Here is something I am very excited about: James Hoffmann has finally figured out a way to do what he has been calling — for years — the “decaf project”. The goal is to taste the same batch of coffee decaffeinated in three different processes, and alongside the caffeinated batch. … | Continue reading
Mike Masnick, for MSNBC: Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the creeping. Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a … | Continue reading
Jason Snell, Macworld: A few years later, Apple began planning how to bring the Mac into the App Store universe. However, macOS was designed in a much earlier era and didn’t offer the level of lockdown that Apple built into iOS. Rather than attempting to lock down the Mac and mak … | Continue reading
Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron, Wired: A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US companies legally collecting digital advertising data are also providing the world a cheap and reliable way to track the movements of American mi … | Continue reading
Hey, remember that wacky story from Cabel Sasser’s GDC talk of all those Playdates that went missing, and then resurfaced in May? The story, in full, is in the latest episode of the Playdate Podcast. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Last week, I linked to a very cool project in which Ben Wallace pointed to the seemingly endless depths of barely labelled iPhone video uploads on YouTube. Here are a couple more things along similar lines. First, Riley Walz built a viewer to shuffle between five million of these … | Continue reading
Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic: This technical report presents findings from a two-phase analysis investigating potential algorithmic bias in engagement metrics on X (formerly Twitter) by examining Elon Musk’s account against a group of prominent users and subsequently compar … | Continue reading
Alex Reisner, the Atlantic: I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. […] The files within this data set are not scripts, exactly. Rather, they are subtitles taken from a website called OpenSubtitles.org. Users of … | Continue reading
Albert Burneko, Defector: What is skepticism? In my lifetime as a word-nerd, I have known “skepticism” to refer to a sort of stubborn insistence upon rigor and evidence in place of things like dogma and “common sense.” A skeptic, by those terms, is someone who questions what they … | Continue reading
Brandon Vigliarolo, the Register: Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada’s Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of “maintaining or repairing a product, incl … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge: […] But so had a lot of artists with single-word names, such as Swans, Asia, Standards, and Gong. A new album would appear on an artist’s Spotify page, bearing their name but no similarity to their music. Sometimes, as with the fake HEALTH albums, th … | Continue reading
Ben Collins today promised “the funniest news you’ve ever heard in your entire life” and, boy, did he deliver. “Bryce P. Tetraeder”, “CEO” of Global Tetrahedron, as published the Onion: Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars … | Continue reading
Adam Engst, TidBits: In the first ad, Apple Intelligence enables a goof-off who wastes time and annoys his colleagues to surprise his boss with an unexpectedly well-written email. It’s not clear that the boss is impressed; he just can’t believe the guy would have written a profes … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: I have reported on AI-generated spam for a year now, and have watched as different trends come and go. In August, when I wrote about this community of people, bizarre Jesus content, surreal landscapes and dream homes, and birthday celebration posts were … | Continue reading
Eric Hal Schwartz, TechRadar: Microsoft has made Copilot the name and style of its AI assistant and other AI services for more than a year, but it seems the company might have a rebranding project underway with a transparent origin. In references shared on X from the appprivacy.a … | Continue reading
Paris Marx: That leaves us with an important question to consider. Not just what we want the future of Canada Post to be, but also what kind of society we want to live in. We should want to take advantage of the post office’s unique, nationwide infrastructure to provide more and … | Continue reading
Ben Wallace: While Send to YouTube can be thoroughly analyzed as a milestone on the “frenemy” timeline between Apple and Google, I want to explore a pleasant consequence of this moment. Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, … | Continue reading
I am not sure what amuses most about this book, as there is so much to choose from. The $450 price tag, perhaps, for what appears to be the same short essays featured in Apple Music. Maybe it is the lack of anything released before 1959. Perhaps it is in celebrating the hollownes … | Continue reading
Joseph Cox, 404 Media: On Thursday, 404 Media reported that law enforcement officials were freaking out that iPhones which had been stored for examination were mysteriously rebooting themselves. At the time the cause was unclear, with the officials only able to speculate why they … | 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
Matthew Schneier, Grub Street: What even is Wonder? Founded in 2018, it is, according to its own marketing copy, “a new kind of food hall.” More of a Potemkin food hall, really. Under its green shingle, Wonder comprises some 30 “restaurants,” which are really more like sub-brands … | Continue reading
Jaron Schneider, of PetaPixel, reviewed the new MacBook Pro: The only other major change to the design of this laptop is the choice to add Apple’s nano-texture display which significantly reduces glare. The MacBook Pro has been very prone to glare over the years and would have to … | Continue reading
You might want to skip this one. From the perspective of this outsider, the results of this year’s U.S. presidential election are stunning. I feel terrible for those within the U.S. who will endure another four years of having longtime institutions ripped apart by a criminal admi … | Continue reading
Catharine Tunney, CBC News: Citing national security concerns, the federal government has ordered TikTok to close its Canadian operations — but users will still be able to access the popular app. My position is that TikTok should not be banned; instead, governments should focus o … | Continue reading
Please forgive me for quoting this New York Times editorial board piece in its entirety: You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, wi … | Continue reading
In short. In long: Ten years ago, the USB Implementers Forum finalized the specification for USB-C 1.0, and the world rejoiced, for it would free us from the burden of remembering which was the correct orientation of the plug relative to the socket. And lo, it was good. And then … | 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
Om Malik, at his new Crazy Stupid Tech publication — which, according to its mission statement, is a compliment — interviewed Humane founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri about how things are going: Lost in the barbs about the botched hardware was the fact that a new kind … | Continue reading
Apple on Monday in the Irish press release for this week’s operating system updates: Mac users in the EU can access Apple Intelligence in U.S. English with macOS Sequoia 15.1. This April, Apple Intelligence features will start to roll out to iPhone and iPad users in the EU. This … | Continue reading
Pixelmator: Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come. Congratulations to the P … | Continue reading
Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media: For the past two years an algorithmic artist who goes by Ada Ada Ada has been testing the boundaries of human and automated moderation systems on various social media platforms by documenting her own transition. Every week she uploads a shirtless self … | Continue reading
Jeff Johnson: First, StopTheMadness Pro 11.0 adds the ability to copy a text fragment link from selected text in Safari, using a contextual menu item on macOS or Show Menu on Tap on iOS. The previous two links are themselves examples of text fragments; the first link, when clicke … | Continue reading
Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac: It’s officially the end of an era. Apple on Wednesday held the last day of its super week of Mac announcements, this time with the launch of a new generation MacBook Pro with an M4 chip. But the company also did something else: it upgraded all Macs with … | Continue reading
A press release from Calgary Public Library: The Library’s Technology Team and existing cybersecurity partners engaged a Microsoft Incident Response team to support containment procedures and complete a thorough investigation. The findings of the investigation confirm that while … | Continue reading
Sébastien Bourdon, Antoine Schirer, and Sinead McCausland, of Le Monde, are in the middle of a three-part investigation into how Strava compromises the travel activities of world leaders. It is paywalled, but two videos, in English, have been published on YouTube. Sylvie Corbet, … | Continue reading
If software is judged by the difference between what it is actually capable of compared to what it promises, Siri is unquestionably the worst built-in iOS application. I cannot think of any other application which comes preloaded with a new iPhone that so greatly underdelivers, a … | Continue reading
Robb Knight: Mastodon 4.3 released today with a bunch of features but the one most people, including me, are excited about is author tags – this isn’t the name of them but they also don’t seem to have a proper name as far as I can tell. Anyway, you need to do two things to […]⌥ P … | Continue reading
Joe Rosensteel, Six Colors: The photographs you take are not courtroom evidence. They’re not historical documents. Well, they could be, but mostly they’re images to remember a moment or share that moment with other people. If someone rear-ended your car and you’re taking photos f … | Continue reading
Jaron Schneider, PetaPixel: Some might believe that Apple isn’t invested in the future of the [Vision] platform either given the niche appeal or the high price, but after speaking with Della Huff (a member of the Product Marketing team at Apple, who oversees all things Camera app … | Continue reading
Ahmad Alfy: My first encounter with text fragments was through links generated by Google Search results. Initially, I assumed it was a Chrome-specific feature and not part of a broader web standard. However, I soon realized that this functionality was actually built upon the open … | Continue reading
Hank Green, who lives in Montana, spotted something weird with his mail-in ballot: in all categories, the Democrat candidate was listed last. That seemed odd. So he looked it up: Since every district — and there’s a ton of them — is getting a different ballot anyway, the candidat … | Continue reading
Brian Krebs: In an interview, Atlas said a private investigator they hired was offered a free trial of Babel Street, which the investigator was able to use to determine the home address and daily movements of mobile devices belonging to multiple New Jersey police officers whose f … | Continue reading
Juli Clover, MacRumors: Disney is no longer allowing its customers to sign up for and purchase subscriptions to Hulu or Disney+ through Apple’s App Store, cutting out any subscription fees that Disney would have needed to pay to Apple for using in-app purchase. As of writing a da … | Continue reading
Hayden Anhedönia, who you might know as Ethel Cain: I just feel as though there’s a lack of sincerity in the world these days. I speak from personal experience as an artist putting things out into the world, yes, but also as a human being interacting with other human beings on th … | Continue reading
danah boyd: Since the “social media is bad for teens” myth will not die, I keep having intense conversations with colleagues, journalists, and friends over what the research says and what it doesn’t. (Alice Marwick et. al put together a great little primer in light of the legisla … | Continue reading
X on Wednesday announced a new set of terms, something which is normally a boring and staid affair. But these are a doozy: Here’s a high-level recap of the primary changes that go into effect on November 15, 2024. You may see an in-app notice about these updates as well. Governin … | Continue reading
Gian Volpicelli and Samuel Stolton, Bloomberg: Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules. Regulators are … | Continue reading
Dominic Wellington responded thoughtfully to speculation, including my own that a device management key for suppressing screen recording alerts in MacOS Sequoia was added in part because of employee monitoring software: […] I know perfectly well that these sorts of tools exist an … | Continue reading