Daring Fireball: Apple Terminated Epic’s E.U. Developer Account: I guess Epic is implying that the EU government, not Apple, should have that discretion? They don’t say so, but who else but Apple could have that discretion? But the European Commission isn’t set up for that sort o … | Continue reading

Craig Grannell on Apple’s u-turn on web apps: Apple has performed a screeching U-turn on killing web apps, perhaps because the European Commission publicly stated there was no need for Apple to scrap them in the first place. Oh dear. I look forward to certain (mostly US) commenta … | Continue reading

9to5Mac: Apple has also confirmed that it will charge a commission on purchases made through alternative payment platforms. This commission will be 12% for developers who are a member of the App Store Small Business Program and 27% for other apps. The commission will apply to “p … | Continue reading

Finally, A Grocery Cart That Can Save Me From The Horror Of An Ad-Free Moment Of Existence | Defector: This is one of those new technologies that’s useful primarily as a viewfinder on a dismal present and a future determined to be even more miserable. Nobody anywhere will like th … | Continue reading

Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (08 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow: In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NE … | Continue reading

The MacBook Pro 16in which was effectively replaced by my MacBook Air M2 has been sitting in a corner for a while. I had wiped it completely – something that’s a bit of a saga in its own right – and intended to sell it. The buyer I had in mind wasn’t able to take it as unfortunat … | Continue reading

Open extensions on Firefox for Android debut December 14 (but you can get a sneak peek today): Starting December 14, 2023, extensions marked as Android compatible on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) will be openly available to Firefox for Android users. But not of course for iOS, because … | Continue reading

Daring Fireball: Monica Chin on the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3: ‘Why Does This Exist?’: A $999 laptop that maxes out at 256 GB of storage and has a 1536 × 1024 display — yeah, I’m wondering why this exists in 2023, too. And I’m no longer wondering why Panos Panay left Microsof … | Continue reading

Regulating AI by Executive Order is the Real AI Risk: The President’s Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence is a premature and pessimistic political solution to unknown technical problems and a clear case of regulatory capture at a time when the world would be best served by … | Continue reading

Obsidian’s Importer Plugin Lets You Move Your Apple Notes to Any Note-Taking App That Supports Markdown - MacStories: Apple Notes doesn’t have an export option. Instead, as Obsidian’s blog post on the Importer plugin update explains, it stores your notes in a local SQLite databas … | Continue reading

Amazon deliberately deleted messages to hide dodgy business practices: The FTC also alleges that Amazon tried to impede its investigation into the company’s business practices. “Amazon executives systematically and intentionally deleted internal communications using the ‘disappea … | Continue reading

DOJ probing Tesla’s EV range after reports of exaggerated numbers - The Verge: The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating the range of Tesla’s electric vehicles after reports surfaced that the company was relying on exaggerated numbers. In documents filed with the Secur … | Continue reading

China launches investigation into iPhone maker Foxconn, says state media: China has launched an investigation into Apple iPhone maker Foxconn over tax and land use, Chinese state media reported on Sunday. The Global Times, citing anonymous sources, said tax authorities inspected … | Continue reading

Apple has released a new Pencil for iPad and it’s weird. It looks like the Second Generation Pencil (the one which charges by sticking to the side of the iPad Pro or current Air). And it will attach there. But it won’t charge if you do – it charges through a hidden USB-C port via … | Continue reading

It would take a far, far longer post than I’m prepared to spend my time writing to go through Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” paragraph by awful paragraph, but a few points probably won’t go amiss. If you’re going to approvingly paraphrase “a manifesto of a differen … | Continue reading

Google-Extended does not stop Google Search Generative Experience from using your site’s content (searchengineland.com) Google explained that SGE is part of the Google Search experience; it is a search feature and thus it should work as how normal search directives work. “The con … | Continue reading

Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits - WSJ: Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users we … | Continue reading

I’m not a huge fan of using ChatGPT for writing, because even leaving aside issues of accuracy, its style is stilted and just the wrong side of formulaic. But there’s one area where it really works as a writing assistant: giving you an outline on a topic as a starting point. Tell … | Continue reading

In this week’s Weeknote, I’m doing some writing, walking around Sheppey, and being angry about repairability. ianbetteridge.com/2023/09/2… | Continue reading

One of these days I am going to write something about the prophetic nature of Cronenberg’s “Videodrom” and “eXistenz”. | Continue reading

Many places reported that the British government had seen sense and backed down from its plans to require companies like Apple, Meta and Signal to give them back door access to end to end encrypted messages. Unfortunately, these reports were completely wrong. All that the governm … | Continue reading

New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire's Ukraine dilemma | CNN Politics: Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the … | Continue reading

Tom Warren, for The Verge: Microsoft will finally stop forcing Windows 11 users in Europe into Edge if they click a link from the Windows Widgets panel or from search results. The software giant has started testing the changes to Windows 11 in recent test builds of the operating … | Continue reading

Finished reading: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion by TANSY E. HOSKINS I’m not exactly someone that knows a lot about fashion, but this is great book about its relationship with capitalism and how the clothes on your back (literally) cost lives and the earth. | Continue reading

Finished reading: Do Interesting by Russell Davies I absolutely breezed through this, and enjoyed it greatly. | Continue reading

Mashable: Over the past 24 hours, the hashtag “BanTheADL” has been trending on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The trending hashtag refers to the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish anti-extremism civil rights organization. Even more concerning is that X owner Elon Mus … | Continue reading

Keanu just can’t be human. No human being can be this nice. twitter.com/LAPublicL… | Continue reading

Goddamit I’m listening to The Kitchen Cabinet and they are talking about cheese and now all I want is cheese. | Continue reading

Om Malik on how the experience in Pocket has declined and his thoughts on Readwise Reader: To me, Pocket has always been a repository where I save, store, and archive articles I want to read or use for my ongoing research. That’s its value for me. I don’t care much for their “Hom … | Continue reading

Apple explains why it abandoned iPhone CSAM detection: “Scanning every user’s privately stored iCloud data would create new threat vectors for data thieves to find and exploit,” Neuenschwander continued. “It would also inject the potential for a slippery slope of unintended conse … | Continue reading

X, Formerly Twitter, Plans to Collect User Biometric Data, Job, Education - Bloomberg: “Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the company said in its new policy. X doesn’t define what it consid … | Continue reading

The Real Story of Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover - WSJ: The way that Musk blustered into buying Twitter and renaming it X was a harbinger of the way he now runs it: impulsively and irreverently. It is an addictive playground for him. It has many of the attributes of a school yard, … | Continue reading

Microsoft seems really determined to give more people more reasons to avoid Windows like the plague. www.theverge.com/2023/8/30… | Continue reading

BTW, if you notice that I’m posting a bunch of little links, it’s because I’m going through the backlog of stuff I’ve saved into Raindrop.io which I TOTALLY recommend over Pinboard. | Continue reading

A rare Betteridge’s Law-breaking headline. Yes. Yes he was. (Because of the nature of the content, Snopes has a pass) www.snopes.com/fact-chec… | Continue reading

This is great: a bunch of primary sources about the early Macintosh. Much reading! web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/… | Continue reading

I see Captain Dickhead is at it again www.cnbc.com/2023/08/3… | Continue reading