Casey Newton, Platformer: Substack is removing some publications that express support for Nazis, the company said today. The company said this did not represent a reversal of its previous stance, but rather the result of reconsidering how it interprets its existing policies. As p … | Continue reading
David Heinemeier Hansson: But unfortunately there is no rule of law with the app stores, except that of the jungle, and Apple is the 800 lbs gorilla, ruling as it sees fit. So now HEY is back on trial in their kangaroo court. This time with our new calendar feature, HEY Calendar, … | Continue reading
David McCabe and Tripp Mickle, New York Times: The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year … | Continue reading
Will Oremus and Elahe Izadi, Washington Post: AI systems are typically “trained” on gargantuan data sets that include vast amounts of published material, much of it copyrighted. Through this training, they come to recognize patterns in the arrangement of words and pixels, which t … | Continue reading
Thomas Germain, Gizmodo: Facebook recently rolled out a new “Link History” setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. Users can opt-out, but Link History is turned on by default, and the data is used for targeted ads. As la … | Continue reading
Max Tani, Semafor: The board of the startup news organization The Messenger weighed shutting the publication down at a meeting on Friday, after learning that the company is on track to run out of cash at the end of January. The New York Times earlier reported Wednesday that The M … | Continue reading
When I was much younger, I assumed people who were optimistic must have misplaced confidence. How anyone could see a future so bright was a complete mystery when, I reasoned, when what we are exposed to is a series of mistakes and then attempts at correction from public officials … | Continue reading
When I link to books, I typically point readers to IndieBound — now Bookshop — because it lets people buy a copy from a local store instead of a rainforest-themed monolith. Though this works for U.S.-based readers, it has not given Canadians the same access. Enter IndieBookstores … | Continue reading
Caroline O’Donovan, Washington Post: Google settled a class-action lawsuit on Thursday brought by users who alleged the search giant captured and tracked their data while in “Incognito” mode, a Chrome browser setting that is supposed to protect users’ privacy. Previously, a feder … | Continue reading
Speaking of end-of-year lists, I posted on Mastodon my ten favourite records of the year — well, nine and an E.P., to be precise. These are not the “best” albums of the year; I am not a music critic. They are just the ones I liked the most. Maybe there will be something in there … | Continue reading
I have previously linked to Bloomberg’s annual “jealousy list” of articles from other outlets they wish they had published; it is mostly an excuse to ask about the Supermicro fiasco. This year, though, no snark and no Bloomberg. This year, Rest of World — a website you really oug … | Continue reading
Alastair McCready and Allegra Mendelson, South China Morning Post (likely paywalled): Cambodia’s scam sector gained infamy last year after reports seeped out of massive human trafficking, forced labour and systematic torture. The Philippines’ role as a major scam hub was also rea … | Continue reading
Dan Goodin, Ars Technica: Researchers on Wednesday presented intriguing new findings surrounding an attack that over four years backdoored dozens if not thousands of iPhones, many of which belonged to employees of Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky. Chief among the discoveries: … | Continue reading
Benjamin Mullin and Tripp Mickle, New York Times: Apple has opened negotiations in recent weeks with major news and publishing organizations, seeking permission to use their material in the company’s development of generative artificial intelligence systems, according to four peo … | Continue reading
Jay Graber announced the new branding — a butterfly — on Bluesky’s blog: Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, we are starting to open up. Posts on Bluesky have been public from the start through the open protocol, but today we’re making them publicly accessible through t … | Continue reading
Colin Devroe: In 1991, Geoffrey A. Moore described the challenges of introducing new technology products as Crossing the Chasm. The chasm is this very real gap between the earliest adopters and the early majority adopters of any new technology. By crossing the chasm, the momentum … | Continue reading
Dave Karpf: But the philosophical issues are secondary to the pragmatic ones. Pragmatically, it’s really quite simple. Content moderation is costly. It is a first-order revenue sink, not a revenue-generator. (I say “first-order” because if you skimp on content moderation, eventua … | Continue reading
In the nick of time to beat its self-imposed “late 2023” deadline, Apple has announced two automakers which will support the new version of CarPlay: Aston Martin and Porsche. This news is not relevant to my tax bracket, and it was delivered in a series of articles from — at least … | Continue reading
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple has announced that it will soon halt sales of its flagship Apple Watch models in the United States. The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this wee … | Continue reading
Michael Grothaus, writing for Fast Company, has some pretty standard grievances with the increasing role of computers in photography: As a middle-aged Gen Xer, these new camera technologies never cease to amaze me. But as someone who was also trained in analog photography — captu … | Continue reading
Figma CEO Dylan Field: Figma and Adobe have reached a joint decision to end our pending acquisition. It’s not the outcome we had hoped for, but despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the ma … | Continue reading
Glenn Fleishman wrote a wonderful history of Yahoo Pipes: The interactive, web-based visual programming of Pipes — inspired by earlier interfaces — became a primary influence on a generation of UI/UX designers and products that followed. Its remix ethos matched the time, and led … | Continue reading
Joseph Cox, 404 Media: A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads, accordi … | Continue reading
Dropbox recently added some features, marketed as “A.I.”, which it turned on by default for people outside the European Economic Area, U.K., and — depending on which part of the page you read — maybe also Canada. In those named regions, it must be enabled by users. So you can ima … | Continue reading
Brian X. Chen tried Meta’s recently updated Ray-Ban “smart” glasses for the New York Times: To inform people that they are being photographed, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses include a tiny LED light embedded in the right frame to indicate when the device is recording. When a photo is s … | Continue reading
Jeff Johnson: It’s a momentous year for my Safari extension StopTheMadness. The fifth anniversary of StopTheMadness was back in April. And today is the zeroth anniversary of StopTheMadness Pro! Actually, Tuesday was the zeroth anniversary, but that’s a story for another day. The … | Continue reading
Google announced yesterday that it would soon begin storing users’ Maps Timeline — which uses the optional Location History toggle to produce a record of places one has visited — locally on users’ devices. It sounds like a privacy enhancement at first, but Ron Amadeo of Ars Techn … | Continue reading
Timothy Burke posted this on Bluesky four days ago: So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage. They then unilaterally ended that plan, but assured me my data would remain safe — just in read-only mode. Today they informed me I have … | Continue reading
Daniela Sirtori-Cortina, Bloomberg: Presto Automation Inc. pitched a restaurant industry desperate to combat rising wages on a talking chatbot that could take orders with almost no human intervention. The firm touted OpenAI’s Sam Altman as an early investor. And it has used the f … | Continue reading
The Verge put together a package of articles about the year Twitter died, and it must be seen to be believed. There is a slider in the lower-left so you can adjust the “Chaos” level of the layout but, even in its most normal setting, it is a uniquely challenging series to read. I … | Continue reading
Victoria Scott, Road and Track: So automakers have given us what we demanded, and the stylistic language has changed to match: the overarching trends of this decade thus far is to make our vehicles broader, heavier, boxier, and more militaristic in nature, as rounded lines don’t … | Continue reading
Emily Badger, Ben Blatt, and Josh Katz, New York Times (via Clive Thompson):1 Sometime around 2009, American roads started to become deadlier for pedestrians, particularly at night. Fatalities have risen ever since, reversing the effects of decades of safety improvements. And it’ … | Continue reading
David Pierce, of the Verge, obtained a statement from Nadine Haija at Apple acknowledging it was responsible for shutting down Beeper Mini’s reverse-engineered iMessage app: At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies desig … | Continue reading
Beeper Mini has stopped being able to send and receive iMessages, but the cofounder of the company is teasing an update. While Apple has not confirmed whether it is responsible, I thought it was clear an unofficial reverse-engineered subscription-priced iMessage app for Android w … | Continue reading
Surely by now you have seen Google’s Gemini demo. The company opens the video with this description: We’ve been testing the capabilities of Gemini, our new multimodal Al model. We’ve been capturing footage to test it on a wide range of challenges, showing it a series of images, a … | 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
Todd Vaziri: In this day and age, when there are filmmakers out there like James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Michael Bay, Zack Snyder and others proudly showing off the digital effects work in their movies, considering them valuable partners in the filmmaking process … | Continue reading
Dan Milmo, reporting for the Guardian in 2021: The head of safety at Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, announced that the encryption process would take place in 2023. The company had previously said the change would happen in 2022 at the earliest. Loredana Crisan, vi … | Continue reading
Sean Hollister, the Verge: On Friday, Judge Donato vowed to investigate Google for intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence, calling the company’s conduct “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” We were there in the courtroom for his explanation. “ … | Continue reading
Today, after searching for a technical problem I was having, I wound up in a familiar place: a software vendor’s support forum. I ended up staring at an answer from someone proudly touting their contribution level while confidently pasting irrelevant instructions from some knowle … | Continue reading
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden: In the spring of 2022, my office received a tip that government agencies in foreign countries were demanding smartphone “push” notification records from Google and Apple. My staff have been investigating this tip for the past year, which included contactin … | Continue reading
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch: On Friday, genetic testing company 23andMe announced that hackers accessed the personal data of 0.1% of customers, or about 14,000 individuals. The company also said that by accessing those accounts, hackers were also able to access “a s … | Continue reading
Bruce Schneier, Slate: Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes how people behave. They conform. They self-censor, with the chilling effects that brings. Surveillance facilitates social control, and spying will only make this worse. Governments around the world a … | Continue reading
Sony PlayStation: As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library. The list of shows which user … | Continue reading
Beeper: Now you can send and receive blue bubble texts from your phone number. As soon as you install Beeper Mini, your Android phone number will be blue instead of green when your iPhone friends text you. It’s easy to join iPhone-only group chats, since people can add your phone … | Continue reading
Some table-setting: I rarely need to note any conflicts of interest in the things I publish here, but repeat site sponsor — most recently this week — Magic Lasso is an ad blocker, and its developer must navigate YouTube’s crackdown. To be clear, this post is not informed by that … | 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 setup, blocks all ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads. Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high … | Continue reading
Harris Brewis is back with a four-hour examination of plagiarism on YouTube. Yeah, it is a big one; I watched it in two parts because I needed to charge my headphones, because that is the world in which we now live, and it effectively monopolized my lazy Sunday. Its subject matte … | Continue reading