Stu Maschwitz: After Apple released a behind-the-scenes video about the production of “Scary Fast,” the Internet did its internet thing and questioned the “Shot on iPhone” claim, as if “Shot on iPhone” inherently means “shot with zero other gear besides an iPhone.” These takes we … | Continue reading
“Gabe” on Twitter [sic]: it’s cool how every google search now starts with a wall of LLM slop that is completely useless and takes up half the screen Via Simon Willison: Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generate … | Continue reading
David Bushell: I loathe what WordPress development has become. If you haven’t kept up with Gutenberg and full-site editing (FSE) you may be surprised at how radically different modern WordPress themes are — and not in a good way. Modern WordPress theme development is a series of … | Continue reading
What a loss, and what a life. A trip through Steve Albini’s catalogue as a recording engineer — never “producer” — is a varied and lengthy excursion. Yes, he recorded Nirvana’s “In Utero” and it is very good, and he also worked with Cloud Nothings, and Sunn O))), and Low, and bla … | Continue reading
Rebecca Kern, Politico: TikTok and its parent company ByteDance sued Tuesday to challenge a law President Joe Biden signed to force the sale or ban of the video sharing app. The petition filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit claims the law viol … | Continue reading
Kudos to Mark Gurman — Apple really did introduce the M4 SoC in the new iPad Pro models. The M4 comes just six months after Apple launched the M3, which is currently used in half the Mac lineup. The other half — the Mac Mini, the Mac Studio, and the Mac Pro — all use […]⌥ Permali … | Continue reading
Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica: Near the end of the second day of closing arguments in the Google monopoly trial, US district judge Amit Mehta weighed whether sanctions were warranted over what the US Department of Justice described as Google’s “routine, regular, and normal destru … | Continue reading
Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li, Nikkei: Apple is deepening its ties with China even as it further expands production in Southeast Asia and India, highlighting the balancing act the iPhone maker is striking between politics and business. Apple increased its China-headquartered suppl … | Continue reading
Experience your favourite articles as podcasts. Simply email Listen Later a link, a PDF, or a newsletter, and our A.I. — featuring remarkably human-like narration — will transform it into a podcast episode. Delivered straight to your preferred podcast app. Start listening for fre … | Continue reading
Satya Nadella, in a memo to Microsoft employees since posted on the company’s blog: Today, I want to talk about something critical to our company’s future: prioritizing security above all else. Microsoft runs on trust, and our success depends on earning and maintaining it. We hav … | Continue reading
Thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring this week’s posts at Pixel Envy. Some sponsors provide their own Friday posts, but I was asked to write a little something of my own for Listen Later and I am happy to do so. I only accept sponsorships for products I actually like and would u … | Continue reading
Raghav Mendiratta, of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, in March 2021: Under Rule 4(2), it is mandatory for a significant social media intermediary providing messaging services to identify the first originator of a message if a competent court or executive au … | Continue reading
Apple: […] Today, we’re introducing two additional conditions in which the CTF is not required: First, no CTF is required if a developer has no revenue whatsoever. […] Second, small developers (less than €10 million in global annual business revenue*) that adopt the alternative b … | Continue reading
Zach Ocean: Encountered AI music in the wild today Motown-style tracks straight from Suno/Udio with … interesting … titles and lyrics Recommended by Spotify via Discover Weekly These “interesting” songs include instant classics like “My Arms Are Just Fuckin’ Stuck Like This” and … | Continue reading
Joseph Cox has a new book called “Dark Wire” coming out in June about Anom, a company that purportedly distributed highly secured phones but was actually an FBI operation. Cox published a short teaser on Mastodon and was interviewed briefly by Ben Smith of Semafor. I am looking f … | Continue reading
Timothy B. Lee, writing in Asterisk: Over the last decade, Silicon Valley elites have grown increasingly frustrated with media coverage of their industry. And they aren’t wrong that coverage has grown increasingly negative. But I think they’re wrong to assume this reflects a host … | Continue reading
Apple: Starting May 1, 2024, new or updated apps that have a newly added third-party SDK that‘s on the list of commonly used third-party SDKs will need all of the following to be submitted in App Store Connect: Required reasons for each listed API Privacy manifests Valid signatur … | Continue reading
Robert Simmon, Nightingale: The launch of Ikonos was one of a handful of developments that allowed newsrooms to expand from reporting on rocket launches and satellite hardware, to using remote sensing data as an essential tool to help tell stories. A wide variety of satellite dat … | Continue reading
Welcome to a world where your reading list becomes your listening playlist. We are thrilled to introduce you to ListenLater.net — an innovative service that turns articles into podcasts, making your favourite reads accessible in your favourite podcast app. Have you ever stumbled … | Continue reading
Rarely do I link to something just because I want you to go read it, but this piece by Alex Ross in the New Yorker is just such an occasion. It is a wonderful piece about how we sometimes embrace noise and sometimes reject it, and what “noise” even means. (Via Matt.) ⌥ Permalink⌥ … | Continue reading
Tom Wheeler, former FCC chairman, writing for the Brookings Institution in October, following a vote to begin the process of reclassifying broadband as a “Title II” telecommunications service, regarding efforts to paint net neutrality regulations as no big deal: It is the conduct … | Continue reading
Michael Tsai: I had another instance of my Apple ID mysteriously being locked. First, my iPhone wanted me to enter the password again, which I thought was the “normal” thing it has done every few months, almost since I got it. But after doing so it said that my account was locked … | Continue reading
Waldo Jaquith: I made a new Mastodon bot, called “I Hope This Email Finds You.” Twice a day it proposes a novel way to conclude that sentence that opens so many emails. (It uses phrases from Google Books that include the phrase “finds you.”) I’ve been having fun reading these, so … | Continue reading
Malcolm Coles: 10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence. Now a decade has passed, let’s see who’ … | 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
Mark Stenberg, reporting for Adweek in January: Digital media company G/O Media is shopping around its portfolio of editorial assets in hopes of securing buyers for individual titles, part of a broader effort to divest the properties ahead of another challenging year for the medi … | Continue reading
Mary Jo Foley: In a perfect world, Microsoft would take security seriously again. It would be transparent about breaches. Its execs would stop gloating about increasing security service revenue at a time when Microsoft can’t secure its own employees, let alone customers, against … | Continue reading
Hardika Singh, Wall Street Journal: Bartash isn’t alone. Scores of individual investors have piled into Tesla shares in recent years, lured by the company’s technology, visionary chief executive and mammoth stock market gains. Through the end of last year, the stock was one of th … | Continue reading
Ed Zitron read a bunch of the emails released in United States v. Google and believes the quality of Google’s search engine has been in decline since early 2019 thanks to new leadership: These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates … | Continue reading
Adam Demasi: In iOS 17.4, Apple introduced a new system called eligibilityd. This works with countryd (which you might have heard about when it first appeared in iOS 16.2) and the Apple ID system to decide where you physically are. The idea is that multiple sources need to agree … | Continue reading
Following the passage of the Online News Act, the Media Ecosystem Observatory studied the behaviour of Canadian Facebook and Instagram users. The resulting report (PDF) is a brief but useful read. Sara Parker, et al. summarizing two of its findings: The Facebook Pages of national … | Continue reading
Dr. Drang: I have a feeling many longtime Mac users are like me: some special characters are typed directly, some are done through expansion, and the rest — never used before and never expected to be used again — come through the Character Viewer. When the Mac turned forty earlie … | 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. It’s easy to setup, blocks all ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads. Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high … | Continue reading
Aaron Tilley, Liza Lin, and Jeff Horwitz, Wall Street Journal: Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads as well as messaging platforms Signal and Telegram were taken off the Chinese App Store Friday. Apple said it was told to remove certain apps because of national security concerns, … | Continue reading
Frank Thorp V, Sahil Kapur and Ryan Nobles, NBC News: The Senate voted to reauthorize a powerful surveillance tool the U.S. government describes as critical to combating terrorism, after defeating efforts by civil liberties advocates on the left and right to rein it in. The vote … | Continue reading
John Gruber, in 2020: Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to e … | Continue reading
Victoria Song, the Verge: I became the family Chewbacca. Family would speak to me in Korean, I’d reply back in English — and vice versa. Later, I started learning Japanese because that’s what public school offered and my grandparents were fluent. Eventually, my family became adep … | Continue reading
After I linked to Josh Dzieza’s long report about subsea cable repair, I got an email from Joshua Ochs who pointed me to Neal Stephenson’s 1996 essay, published in Wired, about the laying of the FLAG cable. There is some poetry here. The only way I read that original article, pub … | Continue reading
Mediana, Benediktus Krisna Yogatama, Mawar Kusuma Wulan, Kompas (as translated by Safari): Indonesia is a destination country visited by the boss of the technology giant company Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. The second visit has been announced by th … | Continue reading
The new A.I. Pin from Humane is, according to those who have used one, bad. Even if you accept the premise of wearing a smart speaker and use it to do a bunch of the stuff for which you used to rely on your phone, it is not good at those things — again, according […] | Continue reading
Katie Notopoulos, Business Insider: But then there’s the other, more existential argument against phones: We are spending all our free moments with a screen shoved in our faces, mindlessly scrolling for dopamine and ignoring the world around us. Time spent on your phone is bad; t … | Continue reading
Omer Benjakob and Eliza Triantafillou, Haaretz: According to the documents, in 2022 Intellexa presented a proof of concept for a system called Aladdin that enables the remote infection of a specific mobile telephone device through online advertisements. This is the first time it … | Continue reading
Josh Dzieza, the Verge: […] It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thin … | Continue reading
Eric Geller, Wired: Microsoft’s almost untouchable position is the result of several intermingling factors. It is by far the US government’s most important technology supplier, powering computers, document drafting, and email conversations everywhere from the Pentagon to the Stat … | Continue reading
Daniel Parris: Reading these studies proved an existential body blow because I am 31, apparently on the precipice of becoming a musical dinosaur. I like to think I’m special—that my high-minded dedication to culture makes me an exceptionally unique snowflake — but apparently I’m … | Continue reading
In the 1970s and 1980s, in-house researchers at Exxon began to understand how crude oil and its derivatives were leading to environmental devestation. They were among the first to comprehensively connect the use of their company’s core products to the warming of the Earth, and th … | Continue reading
The thing about talks from Cabel Sasser is that he has mentioned on more than one occasion that he dislikes giving them, yet he is extremely good at storytelling and public speaking. This one is no exception. He spoke at GDC this year about the development of the Playdate console … | Continue reading
I was perhaps a little optimistic about Humane’s A.I. Pin. It seems like an interesting attempt at doing something a little different and outside the mainstream device space. But the early reviews have dampened any of intrigue I may have had. In its current guise, it is a solutio … | Continue reading