At WWDC 2022, Apple previewed a new version of CarPlay. It promised deeper integration, taking over for things like ventilation controls, seat position, and dashboard dials. Such an update will basically require expansive screen space, and it will also permit CarPlay to span mult … | Continue reading
Mercedes Ruehl, Financial Times: Grab and GoTo, south-east Asia’s biggest start-ups before their listings, took inspiration from the grandfather of superapps, Tencent’s WeChat. The Chinese app is the world’s most popular, with more than a billion users, and combines messaging, on … | Continue reading
I have a special appreciation for artworks and projects which rely on themed web scraping; I have worked on several myself. But this one, in particular, is quite distressing. Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain introducing their project: The comments posted on gofundme.com’s medical fundr … | Continue reading
Zoe Kleinman, BBC News: Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon. The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services … | Continue reading
In digging around the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research for that last post, I stumbled across a working paper entitled “Consumer Surveillance and Financial Fraud” (PDF) by Bo Bian, Michaela Pagel, and Huan Tang. These researchers used Apple’s App Tracking Transp … | Continue reading
Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed: Researchers looking into online toxicity found a way to connect supposedly anonymous posts on the site Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) to IP addresses over the past dozen years, according to a draft paper leaked early online. While EJMR is an acad … | Continue reading
Devastating news, via Boing Boing: Kevin David Mitnick, 59, died peacefully on Sunday, July 16, 2023, after valiantly battling pancreatic cancer for more than a year. Kevin is survived by his beloved wife, Kimberley Mitnick, who remained by his side throughout their 14-month orde … | Continue reading
Billy Steele, Engadget: For the first time, Beats has enabled USB-C wired audio on the Studio Pro. In addition to listening to high-resolution and lossless tunes, you can also take calls while the headphones are actively charging. The Studio Pro has a built-in digital-to-analog c … | Continue reading
I have long appreciated the default desktop picture which shipped with Mac OS X Tiger, and I think this revised and higher-resolution version from BasicAppleGuy is a very nice update to a timeless classic. The “Aqua” colour is a little loud for my liking, but the other two are lo … | Continue reading
Shmuli Evers in a Twitter thread, which was summarized by Monica Humphries at Insider: “My @delta flight got canceled from JFK. The customer service line was huge, so I google a Delta JFK phone number. The number was 1888-571-4869 Thinking I reached Delta, I started telling them … | Continue reading
Ann-Marie Alcántara, Wall Street Journal: While Apple might not need the app to sell any more iPhones, the company’s lofty ambitions with cars and augmented-reality headsets depend on maps people actually like using. “Maps has come a long way, and people have noticed,” Craig Fede … | Continue reading
Sara Fischer and Kerry Flynn, Axios: Vox Media, the parent company to websites such as New York Magazine, Eater and SB Nation, will no longer use Chorus — its proprietary content management system — to power its own websites, sources told Axios. […] Vox Media will move its own we … | Continue reading
I thought this interview with Alan Dye by Debbie Millman, recorded in June shortly after WWDC, was entertaining and occasionally enlightening. If you spent the weeks after WWDC immersed in news about Apple’s Vision Pro, I am not sure there is much new here — mostly because I am n … | Continue reading
Speaking of creepy and pervasive surveillance, the U.S. Senate Commission on the Judiciary, in a Friday press release, triumphantly announced it had advanced a bill turning communications providers into narcs: Today, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the bipartisan Coo … | Continue reading
Martin Lukacs, reporting for the Breach last year: Working around-the-clock in special rooms or wings of police stations, these so-called “real-time operations centres” are the cornerstone of a shift to confront what police call the “new challenges” of a digital age. They are int … | Continue reading
Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic: […] That’s because the mere idea that Zuckerberg is having a moment is itself a carefully composed bit of image maintenance. The feeling that there might be a new Zuckerberg in town is not an accident, nor is the fact that the CEO made headlines by s … | Continue reading
Michael Schulman, the New Yorker: “Orange [is the New Black]” was distributed by Netflix but produced by Lionsgate, which determined the cast’s up-front payments. Myles was paid scale, SAG’s minimum rate, which was under nine hundred dollars per day. “They could and would pay us … | Continue reading
In April 2021, Microsoft announced it was seeing to replace Calibri as the default type family in Office products. It made available five different choices to users. Bierstadt, the likely contender, was described by its designer Steve Matteson as a humanized grotesque sans-serif: … | Continue reading
IDC, explaining an estimated 13.4% year-over-year decline in PC shipments: The overall weak demand has caused inventory levels to remain above normal for longer than expected. This includes finished systems at the channel level, as well as the supply chain. So far, no PC maker ha … | Continue reading
Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Angie Waller, and Colin Lecher, reporting for the Markup in November: Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The M … | Continue reading
It should have been a surprise to exactly nobody that Threads, Meta’s Twitter-alike, was going to seem hungrier for personal data than Bluesky or Mastodon. That is how Meta makes its money: its products surveil as much of your behaviour as possible, then they let others buy targe … | Continue reading
Aaron Wherry, CBC News: Whether the Online News Act takes the exactly right approach to addressing the last of those problems [the financing of journalism] or not, it exists downstream from the real issue — the dominance over digital advertising that Google and Facebook have been … | Continue reading
Tara Deschamps, the Canadian Press: In response to the act known as Bill C-18, Meta and Google have said they will remove news by Canadian journalism outlets from their sites before the law comes into force. […] In response to such moves, Bell Media brands including CTV and BNN B … | Continue reading
It has been about two days since Meta launched Threads — apparently a week ahead of schedule — and it is huge. Mark Zuckerberg says there are seventy million users already, and it seems likely it will hit a hundred million within the next couple of days. For comparison, it took G … | Continue reading
Leyland Cecco, the Guardian: A Canadian judge has ruled that the “thumbs-up” emoji is just as valid as a signature, arguing that courts need to adapt to the “new reality” of how people communicate as he ordered a farmer to pay C$82,000 ($61,442) for an unfulfilled contract. […] “ … | Continue reading
Dell Cameron, Wired: A “must-pass” defense bill wending its way through the United States House of Representatives may be amended to abolish the government practice of buying information on Americans that the country’s highest court has said police need a warrant to seize. Though … | Continue reading
Max Tani, Semafor: On Wednesday, Instagram parent company Meta introduced Threads, a text-based companion to Instagram that resembles Twitter and other text-based social platforms. Just hours later, a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accus … | Continue reading
Brian Merchant, of the Los Angeles Times, with a different take on the Bill C–18 fallout: California and Canada must absolutely not give in to the tech giants’ tantrum. This is a bluff, and not a particularly convincing one. For the sake of the beleaguered news industries in both … | Continue reading
If you are a celebrity or public figure, you probably gained access to Threads within the past week or so. You are also probably not reading my website. For the rest of us, Instagram’s Twitter clone is out now. As promised, you can log in with your Instagram account — full Activi … | Continue reading
I neglected to link to the Tiny Awards when it was launched in June. Now that it is July, the hundreds of submissions were narrowed to a field of sixteen finalists, and voting is now open to find a winner. All are worthy contenders. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Mike Masnick, writing at Techdirt last May: This one is just absolutely bizarre. The Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana are now suing President Joe Biden and a whole bunch of his administration, including press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr. Anthony Fauci, DHS boss Alejandro M … | Continue reading
Just a couple of links about Meta’s forthcoming entry into the Twitter alternatives space, beginning with “Bloonface” asking “why is Meta going to use ActivityPub?”: The Jabber analogy works in a different way here, in that it’s not particularly clear why Google Talk needed to in … | Continue reading
Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch: In its February 2019 order, the [Federal Cartel Office of Germany] told Facebook (as Meta still was back then) to stop combining data on users across its own suite of social platforms without their consent. Meta sought to block the order in the German c … | Continue reading
While Twitter is busy shitting the bed, competitive networks like Bluesky and Mastodon are making the most of this chaotic moment. And, it seems, there may be another big-name option coming soon: an App Store listing for Threads, the expected clone from Meta, indicates it will be … | Continue reading
Like Šime Vidas, I have often linked out to Twitter — both my own tweets and those of others — in the many years I have been writing this website. I have never assumed the links would be available forever, but not because of petty reasons like requiring people to log in before vi … | Continue reading
Melissa Gira Grant, the New Republic: It didn’t make sense to him, [Stewart] told me later via text message. Why would a web designer — as the website the inquiry referenced as his own made clear that he was — living in San Francisco, seek to hire someone in another state who has … | Continue reading
David Reevely on Twitter has a great list of independent Canadian publishers, and there are lots more in the comments. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Raisa Patel, last month in the Toronto Star: Jeff Elgie, the CEO of community news company Village Media, told senators studying the bill that Google and Facebook generate more than 50 per cent of his digital company’s web traffic. “If that traffic was lost, the business would be … | Continue reading
Cris Turner of Google: You may have seen in the news that, as a result of Canada’s Bill C-18, we will be removing links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and will no longer be able to operate Google News Showcase in the country when the law g … | Continue reading
On Apple’s marketing page for iOS 17, a section dedicated to Visual Look Up promises it will now be able to display “recipes for similar dishes from a photo”. According to a report in Autoevolution and confirmed by “yahlover” on Reddit, it can detect universal symbols on car dash … | Continue reading
Casey Newton, in a paid issue of Platformer which I was able to access freely via a link in yesterday’s Tabs: I have suggested before some of the alternate ways in which lawmakers could choose to address declining revenue for news publishers: tax the platforms’ ad revenue; fund p … | Continue reading
I got to rule number twenty in the Password Game before I gave up. As hilarious as it is infuriating. Via Andy Baio. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Chris Vallance, BBC News: Police, the government and some high-profile child protection charities maintain the tech [end-to-end encryption] – used in apps such as WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage – prevents law enforcement and the firms themselves from identifying the sharing of chi … | Continue reading
Alexandra S. Levine, Forbes: TikTok has acknowledged to the U.S. government that sensitive information about American creators who sign up to earn money through the app is stored in China. There are two long paragraphs which follow this statement in which Levine reports on a lett … | Continue reading
Last week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Amazon, alleging design patterns which made it easy to accidentally register for Amazon Prime, and difficult to cancel once enrolled. The lawsuit (PDF) is liberally redacted; what is visible attempts to paint a pictu … | Continue reading
Josh Dzieza, writing for New York in collaboration with the Verge, on the hidden human role in artificial intelligence: Over the past six months, I spoke with more than two dozen annotators from around the world, and while many of them were training cutting-edge chatbots, just as … | Continue reading
Raisa Patel, Toronto Star: Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, is making good on its threat to block news sharing on both platforms across Canada in response to Ottawa’s online news bill, which became law late Thursday. “Today, we are confirming that news availability … | Continue reading
The European Commission: Google provides several adtech services that intermediate between advertisers and publishers in order to display ads on web sites or mobile apps. It operates (i) two ad buying tools – “Google Ads” and “DV 360”; (ii) a publisher ad server, “DoubleClick For … | Continue reading