There has been a wave of artificial intelligence regulatory news this week, and I thought it would be useful to collect a few of those stories in a single post. Earlier this week, U.S. president Joe Biden issued an executive order: My Administration places the highest urgency on … | Continue reading
April King’s daughter dressed as a frustratingly accurate Siri for Halloween. Excellent. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
John Herrman, New York: But it’s worth paying attention to which, and whose, problems these companies are trying to solve with AI. Amazon is attempting to address an issue for sellers and for its own advertising business: Clickable “lifestyle” ad imagery is expensive to hire for … | Continue reading
Aaron Gordon, writing at the remaining shell of Vice: For the last three months, I’ve been trying to find an answer to a basic question at the heart of this theft wave: Why didn’t the U.S. follow Canada’s lead and mandate immobilizers, too? If it had, either around the same time … | Continue reading
Jose M. Gilgado: In a world where constant change is the norm, finished software provides a breath of fresh air. It’s a reminder that reliability, consistency, and user satisfaction can coexist in the realm of software development. There is confidence in being able to say a piece … | Continue reading
Emma Roth, the Verge: YouTube is broadening its efforts to crack down on ad blockers. The platform has “launched a global effort” to encourage users to allow ads or try YouTube Premium, YouTube communications manager Christopher Lawton says in a statement provided to The Verge. “ … | Continue reading
Davey Alba and Leah Nylen, Bloomberg: Google maintains a firewall between its ads and search teams so that its engineers can innovate on Google’s search engine, unsullied by the influence of the team whose goal is to maximize advertising revenue. But in February 2019, testimony a … | Continue reading
Even if you do not believe the results of Geekbench tests are representative of real-world performance, it is clear Apple’s system-on-a-chip lineup has written an extraordinary story for its own products. Its effects are unsurprisingly reminiscent of the switch from PowerPC to In … | Continue reading
Leica last week launched the M11-P which, as I am sure you know, is the kind of news I am a total sucker for and it is embarrassing. Aside from the usual stuff you might expect from a “P”-type Leica, there is buried in the camera an implementation of an open image authentication … | Continue reading
Apple held a short presentation tonight to introduce its first M3 SoCs — built with the same three-nanometre process as its A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro — and updated Macs which use those chips: a refreshed iMac and MacBook Pro line. Aside from the SoC, there appears to be l … | Continue reading
David Montgomery of YouGov: Physical books are a much more common thing for Americans to own than electronic books or e-books. Only around half of Americans say they own even one e-book, and only 9% of Americans say they own at least 100 e-books. This is a trick question, since m … | Continue reading
Mia Soto, the Verge: Thai Food Near Me isn’t the first business to think of the Google-first naming convention. There are reminders of Google’s kingmaker status in online discoverability everywhere in cities across the country. Among the businesses I was able to find: a chain of … | Continue reading
Kate Knibbs, Wired: As artists are quick to point out, Meta’s insistence that people provide evidence that its models have trained on their work or other personal data puts them in a bind. Meta has not disclosed the specifics about which data it has trained its models on, so this … | Continue reading
Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch: The MEPs said they had reached agreement on a substantially revised version of the draft legislation. Key changes parliamentarians have found agreement over — on the detection side — include putting a number of limits on scanning. Firstly their proposal … | Continue reading
Imran Rahman-Jones and Chris Vallance, BBC News: Powers in the act that could be used to compel messaging services to examine the contents of encrypted messages for child abuse material have proved especially controversial. Platforms like WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage say they ca … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published an article authored by four reporters — Byron Tau, Andrew Mollica, Patience Haggin, and Dustin Volz — explaining how data collected by ad tech ends up in the hands of U.S. government agencies. They cited the case of Near Intel … | Continue reading
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg: The company is preparing a new version of the [Apple TV] app for release around December as part of an upcoming tvOS software update, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is private. The app, which first launched in 2016, aggreg … | Continue reading
This piece from Benedict Evans is wonderful — one of his best, I think — but I wanted to highlight a smaller and less consequential point than the one Evans ultimately makes toward the article’s end: Meanwhile, lots of people tried to build a better Craigslist and a better Twitte … | Continue reading
The U.S. Department of Justice: James Wan, M.D., has pleaded guilty to paying a hitman he found on the dark web to murder his girlfriend. […] After learning about the threat to the victim’s life, FBI agents notified the victim, provided her protection, and questioned Wan. Wan adm … | Continue reading
Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork: We don’t know what is going to happen, but now is the time to begin imagining and building new alternatives. First of all: Anyone worried about losing their Bandcamp collection might want to try Batchcamp, a Chrome extension for bulk-downloading all o … | 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
Benjamin Mullin, John Koblin, and Tripp Mickle, New York Times: Jon Stewart’s show on Apple’s streaming service is abruptly coming to an end, according to several people with knowledge of the decision, the result of creative differences between the tech giant and the former “Dail … | Continue reading
Lumafield, which makes X-ray scanners for inspecting manufacturing quality, has done a bit of content marketing: Does Apple’s Thunderbolt 4 cable really warrant its $129 price tag? Or does a $5 cable get the job done just as well? We’ve used our Neptune industrial X-ray CT scanne … | Continue reading
Katie Notopoulos, writing for MIT Technology Review: Here’s the good news. We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent- seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could act … | Continue reading
Sara M. Watson, writing for Columbia Journalism Review’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism in 2016: Technology criticism evokes visions of loom-smashing Luddites and told-you-so Cassandras. Something about criticism in the context of technology seems to suggest that technological … | Continue reading
Today’s Google Doodle recognizes the legacy of Violet King Henry, born in Calgary in 1929, and becoming the first black woman to practise law in Canada in 1954. Her daughter, Jo-Anne Henry, wrote about her for Google’s blog: My favorite quote of my mom is one I only discovered 2 … | Continue reading
Erik Hayden, the Hollywood Reporter: Songtradr, the Santa Monica-based music licensing service that acquired Bandcamp from Epic Games, said on Monday that it had closed the deal for the music discovery platform. Some 60 Bandcamp staffers, out of 118, were offered employment to jo … | Continue reading
Jason Kottke, with the answer to why?: The timing feels right. Twitter has imploded and social sites/services like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are jockeying to replace it (for various definitions of “replace”). People are re-thinking what they want out of social media on the i … | Continue reading
It is not succinct and it is not especially coherent, but at least we now have a full record of the beliefs Marc Andreessen — and others of his ilk — are going to bat for. It is just about every libertarian fantasy — except that one — wrapped in the kind of absolutist framing […] … | 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 YouTube ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads. Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient … | Continue reading
Internal Tech Emails posted an email exchange between Tim Cook and Eddy Cue, as revealed during the ongoing Google antitrust trial. Cue had just met with Sundar Pichai about renegotiating their Safari deal [sic]: […] He tried to say we pay you more than anyone, numbers are increa … | Continue reading
Bethy Squires, Vulture: Like so many other web 2.0 companies, CollegeHumor started as one thing (a site for posting memes, humorous essays, and short-form videos), then became something else (a home for scripted sketch, as well as the production company behind shows like Adam Rui … | Continue reading
Gabe Bullard, Nieman Reports: Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic … | Continue reading
Molly White: Code snippets shown to the jury demonstrated how Nishad Singh wrote some code that would update the insurance fund amount by adding to it the daily trading volume, multiplied by a randomish number around 7,500, and dividing it by a billion, thus making it appear as t … | Continue reading
Marie Woolf, the Globe and Mail: The proposed regulations set a $230-million cap on the amount Google and Facebook would together have to inject into Canada’s news sector. Google would have to pay $172-million of that. But in an e-mailed statement on Monday, the final day of a mo … | Continue reading
Since Google’s introduction of its Pixel 8 phones earlier this month, it has been interesting and a little amusing to me to read the reactions to its image manipulation tools. It feels like we have been asking the same questions every year — questions like what is a photograph, a … | Continue reading
Bill Toulas, Bleeping Computer: The initial data leak was limited, with the threat actor releasing 1 million lines of data for Ashkenazi people. However, on October 4, the threat actor offered to sell data profiles in bulk for $1-$10 per 23andMe account, depending on how many wer … | Continue reading
Last night, I published a short piece detailing my understanding of Megan Gray’s claim, made in Wired, that Google silently replaces search queries with ones which are more lucrative for the company. I sat on that for a couple of days because I was hoping someone would be able to … | Continue reading
In an article for the Verge, Sean Hollister points to glaring gaps in Google’s promise to deliver seven years of real software updates to Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro buyers: The hole: Google is arbitrarily locking software features behind the Pixel 8 Pro’s $999 paywall, even though t … | Continue reading
Megan Gray, formerly an FTC attorney and DuckDuckGo general counsel, writing in an op-ed for Wired: Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, withou … | Continue reading
Dan Moren’s iCloud account was offline for exactly twelve hours for reasons apparently known to somebody at Apple but which cannot be disclosed to Moren: Moreover, if this was some kind of scheduled procedure, why not warn affected users ahead of time? The idea that my email — wh … | Continue reading
In two announcements, Google has now publicly committed to seven years of software updates for its newest Pixel phones, while Chromebooks will get ten years of updates. The Chromebook promise is almost more impressive — Google says it will not support all features for devices old … | Continue reading
Amy Thorpe, Rest of World: Twitch.tv. Discord.gg. Github.io. Three memorable addresses for three major websites that all have something in common: Their iconic URLs come from small island nations and territories. I have not thought about domain hacking in a long while. But, thank … | Continue reading
Sebastiaan de With: The challenge here is serious: the longer the lens, the harder it is to keep it steady from your shaky, pathetically unstable human hands. Most people do not take photos the way a tripod does — which means the iPhone camera has to do several things: […] Gettin … | Continue reading
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: All first-generation Apple Watch models released in 2015 were added to Apple’s obsolete products list on September 30, according to an internal memo obtained by MacRumors. As a result, these outdated “Series 0” watches are no longer eligible for repairs … | Continue reading
Michael Geist: The CRTC last week released the first two of what is likely to become at least a dozen decisions involving the Online Streaming Act (aka Bill C-11). The decision, which attracted considerable commentary over the weekend, involves mandatory registration rules for au … | Continue reading
After Apple released Big Sur in 2020, many users were unable to launch applications for several hours because the Online Certificate Status Protocol check was failing. This quickly became a — misguided, in my opinion — privacy fiasco, culminating in a November 2020 support docume … | Continue reading
Miles Klee, Rolling Stone: “Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market” is a new report from dappGambl, a community of experts in finance and blockchain technology. Upon analysis of 73,257 NFT collections, the authors found that 69,795 have a market cap of zero Ether (ET … | Continue reading