If you work in print design, you may have noticed a bunch of colours you paid for have begun to disappear from the software you rely upon to get your work done. One minute, you are happily doing your job; the next, your software has become less capable and your expenses have rise … | Continue reading
James Vincent, London Review of Books: The ascendancy of Lena in image processing is, then, the result of the usual mix of impromptu decision-making and post-hoc justification that underlies a surprising amount of scientific work. But it is also an example of the way that specifi … | Continue reading
Tim Cook, via Jason Snell’s transcript of comments made during today’s quarterly earnings call: […] Importantly, our investment in the category has attracted both upgraders and customers new to Mac, and helped our install base reach an all time high. In fact, we set a quarterly r … | Continue reading
Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, in a tweeted letter addressed to advertisers, embedded as a series of screenshots without descriptive text: That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adherin … | Continue reading
Garth Graham, head of YouTube Health: Today, we’re announcing that for the first time, certain categories of healthcare professionals and health information providers can apply to make their channels eligible for our health product features that were launched in the US last year. … | Continue reading
Nur Dayana Mustak, Bloomberg: Zuckerberg, 38, now has a net worth of $38.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a stunning fall from a peak of $142 billion in September 2021. While many of the world’s richest people have seen their fortunes tumble this year, Me … | Continue reading
Apple: Updates are more frequently released software patches that help secure or enhance the current operating system and are designed to protect your device against security or privacy vulnerabilities. Updates use a second and sometimes a third number to denote increments. For e … | Continue reading
The Economist: The mushrooming of factories in southern India marks a new chapter for the world’s biggest technology company. Apple’s extraordinarily successful past two decades — revenue up 70-fold, share price up 600-fold, a market value of $2.4trn — is partly the result of a b … | Continue reading
One more from Reuters today, this time by Mike Spector and Dan Levine: Tesla Inc is under criminal investigation in the United States over claims that the company’s electric vehicles can drive themselves, three people familiar with the matter said. […] As part of the latest probe … | Continue reading
Sheila Dang, Reuters: The reality, according to internal Twitter research seen by Reuters, goes far beyond the handful of examples of celebrities ghosting their own accounts. Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users – who are vital to the business – engaged, underscori … | Continue reading
Apple has a uniquely loyal customer base, cultivated by spending the past twenty-odd years, in particular, carefully balancing its corporate priorities and users’ satisfaction. It has long prided itself on being an accessibly premium brand: not necessarily expensive, but definite … | Continue reading
Perhaps you, like I, have previously attempted to untangle the dense vocabulary inherent to the “crypto” or cryptocurrency or “Web3” space. Maybe you have read Kevin Roose’s guide in the New York Times, or a version of Roose’s essay edited to add context and remove puffery on Mol … | Continue reading
Ben Brody, Protocol: Here’s the thing though: I can’t remember ever having checked out at any of these merchants using my work email address, much less using it to sign up for marketing. A search of my account didn’t turn up any records. Annoyed with the most insistent emailers, … | Continue reading
An un-bylined statement from the Wire: Our investigation, which is ongoing, does not as yet allow us to take a conclusive view about the authenticity and bona fides of the sources with whom a member of our reporting team says he has been in touch over an extended period of time. … | Continue reading
Hey, remember when an academic study found emails from U.S. Republican candidates and officials were slightly more likely to be sent to Gmail’s spam folder than emails from Democrats? In response, Google made up a whole exemption program specifically for political emails. Makena … | Continue reading
When I said I read Federico Viticci’s iPadOS review every year, I meant it — except this year, because there is no iPadOS review, because Stage Manager deserves a big long post all for itself, apparently: At the end of all this, here’s how I feel about Stage Manager: Apple starte … | Continue reading
When iPadOS gets released, I read Federico Viticci’s review. When a new version of MacOS is shipped, I rely on Andrew Cunningham of Ars Technica and Jason Snell of Six Colors to tell me the good, the bad, and the buggy. Choice excerpts from Cunningham’s review: Suffice it to say … | Continue reading
Chris Stokel-Walker, Wired, in an article headlined “Apple Is an Ad Company Now”: Apple has sold ads inside Apple News and the App Store since 2016 but in recent months has shown a new determination to muscle into an industry dominated by Google, Meta, and Amazon. In June, Apple … | Continue reading
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg: Apple Inc.’s head of hardware design, Evans Hankey, is leaving the iPhone maker three years after taking the job, creating a significant hole at the top of a company famous for its slick-looking products, according to people with knowledge of the matter. H … | Continue reading
Thank you to Golden Hill Software and Unread for this week’s sponsorship. Unread is an RSS reader for iPhone and iPad with beautiful typography, comfortable gesture-based navigation, and a variety of color themes. While great websites like Pixel Envy provide RSS feeds with full a … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui, Gerrit De Vynck, and Jeremy B. Merrill, Washington Post: Elon Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staf … | Continue reading
Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, in the Check My Ads Branded newsletter: Without seller crucial information, advertisers can’t meet the standards they’ve set for themselves, putting them at near constant business and legal risk. […] The only tool Google gives advertisers today to … | Continue reading
Speaking of costly film photography, Leica is once again making the M6 — and not as a limited edition. That should give you plenty of time to save up. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
In addition to the aforementioned Apple TV, Apple today announced new versions of the iPad and iPad Pro. Alex Guyot of MacStories rightly describes the resulting product selection as “strange”: As you’ve probably noticed from the many caveats throughout this article, this iPad li … | Continue reading
It seems too poetic for a major journalism scandal to unfold in one corner while a high-profile effort to save the future of media — and, if you believe its marketing, the democratic world itself — is launching in another. This new effort is called Semafor, and its co-founder Ben … | Continue reading
Randy Gorbman, WXXI News of Rochester, New York: Film is obviously a legacy product in a digital world, but Nagraj Bokinkere, Vice President of Industrial Films and Chemicals at Kodak, said it has seen a resurgence in the last few years. […] “A few short years ago in the film fin … | Continue reading
I am tempted to pick one of these up to replace my 2015 HD model which — you will be surprised to learn, reader — is feeling a little old. Apple dropped the price by about $50, too, while doubling the storage in the base model. Sounds pretty good, right? Alas, it is a little […]⌥ … | Continue reading
L’affaire the Wire sure has taken a turn since yesterday. First, Kanishk Karan, one of the security researchers ostensibly contacted by reporters, has denied ever doing so: It has come to my attention that I’ve been listed as one of the “independent security researchers” who supp … | Continue reading
Simon Owens: The rise of the podcast streaming wars threatened to upend all that. As large tech and media conglomerates — companies like Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeart, and Amazon — invested in podcasting, many assumed they’d take a page out of Netflix’s playbook and pull all their sh … | Continue reading
Unread is an RSS reader for iPhone and iPad with beautiful typography, comfortable gesture-based navigation, and a variety of color themes. While great websites like Pixel Envy provide RSS feeds with full article content, some websites have feeds that contain only article summari … | Continue reading
Sara Fischer, of Axios, is reporting today that Meta’s proprietary Instant Articles format will go away in April. This should not be a surprise — Instant Articles does nothing for Meta’s virtual reality efforts, Meta is cutting costs, and Google has been phasing out its commitmen … | Continue reading
Parmy Olson of Bloomberg was not impressed with Meta’s announcements at Connect 2022: While Zuckerberg spent most of the hour-and-a-half long presentation as his regular self on camera, the Facebook co-founder had one brief moment walking around a virtual stage as an avatar that … | Continue reading
Microsoft: Over the last couple years, Microsoft 365 has evolved into our flagship productivity suite, so we are creating an experience to help you get the most out of Microsoft 365. In the coming months, Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows will beco … | Continue reading
Adi Robertson, the Verge: So far, huge parts of Meta’s “openness” happen on its terms and can evaporate the moment they become inconvenient. If you’re Satya Nadella, then sure, you’re in a strong bargaining position. But if you’re a small developer pushing the Quest’s technical l … | Continue reading
Chloe Xiang, Vice: On Tuesday, the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) shared a computer generated image of a suspect they created with DNA phenotyping, which it used for the first time in hopes of identifying a suspect from a 2019 sexual assault case. Using DNA evidence from the case, … | Continue reading
Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal: During the ride, Apple’s new car-crash detection triggered and automatically dialed 911. The call to the Warren County Communications Center, which you can listen to here, featured an automated voice message from Ms. White’s iPhone: “The owner o … | Continue reading
The European Parliament: By the end of 2024, all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the EU will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C charging port. From spring 2026, the obligation will extend to laptops. The new law, adopted by plenary on Tuesday with 602 votes in favou … | Continue reading
Pew Research Center: Although fewer than one-in-ten Americans say they use any of these sites for news, most who do say they have found a community of like-minded people there. And news consumers on the four sites with large enough numbers to be analyzed individually – Parler, Ru … | Continue reading
Alex Heath, of the Verge, obtained internal memos written by Vishal Shah, Meta’s “VP, Metaverse”:1 A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, … | Continue reading
Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab: In other words: Most people don’t follow a bunch of political “elites” on Twitter — a group that, for these authors’ purposes, also includes news organizations. But those who do typically follow many more people they agree with politically than people w … | Continue reading
Dave Lee, Financial Times: Today, the archive’s founder Brewster Kahle tells me, the project is on the brink of surpassing 100 petabytes – approximately 50,000 times larger than in 1997. It contains more than 700bn web pages. The work isn’t getting any easier. Websites today are … | Continue reading
Frank Landymore, Futurism: Basically, Zuckerberg and his vanity project have been taking hits left and right online, getting relentlessly roasted and memed while failing to produce a convincing product. And lately, the metaverse has been catching strays from big names in the spac … | Continue reading
Jef Feely and Ed Hammond, Bloomberg: Elon Musk is proposing to buy Twitter Inc. for the original offer price of $54.20 a share, potentially avoiding a courtroom fight over one of the most contentious acquisitions in recent history. Musk made the proposal in a letter to Twitter, a … | Continue reading
Dan Moren, Macworld: The iPad shouldn’t be a big iPhone and it shouldn’t just become a Mac. So what’s left? The trickiest needle to thread of them all: making the iPad truly its own device. A good start would be to question the assumptions that the tablet inherited from iOS. For … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, the fine people at Rogue Amoeba asked if it would be possible to pay for some sponsored posts on Pixel Envy. How does one say no to Rogue Amoeba? Anyway, you probably saw the results of that ask for the company’s twentieth anniversary. I want to publicly thank … | Continue reading
Morgan Meaker, Wired: Advertising didn’t always used to be like this. Augustine Fou, who has been a digital marketer for 25 years, says that in the past decade there’s been an explosion in fake traffic. Fou believes the industry was corrupted around a decade ago, when a series of … | Continue reading
Ximena González, the Sprawl: Last year, Vanessa Acevedo worked part time as a driver for Amazon. Using her personal vehicle, a 2014 Ford Fiesta, five times per week she drove the 26 km of Stoney Trail (a.k.a. the ring road) between her home in Redstone, in Calgary’s far northeast … | Continue reading
Citizen Lab: Using only a single website, as well as publicly available material such as historical internet scanning results and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we identified a network of 885 websites and have high confidence that the United States (US) Central Intellige … | Continue reading