I enjoyed this appearance by Jony Ive on the “Live in Seven Songs” podcast. There are no revelations for anyone familiar with Ive’s life story, but it is a lovely conversation for anyone who enjoys listening to someone who is passionate about their life’s work. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Perma … | Continue reading
Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch: One big change Apple announced Thursday is that developers who include link-outs in their apps will no longer need to accept the newer version of its business terms — which requires they commit to paying the Core Technology Fee (CTF) the EU is investiga … | Continue reading
Jason Snell, Six Colors: Apple’s recent feature changes suggest a value system that’s wildly out of balance, preferring to warn (and control) users no matter how damaging it is to the overall user experience. Maybe the people in charge should be forced to sit down and watch that … | Continue reading
Kylie Robinson, of the Verge, obtained internal sales data from Humane. Not only is the A.I. Pin not selling super well, but many of those which have been sold are being returned. That is a huge frustration, I imagine, for lots of people who worked on this product. Also, maybe it … | Continue reading
Alfonso Maruccia, TechSpot: Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default f … | Continue reading
Since owners of web properties became aware of the traffic-sending power of search engines — most often Google in most places — they have been in an increasingly uncomfortable relationship as search moves beyond ten relevant links on a page. Google does not need websites, per se; … | Continue reading
Apple, in a Developer News bulletin: In macOS Sequoia, users will no longer be able to Control-click to override Gatekeeper when opening software that isn’t signed correctly or notarized. They’ll need to visit System Settings > Privacy & Security to review security information fo … | Continue reading
Reddit user devanxd2000: I was digging into the system files for the update and I found a bunch of json files containing what appears to be prompts given to the AI in the background. I found it interesting and thought I’d share. You can find them here: /System/Library/AssetsV2/co … | Continue reading
Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica: Google just lost a massive antitrust trial over its sprawling search business, as US district judge Amit Mehta released his ruling, showing that he sided with the US Department of Justice in the case that could disrupt how billions of people search … | Continue reading
The Media Ecosystem Observatory: On August 1, 2023, in response to Bill C-18, Meta blocked Canadians from viewing, accessing, and sharing news article links on its platforms. Over the past 12 months, our team of researchers has closely monitored the effects of the ban particularl … | Continue reading
Jason Snell, Six Colors: Last quarter, Apple made about $22 billion in profit from products and $18 billion from Services. It’s the closest those two lines have ever come to each other. This is what was buzzing in the back of my head as I was going over all the numbers on Thursda … | Continue reading
Tim Berners-Lee in 1998: Keeping URIs so that they will still be around in 2, 20 or 200 or even 2000 years is clearly not as simple as it sounds. However, all over the Web, webmasters are making decisions which will make it really difficult for themselves in the future. Often, th … | Continue reading
Mark Bergen and Dawn Chmielewski, reporting for Vox — or perhaps Recode — in June 2016: The latest charge comes from SourceFed, a stray pop culture web and video site. It uploaded a short YouTube video on Thursday charging Google with deliberately altering search recommendations … | Continue reading
Karissa Bell, Engadget: Zuckerberg then launched into a lengthy rant about his frustrations with “closed” ecosystems like Apple’s App Store. None of that is particularly new, as the Meta founder has been feuding with Apple for years. But then Zuckerberg, who is usually quite cont … | Continue reading
Nilay Patel, of the Verge, interviewed Hanneke Faber, CEO of Logitech, for the Decoder podcast. NP […] You sell me the keyboard once. It’s got Options Plus. It has an AI button. I push the button, and someone has to make sure the software still works. Someone probably has to pay … | Continue reading
Lily Dupuis, CBC News: Calgary: Blue Sky City. That’s the new city slogan unveiled by Calgary Economic Development and Tourism Calgary on Wednesday, replacing “Be Part of the Energy,” marking the start of a new era of branding. Strategists with the groups say this new brand is a … | Continue reading
Anthony Chavez, of Google: […] Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We’re discussing this ne … | Continue reading
Anthony Ha, of TechCrunch, interviewed Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, and I will draw your attention to this exchange: AH I want to talk about both of those categories, Big Tech and regulation. You mentioned that with GDPR, there was a fork where there’s a little bit of a de … | Continue reading
Thom Holwerda: A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using Windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits … | Continue reading
Dana Mattioli, Wall Street Journal: When Amazon launched the Echo smart home devices with its Alexa voice assistant in 2014, it pulled a page from shaving giant Gillette’s classic playbook: sell the razors for a pittance in the hope of making heaps of money on purchases of the re … | Continue reading
Kate Conger, New York Times: On May 11, Mr. [Elon] Musk posted that he had selected a chief executive [for Twitter]. It was Ms. [Linda] Yaccarino. […] Many of her longtime peers in the advertising world were shocked that Ms. Yaccarino accepted the job — they feared she would tarn … | Continue reading
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier, Lawfare: Today’s internet systems are too complex to hope that if we are smart and build each piece correctly the sum total will work right. We have to deliberately break things and keep breaking them. This repeated process of breaking and fixi … | Continue reading
Thomas Claburn, the Register: Google promotes its reCAPTCHA service as a security mechanism for websites, but researchers affiliated with the University of California, Irvine, argue it’s harvesting information while extracting human labor worth billions. […] “Traffic resulting fr … | Continue reading
Aditya Kalra, Reuters: An investigation by India’s antitrust body has found that Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system, engaging “in abusive conduct and practices”, a confidential report seen by Reuters showed. […] “Apple A … | Continue reading
Katie McQue, the Guardian: The UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) accuses Apple of vastly undercounting how often child sexual abuse material (CSAM) appears in its products. In a year, child predators used Apple’s iCloud, iMessage and Facetime … | Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg: Today we’re taking the next steps towards open source AI becoming the industry standard. We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. In addition to having significantly be … | Continue reading
Derek Guy, for the Guardian: The ruling class today is hardly inspiring in terms of taste. The preponderance of tech vests, which have replaced navy blazers, demonstrates that socio-economic class still drives dress practices, albeit with less appealing forms. The irony is that, … | Continue reading
CrowdStrike: On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. Sensor configuration updates are an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This configuration update trigge … | Continue reading
Matt Novak, Gizmodo: “Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026,” Musk tweeted on Monday morning. As Electrek points out, that’s a delay from what was previously … | Continue reading
Emma Roth, the Verge: On Friday morning, some of the biggest airlines, TV broadcasters, banks, and other essential services came to a standstill as a massive outage rippled across the globe. The outage, which has brought the Blue Screen of Death upon legions of Windows machines a … | Continue reading
Annie Gilbertson and Alex Reisner, Proof: AI companies are generally secretive about their sources of training data, but an investigation by Proof News found some of the wealthiest AI companies in the world have used material from thousands of YouTube videos to train AI. Companie … | Continue reading
Dhruv Mehrotra, Tim Marchman, and Andrew Couts, Wired: US senator J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican and former US president Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, has a public Venmo account that gives an unfiltered glimpse into his extensive network of connections with establishmen … | Continue reading
To promote the launch of a new Beats Pill model, Apple’s Oliver Schusser was interviewed by Craig McLean of Wallpaper — where by “interviewed” I mostly mean “guided through talking points”. There is not much here unless you appreciate people discussing brands in the abstract. How … | Continue reading
For about seven years, I have been automatically broadcasting new posts to Mastodon using a Zapier workflow. That was followed earlier this year by a Bluesky auto-posting setup powered by Linus Rath’s excellent WordPress to Bluesky plugin. I can still recommend the latter; the fo … | Continue reading
Anthony Ha, TechCrunch: Some of those changes [in streaming] would be welcome, but they reinforce the sense that streaming — at least as envisioned by the executives currently running the business — won’t be all that different from the old cable TV ecosystem. Some things will be … | Continue reading
Stephen Rivers, the Autopian: A recent story from Manager Magazine implies that Apple and Porsche are working on a car that’ll end up being a much greater integration than we’ve seen before. It highlights how the two brands have worked closely in the past, how Apple execs love to … | Continue reading
Matthew Connatser, the Register: Authored by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the investigative report [PDF] claimed Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale is “a major cause of injuries for the warehouse workers who make it po … | Continue reading
Sara Fischer, Axios: Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios. […] Most people know Taboola as the company responsible for placing chumbox ads at th … | Continue reading
Miles Klee, Rolling Stone: Whether the stigma attached to MAGA culture is truly softening in deep-blue California, it’s clear that players large and small in its business culture feel emboldened and energized by the attempt on Trump’s life. Musk and his far-right Twitter friends … | Continue reading
Kim Zetter, Wired: US telecom giant AT&T, which disclosed Friday that hackers had stolen the call records for tens of millions of its customers, paid a member of the hacking team more than $300,000 to delete the data and provide a video demonstrating proof of deletion. […] The ha … | Continue reading
The AltStore (italicized note mine): After 3 months in review — including 30+ days for appeal — UTM SE was approved for PAL 🎉 [The E.U.-only Apple-blessed version of AltStore.] Apple also called us to say they decided to allow it in the App Store too, what a coincidence! … | Continue reading
A GLAAD report published in March paints a bleak picture of the moderation of LGBTQ-targeting posts on Meta’s platforms: As this new report documents, nine months later, such extreme anti-trans hate content remains widespread across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. All of the po … | Continue reading
Sergiu Gatlan, Bleeping Computer: Apple has removed 25 virtual private network (VPN) apps from the Russian App Store at the request of Roskomnadzor, Russia’s telecommunications watchdog. Roskomnadzor confirmed to Interfax that the order targets multiple apps (including NordVPN, P … | Continue reading
Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch: U.S. phone giant AT&T confirmed Friday it will begin notifying millions of consumers about a fresh data breach that allowed cybercriminals to steal the phone records of “nearly all” of its customers, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. In a stateme … | Continue reading
Speaking of the quality of art, Anthony Fantano published a terrific dissection of Rick Beato’s claim that “music is getting worse”. Beato’s take and others like it are ahistorical, silly, and trite. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Ryan Broderick: You’ve probably seen the phrase AI slop already, the term most people have settled on for the confusing and oftentimes disturbing pictures of Jesus and flight attendants and veterans that are filling up Facebook right now. But the current universe of slop is much … | Continue reading
Chris Riley, of the Data Transfer Initiative: Beginning today, Apple and Google are expanding on their direct data transfer offerings to allow users of Google Photos to transfer their collections directly to iCloud Photos. This complements and completes the existing transfers tha … | Continue reading
Ivan Penn and Eli Tan, New York Times: Amazon announced on Wednesday that effectively all of the electricity its operations used last year came from sources that did not produce greenhouse gas emissions. But some experts have criticized the method the company uses to make that de … | Continue reading