Mark Gurman, Bloomberg: John Giannandrea, a former Google executive who now oversees machine learning and AI at Apple, has a giant search team under him. Over the past few years, his group developed a next-generation search engine for Apple’s apps codenamed “Pegasus.” That techno … | Continue reading
Apple: With Visual Look Up, you can identify and learn about popular landmarks, plants, pets, and more that appear in your photos and videos in the Photos app. Visual Look Up can also identify food in a photo and suggest related recipes. Meal identification is new to iOS 17, and … | Continue reading
Today is fitting a theme so far that is, unfortunately, just about the heaviest thing I publish here, but I have a couple things I think I need to add. Giacomo Zandonini, Apostolis Fotiadis, and Luděk Stavinoha, for Balkan Insight, investigated how CSAM scanning companies have lo … | Continue reading
Last month, a new organization called the Heat Initiative launched an aggressive, high-profile campaign intended to pressure Apple to more comprehensively scan for child abuse materials in users’ messages, photo and video libraries, and iCloud storage. About a week after its debu … | Continue reading
Vox Media held its Code Conference this week in Laguna Niguel. It was the first iteration of the conference in which hosting duties would not be handled by Kara Swisher, who was only listed as a speaker. It seems that Swisher was supposed to interview General Motors CEO Mary Barr … | Continue reading
Alex Pasternack, Fast Company: The bigger irony is that Google employees’ chat conversations had “history off” set as the default. That explanation dovetails neatly with part of the government’s own argument about Google’s anticompetitive behavior. Google, argues the DOJ, knows t … | Continue reading
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games: As we shared earlier, we are laying off around 16% of Epic employees. We’re divesting Bandcamp and spinning off most of SuperAwesome. Nicole Carpenter, of Polygon, says about 830 people will be without a job. I feel bad for them. Songtradr bought B … | Continue reading
Matthew Cassinelli asked how people are using their iPhone’s Action Button and collected some of the best responses in this post. Unfortunately, I do not see any with download links; if you would like to use one, you will need to re-create it. There are some great ideas here, tho … | Continue reading
Fresh off of duplicating the math round from “Countdown”, the New York Times decided to take the Connecting Wall round from “Only Connect” and subtly rebrand it as Connections. It was released in June, but I only learned about it today via Andy Baio, who points to Conlextions by … | Continue reading
Matt Stoller: But this Google trial? By far the most important moment was when Judge Mehta denied a third-party motion to broadcast a publicly accessible audio feed of the trial for fear that information Google wishes wouldn’t be disclosed become public. Indeed, Google lawyers ha … | Continue reading
Kate Knibbs, Wired: Obituary pirating, where people scrape and republish obituaries from funeral homes and websites like Legacy.com, has been an ethically dubious business for years. Piracy websites are often skilled enough at search engine optimization to rise to the top of sear … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, my wife generously gifted me the Lego Concorde set. I got around to building it this weekend. It was the first time I had experienced a full Lego set in about twenty years, but it felt exactly as magical as I had remembered. As a kid, I would have felt all […] | Continue reading
In case you have not already heard, let me break the news: this year’s iPhones have a USB-C port where the Lightning port used to be. Aside from the physical attributes of each, the main difference between these ports is that Lightning is a proprietary port specific to Apple devi … | Continue reading
Normally, I would not cover a patch update, even if it does contain fixes for three actively exploited vulnerabilities — something which seems increasingly routine. In this case, it is notable because many of you will likely be receiving new iPhones in a matter of hours. (It is b … | Continue reading
Jared Spataro, of Microsoft: Today at an event in New York, we announced our vision for Microsoft Copilot — a digital companion for your whole life — that will create a single Copilot user experience across Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Windows. As a first step toward realizing … | Continue reading
Denise Lu, New York Times Magazine (via Rusty Foster): I was still using iTunes until 2019, when Apple decided to sunset the app and replace it with a new media player called Music (not to be confused with Apple Music, the streaming service). The appeal of the app remains the sam … | Continue reading
Chris Niccols, PetaPixel: Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max bring a lot to the table across the board, from a gaming-ready chip, to USB-C, and — of course — photography. It is that last point where we are putting the emphasis, and this review is specifically for those of you who … | Continue reading
John Herrman, New York: The internet promised, among other things, absolute audience surveillance, full measurability, and perfect knowledge of who was watching what, when, and for how long. What it delivered, instead, was metric tons of metric bullshit. Endowed with new powers o … | Continue reading
Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, in an excerpt from their new book “Key Changes”, as published in the Wall Street Journal: In 1972, the Temptations hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, winning three Grammys, with a seven-minute version of the song “Papa Was a Rollin’ … | Continue reading
Stephen Nellis, Reuters: Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, who oversees its consumer marketing efforts, is taking over the firm’s Surface and Windows businesses with the external PC makers and retail partners, as longtime product chief Panos Panay steps down. Bloomberg reported that Panay … | Continue reading
I promise I am nearly done with new iPhone posts, but I want to leave you with this one from Max Read: Here in 2023, that air of mystery and expectation is gone. Every phone looks the same; every announcement has been widely leaked. But there is still a good reason to attend to A … | Continue reading
I thought this analysis by Wally Nowinski, of PerfectRec, was intriguing, but perhaps not completely convincing. Nowinski says the most recent batch of iPhones are, with the exception of the Pro Max, the “most affordable” iPhones since the product’s launch, when adjusting for inf … | Continue reading
As part of a partnership between Google and iFixit, the latter has created a repair guide for the Pixel Tablet — and it is a very weird product inside. Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica: I have never seen a mobile device be built like this from a major company, especially one that costs $ … | Continue reading
Dr. Drang: Finally, we come to Jason Snell’s surprise at how light the 15 Pro seemed when he played with it in the hands-on area. He mentioned this not only in his Macworld article, but also in the post-keynote episode of Upgrade. You wouldn’t expect a change from 206 g for the 1 … | Continue reading
Apple: Apple today announced its first-ever carbon neutral products in the all-new Apple Watch Lineup. Innovations in design and clean energy have driven dramatic reductions in product emissions of over 75 percent for each carbon neutral Apple Watch. This milestone marks a major … | Continue reading
The iPhone 15 Pro line announced today managed to tick most of the rumour boxes: it is made of titanium and available in a range of tinted greys, it will be able to take spatial video compatible with the forthcoming Vision Pro, the big model has a more impressive telephoto camera … | Continue reading
Roman Dillet, TechCrunch: Last week, the European Union named the six big tech companies that should be considered as gatekeepers in one way or another under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). And just a few days later, as WABetaInfo first reported, a new beta version of WhatsApp fea … | Continue reading
Hey, remember that time the Attorneys General of two U.S. states sued key members of the Biden administration, partially because of stuff that happened before the Biden administration took office? Well, after a bit of back-and-forth, the Fifth Circuit court has mostly sided in fa … | Continue reading
Elana Scherr, reporting for Car and Driver in June (via Charles Arthur): Every city has its secrets. Washington, D.C., may have more than most, but I wasn’t there to dig up bodies, corporeal or political. My interest in visiting our nation’s capital was to find out more about a c … | Continue reading
Will Oremus, Washington Post: Already, one of the book’s critical passages has sparked geopolitical drama — and an embarrassing public walk-back by Isaacson. In an excerpt from the book published in The Washington Post on Friday, Isaacson recounts how Musk single-handedly foiled … | Continue reading
I like Kagi’s idea of shuffling indie blog posts — kind of like a directory-based StumbleUpon — but I am most curious about its announcement that it will be elevating posts from these sites in search results.1 Surely authority and relevance carry heavier weighting in ranking thes … | Continue reading
Ligaya Mishan, New York Times Style Magazine: The path of vanilla to our table is less straightforward, and its provenance is often still elusive on commercial labels. But already you can find vanilla beans from Madagascar at Walmart and order beans and bottles for making homemad … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, of 404 Media, two weeks ago: For the last few months Instagram has served me a constant stream of ads for hard drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, guns, counterfeit cash, wholesale quantities of weed, and Cash App scams, as well as a Russian-language job p … | Continue reading
Brian Krebs: In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting s … | Continue reading
Cristina Criddle and Anna Gross, Financial Times: The UK government will concede it will not use controversial powers in the online safety bill to scan messaging apps for harmful content until it is “technically feasible” to do so, postponing measures that critics say threaten us … | Continue reading
Tanner Kohler and Amy Zhang, of the Nielsen Norman Group: Dark mode is more popular than ever. You might even think it’s essential — at least if you were to read many of the web-design articles devoted to the topic. However, it takes valuable time and resources to fully support d … | Continue reading
Jen Caltrider, Misha Rykov, and Zoë MacDonald, of Mozilla: Car makers have been bragging about their cars being “computers on wheels” for years to promote their advanced features. However, the conversation about what driving a computer means for its occupants’ privacy hasn’t real … | Continue reading
I want to try something a little bit different: a review of a product at what is likely the end of my using it. Early product reviews are great buyer’s guides, but they tend to dwell on the novel, which is understandable for using a product for only a week or two. I have lived [… … | Continue reading
Doha Madani, NBC News: Elon Musk on Monday posted that he was against antisemitism and blamed the Anti-Defamation League for lost advertising revenue since his acquisition of X, formerly known as Twitter. The tech mogul posted his stance on free speech and antisemitism seemingly … | Continue reading
Max Hoppenstedt, Washington Post: On a recent Wednesday evening, a university professor in a large town in western Germany was preparing several paintings to be sold through the British auction house Christie’s. Using his iPhone, he took pictures of the inherited works at his hom … | Continue reading
Harley Turan: According to iOS’ Photos application, I’ve taken 73,281 photos over the past 14 years of owning an iPhone. Each one of those images doesn’t just contain the photo you see as you scroll through the Photos app — it contains a wealth of information stored encoded direc … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: X’s recently updated privacy policy informed its users it would now collect biometric data as well as users’ job and education history, Bloomberg spotted earlier this week. But it appears that’s not the only thing that X plans to do with user data. Accord … | Continue reading
Stephen Hackett today updated a great, easy-to-follow guide for setting up a Time Machine server on your network. This is something I have been meaning to do for about a year and I figured a Friday evening before a long weekend would be a superb time to make it happen. After all, … | Continue reading
Lily Hay Newman, reporting earlier this week in Wired: […] This week, a new child safety group known as Heat Initiative told Apple that it is organizing a campaign to demand that the company “detect, report, and remove” child sexual abuse material from iCloud and offer more tools … | Continue reading
Lots of good new things were announced today, so I will stay on that wavelength with the release of Longplay 2 from Adrian Schoenig. I covered the first version of the app and I really liked it, so I was excited when Schoenig let me know last week that its successor’s release was … | Continue reading
Ben McCarthy launched Obscura 4 today, a much-anticipated — well, with at least a sample size of me — update to their excellent manual camera app. Ivan Mehta reviewed it for TechCrunch: Obscura, the iPhone camera app for pro users, has released a new major version called Obscura … | Continue reading
If you have not yet read it, Tyler Vigen’s story about researching the reason for building one specific pedestrian bridge over one stretch of a highway in Minnesota is — hand on heart — as good as everyone says it is, and I recommend spending the time with it and its many notatio … | Continue reading
Jason Tate: It starts with a big text box; you put in your list of items you want to rank, you click rank, you rank, and then you get the results. I then wanted two other features. After you rank, I wanted a quick button to copy the ranking to your clipboard so you can […]⌥ Perma … | Continue reading