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
Four years ago this week, social media companies decided they would stop platforming then-outgoing president Donald Trump after he celebrated seditionists who had broken into the U.S. Capitol Building in a failed attempt to invalidate the election and allow Trump to stay in power … | Continue reading
Zoe Kleinman, Liv McMahon, and Natalie Sherman, BBC News: “Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that receiving the summaries is optional. “A software … | Continue reading
Jon Milton, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: He also announced that Parliament — which has been consumed for months in Conservative-led procedural squabbling — would be prorogued until March 24. Prorogation is a type of temporary suspension of parliamentary activities. It … | Continue reading
Tara Deschamps, Canadian Press: The Online News Act aims to level the playing field by extracting compensation from search engine and social media companies with a total annual global revenue of $1 billion or more and 20 million or more Canadian average monthly unique visitors or … | Continue reading
Antonio G. Di Benedetto, the Verge: The tech industry’s relentless march toward labeling everything “plus,” “pro,” and “max” soldiers on, with Dell now taking the naming scheme to baffling new levels of confusion. The PC maker announced at CES 2025 that it’s cutting names like XP … | Continue reading
Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post: When I try to cross my street at a marked crosswalk, the Waymo robotaxis often wouldn’t yield to me. I would step out into the white-striped pavement, look at the Waymo, wait to see whether it’s going to stop — and the car would zip right past … | Continue reading
The ads for Apple Intelligence have mostly been noted for what they show, but there is also something missing: in the fine print and in its operating systems, Apple still calls it a “beta” release, but not in its ads. Given the exuberance with which Apple is marketing these featu … | Continue reading
Jason Snell, in the February 2000 issue of Macworld: Suddenly, the future is now. Shortly after the calendar clicked over to 2000, Apple unveiled Mac OS X’s brand-new interface—named Aqua—giving the world its first glimpse of how we’ll all interact with our Macs for years to come … | Continue reading
Ann Telnaes: I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations — and some differences — about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed becaus … | Continue reading
In the United States, donations to the extravagant presidential inauguration ceremony by U.S. citizens and corporations are unlimited. As a result, it is the perfect vehicle with which to get comfortable with the incoming administration. It is not a bribe, though. Money or goods … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: After the Cybertruck explosion outside of the Trump International Hotel in Vegas on Wednesday, Elon Musk remotely unlocked the Cybertruck for law enforcement and provided video from charging stations that the truck had visited to track the vehicle’s loca … | Continue reading
Samantha Cole, 404 Media: That law, passed as Act 440, was introduced by “sex addiction” counselor and state representative Laurie Schegel and quickly copied across the country. The exact phrasing varies, but in most states, the details of the law are the same: Any “commercial en … | Continue reading
Jonathan Stempel, Reuters: Apple agreed to pay $95 million in cash to settle a proposed class action lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated Siri assistant violated users’ privacy. A preliminary settlement was filed on Tuesday night in the Oakland, California federal court, and … | Continue reading
Cristina Criddle and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times: Meta is betting that characters generated by artificial intelligence will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3bn users. […] “They’ll … | Continue reading
Patrick Beuth et al., in a German-language report in Der Spiegel, as translated by Apple’s built-in translator: Because many of the vehicle data could be linked to the names and contact details of the drivers, owners or fleet managers. Precise location data could be viewed on 460 … | Continue reading
Matthew Green on Bluesky: I love that Apple is trying to do privacy-related services, but this [“Enhanced Visual Search” setting] just appeared at the bottom of my Settings screen over the holiday break when I wasn’t paying attention. It sends data about my private photos to Appl … | Continue reading
A press release from U.K. consumer advocacy group Which?: The consumer champion rated products across four categories and gave them overall privacy scores for factors including consent and what data access they want. Researchers found data collection often went well beyond what w … | Continue reading
Emily Rae Pasiuk, CBC News: Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary says he is planning to bankroll and build what he says will be the world’s largest artificial intelligence data centre. The proposal — named Wonder Valley — is slated to be built in the District of Greenview, near Grand … | Continue reading
Wired has been publishing a series of predictions about the coming state of the world. Unsurprisingly, most concern artificial intelligence — how it might impact health, music, our choices, the climate, and more. It is an issue of the magazine Wired describes as its “annual trend … | Continue reading
Chris Doel in a video on YouTube: The rechargeable cells in disposable vapes are so valuable, why are they thrown away after one use?! In this video I extract 130 disposable vape batteries and convert it into a 1500W ebike battery. There are probably some money-minded people who … | Continue reading
Imogen West-Knights, the Dial: I guess it depends on what you think learning a language means or should mean. When we say that we are “learning a language,” the assumption is that the goal is to reach conversational fluency. To speak to other speakers. When I was doing Duolingo I … | Continue reading
Suzanne Smalley, the Record: The developer of the powerful Pegasus spyware was found liable on Friday for its role in the infection of devices belonging to 1,400 WhatsApp users. The precedent-setting ruling from a Northern California federal judge could lead to massive damages ag … | Continue reading
Liz Pelly, Harpers: According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlis … | Continue reading
Ed Zitron: The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same. While buttons on our cars might have moved around — and I’m not even getting into Tesla’s designs right now — we generally have a brake, an accelerator, a wheel, and a turn signal. … | Continue reading
The end of the year is an exciting time because, try as I might, I cannot possibly listen to all the records released in a year. That means I miss a whole bunch of terrific albums until they are mentioned in some year-end roundup. These are some of my favourites: The main link on … | Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg: Threads strong momentum continues — now 300M+ monthly actives and 100M+ daily actives 💪 It looks like I was right to be skeptical of data from Similarweb which, a few weeks ago, said Threads’ daily user count in the U.K. and U.S. was only one-and-a-half t … | Continue reading
Charles Rollet, TechCrunch: After announcing a crackdown in September, Telegram now says it has removed 15.4 million groups and channels related to harmful content like fraud and terrorism in 2024, noting this effort was “enhanced with cutting-edge AI moderation tools.” This make … | Continue reading