Collin Woodard, Jalopnik: I’m sorry to break it to anyone who has trouble keeping their car out of a bike lane (or off a concrete barrier), but it’s not the bike lane’s fault you’re a shitty driver. If you hit something stationary, that’s your fault. Pay attention to the fucking … | Continue reading
Felix Kent, Defector: My tastes have not changed that much since I was 12, but my understanding and acceptance of them has. If someone gave me Green now, I would probably listen to it once or twice, acknowledge its virtues and move on. But when I was 12 I listened to it over and … | Continue reading
Jeff Teper of Microsoft: We have been listening to your feedback which has culminated in a reimagining of Teams from the ground up. The new app is built on a foundation of speed, performance, flexibility, and intelligence—delivering up to two times faster performance while using … | Continue reading
Goodbye, Pepsi energy fields. You will be missed. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Ever wondered what it would be like to run Mac OS 9, or 8, or maybe Systems 7 or 6, in your web browser? Well do not avoid wondering any longer, thanks to a series of emulators shared by Uli Kusterer. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Here is another spectacular video essay from Dan Olson — this time, about Decentraland specifically, but also the amorphous idea of the “metaverse”, and the ridiculous concept of owning “real estate” in virtual space. It feels crushingly boring to me that this whole space — much … | Continue reading
Reddit user “horizontalhole” discovered something curious: From 2017–2022 the Vatican flag SVG on Wikimedia Commons contained a mistake. You can now tell which flag manufacturers/emoji platforms used the file. I found this post via the Depths of Wikipedia Twitter account. Once yo … | Continue reading
Paul Kafasis, writing on Rogue Amoeba’s blog, shares a story from Adam Curry about a nerve-wracking meeting involving Steve Jobs, the then-feared RIAA, and the earliest versions of Audio Hijack. It is a worthwhile story, but I also recommend checking out that full interview with … | Continue reading
Mark Sullivan, Fast Company: Generative AI announcements from major tech companies continue to roll in; meanwhile, Apple’s silence on the subject grows louder. Yeah, why is Apple not rushing into this months-old market, anyway? Why is there no hastily arranged corporate presentat … | Continue reading
Casey Newton: It is a ritual previously endured by Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey, among others. And while each of them faced withering questions, in the end withering questions is all that Congress really gave them. Hearings like these are often … | Continue reading
Caitlin Yilek, CBS News: In testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, CEO Shou Zi Chew struggled to reassure lawmakers that the massively popular social video app doesn’t pose a risk to its 150 million users nor share user data with the Chinese Communist Party … | Continue reading
A non-bylined post at Bitestring: We are going to test a product built by a company called FingerprintJS Inc. who is selling fingerprinting as a service. They make JavaScript fingerprinting libraries which are in fact open source and sell it to many websites. There’s FingerprintJ … | Continue reading
Johana Bhuiyan, the Guardian: Shou Zi Chew is not a prolific TikToker. The 40-year-old CEO of the Chinese-owned app has just 23 posts and 17,000 followers to his name – paltry by his own platform’s standards. […] On Thursday Chew will appear before a US congressional committee, a … | Continue reading
Paul Murray, New York: In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The […]⌥ P … | Continue reading
Mike Masnick, Techdirt: These “big tech pays news” schemes break this fundamental idea. They announce that some companies, these big companies who apparently no one likes, must suddenly pay to link. And sure, you can easily state (1) these big companies can afford it, and (2) no … | Continue reading
Varun Mishra, Counterpoint Research: Although overall global smartphone sales in 2022 fell 12% YoY due to macroeconomic difficulties, global premium (≥$600 wholesale price) smartphone sales climbed 1% YoY in contrast, which allowed the price segment to contribute to 55% of the to … | Continue reading
Scott Everett of DPReview: After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year. The site will remain active until April 10, and the ed … | Continue reading
Josh Hill: During a Europe trip in May 2022, I uploaded over 6,000 photos and hundreds of videos to the cloud. Upon editing and deleting some of the photos, I encountered an issue with Photos.app, which ultimately led to the complete wiping out of my entire cloud library. Despite … | Continue reading
Simon Aarons: Introducing acropalypse: a serious privacy vulnerability in the Google Pixel’s inbuilt screenshot editing tool, Markup, enabling partial recovery of the original, unedited image data of a cropped and/or redacted screenshot. This was reported as CVE-2023-21036; Googl … | Continue reading
Howard Oakley: During Gatekeeper checks, two internet connections are normally made, to api.apple-cloudkit.com for notarization checks, and ocsp2.apple.com for the validity of the code-signing certificate. The first of those was attempted once, failed, and was promptly abandoned. … | Continue reading
Chloe Xiang, Vice: This blog post and OpenAI’s recent actions — all happening at the peak of the ChatGPT hype cycle — is a reminder of how much OpenAI’s tone and mission have changed from its founding, when it was exclusively a nonprofit. While the firm has always looked toward a … | Continue reading
I though Joanna Stern’s look, for the Wall Street Journal, at the second-hand smartphone market was interesting as a whole, but one of the things Stern wrote is particularly notable: […] What I do know is that phones really do have a circle of life — cue Elton John — and selling … | Continue reading
Brian X. Chen, Nico Grant, and Karen Weise, New York Times: On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage in a crowded auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the au … | Continue reading
I promise this has something to do with computers, software, and my usual jibber-jabber, but I want to talk about cooking. And before I get to that, I need to preface this by acknowledging my use of an unfortunate premise: stoves. I started writing this in September, well before … | Continue reading
Aram Zucker-Scharff: The VCs are flipping their position on government bailouts after spending years arguing that they shouldn’t be constrained by any regulations or rules, financial or otherwise. People, both with and without a historical understanding of the marketplace, are un … | Continue reading
This weekend’s news of the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history has been hard for me to process. I live somewhere that has not had a bank go bust since the mid-1990s, so what happened over the past several days is entirely unfamiliar to me. If you feel similarl … | Continue reading
Jessie Char posted a great Twitter thread about why it makes sense for apps focused on classical music listening — such as the forthcoming Apple Music Classical — to be separated from apps for streaming pop music. If you are less familiar with classical music and want to try the … | Continue reading
Kirby Ferguson’s latest is not to be missed: a thoughtful exploration of artificial intelligence within his “Everything is a Remix” framework. Great soundtrack, too. It is also, Ferguson says, his last video. In an April email to subscribers — which I cannot figure out how to lin … | Continue reading
Marie Woolf, the Globe and Mail: The bill would make Google and Meta compensate news organizations for posting or linking to their work. A spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said the company is planning to remove Canadians’ access to both written and broadc … | Continue reading
I thought this exploration by Reddit user ibreakphotos of Samsung’s Moon detection feature was well done. It is a smart test which lines up with previous experiments in its conclusions: these pictures are simply more detailed than is possible from even an impressive zoom lens. Sa … | Continue reading
Jade Markus, CBC News: The amount that phone scammers have stolen from Albertans has nearly doubled compared to two years prior, mirroring a national trend with fewer victims, but millions of dollars lost. Data from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre shows that in 2022 there were 849 … | Continue reading
With the entry into the public consciousness of “deepfaked” impersonation videos came the inevitable concern from policymakers around the world, including in the United States. Congresspersons Adam Schiff, Stephanie Murphy, and Carlos Curbelo sent a letter (PDF) to the Director o … | Continue reading
Michelle Boorstein and Heather Kelly, Washington Post: A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country. […] One … | Continue reading
Great news for a music app more targeted to the specific needs of classical music without the baggage of an additional subscription. iPhone-only at launch, unfortunately, but it looks promising, if you can find it. I am most interested to see how it is differentiated from the Pri … | Continue reading
Miles Kruppa and Sam Schechner, Wall Street Journal: Now Google, the company that helped pioneer the modern era of artificial intelligence, finds its cautious approach to that very technology being tested by one of its oldest rivals. Last month Microsoft Corp. announced plans to … | Continue reading
Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch: A paucity of legislation and regulation have allowed American tech companies to thrive and grow, enriched by our personal information and data we created, including anything from where we go to what we buy, to the people we communicate with to the cont … | Continue reading
Jaimie Brooks: Podcasts were supposed to help them do this. Spotify used to address investor concerns about the viability of their business model by comparing themselves to Netflix, a company that was successfully able to woo subscribers away from expensive licensed fare with the … | Continue reading
Andrea Houston, Ricochet: Then there’s the question of what would happen down the road if Google and Facebook were no longer profitable? [Senator Paula] Simons told Ricochet that when she raised that question with staff in the Heritage ministry, she was told they “would turn to T … | Continue reading
Alfred Ng, Politico: The police said they were conducting a drug-related investigation on a neighbor, and they wanted videos of “suspicious activity” between 5 and 7 p.m. one night in October. Larkin cooperated, and sent clips of a car that drove by his Ring camera more than 12 t … | Continue reading
Rachel Ashcroft, Current Affairs: But by December 1982, things had turned sour. The market was overrun with poor-quality games. Consumers regularly complained about low-budget titles with poor-quality graphics or stories that were too easy to complete. There was also an overabund … | Continue reading
A recent issue of Marcin Wichary’s “Shift Happens” newsletter is dedicated to a collection and exploration of the incredible visualizations of Dana Sibera. Many are of imagined Apple hardware, but there is plenty for everyone to love, including delightful puns. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Perma … | Continue reading
Kalley Huang and Sheera Frenkel, New York Times: The surge in Facebook activity is rooted in a new feature from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Last year, Meta introduced a prompt that popped up on Instagram when people posted a photo or story. The prompt asked Instagram … | Continue reading
This news comes less than five months after Meta launched the Quest Pro. Alex Heath reported earlier this week for the Verge that Meta has sold about twenty million Quest-branded headsets; the first launched in 2019. That is about the same number of units as Apple sold of iPads i … | Continue reading
The main thing which struck me when watching this short video about the current specialty coffee market is how the price paid to producers in Kenya, for example, has declined in recent years. It was upsetting to learn that as the consumer price for specialty coffee has gone up pr … | Continue reading
Dave Karpf: And of course, as I’ve noted elsewhere, today’s tech barons are also proud techno-optimists. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel… it turns out the one thing that all of Silicon Valley’s billionaire-class agrees on is that life is headed in a good direc … | Continue reading
Rachel Gilmore, writing for Global News on February 27: The Canadian government is banning the use of the popular short-form video application TikTok on all government-issued mobile devices, Treasury Board President Mona Fortier announced on Monday. Effective Tuesday, TikTok “wil … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge: One of the major problems with salesbros is that they think “always be closing” is a mantra to live by because they didn’t understand the point of Glengarry Glen Ross, which is that salespeople are nightmares. That’s why there’s always some silly pop … | Continue reading
Ben Taub, the New Yorker: It was against this backdrop [of the “golden age of fraud”] that German institutions supported Wirecard. The country’s traditional industry is in cars and energy systems — BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler, Siemens. Wirecard represented the nation’s challenge to … | Continue reading