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) is accusing U.S. intelligence of hacking “thousands of Apple phones” to spy on Russian diplomats. According to FSB’s statement published on Thursday, the U.S. used previously unknown malware to target iOS device … | Continue reading
It has already been a busy year for Apple, and the company has not yet held a single presentation. Just two weeks into the new year, it launched new Macs and a refreshed HomePod, followed by some services updates, and new iPad software. All of those things — and more — were launc … | Continue reading
Sapna Maheshwari and Ryan Mac, New York Times: […] According to the documents obtained by The Times, the driver’s licenses of American users were also accessible on the platform [ByteDance’s Lark], as were some users’ potentially illegal content, such as child sexual abuse materi … | Continue reading
Andy Maxwell, writing at TorrentFreak in March: After almost 17 years online, file-hosting veteran Zippyshare will shut down at the end of the month. Founded in 2006, Zippyshare was known for its free, no-nonsense, no-frills approach to storing files online. Having changed very l … | Continue reading
Thomas Brewster, Forbes, 2021: Paragon Solutions doesn’t have a website. There’s very little information at all about them online, even if the Tel Aviv-based smartphone surveillance startup’s employees are all over LinkedIn, more than 50 of them. That’s not a bad headcount for a … | Continue reading
Hundreds of experts in artificial intelligence — including several executives and developers in the field — issued a brief and worrying statement via the Center for AI Safety: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale ris … | Continue reading
One week before WWDC is scheduled to begin, during which Apple is widely expected to introduce its take on a mixed-reality headset, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman spent some time with a prototype of Meta’s Quest 3 headset, and it is a bizarre article. Begin, naturally, with the title, w … | Continue reading
TimeGuessr is a fun game that, as you might expect, plays a lot like GeoGuessr except it involves still photography. The object is to guess where the photo was taken on a map and when, on a timeline from 1900–2023. Also notable, to me, is the use of Apple’s MapKit JS instead of t … | Continue reading
Mike Scarcella, Reuters: A U.S. judge on Thursday approved Apple Inc’s $50 million class-action settlement resolving consumer claims over certain defective MacBook keyboards, in a ruling that spurned challenges to the deal. […] The plaintiffs’ lawyers announced the deal a year ag … | Continue reading
Mike Masnick, Techdirt: […] Last year, the US and the EU announced yet another deal on transatlantic data flows. And, as we noted at the time (once again!) the lack of any changes to NSA surveillance meant it seemed unlikely to survive yet again. In the midst of all this, Schrems … | Continue reading
Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker, in the Telegraph: During my two decades in tech I’ve seen governments manufacture public outrage to serve their desire for control more times than I can count. There’s a predictable pattern that starts with a complex social problem receiving widespr … | Continue reading
It may have been a while since you last thought about Advanced Data Protection in iCloud. Or, perhaps there are people in your life who do not think about this kind of thing. The Electronic Frontier Foundation put together a great guide on what ADP is, how to use it, and its limi … | Continue reading
Lily Hay Newman, Morgan Meaker, and Matt Burgess, of Wired, acquired an official survey (PDF) of the views held by E.U. countries’ governments about end-to-end encryption: For years, EU states have debated whether end-to-end encrypted communication platforms, such as WhatsApp and … | Continue reading
The [European Data Protection Board][dp]: Following the EDPB’s binding dispute resolution decision of 13 April 2023, Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (Meta IE) was issued a 1.2 billion euro fine following an inquiry into its Facebook service, by the Irish Data Protection Authority … | Continue reading
Jason Snell, Six Colors: […] Neil Jhaveri, who previously worked on the engineering team for Apple Mail itself, founded a company to build a new email app: Mimestream. After a few years in open beta development, on Monday Mimestream 1.0 was officially released. If you don’t use G … | Continue reading
Pixelmator recently announced a new version of its photo editing software, now called Photomator and available for MacOS: Today’s a big day! Our team has just released Photomator for Mac. From state-of-the-art color adjustments to intelligent AI tools, powerful Repair and Clone t … | Continue reading
Rebecca Sloan of Lux: Today we’re excited to launch a new little app: Skylight Forecast. Skylight is an iPhone app that predicts your evening light. With the help of dozens of atmospheric factors and some of our own intelligent prediction technology, Skylight makes a daily foreca … | Continue reading
Michael Steeber: Today, Apple revealed its most comprehensive redesign of the Apple Store experience in nearly a decade. The Genius Bar is returning with a reimagined design. There’s an all-new space for more immersive product discovery. Store accessibility has been improved, and … | Continue reading
The biggest story in tech for the past fifteen years has been the convergence of a bag full of stuff into a single, pocket-sized, take-everywhere product. From its beginnings on the hips of Wall Street types, it rapidly became the best-selling piece of consumer electronics ever — … | Continue reading
Lia Haberman: You might have read about a new, decentralized, social network Instagram is building for “creators and public figures.” […] All new details have surfaced based on secret calls Meta has been having with select creators, hinting at a potential release in late June. He … | Continue reading
Collin Woodard, Jalopnik: “One of the most bullish / exciting things I’ve seen on Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta 11.4.1. It detected the pedestrian, but rather than slamming on the brakes it just proceeded through like a human would knowing there was enough time to do so,” they wro … | Continue reading
After the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade last year, a bunch of the corporations which have built their business on knowing the physical locations of people without their knowledge or explicit permission said they would not permit the use of that informa … | Continue reading
Todd Spangler, Variety: At the YouTube Brandcast upfront event Wednesday in New York, execs announced the introduction of 30-second unskippable ads in top-performing YouTube content on TVs — you know, just like the commercials that have run on broadcast and cable networks for dec … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, the people behind the Hill launched a new, crappy web publication called the Messenger; Joshua Benton of NiemanLab has a good roundup of its Daily Mail-esque strategy. But, to me, something seemed missing. When Semafor debuted last year, it needed a big gimmick … | Continue reading
Aisha Counts and Alex Barinka, Bloomberg: On the morning of April 23, an error on Meta’s automated ad platform caused some advertisers to spontaneously spend more than intended on Facebook, or to use their budgets in inefficient ways. In the weeks since the glitch, advertisers an … | Continue reading
A news release today from Apple appears to shed light on its App Store crime and fraud prevention tactics in 2022 but, much like previous versions, many questions are left unanswered or unexplained. Here is one such paragraph which makes me scratch my head: In 2022, nearly 1.7 mi … | Continue reading
Matt Burgess, Wired: Official reports and spending documents show that in the past year, UK police have deemed the testing of a system that can collect people’s “internet connection records” a success, and have started work to potentially introduce the system nationally. If imple … | Continue reading
Ben McCarthy, in a post about how difficult it is to manage a massive number of photos: Additionally, I’d like for Apple to offer additional iCloud Storage options. Right now, the maximum capacity is 4TB; 2TB if you subscribe to Apple One’s Premier Tier and another 2TB if you pay … | Continue reading