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
Mike Rogoway, Oregon Live: Oregon became the fourth state to pass a bill giving consumers a legal right to fix their own home electronics Monday with legislation that requires manufacturers provide access to the tools, parts and manuals required to repair their gadgets. […] “We r … | Continue reading
Garry Ing, writing for the third issue of the HTML Review: On my personal websites view source meant being able to adapt and remix ideas. Like drawing a map, elements and pages acted as landmarks in the browser to be navigated between. As a self-initiated learner, being able to v … | Continue reading
Apple has announced WWDC 2024 for June 10, with a rumoured focus on A.I. in operating system updates, including VisionOS. But fear not: 6 (June) + 10 + 2 (A.I.) = iOS 18 confirmed. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch: In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, ac … | Continue reading
Lora Kolodny, CNBC: Judge Charles Breyer in the Northern District of California wrote in his ruling that while X claimed the case was about breach of contract and unlawful data scraping, it was clearly about speech. […] Musk is pursuing similar cases against other groups. In one … | Continue reading
Semafor published in a new format it calls Signals — sponsored by Microsoft, though I am earnestly sure no editorial lines were crossed — aggregated commentary about the U.S. iPhone antitrust case: If the government wins the suit, “the walls of Apple’s walled garden will be parti … | Continue reading
The U.S. antitrust case against Apple was not a closely guarded secret. Stories in the New York Times and Bloomberg spoiled not just the general timing of the case, but its contours as well. That gave Adam Kovacevich, of Chamber of Progress, the confidence to dispute the governme … | Continue reading
In January, Semafor’s Max Tani obtained a memo from Anna Wintour announcing Pitchfork would become part of GQ. Though Wintour emphasized “our coverage of music can continue to thrive within” Condé Nast, it is hard not to see this as the beginning of an ending for the version of P … | Continue reading
Mayank Parmar, Windows Latest: While using Google Chrome, I encountered a Bing pop-up on the right side of the browser. For a moment, I thought Chrome was infected with malware, but it turned out to be a new Microsoft campaign. In a statement to Windows Latest, Microsoft confirme … | Continue reading
John Heilemann, for Wired in November 2000, wrote a sprawling play-by-play of Microsoft’s antitrust trial. There is an awful lot here to digest — close to fifty thousand words — and much of it rhymes with Apple’s situation, as David Piece put it. This, though, is a core issue in … | Continue reading
While the U.S. Department of Justice has not yet issued its press release, its complaint has been filed. Attorneys General from sixteen states have co-signed. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Alfred Ng, Politico: The data-privacy bill passed Wednesday, the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act, H.R. 7520, is highly targeted: It prevents any companies considered data brokers — third-party buyers and sellers of personal information — from selling that … | Continue reading
Adam Engst, TidBits: Longtime Mac users often get caught up in looking at the amount of free space reported by the Finder. We’ll check the storage numbers shown in a Get Info dialog, delete something, and check again. Don’t waste your time! Space management on the Mac is now larg … | Continue reading
Foo Yun Chee, Reuters: Apple on Monday fended off criticism that it has not done enough to open up its closed eco-system as required under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, saying it has complied with the landmark legislation. […] The company told apps developers, busines … | Continue reading
In 2022, the Biden administration was sued by two Attorneys General because it said the government had overstepped in opining on the moderation of social media platforms. A narrowed version of that case — after removing incidents from before the Biden administration existed — mad … | Continue reading
Even for a Mac user who prides themselves on refined taste in typography, one would be excused for missing the rather buried Typography palette in MacOS. It is available in any application that supports the Fonts selector and allows you to enable all manner of features, depending … | Continue reading
Tim Berners-Lee: Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine. There was no roadmap to predict the course of its evolution, it was a captivating odyssey filled with unforeseen opportunities and challenges. Underlying its whole in … | 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
During a White House press briefing on March 12, CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if photos of the president or other members of the White House are ever digitally altered. Jean-Pierre laughed and asked, in response, “why would we digitally alter phot … | Continue reading
Kashmir Hill, New York Times: But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them rem … | Continue reading
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