Tim Bray: I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman’s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes, forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven’t seen a compact explainer on why, so here go … | Continue reading
David Gura, NPR: A woman better known for setting fashion trends than financial ones, Paris Hilton, appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in January. After talking about her recent marriage and trip to Burning Man, the former reality TV star went deep on the NFTs, or … | Continue reading
LastPass: We recently notified you that an unauthorized party gained access to a third-party cloud-based storage service, which LastPass uses to store archived backups of our production data. In keeping with our commitment to transparency, we want to provide you with an update re … | Continue reading
DXOMARK: The results of our battery tests revealed that autonomy was largely impacted by this always-on screen feature, draining the battery about 4 times faster! The battery will last roughly 100 hours in idle when activating the feature, instead of 400 if the feature is deactiv … | Continue reading
Have you thought about your user stylesheet lately? I cannot blame you if you have not, especially if you have no idea what I mean when I write “user stylesheet”. Here is Jennifer Kyrnin’s great explanation of what that is: In the past, the internet was filled with bad web design … | Continue reading
Craig Silverman and Ruth Talbot, ProPublica: ProPublica spent months trying to crack open Google’s black box ad business. We wrote thousands of lines of code to scan more than 7 million website domains looking for Google ad activity, sourced and analyzed data on millions more dom … | Continue reading
Emily Baker-White, reporting for Forbes in October: TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ IP addresses to “among other things, help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable laws, and d … | Continue reading
Brian Krebs: The website for the settlement — equifaxbreachsettlement.com — also includes a lookup tool that lets visitors check whether they were affected by the breach; it requires your last name and the last six digits of your Social Security Number. But be aware that phishers … | Continue reading
TikTok: TikTok For You feeds enable people to discover an incredible diversity of ideas, creators, products, and entertainment. Our system recommends content by ranking videos based on a combination of factors based on your activity on our app, which includes adjusting for things … | Continue reading
Twitter: At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL: Prohibited platforms: … | Continue reading
WNYC’s On the Media: As we approach the end of the year, OTM correspondent Micah Loewinger takes a look at the some of the big media narratives that felt representative of 2022. He speaks with political scientist Paul Fairie, who has devoted his Twitter account to investigating r … | Continue reading
Jesse Squires: If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve likely noticed that my blog posts are automatically tweeted for me. There are multiple services you can use to do this, like Zapier and IFTTT. I use both services for various automations. Each has built-in actions for listening t … | Continue reading
James Hercher, writing at Ad Exchanger in April: The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the main technical standards developer of the internet (HTML and CSS, the code underlying the web, are two such W3C standards), will lose longtime university partner MIT as administrator and US h … | Continue reading
Last month, Jeff Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal explained that Facebook’s most recent Widely Viewed Content report was a cause for celebration at the company, as it indicated the apparent triumph of the platform’s moderation tools over spammers and scammers. It was a well-coo … | Continue reading
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: If you view the November [2020] announcement [of the first M1 Macs] as the start of the transition process, Apple would have needed to have everything wrapped up by November 2022. This deadline, too, has passed. This means Apple has missed its two-year tra … | Continue reading
Michael Levenson, New York Times (via Dave Pell): An increasing number of electric models have dropped AM radio in what broadcasters call a worrisome shift that could spell trouble for the stations and deprive drivers of a crucial source of news in emergencies. Carmakers say that … | Continue reading
Reporters from the Rest of World publication have put together an incredible tour of techology markets around the world. In some places, business is booming; in others, it is a ghost town. Terrific stories paired with stunning images — the photos from Jakarta and São Paulo are pa … | Continue reading
Daniel Jalkut recently released a new version of MarsEdit which, in my eyes, is hands-down the best MacOS application for writing for the web. I do not use anywhere near all of its features, but nearly everything for this website is written using MarsEdit. I adore it. This is the … | Continue reading
Riley Testut, who runs AltStore, has some thoughts on Apple’s rumoured work on complying with E.U. regulations by permitting third-party marketplaces for native apps. The whole Twitter thread is worth reading, but I thought this part was especially thoughtful: Here’s what I see h … | Continue reading
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg: Apple Inc. is preparing to allow alternative app stores on its iPhones and iPads, part of a sweeping overhaul aimed at complying with strict European Union requirements coming in 2024. […] If similar laws are passed in additional countries, Apple’s project … | Continue reading
Jason Kottke, who recently returned from a months-long and well-deserved sabbatical, put J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s “The Wok” on his list of the best books of the year, and I have to agree. I only received a copy a few weeks ago, but I have been enjoying it thoroughly and referencing i … | Continue reading
Lilly Ryan: Podcasts are just out there, like air. You don’t go to one place to get them; you get them from everywhere and anywhere. You can choose how you want to engage with them and manage them and it is legitimately heartwarming that nothing has ever gotten in the way of that … | Continue reading
Sam Rowlands (via Michael Tsai): Have you ever travelled somewhere to find that your MacBook is nice and warm, with next to no battery left? If so, these are the common causes of a “Hot Bag MacBook” that we’ve found so far. As soon as I saw Tsai post this, I knew I had to […]⌥ Pe … | Continue reading
I know: you are probably sick of news about Twitter and its awful owner. I do not plan to write more about the ominous-sounding but empty “Twitter Files” unless there is something truly newsworthy which emerges, and I would rather extract one of my own teeth than think about Elon … | Continue reading
Sara Fischer, Axios The Block, a media company that says it covers crypto news independently, has been secretly funded for over a year with money funneled to The Block’s CEO from the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency trading firm, sources told Axios. Sarah Kopit, the B … | Continue reading
Walter Benjamin, as translated by Harry Zohn: Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history t … | Continue reading
Before I got distracted, I meant to write a little about ChatGPT. I have been playing with it since it launched last week and it is downright impressive in many circumstances. But something felt wrong, and I could not quite put my finger on it until I read a piece from Ian Bogost … | Continue reading
Elon Musk may have eliminated Twitter’s communications department. But it appears he found a new PR team member in Bari Weiss, to whom the so-called “Twitter Files” were leaked, and who will massage Twitter 2.0’s messaging for free. Twitter apparently added Weiss to the company’s … | Continue reading
Lily Hay Newman, of Wired, also reported on today’s privacy announcements from Apple. In addition to confirming it has stopped its iCloud photo scanning efforts, it told her about its plans for its existing child safety features: The company told WIRED that while it is not ready … | Continue reading
[Mark Gurman][mg], Bloomberg: In a significant shift for the project, the company is now planning a less-ambitious design that will include a steering wheel and pedals and only support full autonomous capabilities on highways, said the people, who asked not to be identified becau … | Continue reading
Fred Lambert, Electrek: Tesla believes that the best way to replicate that is through cameras to replace the eyes and neural nets running on a computer to replace the brain. The company removed the radars on its vehicles last year and the ultrasonic sensors earlier this year. Tha … | Continue reading
Apple: iCloud already protects 14 sensitive data categories using end-to-end encryption by default, including passwords in iCloud Keychain and Health data. For users who enable Advanced Data Protection, the total number of data categories protected using end-to-end encryption ris … | Continue reading
Selina Cheng and Wenxin Fan, reporting for the Wall Street Journal on November 23: Workers at the world’s biggest iPhone assembly plant clashed with police after protests erupted at the factory in central China, where the sprawling facility employing more than 200,000 people has … | Continue reading
Apple: Apple today announced Self Service Repair is now available in eight European countries, providing repair manuals and genuine Apple parts and tools through the Apple Self Service Repair Store. Customers who wish to complete their own repairs will be able to perform many of … | Continue reading
In March 2021, the stock photography giant Getty Images acquired free stock photo site Unsplash. Unsplash said it would remain free under its new ownership. So, how is that going? Unsplash: We are excited to announce the launch of Unsplash+. An Unsplash+ subscription gives you a … | Continue reading
Jason Snell: […] But if Mastodon gets enough community gravity to make me want to pay more attention, I’ll need an app. There are a lot of Mastodon client apps out there, and I’ve tried several of them, but none of them are really good enough or polished enough for me to use regu … | Continue reading
Ellery Roberts Biddle, of Authoritarian Tech, after linking to a series of stories about the extreme oppression faced by people in China and Tigray, in Ethiopia — stories which should not be ignored, mind you — in an update about Meta’s suit against NSO Group: This is why the leg … | Continue reading
Andy Greenberg, author of “Sandworm”, has a new book out called “Tracers in the Dark” about the new investigative techniques to find criminals who use Tor and cryptocurrencies. Over the past month and a half, Wired has dripped out a lengthy excerpt from the book. The final part w … | Continue reading
I made a mistake. In my piece about the first month of Twitter’s new ownership at the hands of someone who is, at best, an unreliable narrator of his own reality, I did not add the word “alleged” to the phrase “Apple’s reduced advertising spend”. For some unknown reason, I decide … | Continue reading
Kashfia Kabir, What Hi-Fi?: And the longer it goes on, the more the question needs repeating. Is hi-res audio a priority for Apple? [AirPods engineer Esge] Andersen remains coy, saying that while audio quality is always a priority, “it is important to understand that we can still … | Continue reading
Todd Spangler, in a mess of a Variety article: The new disclosures, touted as “The Twitter Files,” were posted in a lengthy Twitter thread by investigative reporter and author Matt Taibbi (and retweeted by Musk). It’s based on “thousands of internal documents obtained by sources … | Continue reading
Hey, remember Future — the kind with an uppercase F? It launched last June as a way for Andreessen Horwitz to promote its investment activities, almost explicitly: “We want to write about stuff we know and that we invest in,” says [Margit] Wennmachers. This includes topics like c … | Continue reading
Thomas Germain, Gizmodo: Sure, the internet is great, but it has a serious flaw. There just aren’t enough ads. If you’re anything like me, you spend your time online casting your eyes across the screen, desperately hoping for another way to turn your attention into advertising re … | Continue reading
Everdeen Mason, New York Times: Now we can shift our work to editing the puzzle. Tracy Bennett, who joined The Times as an associate puzzle editor in 2020, will be the editor of Wordle. The game will have a Times-curated word list and will be programmed and tested like the Spelli … | Continue reading
Johana Bhuiyan, the Guardian: The tech advocacy group Accountable Tech conducted an experiment in August and October to test Google’s pledge. Using a brand new Android device, researchers with the group analyzed their Google activity timeline, where the company shows what informa … | Continue reading
Andrea Mills, of Internet Archive Canada: With the passing of Bill C-19 this past June, the Copyright Act was amended to extend the term of copyright for literary, dramatic or musical works and engravings to life of the author plus a period of 70 years following the end of the ca … | Continue reading
According to a filing today in the “butterfly” keyboard lawsuit, the class action settlement has been approved. If you are part of the class — that is, a U.S. buyer of a 2015–2019 MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro model, and you had the keyboard repaired or a keycap replaced — … | Continue reading
We are officially one month into Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter. One month of needlessly cruel layoffs, of cozying up to far right goons, of uncertainty about the direction my favourite bar is taking. It is under new management which thinks few people are unwelcome to stay rega … | Continue reading