Michael Steeber: […] No, there wasn’t a single store that opened in 2022 with pivot doors. The last set was installed at Apple Cherry Creek, which opened all the way back in February 2021. Before that? Apple Cherry Hill in September 2020. These stores weren’t just cherry-picked: … | Continue reading
Rosa Addario, communications manager for OpenMedia, in an op-ed in the Toronto Star: Big Telecom may be waiting to pounce on vulnerable independent providers, but the blame falls directly on the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and our Industry M … | Continue reading
Max Tani, Semafor: […] In January, Spotify pushed out [chief content officer Dawn] Ostroff and canceled nearly a dozen shows at its highest-profile podcast investment, the studio Gimlet. Podcasting was a “big drag on our business in 2022,” the company’s chief revenue officer said … | Continue reading
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: What we need to always be aware of is that how we treat any one marginalized group is how we will treat all of them—given the chance. There is no such thing as ignoring the exploitation of one group hoping they won’t come for you. This goes for us individuall … | Continue reading
Marie Woolf, the Globe and Mail: Google is testing ways of blocking Canadians’ access to news websites in response to the federal government’s online news bill, which would force the company and other tech giants to compensate news organizations for using their work. The restrict … | Continue reading
From a press release issued by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada: The privacy protection authorities for Canada, Québec, British Columbia and Alberta announced today that they will jointly investigate the short-form video streaming application TikTok. […] The four … | Continue reading
I appreciated this short piece from Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. The more products like these transform from the vaguely personable — something like Siri — into full-blown conversation simulators, the more wary journalists and pundits need to be of becoming too enamoured o … | Continue reading
Zell Liew: If you haven’t heard the news, Geoff Graham — the chief editor behind CSS Tricks — got fired by Digitial Ocean yesterday, a few months after they acquired it. […] Chris had left. And now Geoff is gone too. Graham’s acknowledgement of his dismissal is a heartbreaking re … | Continue reading
Taras Buria, Neowin: Being the default out-of-the-box browser on Windows 10 and 11 makes Microsoft Edge a go-to utility for downloading Chrome or another browser. That upsets Microsoft so much that it constantly comes with more aggressive and user-hostile methods to make customer … | Continue reading
The innovation is in moving from one set of privacy-destroying technologies to another while ever so briefly paying lip service to rights and respect. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
And now for something completely different, in part because I do not want to write about green bubbles again. You read the headline, so you know what this article is going to be about and, as a member of the “Millennial” generation, I could not be more thankful. For about fifteen … | Continue reading
Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal: Technologists broadly agree that the so-called generative AI that powers systems like ChatGPT has the potential to change how we live and work, despite the technology’s clear flaws. But some investors, chief executives and engineers see sign … | Continue reading
In the latest episode of the Sprawlcast, Jeremy Klazus explored the run of the Calgary Herald, from its peak in the 1980s to its now zenith, which may best be marked by the January sale of its former building to U-Haul. Some of this story — much of it, in fact — is similar to […] … | Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg: Good morning and new product announcement: this week we’re starting to roll out Meta Verified — a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you … | Continue reading
The Economist: Campaigners detect a sea change. Even a few years ago “there was a sense that we were the weirdos,” says Doug Gordon, a founder of “The War on Cars”, a podcast based in New York. Now, he says, “more and more elected officials are adopting positions that were [until … | Continue reading
Dan Goodin, Ars Technica: GoDaddy said on Friday that its network suffered a multi-year security compromise that allowed unknown attackers to steal company source code, customer and employee login credentials, and install malware that redirected customer websites to malicious sit … | Continue reading
Twitter: Non-Twitter Blue subscribers that are already enrolled will have 30 days to disable this method and enroll in another. After 20 March 2023, we will no longer permit non-Twitter Blue subscribers to use text messages as a 2FA method. At that time, accounts with text messag … | Continue reading
This October, after twenty eight years of very nearly no new work from Bill Watterson, an “illustrated fable” from him and John Kascht — whose name I did not recognize but whose work may be familiar — will arrive in bookstores and into my greedy hands. As for so many, Watterson’s … | Continue reading
Jon Keegan, the Markup: When you hit the checkout line at your local supermarket and give the cashier your phone number or loyalty card, you are handing over a valuable treasure trove of data that may not be limited to the items in your shopping cart. Many grocers systematically … | Continue reading
Jason Torchinsky, the Autopian: Tesla is recalling 362,758 vehicles after a new report from the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration called out its Full Self-Driving Beta (FSD Beta) software for a reason that, when you think about it, is surprisingly human for a … | Continue reading
Certo, a company which makes smartphone spyware detection software, published to its blog a story about spyware which abuses the Wi-Fi syncing feature to obtain copies of the phone’s data. It is not a well-written article. It starts by arguing that “Apple’s supposedly impenetrabl … | Continue reading
Eric Van Aelstyn of Microsoft: The out-of-support Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) desktop application was permanently disabled on certain versions of Windows 10 on February 14, 2023 through a Microsoft Edge update. Note, this update will be rolled out over the span of a few days up t … | Continue reading
After I linked to an example of a confident but wrong answer from Google Bard, reader Nick Jarman emailed me with a tip about a similar flub in Microsoft’s Bing demo queries. If you follow the prompt suggested on the New Bing homepage for making a pop music trivia game, the fifth … | Continue reading
I know these sorts of experiments are a little played-out by now, but this one raised my eyebrows a little higher than usual. Colin Meloy of the Decemberists told ChatGPT to write a song in the band’s unique style — and then he played and recorded it. (Via Andy Baio.) ⌥ Permalink … | Continue reading
Ted Chiang, the New Yorker: […] Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of b … | Continue reading
I cannot recall much of the news from when I was a kid, but I distinctly remember a story about a home invasion where some intruders supposedly destroyed a bunch of valuables and covered the walls in graffiti. That narrative fell apart when police noticed the homeowner’s most pri … | Continue reading
Dustin Shahidehpour of Meta earlier this week: Facebook for iOS (FBiOS) is the oldest mobile codebase at Meta. Since the app was rewritten in 2012, it has been worked on by thousands of engineers and shipped to billions of users, and it can support hundreds of engineers iterating … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, Vice: “For years we’ve had to deal with the fact that an entire copy of our phone lives on a server that’s outside of our control. Now the data on that server is under our control. That’s really all that’s changed here,” Matthew Green, associate professor at Johns … | Continue reading
I may have already linked to this year’s instalment of the Six Colors Apple Report Card, but I did not expand my commentary beyond what Jason Snell quoted in the piece, or even reveal what I graded each category. I am still not going to do that in full — see if you can guess […]⌥ … | Continue reading
Clive Thompson: Algorithmically-sorted feeds are good for some things. They let you know what are the big, popular conversations of the day, which is valuable! But if you stare at ’em too much, it’s intellectual monocropping. All you wind up knowing (and thinking about) are the s … | Continue reading
Maddie Stone, Grist: The passage of the Digital Fair Repair Act last June reportedly caught the tech industry off guard, but it had time to act before Governor Kathy Hochul would sign it into law. Corporate lobbyists went to work, pressing Albany for exemptions and changes that w … | Continue reading
James Vincent, the Verge: Google demoed its latest advances in AI search at a live event in Paris on Wednesday — but the features pale in comparison to Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of the “new Bing,” which the company has demoed extensively to the press and offered limited … | Continue reading
Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal: Microsoft’s new Bing and Edge became available in a limited preview Tuesday. You have to sign up on bing.com for the preview wait list, and once you are in, you’ll have to use the Edge browser (available for Windows and MacOS). Microsoft plans t … | Continue reading
There are many things which I was considering linking to in recent weeks, but it is easier to do so via a story told through block quotes. They share a common thread and theme. I begin with Can Duruk, at Margins: I’m old enough to remember when Google came out, which makes me old … | Continue reading
Thoughtful commentary this year from a panel of smart people, and I also wrote some things. The year-over-year comparison chart at the top is telling: a couple of bummer categories, a few outstanding ones, and stagnating grades in several. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Jason Scott: Where possible, save the original. Where possible, digitize the original or maintain a digital copy. Ephemera and transient content is just as important to maintain as products and projects. Digitize at the highest resolution and fidelity possible, but realize you’re … | Continue reading
Mishaal Rahman tweeted a question: “how much of your phone’s storage is taken up by the system?” Respondents with Google Pixels seem to be doing okay, with about 16–18 GB consumed by the system. That is nothing compared to people with Samsung devices, some of whom reported 56, 62 … | Continue reading
Megan Garber, the Atlantic: In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the critic Neil Postman described a nation that was losing itself to entertainment. What Newton Minow had called “a vast wasteland” in 1961 had, by the Reagan era, led to what Postman diagnosed as a “vast d … | Continue reading
Katie Notopoulos and Pranav Dixit, Buzzfeed News: Álex Barredo, who runs @BigTechAlert, told BuzzFeed News he’s open to paying a small fee to keep the popular bot running, but not if it costs $100 a month. He also has other options. He’s aware that most of the actual spam bots do … | Continue reading
Alex Heath, the Verge: […] I and a handful of other journalists were invited to the company’s Los Angeles headquarters earlier this week for the first media tour of its “Transparency and Accountability Center.” It’s a space that, like the political discussion about TikTok these d … | Continue reading
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg: The iPhone maker’s vice president of industrial design, Evans Hankey, won’t be replaced when she leaves the company in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the decision, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are priva … | Continue reading
Twitter: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead. It was only a matter of time before this happened, but it still sucks — and with only a week’s notice. As usual for the new Twitt … | Continue reading
Jordan Novet, CNBC: Facebook parent Meta Platforms said in its quarterly earnings statement on Wednesday that it has increased its share repurchase authorization by $40 billion. In 2022 the social network operator bought back about $28 billion in stock, according to the statement … | Continue reading
Harry McCracken: Your 1987 tech update: Now that cell phones have dropped in price to $3,000, are just the size of a small briefcase, weigh only 10 pounds, and can run for two hours on a charge, they’re finally ready for prime time. Kind of interesting to read the article McCrack … | Continue reading
Rodrigo Ghedin: iFood, Brazilian largest food delivering app evaluated at USD 5.4 billion, was accessing his location when not open/in use, bypassing an iOS setting that restrict an app’s access to certain phone’s features. Even when the reader completely denied location access t … | Continue reading
Roshan Abraham, Vice: “Algorithmic wage discrimination allows firms to personalize and differentiate wages for workers in ways unknown to them, to behave in ways that the firm desires, perhaps as little as the system determines that they may be willing to accept,” [Veena] Dubal w … | Continue reading
Haley Nahman: To be clear, this isn’t about whether the movie was “realistic.” Movies with absurd, surreal, or fantastical plots can still communicate something honest and true. It’s actually, specifically, about how movies these days look. That is, more flat, more fake, over-sat … | Continue reading
Tyson Kendon has thoughts about ChatGPT and how its generated answers can be used in education: I think the real wake up call here, is to create learning experiences that are relevant to the real students in the room with you right now. Build trust with them and show that you tru … | Continue reading