Here is a short and curious Twitter thread from app developers and security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry: Apple’s analytics data include an ID called “dsId”. We were able to verify that “dsId” is the “Directory Services Identifier”, an ID that uniquely identifies an … | Continue reading
Jeff Butts, the Mac Observer: Beginning in iOS 16, Apple has added the ability to push out security fixes without requiring a full iOS update. This can be much faster to install, since the patches are generally much smaller. Wednesday, Apple released one of these updates, called … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at the Verge in April: Now, if Musk buys Twitter, I feel like we all have a vague idea of how this goes. First, a lot of Twitter employees quit because Musk’s companies are notoriously miserable places to work. Second, Musk tweets about a bunch of shit … | Continue reading
I looked between the couch cushions and found some news for you that is not related to Twitter. A pre-emptive caveat that fixed generational boundaries are not my favourite way of grouping people, but I thought the results of this survey were interesting enough to share. Jordan M … | Continue reading
My thanks to Due for sponsoring Pixel Envy this week. Due’s developer asked me to remind you of what makes the app different. “Annoying” is probably not a word a developer would like his app to be associated with. I certainly don’t mind. Thankfully, users have also thought of my … | Continue reading
Max Read: […] Put another way, the rest of Twitter will go like the whole verification episode did: it’ll be stupid and annoying for a while, then chaotic, then pretty funny, and then, at the end of the process, basically the same as before, but slightly worse. Or, that’s how it … | Continue reading
Christine Dobby, writing for the Globe and Mail in 2018: Less than three weeks ago, Shaw gave 6,500 non-unionized employees the option to take voluntary severance packages, but said it expected just 10 per cent, or 650 people, to accept the buyouts; on Thursday, it said 3,300 emp … | Continue reading
Steven M. Bellovin on Twitter: Sad news from @unccs — Fred P. Brooks, the founder and long-time chair of the department (and a major influence on my professional outlook) passed away a few hours ago. Brooks, of course, was responsible for Brooks’ Law as described in the Mythical … | Continue reading
Mia Sato, the Verge: NewsWhip data shows that BuzzFeed’s footprint on Facebook has withered away for years as a result of these changes. In 2016, BuzzFeed stories posted on the platform had 329 million engagements; by 2018, that number had fallen to less than half. Last year, Buz … | Continue reading
Matt Novak, Gizmodo: FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday, leaving reasonable people to wonder how a cryptocurrency platform founded in 2019, which reached a valuation of $32 billion in 2021, could plummet to zero in such a short time. There’s a new piece in the New York Times whic … | Continue reading
Remarkably, for a country that is as large and as loyal to Apple’s ecosystems as Canada,1 this new Vancouver store is only the third location in the country which is not a boring indoor mall store. Apple’s longstanding spot on Rue Sainte-Catherine is its only true “flagship” stor … | Continue reading
Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg: Workers say that whereas the focus of an Apple Genius used to be to impress customers with a high level of service, they and other employees are now increasingly pressured to upsell. They’re pushed to prioritize “ownership opportunities,” the company’s e … | Continue reading
David Roth, Defector: It’s a cycle. People create something, together, that reflects their energy and weird work; that thing becomes compelling as a result, and that makes it valuable, and at some point someone puts a price on it and someone else pays that price. It is at that mo … | Continue reading
Jason Del Rey, Recode: The sponsor-ification of the Amazon shopping experience is just the latest twist. If you’re looking closely enough, a quick search on Amazon for, say, “iPhone screen protector” or “youth soccer socks” will only turn up paid product listings carrying a “Spon … | Continue reading
“Annoying” is probably not a word a developer would like his app to be associated with. I certainly don’t mind. Thankfully, users have also thought of my app as “indispensable” and a “game changer”. It has helped people living with ADHD and early dementia. It has saved marriages. … | Continue reading
The awkwardly named “semaform” article format that is the main gimmick of Semafor is supposed to ensure information and analysis remain in separate buckets. So, how is that working out for them? Here is an article from Friday by Diego Mendoza, which carries the following headline … | Continue reading
The absence of clear understanding of App Tracking Transparency’s material effect has produced a cottage industry of writers explaining how it is responsible for all kinds of trends in advertising. Some of those theories are more believable than others; here is an example of the … | Continue reading
Twitter is obviously not dead, but this feels like a collection of artifacts of a different time on Twitter. Good for a chuckle or, if you are weird like me, a lot of wheezy laughter. “Stay fresh cheese bags” gets me every time. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Adi Robertson, reviewed Meta’s Quest Pro at the Verge: But, again, the current use is limited. Meta has one confirmed app that uses foveated rendering, the game Red Matter 2, which renders at a high resolution in the Quest Pro — but is still held back by that fundamental grainine … | Continue reading
Mike Masnick, Techdirt: As for the background on all this, some of you youngsters might not remember this, but back in 2011 Twitter signed a consent decree with the FTC over its failure to safeguard user info. Now, almost every big tech company these days has a consent decree wit … | Continue reading
Alexander George, Wired: Feeling his engineers have lost touch with the common folk, Herb employs Homer because he is, Powell says, “an average schmo.” Homer is given free rein to design his dream car, a futuristic creation filled with conveniences that make driving easy and plea … | Continue reading
Dougall Johnson dove deep into the nitty-gritty of Apple’s Rosetta 2 x86 emulator for its ARM-based Macs, and I cannot comprehend almost any of it. But the conclusion? That is something even I can understand: Engineering is about making the right tradeoffs, and I’d say Rosetta 2 … | Continue reading
Taylor Hatmaker, TechCrunch: Now when tweets appear in Twitter’s timeline it’s impossible to visually distinguish the two categories of blue check accounts from one another. Doing so would require clicking through to examine a user’s follower count, which isn’t necessarily a reli … | Continue reading
Wang Boyuan of PingWest on Twitter: In the recently released iOS 16.2 beta2, AirDrop to everyone feature is found to last for 10 minutes instead of forever. However, this change only appears in iPhone’s China models. […] Well, it turns out to be also a “hot fix” in today’s iOS 16 … | Continue reading
Esther Crawford, project manager at Twitter: A lot of folks have asked about how you’ll be able to distinguish between @TwitterBlue subscribers with blue checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official, which is why we’re introducing the “Official” label to select accounts … | Continue reading
Patrick McGee and Ryan McMorrow, Financial Times: Yet when it comes to selling its devices to Chinese consumers, business has boomed. Operating profits in greater China — which includes Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and mainland China — have shot up 104 per cent over 24 months to $31. … | Continue reading
Last month, Apple’s Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak were interviewed by Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event. Stern asked some pretty good questions; Federighi and Joz are too media trained to answer as comprehensively as any of us would like. But there was … | Continue reading
If you think you hate video shot in vertical orientation now, just wait until you see the screenshot in this article. Then imagine that space packed with ads, and you have a pretty good idea of what the future of television looks like. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Charles Edge (via Michael Tsai): The net result is that when doing the last few upgrades, they have required 12+GB for the installer itself (which can be run from a USB drive) and up to 44GB for the installer to do the work it needs to do, so a total of up to about 56GB. […]⌥ Per … | Continue reading
Ben Thompson, Stratechery: Meta, née Facebook, is now, incredibly enough, worth 42% less than it was when I wrote Facebook Lenses, hitting levels not seen since January 2016. It seems the company’s many critics are finally right: Facebook is dying, for real this time. The problem … | Continue reading
Safi Bugel, the Guardian: Mimi Parker, drummer, vocalist and songwriter for the Minnesota indie band Low, has died, her husband and bandmate Alan Sparhawk has said. Parker was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in December 2020. She was 55 years old, the band’s management confirmed. A … | Continue reading
Mike Isaac and Ryan Mac, New York Times: This week, Mr. Musk moved to make money from Twitter’s “blue check” verification program, a method of making sure users are who they say they are. The billionaire announced that the program, which is currently free, will be rolled into the … | Continue reading
Michael Hobbes, of the excellent “Maintenance Phase”, and Peter Shamshiri, who you might know from the “5–4 Podcast”, have launched a new show called “If Books Could Kill”, where they deconstruct crappy airport non-fiction and reflect on, as Hobbes puts it, the TED Talk-ification … | Continue reading
I have been using MacOS Ventura for a little over a week now and, while I still have not gotten used to phrases like “Preferences” and “Desktop Picture” getting replaced with the dreary words “Settings” and “Wallpaper”, respectively, I do think there are two legitimately great th … | Continue reading
Speaking of ProPublica, it appears the publication is struggling with its own trustworthiness problems after fallout from a scandalous story claiming a “research-related incident” was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Max Tani, Semafor: The ProPublica/Vanity Fair article rel … | Continue reading
Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, ProPublica: In early 2022, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which is part of DHS, was in talks to deploy a federally funded nonprofit to protect election workers from harassment and violence. The effort would have a … | Continue reading
Mike Masnick, Techdirt: Do not believe everything you read. Even if it comes from more “respectable” publications. The Intercept had a big story this week that is making the rounds, suggesting that “leaked” documents prove the DHS has been coordinating with tech companies to supp … | Continue reading
Jake Offenhartz, Gothamist: At least 500 drones will depart the shores of New Jersey on Thursday evening, flickering over the horizon in a choreographed dance meant to evoke the experience of swiping colorful treats on a phone screen. Promising a “surreal takeover of New York Cit … | Continue reading
Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch: Uber recently launched its new advertising division and in-app ads. Apparently, those ads aren’t staying within the app. Instead, ads from other companies are being sent out as push notifications, much to the chagrin of some Uber users. Over the weeken … | Continue reading
Sebastiaan de With: I shoot a lot of iPhone photos. In the last five years, I’ve taken a bit over 120,000 photos — averaging at least 10,000 RAW shots per iPhone model. I like to take some time — a few weeks, at least — to review a new iPhone camera and go beyond a […]⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Daniel Holden and Chris Kerr: This website displays a collection of twelve code poems, each written in the source code of a different programming language. Every poem is also a valid program which produces a visual representation of itself when compiled and run. What a beautiful … | Continue reading
Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang, the Intercept: The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an o … | Continue reading
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