Brian X. Chen, New York Times: When you browse the web, an increasing number of sites and apps are asking for a piece of basic information that you probably hand over without hesitation: your email address. It may seem harmless, but when you enter your email, you’re sharing a lot … | Continue reading
PBS’ Frontline program and Forbidden Films jointly produced a two-part documentary about NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware and I think it is worth your time. The “Pegasus Project” — the umbrella title for the stories published by media outlets around the world — had its faults, but it … | Continue reading
Robb Knight did a bang-up job converting that line art icon font from Apple’s thirtieth anniversary microsite into a series of SVGs. Looking at it now — with about a year to go until the Mac turns forty — it is funny to see each era of design so specifically outlined. It is also … | Continue reading
Patrick McGee, Financial Times: Apple is taking steps to separate its mobile operating system from features offered by Google parent Alphabet, making advances around maps, search and advertising that has created a collision course between the Big Tech companies. […] One of these … | Continue reading
Security researcher Jeffrey Paul was using a Mac without signing into iCloud and has blocked many internet-connected services using Little Snitch in MacOS Ventura 13.1: Imagine my surprise when browsing these images in the Finder, Little Snitch told me that macOS is now connectin … | Continue reading
Isabelle Bousquette, Wall Street Journal: LG Electronics Inc. said that less than half of the smart appliances it has sold stay connected to the internet — a number it is actively working to increase, according to Henry Kim, the U.S. director of ThinQ, an LG platform primarily ai … | Continue reading
Pete Evans, CBC News: Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal has rejected the Competition Bureau’s request to block the takeover of Shaw by Rogers, a decision that removes one of the final hurdles standing in the way of the $20-billion merger from going ahead. The merger, first propose … | Continue reading
Isaac Stanley-Becker, Washington Post: Google plans to discontinue a pilot program that allows political campaigns to evade its email spam filters, the latest round in the technology giant’s tussle with the GOP over online fundraising. The company will let the program sunset at t … | Continue reading
Margaret Renkl, writing what I can only assume is a too-obvious impression of what some young people think old people think of them, which is the only reason I can think of for the New York Times to give it any space online: “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to … | Continue reading
Ashley Capoot and Sofia Pitt, CNBC: Google announced plans to lay off 12,000 people from its workforce Friday, while Microsoft said Wednesday that it’s letting go of 10,000 employees. Amazon also began a fresh round of job cuts that are expected to eliminate more than 18,000 empl … | Continue reading
I wanted to follow up on something I asked last year: This is a good and wide-ranging interview that dances around a question I have been thinking about for a while now: what capabilities do high-performance products like these unlock for a creative professional? It is great to s … | Continue reading
If you live in just about any other developed country, you may not realize how good your cell providers are compared to what we deal with in Canada. This recent episode of CBC’s Marketplace covers everything: we pay more for less, competition is nonexistent, regulators fail to ho … | Continue reading
Mia Sato and James Vincent, the Verge, expanding upon last week's story about titles owned by Red Ventures — including CNet — publishing computer-generated articles: Red Ventures’ business model is straightforward and explicit: it publishes content designed to rank highly in Goog … | Continue reading
Karissa Bell, Engadget: The “restrictions” section of Twitter’s developer agreement was updated Thursday with a clause banning “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.” The additio … | Continue reading
The release candidate for iOS 16.3, available today for developers and rolling out next week, expands availability of Advanced Data Protection to customers worldwide. As I already had a beta version of that version on my iPhone, I figured I could take the opportunity and upgrade … | Continue reading
As previosuly mentioned, Apple announced a new HomePod model today, which it insists on referring to as the “HomePod” instead of a “HomePod Mini Max”. You might think I am being stupid — and I am — but this thing is closer to the Mini on the inside despite looking like the origin … | Continue reading
Patrick McGee, Financial Times: The supply chain ranking turned out to be an early indication of a profound shift in operations at Apple, which held the No.1 spot for the next seven years. In that time it became the world’s most valuable company, while placing itself at the centr … | Continue reading
Brandon Bigley, writing about that short pro-themed video toward the end of today’s M2 Mac announcements: It’s a great ad that gets to the heart of why I’ve found Apple’s computing lineup so exciting since making my own switch way back when: It all feels frictionless due to the a … | Continue reading
Sara Fischer, Axios: Retail trading platform Robinhood is launching an independent media brand called Sherwood that will be led by veteran tech editor and media entrepreneur Joshua Topolsky. […] “It’s a significant, long-term investment,” Topolsky said when asked about Robinhood’ … | Continue reading
Apple: Apple today announced M2 Pro and M2 Max, two next-generation SoCs (systems on a chip) that take the breakthrough power-efficient performance of Apple silicon to new heights. M2 Pro scales up the architecture of M2 to deliver an up to 12-core CPU and up to 19-core GPU, toge … | Continue reading
Georgia Wells and Stu Woo, Wall Street Journal: The talks with U.S. officials and lawmakers have become more urgent for TikTok in recent months as federal and state politicians made moves to ban the app on government-issued devices. Congress is also considering a bill that would … | Continue reading
Chase Miller, 9to5Mac: Apple could be making its first announcement of 2023 as soon as tomorrow, sources say. The company is holding Mac-related briefings with influencers and select members of the press this week, and an announcement could be made via Apple’s Newsroom website on … | Continue reading
Craig Hockenberry: What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for … | Continue reading
Ryan Broderick: But the comic “On Fire,” by KC Green, two panels of which became the meme probably better know as the “This Is Fine” dog, is a bit different. It has a known creator and it was created with an intended purpose and it has, in many ways, grown over time and in a […]⌥ … | Continue reading
The Iconfactory: Last night at about 7:30pm PST, Twitterrific customers started reporting problems accessing Twitter via the iOS app. News quickly spread on Twitter and Mastodon that a wide range of third party apps like Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Echofon, and many others had been d … | Continue reading
Adam Chandler: Some of my gripes with Maps on iOS 16: […] Guides, they are prominently featured on the floating tile where you would search but I truly don’t know why. I’ve tried to use them but I don’t really care what a famous chef likes to eat when she’s in Atlanta. I’m nowher … | Continue reading
Marques Brownlee: As I’ve already mentioned, these smartphone cameras are so much [about] software now that the photo that you get when you hit that shutter button isn’t so much reality as it is this computer’s best interpretation of what it thinks you want reality to look like. … | Continue reading
I have once again been on an “Only Connect” binge, through which I learned about PuzzGrid. You can play the wall round in user-submitted games. My only complaint is the vast gulf between the best “Hard” games and the “Fiendish” ones. Otherwise, it follows the same rules as the sh … | Continue reading
Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch: In December, reports suggested that Microsoft had acquired Fungible, a startup fabricating a type of data center hardware known as a data processing unit (DPU), for around $190 million. Today, Microsoft confirmed the acquisition but not the purchase pric … | Continue reading
Frank Landymore, Futurism: CNET, a massively popular tech news outlet, has been quietly employing the help of “automation technology” — a stylistic euphemism for AI — on new wave of financial explainer articles, seemingly starting around November of last year. In the absence of a … | Continue reading
Ken Klippenstein, the Intercept: Highway surveillance footage from Thanksgiving Day shows a Tesla Model S vehicle changing lanes and then abruptly braking in the far-left lane of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, resulting in an eight-vehicle crash. The crash injured nine people, inc … | Continue reading
Hari Kunzru, Harper’s: Ironically, the digital frontier of the Nineties, which for a while was the great hope for exit, was enclosed by men like [Peter] Thiel, who have created a landscape of corporate walled gardens that hasn’t fulfilled the utopian potential of the early intern … | Continue reading
Brian Krebs: Annualcreditreport.com begins by asking for your name, address, SSN and birthday. After I supplied that and told Annualcreditreport.com I wanted my report from Experian, I was taken to Experian.com to complete the identity verification process. Normally at this point … | Continue reading
Hanna Ingber, New York Times: We decided to ask readers how they use and interact with Alexa and how the technology fits into their lives. Nearly 200 people in the United States and Europe responded. Those who relied on the voice assistant said they used it mainly for mundane tas … | Continue reading
Adam Engst, writing at TidBits in 2018: In short, the LG UltraFine 5K Display appears to be the only 5K display you can buy today, and you would have to order it online, sight unseen. If you can wait, it’s possible that LG will have a new model, and Apple has said that it will [… … | Continue reading
Rupert Goodwins, the Register: Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can’t be monetized. Google Cloud is $700 million in the red as of last earnings and heading south to a state of madness like a New Jersey retiree. These are … | Continue reading
Speaking of the Guardian, it is apparently the victim of an ongoing attack which is primarily affecting its print and office systems. Max Tani, Semafor: Guardian staffers who spoke to Semafor said there seemed to be a distinction between the systems that were working and those th … | Continue reading
Leyland Cecco, the Guardian: Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it a … | Continue reading
Monique Judge, the Verge: In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs. … | Continue reading
The Data Protection Commission of Ireland has issued its judgement in a case brought against Meta — then Facebook — when GDPR came into effect nearly five years ago: Meta Ireland considered that, on accepting the updated Terms of Service, a contract was entered into between Meta … | Continue reading
Meredith Whittaker of Signal, on that terrible New York Times op-ed: […] Those of us invested in defending privacy need to understand that this op-ed wasn’t written for people with expertise, and its purpose won’t be perturbed by expert rebuttal. We’re not the audience. The op-ed … | Continue reading
Catherynne M. Valente, on the now-familiar cycle of web communities (via Andy Baio): All the rest are gone. Dismantled for parts and sold off with zero understanding that the only thing of any value the site ever offered was the community, its content, its connection, its possibi … | Continue reading
Kashmir Hill, New York Times: The photos transported me back to a tremendously fun evening that I had all but forgotten. Yet I wondered how there could be so many photos from just one night. How do I decide which to keep and which to get rid of? This kind of data explosion is a [ … | Continue reading
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