John Semley, Defector: At a very basic level, commodity fetishism is fine, and probably pretty normal: a way of declaring, “Here is my stuff that I like.” It can be an expression not only of personal curatorial habits, but of taste, and identity. But commodities conceived along t … | Continue reading
Rakhim Davletkaliyev: Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok — which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It’s like Carcinisation, a form of convergen … | Continue reading
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you. As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances … | Continue reading
Kyle Chayka, of the New Yorker, wrote a pretty good profile of Bluesky and its CEO Jay Graber recently which, as it turns out, is his third in what is now a set of articles about the post-Twitter services trio. On Mastodon in November 2022: Users who want to have a lively, varied … | Continue reading
Birgit Mueller, Chris Danis, and Giuseppe Lavagetto, of the Wikimedia Foundation: Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape th … | Continue reading
Alexander Lee, Digiday: A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms. Across the board, writers such as Marisa Kabas, Luke O’Neil, Jonathan M. Katz and Ryan Broderick — all of whom exited Substack in … | Continue reading
I needed cheering up after the last post. Sorry about that. Jen Simmons, of Apple’s WebKit team: While support for pretty shipped in Chrome 117, Edge 177, and Opera 103 in Fall 2023, and Samsung Internet 24 in 2024, the Chromium version is more limited in what it accomplishes. Ac … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: These articles are good exercises but they are also total fantasy. There is no universe in which Apple snaps its fingers and begins making the iPhone in the United States overnight. It could theoretically begin assembling them here, but even that is a ye … | Continue reading
Hugo Lowell, the Guardian: According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, [the Atlantic’s Jeffrey] Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaig … | Continue reading
Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch: OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Produc … | Continue reading
Tom Singleton and Liv McMahon, BBC News: The government argued it would damage national security if the nature of the legal action and the parties to it were made public — what are known as the “bare details of the case”. In a ruling published on Monday morning, the tribunal reje … | Continue reading
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you. As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances — del … | Continue reading
I would like to make an amendment to an article I published last month comparing the risks of popular U.S. technology companies with concerns previously reserved for those from China. I wrote: In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg lamented an apparently lost … | Continue reading
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Foreign Affairs: The global Internet will likely continue to exist in the form of shared technical infrastructure. But if U.S. companies persist in identifying with a U.S. administration that is hostile to Europe, it is likely that Europe will wa … | Continue reading
John Gruber: It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or even the obvious constraints of simple supply and demand … | Continue reading
Gianluca Guidi, et al., in a peer-reviewed article in Nature Communications: […] In this study, we located the 34 largest mines in the United States in 2022, identified the electricity-generating plants that responded to them, and pinpointed communities most harmed by Bitcoin min … | Continue reading
A little over a month ago, I had the misfortune of breaking both a fifteen-year record of intact phone screens and, relatedly, my phone’s screen. This sucked in part because I can no longer be so smug about not using a case, and also because I do not have AppleCare. I do have ins … | Continue reading
Jake Bleiberg, Bloomberg: Oracle Corp. has told customers that a hacker broke into a computer system and stole old client log-in credentials, according to two people familiar with the matter. It’s the second cybersecurity breach that the software company has acknowledged to clien … | Continue reading
Hannah Murphy, et al., Financial Times: Under the terms of the transaction, a group of new outside investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Blackstone and other large private capital firms would own about half of TikTok’s US business, according to several people familiar with the … | Continue reading
Alexander Martin, the Record: Alongside the new Europol, the Commission said it would create roadmaps regarding both the “lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement” and on encryption. The aim is to “identify and assess technological solutions that would enable law e … | Continue reading
Jason Snell, Six Colors: I feel sympathy for whomever Netflix is paying to tag content for the best places to insert ads. There are no clear act breaks in “Adolescence,” and the fact that it’s one continuous shot means that literally any interruption is going to be incredibly dis … | Continue reading
Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, and James Evans, in an article for Science, as published on Farrell’s website because good academics are aware of how restrictive a paywalled journal can be: Our central point here is not just that these technological innovations, like … | Continue reading
Om Malik: What’s particularly ironic is that today’s Google has become exactly what its founders warned against in their 1998 paper: an advertising company whose business model fundamentally conflicts with serving users’ needs. I remember when Sergey Brin and Larry Page first art … | Continue reading
The Autorité de la concurrence: The Autorité de la concurrence has fined Apple €150,000,000 for abusing its dominant position in the sector for the distribution of mobile applications on iOS and iPadOS devices between April 2021 and July 2023. […] However, while the principle of … | Continue reading
With the launch of iOS 18.4 today, Apple says Apple Intelligence features are now available in the E.U. and in several new languages. I remain skeptical that Apple Intelligence was ever “delayed” in the region. Until today, it was only available in variations of English. When App … | Continue reading
Kurt Wagner and Katie Roof, Bloomberg: Elon Musk said his xAI artificial intelligence startup has acquired the X platform, which he also controls, at a valuation of $33 billion, marking a surprise twist for the social network formerly known as Twitter. This feels like it has to b … | Continue reading
Allison Morrow, CNN: Tech columnists such as the New York Times’ Kevin Roose have suggested recently that Apple has failed AI, rather than the other way around. “Apple is not meeting the moment in AI,” Roose said on his podcast, Hard Fork, earlier this month. “I just think that w … | Continue reading
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks. By blocking ad trackers, Magic Lasso Adblock stops you being followed by ads around the web. … | Continue reading
Meta: Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests. You know, I think this concept of showing people things they say they want to see might just work. Meta says t … | Continue reading
Jeff Johnson in November 2023: When people wistfully proclaim that they wish for the next major macOS version to be a “Snow Leopard update”, they’re wishing for the wrong thing. No major update will solve Apple’s quality issues. Major updates are the cause of quality issues. The … | Continue reading
Remember when Substack’s co-founders went to great lengths to explain what they had built was little more than infrastructure? It was something they repeated earlier this year: You need to have your own corner of the internet, a place where you can build a home, on your own land, … | Continue reading
The high-test idiocy of a senior U.S. politician inviting a journalist to an off-the-record chat planning an attack on Yemen, killing over thirty people and continuing a decade of war, seems to have popularized a genre of journalism dedicated to the administration’s poor digital … | Continue reading
Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal — which has recently been in the news — in an op-ed for the Financial Times: The UK is part and parcel of a dangerous trend that threatens the cyber security of our global infrastructures. Legislators in Sweden recently proposed a law that … | Continue reading
Like those since 2020, WWDC 2025 appears to be an entirely online event with a one-day in-person event. While it is possible there will be live demos — I certainly hope that is the case — I bet it is a two-hour infomercial again. If you are planning on travelling there and live o … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people m … | Continue reading
Grace Dean, BBC News: Ms O’Carroll’s lawsuit argued that Facebook’s targeted advertising system was covered by the UK’s definition of direct marketing, giving individuals the right to object. Meta said that adverts on its platform could only be targeted to groups of a minimum siz … | Continue reading
John Voorhees, MacStories: The update [next month] will enable 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio, which Apple says is supported by over 100 million songs on Apple Music. Using the headphones’ USB-C cable, musicians will enjoy ultra-low latency and lossless audio in their Logic Pro wo … | Continue reading
Simon Sharwood, the Register: Over the weekend, users noticed their Timelines went missing. Google seems to have noticed, too, as The Register has seen multiple social media posts in which Timelines users share an email from the search and ads giant in which it admits “We briefly … | Continue reading
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you. As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyance … | Continue reading
Lucy Mangan, the Guardian: There have been a few contenders for the crown [of “televisual perfection”] over the years, but none has come as close as Jack Thorne’s and Stephen Graham’s astonishing four-part series Adolescence, whose technical accomplishments – each episode is done … | Continue reading
Reid Tatoris, Harsh Saxena, and Luis Miglietti, of Cloudflare: Today, we’re excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” direct … | Continue reading
There is a long line of articles questioning Apple’s ability to deliver on artificial intelligence because of its position on data privacy. Today, we got another in the form of a newsletter. Reed Albergotti, Semafor: Meanwhile, Apple was focused on vertically integrating, designi … | Continue reading
Damian Carrington, the Guardian: Their exploration of future fossils has led [Prof. Sarah] Gabbott and [Prof. Jan] Zalasiewicz to draw some conclusions. One is that understanding how human detritus could become fossils points towards how best to stop waste piling up in the enviro … | Continue reading
Benedict Evans: That takes us to xR, and to AI. These are fields where the tech is fundamental, and where there are real, important Apple kinds of questions, where Apple really should be able to do something different. And yet, with the Vision Pro Apple stumbled, and then with AI … | Continue reading
There is a free market argument that can be made about how Apple gets to design its own ecosystem and, if it is so restrictive, people will be more hesitant to buy an iPhone since they can get more choices with an Android phone. I get that. But I think it is unfortunate so much [ … | Continue reading
Tom Van Pelt, technical director at GSMA: In my last post, ‘RCS Now in iOS: a New Chapter for Mobile Messaging‘, I celebrated the integration of Rich Communication Services (RCS) with Apple’s iOS 18, a culmination of years of collaboration across mobile operators, device manufact … | Continue reading
Constantine Anastasakis, of Dribbble, a portfolio hosting site for designers that also has a job board and, as of last year, serves as an intermediary between designers and clients: Since Week 36 of last year, the total value of transactions processed through our marketplace (GMV … | Continue reading
Estella Ren, the Toronto Star: A Canadian retail icon is on its last legs as Hudson’s Bay Company plans to liquidate its entire business by June, with the process starting as early as next week. This is a 350-year-old retailer that has been hollowed out in the span of less than t … | Continue reading