Munira Mutaher, Rest of World: The 227 entries we received from contestants — including from Mongolia, the Philippines, Argentina, and Jordan — not only celebrate these stories but reaffirm our commitment at Rest of World to challenge stereotypes about how people use technology i … | Continue reading
Caitlin Dewey: “For the longest time I’ve been satisfied and chill,” he [Tom Anderson] later wrote on IG. “Just at peace with how I am and how the world is.” In comments like these, I see the enduring appeal of Myspace Tom. Today’s tech founders live largely to extract and hoard: … | Continue reading
Emily Mae Czachor, CBS News: Google Maps users in the United States can expect to see the body of water known for centuries as the Gulf of Mexico renamed the Gulf of America, aligning with the terms of President Trump’s controversial executive order. Google also said Denali, a mo … | Continue reading
Amy Fleming, the Guardian: The “study” that spearheaded this cascade of concern in 2005, and is still quoted in the press today, claimed that using email lowered IQ more than cannabis. But Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin, smelled … | Continue reading
Scott Strasser, Calgary Herald: The complaint [by Uber] was issued shortly before council voted 11–3 to approve a suite of changes to the livery and transport bylaw on Tuesday. Among the changes is a requirement for Uber and other ride-booking companies to provide the city with e … | Continue reading
None of Your Business: Today, noyb has filed GDPR complaints against TikTok, AliExpress, SHEIN, Temu, WeChat and Xiaomi for unlawful data transfers to China. While four of them openly admit to sending Europeans’ personal data to China, the other two say that they transfer data to … | Continue reading
With this week’s public release of Apple’s operating system updates comes Apple Intelligence now on by default. More users will be discovering its “beta” features and Apple will, in theory, be collecting even more feedback about their quality. There are certainly issues with the … | Continue reading
Katie Mcque, Laís Martins, Ananya Bhattacharya, and Carien Du Plessis, Rest of World: Brazil’s AI bill is one window into a global effort to define the role that artificial intelligence will play in democratic societies. Large Silicon Valley companies involved in AI software — in … | Continue reading
Catherine McIntyre, Laura Osman, and Murad Hemmadi, the Logic: In a WhatsApp group named Build Canada, some of the country’s most prominent technology leaders, including Shopify executives Tobi Lütke, Daniel Debow and Kaz Nejatian, as well as investor John Ruffolo, are developing … | Continue reading
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks. By blocking ad trackers, Magic Lasso Adblock stops you being followed by ads around the web. … | Continue reading
“David and Felipe”, Hall of Impossible Dreams: At first glance, ravenprp is a very impressive user, writing 2,891 posts in a mere seven-month span (from September 2006 to April 2007) for average of more than thirteen posts per day. […] Impressively, these posts span from three ye … | Continue reading
Maxwell Neely-Cohen, writing for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab: This piece looks at a single question. If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in y … | Continue reading
Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times: A group of Italian physicists has dared to tinker with the traditional recipe for cacio e pepe, the challenging Roman dish consisting of pasta, pecorino cheese and black pepper. In a new study, the scientists claim to have “scientifically optim … | Continue reading
Justin Baer, Alexander Saeedy, and Alexa Corse, Wall Street Journal: In a January email to staff, Musk pointed to the company’s growing influence and power, but said the finances remain problematic. “Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking … | Continue reading
You might know that the RSS reader Unread has a long history on iPhone and iPad, but did you know Unread is also now available for Mac? Unread for Mac is a fully-native Mac app. Unread includes the features you know from the iPhone and iPad app: beautiful typography, a variety of … | Continue reading
John Ganz: If one reads closely, there is nothing in the ideology of the imperialist bourgeoisie that Arendt describes that is not shared by this new tech-oligarchy. What could explain better the apparent contradiction in the oscillation between their state-phobic libertarianism … | Continue reading
Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica: It’s official: The FBI’s warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment. In a major December ruling made public this week, US District J … | Continue reading
Lily Hay Newman, Wired, interviewed Easterly near the end of her time running CISA: The timing couldn’t be worse for the nation to lose its top cybersecurity cop. A Beijing-linked group called Salt Typhoon spent months last year rampaging through American telecoms and siphoning c … | Continue reading
Leader Key is a neat new-ish app from Mikkel Malmberg: Problems with traditional launchers: Typing the name of the thing can be slow and give unpredictable results. Global shortcuts have limited combinations. Leader Key offers predictable, nested shortcuts — like combos in a figh … | Continue reading
Charitably, the best you can say about Tim Cook’s appearance at the inauguration this week is to presume he is there reluctantly. A million-dollar contribution bought him the same proximity to this nakedly transactional administration as executives from Amazon, Google, Meta, and … | Continue reading
Juli Clover, MacRumors: When installing macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3, or iPadOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be turned on automatically on compatible devices, Apple says in the developer release notes for the updates. Eric Schwarz: The documentation is for 15.3, so I suspect the … | Continue reading
You are probably aware already of the flurry of executive orders signed on the first day of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, a phrase that will hopefully not become as infamous as it already feels. His attack on transgender people is particularly appalling despite its pre … | Continue reading
Molly White: The TikTok ban, the Musk Twitter takeover, the Facebook moderation policy changes, the Republicans’ rapidly intensifying crackdowns on speech… let these be the proof you needed to move anything you care about online to a space you control. A good reminder, indeed. We … | Continue reading
Mat Duggan: Last week I awoke to Google deciding I hadn’t had enough AI shoved down my throat. With no warning they decided to take the previously $20/user/month Gemini add-on and make it “free” and on by default. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also decided to remove my ability … | Continue reading
Now, more than ever, it is important to get information directly from authors and publications you can trust. But visiting dozens of websites to look for new articles each day is time-consuming. An RSS reader such as Unread can do that for you. Unread features beautiful typograph … | Continue reading
Craig Grannell: In November 2024, Pixelmator announced that the company would join Apple. Although the post said there would be “no material changes” to the company’s apps, fans were worried. The assumption was that Photomator and Pixelmator (the latter being a rare sort-of-Photo … | Continue reading
Lauren Feiner, the Verge: Trump seems to want TikTok available for his inauguration on Monday, because “Americans deserve” to see the event. But TikTok is officially banned starting today until it sells to a non-Chinese company, and there’s no deal in sight. Flouting that ban cou … | Continue reading
Joanna Stern, in her Tech Things newsletter: Here’s a notification for you, Apple: There is no husband. Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage — because, again, I don’t ha … | Continue reading
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you. As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances … | Continue reading
Mark Sherman, Associated Press: The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it’s sold by its China-based parent company,holding that the risk to national security posed by its ties to China overcomes concerns about limitin … | Continue reading
Stephen Brun, CBC News: The timing of their departure that day last July proved lucky. Just seconds later, a meteorite would plummet onto the front walkway of [Joe] Velaidum’s home in Marshfield, Prince Edward Island, shattering on impact with a reverberating smack. […] Luckier s … | Continue reading
Joan Westenberg: Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed. But this protection comes at a … | Continue reading
This week, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it is legal to require that TikTok be forced to divest from its parent company by January 19 or be banned. You may know this as the “TikTok ban” because that is how it has been reported basically everywhere. … | Continue reading
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Apple released iOS 18.3 beta 3 to developers this afternoon. The update includes a handful of changes to the notification summaries feature of Apple Intelligence. Miller rounds up the key changes which, sadly, do not include an Apple logo beside the summar … | Continue reading
Ingo Dachwitz and Sebastian Meineck, Netzpolitik: A new data set obtained from a US data broker reveals for the first time about 40,000 apps from which users‘ data is being traded. The data set was obtained by a journalist from netzpolitik.org as a free preview sample for a paid … | Continue reading
Molly White: When Elon Musk launched his latest crusade against Wikipedia this Christmas Eve, it wasn’t just another of the billionaire’s frequent Twitter tantrums. His gripes about the community-written encyclopedia expose something far more significant: the growing efforts by A … | Continue reading
Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac, New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive who has tried to keep a distance from politics, is warming to President-elect Donald J. Trump. Mr. Zuckerberg is among several Big Tech executives who are expected to be front and center … | Continue reading
Parker Molloy: Look, I get it. We’ve all grown cynical about promises to “fix” social media. But this could be different. It’s not about creating a utopian new platform; it’s about building the infrastructure to ensure that no matter what platform you choose to use, it can’t be c … | Continue reading
Aisha Malik, TechCrunch: The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that can’t be controlled by a single person or company, including Bluesky itself. The goal of the in … | Continue reading
Bloomberg News: Beijing officials strongly prefer that TikTok remains under the ownership of parent ByteDance Ltd., the people say, and the company is contesting the impending ban with an appeal to the US Supreme Court. But the justices signaled during arguments on Jan. 10 that t … | Continue reading
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances – deli … | Continue reading
Lewin Day, the Autopian: The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is widely considered to be a dry and unemotional document. Published by the Department of Transportation, it outlines the basic specifications of all the street signs you could expect to see out on roa … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned. […] The Internet Ar … | Continue reading
Dan Counsell: Can we please have the macOS X Lion UI back? 😍 Kyle Halevi (I trimmed the URL): @realmacdan I redrew more than just Lion, see here: https://www.sketch.com/s/… Louie Mantia: There’s a refined clarity to this version of Aqua. It evolved gracefully to this poin … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Lopatto, for the Verge, listened to Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast so none of us need to. Lopatto does a good job in this article of walking through some of the claims made by Zuckerberg and the conspicuous things he omits. It is a good piece. Howev … | Continue reading
Anna Gross and Joe Miller, Financial Times: Elon Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election, according to people briefed on the matter. Musk, the world’s richest man and key confidant of US … | Continue reading
Joseph Cox, 404 Media: Hackers claim to have compromised Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel which has sold masses of smartphone location data to the U.S. government. The hackers said they have stolen a massive amount of data, including customer lists, information on t … | Continue reading
Sam Biddle, the Intercept: Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal. There are examples in this … | Continue reading