Suzanne Smalley, the Record: An Idaho federal judge on Saturday ruled that a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforcement action against the data broker Kochava — which the agency asserts sells vast amounts of non-anonymized data belonging to millions of people — may continue, a re … | Continue reading
Will Oremus, Washington Post: “I didn’t see the future,” [Jay] Graber said in an interview Monday, referring to the subsequent ouster of Dorsey as Twitter’s CEO and sale of the company to Elon Musk. “But as I like to say, the captain can always sink the ship.” Today, Bluesky is o … | Continue reading
Thomas Claburn, the Register, in October: Bug reports filed to Google’s Issue Tracker on October 17 and 24 describe Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 devices that can no longer access locally stored photos and other documents, or conduct updates, because the hardware reports having no space to … | Continue reading
Ethan Cox, Ricochet: On Thursday, February 1 a strange tweet was sent from the Twitter account of Welund, a secretive multi-national surveillance company run by former law enforcement and intelligence operatives with a track record of spying on activists and public figures. “Obst … | Continue reading
This story in which Jonathan Gulbrandsen gave Tim Cook a shirt sporting his visage is rather good relaxed Friday fare. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Bobby Allyn, NPR: Now in 2024, tech company workforces have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, inflation is half of what it was this time last year and consumer confidence is rebounding. Yet, in the first four weeks of this year, nearly 100 tech companies, including Meta, A … | Continue reading
On the eve of Apple’s Vision Pro release, Vanity Fair published a preview from Nick Bilton. It is a fun, light-touch article, notable mostly for its photos of Tim Cook wearing the headset, answering a perplexing obsession. Bilton interviewed Cook about the Vision Pro and got a gl … | Continue reading
Paula Tran, Global News: In a social media post on Wednesday afternoon, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said the government will require parental notification and consent if a child 15 years or younger changes their name and pronouns at school. In the video on X, formerly known as … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I shared on Mastodon one of my favourite Wikipedia graphics: an image on the PDF article which purportedly shows the maximum size of a page in Acrobat. I would like to correct the record. Alex Chan (via Andy Baio): Some version of this has been floating around th … | Continue reading
Justin Ling, on January 12: In a hour-long special, I’m Glad I’m Dead, [George] Carlin returns to talk reality TV, AI, billionaires, being dead, mass shootings, and Trump. It premiered to horrified reviews. Carlin’s daughter called the special an affront to her father: “Humans ar … | Continue reading
Salvador Rodriguez, Wall Street Journal: Meta Platforms is hoping Apple’s launch of the Vision Pro can reinvigorate its $50 billion metaverse effort, which consumers have yet to widely embrace. […] Meta employees see the Quest and its software ecosystem emerging as a primary alte … | Continue reading
As Twitter becomes more insular and technically unreliable, I have increasingly turned to Nitter, which describes itself as a “free and open source alternative Twitter front-end”. It mirrors posts and profiles, does not require users to be signed in, and is faster than Twitter’s … | Continue reading
John Conway flipped the roles of artist and “artificial intelligence”, and painted pictures as suggested by generated prompts. Clever idea for an exercise. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Nathan J. Robinson, of Current Affairs, spoke to Brian Merchant, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, about his book “Blood in the Machine”. Published last year, it tells the history of the Luddites and finds parallels in today’s technologies. Merchant, in response to a question fr … | Continue reading
Joseph Cox, 404 Media (this page may be login-walled, which 404 justifies for business reasons): Hundreds of thousands of ordinary apps, including popular ones such as 9gag, Kik, and a series of caller ID apps, are part of a global surveillance capability that starts with ads ins … | 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
In more Apple news from today — this time unambiguously good — automatic transcriptions of podcasts are coming in iOS 17.4: Apple automatically generates transcripts after a new episode is published. Your episode will be available for listening right away, and the transcript will … | Continue reading
Apple’s response to the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act has arrived. In theory, this is the biggest ever change to the way native apps are distributed and sold on iOS. Between the complexity and caveats, however, this is not a Mac-like software experience on the iPhone — though I am n … | Continue reading
A little thing I noticed when I was looking up great older Mac software is how much of my appreciation for it was driven by its feel. I put Coda on my list of all-time great Mac software because Panic worked hard to make it feel just right — just the way they had intended. […] | Continue reading
Apple: CUPERTINO, Calif., January 24, 1984–Apple Computer today unveiled its much-anticipated Macintosh computer, a sophisticated, affordably priced personal computer designed for business people, professionals and students in a broad range of fields. Macintosh is available in al … | Continue reading
Riley Griffin, Bloomberg: The administration plans to soon unveil the new executive order, which will direct the US Attorney General and Department of Homeland Security to issue new restrictions on transactions involving data that, if obtained, could threaten national security, a … | Continue reading
Paul Kunert, the Register, September 2022: The DRM-like mechanism [HP Dynamic Security] resulted in the print hardware returning a message that the carriage was damaged and an HP-branded toner was required. A Dutch ink seller spotted the move, saying the mass rejection was actual … | Continue reading
Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac: Apple will pay up to 10% more per play in royalties for tracks where a spatial version is available. This is starting with January’s payouts. Crucially, Apple Music users do not necessarily have to listen in Spatial Audio for the artist to be rewarded with … | Continue reading
Post-Post-P.C. A question the technology press loves to ask is some variation of what supplants the smartphone? and the answers are always unsatisfactory. Mainly that is the case because it does not seem like the right question. The smartphone is a near-perfect convergence device … | 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. It’s easy to set up, blocks all ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads. Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high … | Continue reading
David Mills, inventor of Network Time Protocol, died this week aged 85. When I saw the news first at Ars Technica, I confess I had no idea who this person was and, while I was vaguely aware of the importance of synchronized clocks in computing, I had no full appreciation for the … | Continue reading
Andy Greenberg, Wired: When she had started that process of probing the Bitcoin ecosystem, [Sarah] Meiklejohn had seen her work almost as anthropology: What were people doing with bitcoin? How many of them were saving the cryptocurrency versus spending it? But as her initial find … | Continue reading
The U.S. Department of Justice, in November: Last October, the Attorney General issued regulations creating the DPRC [Data Protection Review Court] within the Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties at the Department of Justice. The DPRC serves as the second level of the new redres … | Continue reading
It was Microsoft’s “landmark event”, according to the New York Times, and an “‘iPhone moment'” when it introduced Bing juiced with OpenAI. Google was “scrambling” because Bing was now “better”. Given how “competition is a click away”, you might think this triumph for Microsoft co … | Continue reading
John Voorhees, MacStories: You see, iPhone and iPad apps are compatible with Apple Vision Pro and made available to its users by default. Developers have to affirmatively opt-out, using App Store Connect if they don’t want their apps to show up in the device’s App Store. As it tu … | Continue reading
Kyle Chayka, in the Guardian, describes the universalized interior design trends of what he calls post-recession “hipster coffee shops”: Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic caf … | Continue reading
James Meek, London Review of Books: The arcs of the New Hollywood and the new TV are alike. The early optimism of Easy Riders fades when it turns out that American auteurs inspired by the French New Wave aren’t the future of popular big-screen entertainment: instead it’s the mer … | Continue reading
Juli Clover, MacRumors: Apple is making major changes to its U.S. iOS App Store policies, and developers are now able to direct customers to a non-App Store purchasing option for digital goods. Apple is allowing apps to feature a single link to a developer website that leads to a … | Continue reading
Jon Schuppe and Bracey Harris, reporting for NBC News in December 2020 from Mississippi: The move made Jackson, which has struggled to keep up with advances in high-tech crime-fighting, one of two dozen places in the country where police agencies inked deals this year with Fusus, … | Continue reading
Alex Kantrowitz, in a Big Technology article with the headline “WhatsApp is Finally Starting to Dominate in the United States. Here’s Why.”: Suddenly, everyone in the U.S. seems to be using WhatsApp. The app — once seen as an international phenomenon — grew daily users in the U.S … | Continue reading
Kevin Systrom announced the decision to shut down Artifact on Medium: While we’ve made this decision, we wanted to make sure that we allowed the community time to adjust. So, today we’ve decided to slim down the app’s complexity and operations by removing the ability to add new c … | Continue reading
Tom Coates attended an event of some kind thrown by Meta in December in which the company laid out its fediverse plans for Threads: Threads itself has only been around for a few months now and it still towers over the rest of the Mastodon community in terms of users. It’s based o … | Continue reading
Casey Newton, Platformer: In emails, comments, Substack Notes and callouts on social media, you’ve made your view clear: Platformer should leave Substack. We waited a day to announce our move as we finalized plans with Ghost and began our migration. But today we can say clearly t … | Continue reading
John Siracusa: In its current state, generative AI breaks the value chain between creators and consumers. We don’t have to reconnect it in exactly the same way it was connected before, but we also can’t just leave it dangling. The historical practice of conferring ownership based … | Continue reading
Unnecessary backstory: in this year’s instalment of “Classics Week”, Anthony Fantano highlighted the excellent Gorillaz album “Demon Days”. It has been a while since I last played it, so I gave it a spin and it was an instant nostalgia tunnel to 2005. I joked about needing a glas … | Continue reading
In April, the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott said DatPiff would be uploading every mixtape it had because the site was going in a “different direction”. The resulting library of hundreds of thousands of records is an overflowing treasure chest. Andre Gee, Rolling Stone: No one at … | Continue reading
Matt Birchler: Substack is not open source, they are proprietary software. Substack is not infrastructure, they are a brand that is directly tied to the people using them to publish. Go to any Substack blog and you’ll see the Substack logo and terms and conditions. Subscribe to a … | Continue reading
Alex Bitter, Business Insider: Instacart will test ads on its Caper smart shopping carts at Bristol Farms grocery stores in Southern California, it said on Monday. These carts, designed by an AI startup Instacart acquired in 2021, have been tested in Kroger, Schnucks, Geissler’s, … | Continue reading
Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times (via Jason Kottke): Both incidents could have been much worse. And that everyone on both airliners walked away is, indeed, a miracle — but not the kind most people think about. They’re miracles of regulation, training, expertise, effort, constant im … | Continue reading
Justin Clark, Bellingcat: […] Bellingcat has developed a lightweight open source research tool — Wayback Google Analytics — which automates the collection of tracking codes and discovery of relationships between websites using copies of sites maintained by The Internet Archive’s … | Continue reading
Ricky Romero built a very cool simulator to show how square pixels are drawn by the diamond subpixel layout of a display like that used for an OLED iPhone. You can draw or drop in images of your own to see how they render on a 40×40 grid. Then the thread goes a little off […]⌥ Pe … | Continue reading
In 2020, Joseph Cox of Vice published an investigation into HYAS, explaining how it received precise location data from X-Mode; I linked to this story at the time. The latter company, now Outlogic, obtained that data from, according to Cox’s reporting, an SDK embedded “in over 40 … | Continue reading
Camilla Hodgson, Financial Times (syndicated at Ars Technica): AI models are “trained” on data, such as photographs and text found on the internet. This has led to concern that rights holders, from media companies to image libraries, will make legal claims against third parties w … | Continue reading