Jeff Johnson: The Safari web browser has a longstanding annoying misfeature: it announces “Reader Available” and “Translation Available” in the address bar, whether you like it or not, with no way I know of to stop that madness. This behavior is bad on Mac, worse on iPhone. Below is a screen recording of Safari on […]⌥ Permalink

Jason Snell, Six Colors: Every five years when we hit an anniversary, I struggle to recontextualize the iPod. But this year, for the 25th anniversary, I’ve been thinking about Apple’s little music player a lot more. Stephen Hackett: This link — which you gotta manually open in your browser — is the best thing I’ve […]⌥ Permalink

Jason Koebler, 404 Media: To give you a sense of what I’m seeing, Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins professor and one of the most respected cryptographers in the world, posted “we’re in the part of the movie where you need to throw whatever you can in the path of the zombies and hope it slows […]⌥ Permalink

Tom Williams, Information Age: Apple has been ordered to open its “walled garden” to allow third-party app stores and alternative in-app payment systems in Australia, in a landmark court decision which the technology giant says it will appeal. Apple has until at least March 2027 to allow Australian users to download apps through alternative app […]⌥ Permalink

Lawrence Abrams, Bleeping Computer: In an advisory published Tuesday, the PHP development team announced that it plans to release security updates on Wednesday, October 21, at 14:00 UTC (10:00 AM Eastern), to address two vulnerabilities, each rated 9.2 under CVSS v4.0. The PHP security team also sent a notice to its ANNOUNCE mailing list, urging […]⌥ Permalink

A feature I sometimes forget is present in NetNewsWire is that you can change its theme. That is mostly because I set it years ago and forgot all about it. Dave Marquard recently created a theme repository. I quite like Ember, which looks very nice on my Mac and iPhone alike — aside from the […]⌥ Permalink

Brent Simmons: We’ve released NetNewsWire 7.2 for Mac with a new column view layout: choose View > Use Column Layout to switch. (Choose it again to switch back.) This is a new feature in the sense that the previous version of the app didn’t have it — but NetNewsWire of Yore, before the 2018 reboot, […]⌥ Permalink

Geoff Mann, London Review of Books: The dubious achievement of prediction markets is to have found a new way to exacerbate and exploit the simultaneously frantic and passive experience of the world that is a defining aspect of our age. Like any kind of gambling, they are enervating. We put our money down and then […]⌥ Permalink

Jarrett Fuller [sic]: It’s 2026 and when I click the button on my glass phone, it makes a shutter sound! There are still skeuomorphs in iOS after all! The skeuomorphic designs of the early camera simulated a shutter closing and opening when you a took a photo but that’s long been replaced with just a […]⌥ Permalink

Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez, Nieman Lab: In its revision, published Friday afternoon, Meta removed the word “train” from a list of allowed use cases and limited those uses to “advertising and business products,” rather than all Meta products. But the revised terms will still allow for broad scraping of websites, potentially superseding robots.txt files, […]⌥ Permalink

Sun-ha Hong, Tech Policy Press: Sometimes, failures do lead to wider stigma and skepticism around the technology in question. But this does not happen anywhere near as often as the massive levels of investment and inflated promises might warrant. The distinct characteristic of tech hype of the 21st century is the overwhelming centralization of wealth, […]⌥ Permalink

Bill Marczak, et al., of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab: This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. We call the technique AdFection, and show how it was used to infect devices at Al Jazeera with Candiru’s spyware. We also uncover Discover-Tech, and show how the company helps […]⌥ Permalink

Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez, Nieman Lab: Meta can use web scrapers to crawl and collect content from websites “associated with” business accounts on its platforms, according to its new commercial terms of use. […] The new terms broadly cover business accounts that manage pages and groups, run advertisements, push marketing messages, and use the […]⌥ Permalink

Renée DiResta, writing for Lawfare: There is a real event underpinning the story, and an authentic chart showing a dramatic decline in automated internet traffic. But the leap from a viral chart to the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots is a large one. Much of the apparent corroboration comes from anecdotes about how social media […]⌥ Permalink

Time announced its roundup of what it thinks are the best inventions of 2026. Among them are John Ternus — or so it would seem — and the iPhone Duo. Andrew R. Chow profiled Apple’s new CEO, and this excerpt has caught some eyes: But Ternus and other Apple executives say they aren’t concerned. In […]⌥ Permalink

Elena Rossini: W Social is a European social media company that launched in Davos earlier this year, during the World Economic Forum. I have written a series of articles about them; […] […] I wonder: are W Social verified users aware that their personal details (first name, last name, nationality and approx. birthday) are being […]⌥ Permalink

The Pet Shop Boys have a new album out: Created in collaboration with Alan Turing biographer, Andrew Hodges, and performed by Pet Shop Boys and the Manchester Camerata Octet with narration by Juliet Stevenson, string arrangements by Sven Helbig and additional production, programming and synthesisers by Maarten Vos, the work explores eight significant chapters in […]⌥ Permalink

Not too long ago, Apple accessory company Elevation Lab released a product designed to silence the noises made by AirTags when they are out of range. That is a reasonable idea for an AirTag installed in something someone might steal. It is also a dangerous product in the hands of someone who might want to […]⌥ Permalink

Ethan Marcotte is tired of all the recommendations and suggestions in internet services. For the most part, I am, too. At the very least, I dislike how much they feel imposed or as a default, as though my use of most services should flow through the suggestions they provide. Even calling them “suggestions” or “recommendations” […]⌥ Permalink

After Ukrainian forces struck several data centres belonging to Russian internet services giant Yandex, a couple of charts began circulating social media purportedly showing a decline in traffic from Russian bots. The narrative suggested — by people like political scientist Ian Bremmer, journalist Jamie Dupree, TPM’s Josh Marshall, and historian Timothy Snyder — is that […]⌥ Permalink

Greg Iacurci, CNBC Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella on Saturday called for advanced artificial intelligence systems to be built with containment, independent controls and an “emergency brake” that lets authorized people pause or shut a model down mid-task. “We need to surround non-deterministic models with strong, deterministic system design, human controls, and reliable operating […]⌥ Permalink

Sheets.works put together an excellent but — perhaps ironically — unbylined visualization with this simple premise: Billions of phones run on code looked after by a handful of people. We counted them from the code itself. I had no idea SQLite or sudo were maintained by such a small number of individuals and — like […]⌥ Permalink

Aparna Pappu of YouTube: This builds on the incredible success we’ve seen with other Studio tools like A/B testing, where creators have run more than 40 million experiments to find the perfect titles and thumbnails for their videos since the feature officially launched in 2024. Coming soon, you’ll also be able to test up to […]⌥ Permalink

Meta: Drive people directly to your website, shop or latest offer by adding a clickable link to your Instagram posts and reels. People can visit the website from your post or reel. If you subscribe to a Meta One plan, you can add links to a set number of posts and reels each month based […]⌥ Permalink

Josh Dzieza, in a Verge feature about Kevin O’Leary’s data centre in Utah and the citizens protesting its development, has a small update on how things are going for O’Leary’s proposal in Alberta: For developers, this presents what [Paul] Palandjian, the CEO of O’Leary Digital, calls a “chicken-and-egg problem.” In order to finance construction of […]⌥ Permalink

Kate Knibbs, Wired: Verifact Markets, a new startup that bills itself as a “prediction market for disputed facts,” is betting that people will be eager to weigh in on questions like these. The company’s premise is so quirky it sounds like something a couple of philosophy and economics majors dreamed after too many bong rips […]⌥ Permalink

Apple, in a Developer News post I am reproducing in its entirety, segment-by-segment: We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function […]

The White House issued an executive order last week: The terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people. Accordingly, the term “Super Intelligence” more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies. It is therefore […]⌥ Permalink

Semafor published a graph earlier this week purportedly showing a staggering decline in tourism to the United States from five countries. Among them, it appeared to illustrate a decline from over twenty million Canadian visitors a few years ago to under eight million this year. That felt fishy to me as I had also recently […]⌥ Permalink

Glenn Fleishman, writing at Six Colors: ElevationLab has released an AirTag product I find appalling, and I strongly urge they immediately withdraw it from sale and recall all inventory. The AirTag Silencer is a simple device: remove the back panel and battery from an AirTag, position the Silencer’s highly engineered pin over the speaker, tap […]⌥ Permalink