Jason Snell, Macworld: And now we can fully see Apple’s strategy of incremental compliance, brought into action: The company announced the minimum possible and then waited to be told what else it needed to do. Now it will begin modifying those policies, as required, in order to s … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez, in her Small Screens newsletter: What’s worse is that Apple doesn’t seem to think that IAP [in-app purchases] can stand up to the competition: app developers’ websites. In reality, Apple’s IAP is the most natural and easiest way to buy things on the iPhone, whether t … | Continue reading
In November, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a revised version (PDF) of its case against Amazon with some notable redactions removed or adjusted. There is much to learn in this newer version which I have inexplicably ignored for four months. For example, paragraph 39 orig … | Continue reading
Do you want an to try an ad blocker that’s easy to setup, easy to keep up to date and with pro features available when you need them? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you. Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your … | Continue reading
Dan Moren, Six Colors: That’s where optics comes into play. Apple’s not publishing a 1500-word piece about why it disagrees with the EC’s ruling in order to convince the EC to change its mind. Presumably it made all of these arguments in its discussions with the regulator, and if … | Continue reading
You’re still not sure if and how ScreenFloat 2 for Mac powers up your screenshots and recordings? There’s a very easy way to find out: download the no-strings-attached, free, 28-day trial (with a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store after that)! It floats your captures, like Pi … | Continue reading
Kalhan Rosenblatt and Kyle Stewart, NBC News: A bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to divest the popular social media company passed a crucial vote Thursday, as the company sought to rally users to its defense with a call to action that flooded some congressio … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: The New York Times has filed a series of copyright takedown requests against Wordle clones and variations in which it asserts not just ownership over the Wordle name but over the broad concepts and mechanics of the word game, which includes its “5×6 grid … | Continue reading
Big news out of Brussels: The European Commission has fined Apple over €1.8 billion for abusing its dominant position on the market for the distribution of music streaming apps to iPhone and iPad users (‘iOS users’) through its App Store. In particular, the Commission found that … | Continue reading
I only drop into “Decoder” every now and again, but this recent episode is fantastic. It is a reversal of the usual format — instead of Nilay Patel interviewing an executive, guest host Hank Green chats with Patel about the Verge’s business and publishing on the web. It seems a l … | Continue reading
XOXO Festival is coming back in August, “one last time”. I do not know if you like playing with toggles and switches but this website has light mode, dark mode, and — well — see for yourself. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: We have recently been getting bombarded with Instagram Reels of influencers explaining how they make five figures a month by using AI to create tons of viral TikTok pages using stolen celebrity clips juxtaposed next to Minecraft gameplay footage. This st … | Continue reading
Kate Wagner wrote, for Road & Track, a exploration of Formula 1 from the perspective of a cycling journalist who does not have a driving license, and it is wonderful: One thing that strikes me about Formula 1 is its unexpected resemblance to fencing — it is an absolutely poised a … | Continue reading
Power up your screenshots and recordings with ScreenFloat. Here’s how. Capture screenshots, record your screen, or take timed screenshots. Re-capture shots without painstakingly reframing them. Import from your clipboard, other apps, or your iOS devices. Float your captures to ke … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler and Samantha Cole, 404 Media: Almost every platform has some sort of post “firehose,” API, or way of accessing huge amounts of user posts. Famously, Twitter and Reddit used to give these away for free. Now they do not, and charging access for these posts has become … | Continue reading
Two weeks ago, Apple confirmed it would roll back the capabilities of Progressive Web Apps in the E.U. to the days of iPhone home screen bookmarks. It said it would need to do this to comply with the Digital Markets Act, implying it interpreted alternative browser requirements to … | Continue reading
Today’s announcement from the Competition Bureau reveals an expansion in the scope of its investigation into Google’s advertising business, something it has been looking into for over three years. One of the problems faced by regulators like these is the sheer scale of an operati … | Continue reading
Even though it has only been a couple of days since word got out that Apple was cancelling development of its long-rumoured though never confirmed car project, there have been a wave of takes explaining what this means, exactly. The uniqueness of this project was plenty intriguin … | Continue reading
U.S. President Joe Biden today signed an executive order, previously covered, which intends to limit the sale and distribution of Americans’ sensitive data to “countries of concern”: To address this threat and to take further steps with respect to the national emergency declared … | Continue reading
Bryon Tau, in an excerpt from his new book “Means of Control”, as published in Wired with a clarification in brackets by me: Initially, PlanetRisk was sampling data country by country, but it didn’t take long for the team to wonder what it would cost to buy the entire world. The … | Continue reading
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg: Apple Inc. is canceling a decade-long effort to build an electric car, according to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company. 2023 California testing reports, made public earlier this … | Continue reading
What people with Big Business Brains often like to argue about the unethical but wildly successful ad tech industry is that it is not as bad as it looks because your individual data does not have any real use or value. Ad tech vendors would not bother retaining such granular deta … | Continue reading
When I linked to Tim Burke’s indictment yesterday, I compared the ridiculousness of the case to Josh Renaud’s near-indictment for viewing the source of a webpage. I missed an obviously more analogous and equally outrageous case: that of Aaron Swartz. Sarah Jeong, of the Verge, [… … | Continue reading
This story from Troy Hunt is a maddening read, though not because of Hunt. It is a poisonous stew of bad security practices, inconsistent behaviour, and bugs. It is a level of sloppiness that is far too common at businesses large and small. This is everything they should not be d … | 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
Justin Garcia, Dan Sullivan, Jay Cridlin, and Olivia George, Tampa Bay Times: Tampa media consultant Tim Burke was charged Thursday with 14 federal crimes related to alleged computer hacks at Fox News. […] According to the indictment, Burke and an unnamed person used “compromised … | Continue reading
Alexander Saeedy and Alexandra Bruell, Wall Street Journal: Vice Media said it would stop publishing content on its flagship website and plans to cut hundreds of jobs, following a failed effort by owner Fortress Investment Group to sell the embattled digital publisher and its bra … | Continue reading
Apple, in a post credited to Security Engineering and Architecture: Today we are announcing the most significant cryptographic security upgrade in iMessage history with the introduction of PQ3, a groundbreaking post-quantum cryptographic protocol that advances the state of the ar … | Continue reading
When I bought my mid-2017 iMac, I had assumed I would get eight to ten years of updates from it, similar to my mid-2012 MacBook Air. Alas, just four years after it was on my desk, Apple deemed it unworthy of running MacOS Sonoma, which means I have begun looking at desktop replac … | Continue reading
Bryan Carney, the Tyee, March 2019: The RCMP has been quietly running an operation monitoring individuals’ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media activity for at least two years, The Tyee has learned. […] “There is a position taken that this is public information and … | Continue reading
It is that time of year again. A panel of smart people, and also me, have completed Jason Snell’s annual survey of how we think Apple is doing when it comes to products, services, and social obligations. The grades I gave were generally aligned with the rest of the panel — just l … | 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 set up, blocks all ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads. Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high … | Continue reading
James Moore, Open Web Advocacy: We have been alerted that Apple has broken Web App (PWA) support in the EU via iOS 17.4 Beta. Sites installed to the homescreen failed to launch in their own top-level activities, opening in Safari instead. This demotes Web Apps from first-class ci … | Continue reading
OpenAI: We explore large-scale training of generative models on video data. Specifically, we train text-conditional diffusion models jointly on videos and images of variable durations, resolutions and aspect ratios. We leverage a transformer architecture that operates on spacetim … | Continue reading
Oliver Darcy, in CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter, asked Meta what it meant by “political” posts: The Meta spokesperson, instead, offered this vague statement: “Informed by research, our definition of political content is content likely to be about topics related to government o … | Continue reading
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg: Apple Inc., racing to add more artificial intelligence capabilities, is nearing the completion of a critical new software tool for app developers that would step up competition with Microsoft Corp. The company has been working on the tool for the last year … | Continue reading
Paris Marx: After being unable to turn a profit for well over a decade, Uber seems to have finally gotten there. But it didn’t do it by building a sustainable business that benefits all its stakeholders. To get to this point, it fired thousands of workers, hiked the prices for it … | Continue reading
Alfred Ng, Politico: A company allegedly tracked people’s visits to nearly 600 Planned Parenthood locations across 48 states and provided that data for one of the largest anti-abortion ad campaigns in the nation, according to an investigation by Sen. Ron Wyden, a scope that far e … | Continue reading
Dan Hon put together an excellent set of warning “stickers” to discourage certain types of replies. And to think people still occasionally email me to ask why I do not have a comments form. (I do like getting email, however.) ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
The European Commission: Yesterday, the Commission has adopted decisions closing four market investigations that were launched on 5 September 2023 under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), finding that Apple and Microsoft should not be designated as gatekeepers for the following core … | Continue reading
Saul Austerlitz, New York Times (unlocked link if you need it): In recent interviews, several of the people involved in creating the “1984” spot — [Ridley] Scott; John Sculley, then chief executive of Apple; Steve Hayden, a writer of the ad for Chiat/Day; Fred Goldberg, the Apple … | Continue reading
The Government of Canada today announced it would ban the Flipper Zero, a product which allows users to explore wireless signals under 1 GHz, hardware protocols, and infrared. That is the headline story emerging from yesterday’s National Summit on Combatting Auto Theft. But there … | Continue reading
Sara Fischer, Axios: Meta will not “proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow” on Threads, the company said in a statement provided to Axios. […] Users who post political content can check their account status to see whether they’ve posted too much of … | Continue reading
Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc of Microsoft: Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052 to the Canary and Dev Channels. […] Plugging in to use a Windows Mixed Reality headset will not work starting with this build. Windows Mixed Re … | Continue reading
Matthew Gault, Vice: In January of 2022, Harvey Murphy was arrested and thrown in jail while trying to get his driver’s license renewed at a local DMV. According to a $10 million lawsuit Murphy has since filed, a “loss prevention” agent working for a Sunglass Hut retail store use … | Continue reading
iFixit has been tearing down Apple’s Vision Pro, and there is much to look at in this thing. There are jam-packed boards if you are into nitty-gritty details, there are many complicated parts sandwiched together, and there are the “highest-density displays [iFixit has] ever seen” … | Continue reading
Molly White, writing at her Citation Needed newsletter, which is a great name I would steal if I had a time machine: Although there are no footnotes marked in the text, I was briefly pleased to find a section for notes at the end of the book, where Dixon does lightly cite various … | Continue reading
Michael Steeber: Compared to other new platforms, Apple is relatively early to the spatial computing category in a consumer context. In addition, Apple Vision Pro is intensely personal, much more so than even the Apple Watch. Trying your buddy’s Vision Pro is more like trying on … | Continue reading