Google, fresh from being found to have an illegal monopoly in search, is now facing another trial over its dominance in internet advertising. Jody Godoy, Reuters: Prosecutors say Google has largely dominated the technological infrastructure that funds the flow of news and informa … | Continue reading
Katie Notopoulos, Business Insider: Let me ask you something: Have you noticed that engagement bait questions are taking over your Threads feed? Ha! Got ya! Sorry, sorry. But seriously, I’ve noticed it, too — and I have some ideas about what might be happening. This is surprising … | Continue reading
Lily Hay Newman, of Wired, interviewed Apple’s Craig Federighi about Private Cloud Compute, the company’s custom system for processing Apple Intelligence requests unable to be handled on-device. Federighi explains how it all works in more simplified language, which is helpful, bu … | Continue reading
Nathan J. Robinson, of Current Affairs, reviewing “Corporate Bullshit” by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, and Donald Cohen last year: Over the last several decades, we have been told that “smoking doesn’t cause cancer, cars don’t cause pollution, greedy pharmaceutical companies aren’t … | Continue reading
Adrian Vila: I said it a year ago, and I still think Apple made a mistake with the 120mm lens. The current lineup of 13mm, 24mm, and 120mm leaves a huge gap between the main and telephoto lenses, missing out on key and very useful focal lengths for everyday situations. I’d rather … | Continue reading
David Smith: An interesting point of comparison. The Series 10 “Small” (42mm) Apple Watch is very nearly the same physical footprint of the “Large” (42mm) Series 1 Apple Watch. Though obviously with a much larger screen given the rounded shape and drastic reduction in bezel thick … | Continue reading
Sophia Harris, CBC News: The taxi scam has several variations but typically ends the same way: the victim pays with a debit card, then the scammer secretly steals it and hands the victim a similar but fake card. Shortly thereafter, money disappears from the victim’s account. […] … | Continue reading
Apple: Camera Control — a result of thoughtful hardware and software integration — elevates the camera experience on the iPhone 16 lineup. It is packed with innovation, including a tactile switch that powers the click experience, a high-precision force sensor that enables the lig … | Continue reading
Professional editor John Buck spoke to former members of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group to gain an insight into the inner workings of a secretive team that imagined Apple’s future. The result is a compelling 470-page book called “Inventing the Future, Bit by Bit”. I was at App … | Continue reading
Ted Chiang, the New Yorker: It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand … | Continue reading
I got a batch of film scans from the developer today and realized I needed a better process for converting them — better, that is, than the way I had been doing it, which was to flip the curves in Lightroom and then do all my corrections in reverse. I played around with the Filmo … | Continue reading
Danielle Deschamps, in the conclusion to a rather interesting chapter from “Contemporary Issues in Collection Management”, hosted by Open Education Alberta: Ebook licensing agreements have become the widespread norm for library ebook access. Yet, between libraries and publishers, … | Continue reading
At the beginning of August, Nassim Haramein sued RationalWiki on charges of defamation, conspiracy, and invasion of privacy. Regardless of the merits of the suit — I write, trying not to fall afoul of an obviously litigious individual — RationalWiki is a small, volunteer-run oper … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: The chats show 22 instances in which one Google employee told another Google employee to turn chat history off. In total, the court has dozens of specific employees who have told others to turn history off in DMs or broader group chats and channels. The … | Continue reading
The Economist: So how big is too big? At what point do the costs of the heaviest vehicles — measured in lives lost — vastly exceed their benefits? To answer this question, The Economist compiled ten years’ worth of crash data from more than a dozen states. Like the data compiled … | Continue reading
Sérgio Spagnuolo, Sofia Schurig, and Pedro Nakamura, Núcleo: A Supreme Court Justice ordered, on Friday (August 30, 2024), the complete suspension of all access to X (formerly Twitter) across the entire Brazilian territory, in an unprecedented ruling against the social platform. … | Continue reading
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor for the Clinton administration and Sam Reich’s dad, wrote about Elon Musk’s political influence in an editorial for the Guardian. It begins as a decent piece, comparing the power of owning a social media platform with Musk’s childlike … | Continue reading
Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press: A U.S. appeals court revived on Tuesday a lawsuit filed by the mother of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl who died attempting a viral challenge she allegedly saw on TikTok that dared people to choke themselves until they lost consciousness. While … | Continue reading
I do not wish to make a whole big thing out of this, but I have noticed a bunch of little things which make my iPhone a little bit harder to use. For this, I am setting aside things like rearranging the Home Screen, which still feels like playing Tetris with an adversarial board. … | Continue reading
Lauren Theisen, Defector: Columbus Blue Jackets winger Johnny Gaudreau and his brother Matthew were killed by a car while biking in Oldmans Township, New Jersey on Thursday night, according to New Jersey State Police. Johnny was 31, and Matthew was 29. The brothers, originally fr … | Continue reading
Juli Clover, MacRumors: With the third beta of iOS 18.1, Apple has introduced new Apple Intelligence features for notifications. The notification summarization option that was previously available for the Mail and Messages apps now works with all of your apps. Matt Birchler poste … | Continue reading
Cyrille Louis, Le Figaro, originally in French and translated here with DeepL: After four days in police custody, Pavel Dourov, founder and boss of the encrypted messaging service Telegram, was indicted in Paris on Wednesday evening by two examining magistrates for a litany of of … | Continue reading
Paul Frazee, on Bluesky’s blog, announced a set of new “anti-toxicity” features. This one seems particularly good: As of the latest app version, released today (version 1.90), users can view all the quote posts on a given post. Paired with that, you can detach your original post … | Continue reading
French magistrate Laure Beccuau (PDF) on Monday disclosed the reasons for Pavel Durov’s arrest and detainment. The first two pages are in French; the last two are in English. Mike Masnick, Techdirt: In the end, though, a lot of this does seem potentially very problematic. So far, … | Continue reading
The extremely normal U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary posted a letter sent from Mark Zuckerberg to Chairman Jim Jordan.1 In it, Zuckerberg says Meta felt “pressured” by the Biden administration to more aggressively moderate users’ posts during the COVID-19 pandemic, that the … | Continue reading
Joseph Cox, 404 Media: Media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) says it can target adverts based on what potential customers said out loud near device microphones, and explicitly points to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Bing as CMG partners, according to a CMG presentation obtained by 40 … | Continue reading
Jess Weatherbed, the Verge: Image manipulation techniques and other methods of fakery have existed for close to 200 years — almost as long as photography itself. (Cases in point: 19th-century spirit photography and the Cottingley Fairies.) But the skill requirements and time inve … | Continue reading
Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, in an excerpt from their forthcoming book “Character Limit” published in the New York Times: Mr. Musk’s fixation on Blue extended beyond the design, and he engaged in lengthy deliberations about how much it should cost. Mr. [David] Sacks insisted that th … | Continue reading
An un-bylined report in Le Monde: French judicial authorities on Sunday extended the detention of the Russian-born founder and chief of Telegram Pavel Durov after his arrest at a Paris airport over alleged offenses related to the popular but controversial messaging app. I believe … | Continue reading
Paris Marx: […] If he [Sam Altman] was serious about wanting to extend people’s lifespans by 10 years, he wouldn’t be looking at sci-fi fantasies, but at the policies that can deliver those benefits and how to get the US political system to move them forward. […] Silicon Valley c … | Continue reading
Katie Notopoulos, Business Insider: A company that makes parental monitoring software called Qustodio recently released a report about app use for kids and teens based on its analysis of anonymous data from about 180,000 of its US users. Some of the information about what young p … | Continue reading
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Apple has changed its screen recording privacy prompt in the latest beta of macOS Sequoia. As we reported last week, Apple’s initial plan was to prompt users to grant screen recording permissions weekly. In macOS Sequoia beta 6, however, Apple has adjusted … | Continue reading
Apple today announced forthcoming iOS changes for E.U. users, including a more informative first-run browser choice screen — one that will require users to scroll to the bottom before confirming — and the ability to delete every default app except Phone and Settings. Also, this: … | Continue reading
Sarah Jeong, the Verge: If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express. … | Continue reading
Tiffany Ng wrote a fantastic article for MIT Technology Review about the gradient of recommendations that runs between the automated and the more personal. I think the whole thing is worth reading — call it a personal recommendation — but I wanted to highlight a few specific thin … | Continue reading
Erin Brooks: I use many brands of cameras for my professional work: Leica, FujiX, Canon, as well as Zeiss attachments for my phone. But the fact remains that more than 50% of my work continues to be shot on iPhone, using the native camera app, and editing in Lightroom Mobile, bec … | Continue reading
M.G. Siegler: Just close your eyes and imagine a single interface where all the world’s content is served up to you and you’re just one click away from watching any of it. Not a few clicks and navigating some other UI. Not a click and a dialog box saying you can’t access the cont … | Continue reading
Leyland Cecco, the Guardian: Canada’s Conservative party has deleted a social media campaign video with a heavily nationalist message after much of the video featured scenes from other countries, including Ukrainian farmers, Slovenian homes, London’s Richmond Park and a pair of R … | Continue reading
Lawrence Abrams, Bleeping Computer: Almost 2.7 billion records of personal information for people in the United States were leaked on a hacking forum, exposing names, social security numbers, all known physical addresses, and possible aliases. The data allegedly comes from Nation … | Continue reading
Reed Albergotti, Semafor: Google’s Android phones are about to get an AI upgrade. The company’s flagship AI model, Gemini, will replace Google Assistant as the default service on Android phones in the coming weeks, the company announced Tuesday. Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal: … | Continue reading
Scharon Harding, Ars Technica: Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasi … | Continue reading
Julia Love and Davey Alba, Bloomberg: Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages — meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can’t a … | Continue reading
Marko Zivkovic, in an April report for AppleInsider, revealed several new Safari features to debut this year. Some of them, like A.I.-based summarization, were expected and shown at WWDC. Then there was this: Also accessible from the new page controls menu is a feature Apple is t … | Continue reading
I quoted Steve Jobs the other day; here is another one courtesy of a 2006 interview with Brian Williams which, in its re-uploaded form, has been bizarrely stabilized relative to each face in a way that is difficult to describe and nauseating to watch: Brands are like bank account … | Continue reading
For years, the Patreon app on iOS has allowed users to buy digital subscriptions without using Apple’s In-App Purchases model.1 Instead, it throws up a Safari sheet with its own payment form. In 2021, Jacob Kastrenakes, of the Verge, contrasted this with the mandate given to Fanh … | Continue reading
Shane Goldmacher, New York Times: Former President Donald J. Trump has taken his obsession with the large crowds that Vice President Kamala Harris is drawing at her rallies to new heights, falsely declaring in a series of social media posts on Sunday that she had used artificial … | Continue reading
In response to Apple’s increasingly distrustful permissions prompts, it is worth thinking about what benefits this could provide. Apps can start out trustworthy and become malicious through updates or ownership changes, and users should be reminded of the permissions they have af … | Continue reading
Speaking of podcasts, Michael Hobbes dove into Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” — previously mentioned — for his “If Books Could Kill” podcast. At two hours, it is the longest single episode they have done, but it is worth it for Hobbes’ careful exploration. There is som … | Continue reading