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
Sherman Smith, Kansas Reflector: Facebook’s unrefined artificial intelligence misclassified a Kansas Reflector article about climate change as a security risk, and in a cascade of failures blocked the domains of news sites that published the article, according to technology exper … | Continue reading
Nicole Lipman, N+1 magazine: But both things can be true. SHEIN might be singled out as the worst fast-fashion retailer because the United States fears and envies China and has a particular interest in denigrating its successes, and it might be singled out because it is, in fact, … | Continue reading
Speaking of repairability, Samuel Gibbs reviewed, for the Guardian, the new Fairphone Fairbuds: The Fairbuds cost £129 (€149) and are designed from the ground up to be as sustainable as possible, combining fair trade and recycled materials with replaceable parts that can be swapp … | Continue reading
Jason Kottke shares some breathtaking shots from the total eclipse that crossed much of North America, including my personal favourite by Notorious RBMK. I missed the entire thing, but I have already put something in my calendar for August 2044. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Apple, in a press release that does not once contain either of the words “[Oregon][or]” or “regulation”: Today Apple announced an upcoming enhancement to existing repair processes that will enable customers and independent repair providers to utilize used Apple parts in repairs. … | Continue reading
Supantha Mukherjee and Foo Yun Chee, Reuters: Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data … | Continue reading
Over the past several years, consequences have been slowly dripping out regarding Apple’s decision to silently curb iPhone performance in cases of poor battery capacity. First, the French competition authorities fined the company, then Apple settled a U.S. class action. In March, … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: WordPress.com owner Automattic is acquiring Beeper, the company behind the iMessage-on-Android solution that was referenced by the Department of Justice in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The deal, which was for $125 million according to sources clos … | Continue reading
Louise Matsakis, Wired: [Zen] Goziker worked at TikTok for only six months. He didn’t hold a senior position inside the company. His lawsuit, and a second one he filed in March against several US government agencies, makes a number of improbable claims. He asserts that he was put … | Continue reading
Zuha Siddiqui, Samriddhi Sakunia, and Faisal Mahmud, Rest of World: To better understand air quality exposure among gig workers in South Asia, Rest of World gave three gig workers — one each in Lahore, New Delhi, and Dhaka — air quality monitors to wear throughout a regular shift … | Continue reading
Louie Mantia: I used to instantly delete emails about a company’s policy changes, but now I’m taking a different approach. Before I delete the email, I delete the account. […] But why am I the one who has to delete the account? Companies are too comfortable modifying their polici … | Continue reading
The Calgary Cassette Preservation Society: Documenting Calgary’s music scene since 2007, this is the new home of the CCPS. We’re bringing over content from our old site and will be adding more stuff (including a long-dreamed of gig poster archive) in the coming months. Via Boshik … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, Dave Kendall of documentary production company Prairie Hollow and formerly of a Topeka, Kansas PBS station, wrote in the Kansas Reflector an article criticizing Meta. Kendall says he tried to promote posts on Facebook for a screening of “Hot Times in the Heartl … | 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. It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and blocks all YouTube ads. Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance … | Continue reading
Gaby Del Valle, the Verge: The complaint emphasizes that, unlike iMessages, iPhone users’ SMS communications with Android users — i.e., green bubble texts — lack encryption. “Apple forces other platforms to use SMS messaging. It doesn’t allow them to integrate with iMessage or an … | Continue reading
Maxwell Zeff, Gizmodo: Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,00 … | Continue reading
In March, a massive amount of AT&T customer data was leaked on a well-known marketplace. The data included extremely sensitive subscriber information, including Social Security Numbers that were apparently decrypted from how they were stored. AT&T initially denied its own systems … | Continue reading
While Threads in North America feels like everyone is experiencing a gas leak, that is apparently not the case elsewhere — especially Taiwan. Zeyi Yang wrote, for MIT Technology Review, an excellent explanation of Threads’ popularity, and I think the bloggier summary is a particu … | Continue reading
Predrag Gruevski: My dad is an engineer who had already been tinkering with networking gear longer than I’d been alive. Through the company he started, he had designed and deployed all sorts of complex network systems at institutions across the country — everything from gigabit E … | Continue reading
Max Read: Some friends and I have taken to calling Threads “the gas-leak social network” because that is the basic experience of using it: Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering some kind of minor brain damage. […] I hate to keep slagging off Threads on my … | 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
Candice L. Odgers, who is a “developmental psychologist with expertise in adolescent mental health”, reviewed Jonathan Haidt’s new book for Nature: Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan … | Continue reading
Pranav Dixit, Engadget: “WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through Whats … | Continue reading
What follows is a short complaint about a couple of things I have written about occasionally over the past couple of years: proprietary chargers and Amazon’s rapid decline in trustworthiness. I am prefacing it with this disclaimer because perhaps you do not want to read a complai … | Continue reading
Supriya Dwivedi, a “senior advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau”, in the Toronto Star: Critics are once again engaging in bad faith tactics and are trying to frame the issue of online harms as a false dichotomy between freedom of expression and clamping down on online harms, … | Continue reading
Jim Dalrymple: Siri has done what no person could for 30 years: Make me stop using an Apple product. I am giving up on my 8 HomePods/minis out of the sheer frustration of trying to use Siri. I’ve been in tech for 30 years and this is one of the worst technologies ever and only [… … | Continue reading
Marco Arment: If I ran a website that supported Google-account login, I’d be pretty pissed at how they’re suddenly putting up an obnoxious overlay over my site’s layout. Why is this not bothering more people? Does anyone give a shit about their websites anymore? This aggressive d … | Continue reading