Year: 2017

I didn’t order one of these because it looks massive, but if you don’t like to pack light, and still want to fit it all in a bag. This is probably a good option. Either way, so,e interesting design choices in it.

John Gruber: I feel like it keeps me on my toes to read the comments from people who don’t like Daring Fireball. I used to read every comment someone made in reference to my site, by way of seeing an incoming link in my analytics and heading over to the source. I’d still do that […]

Yair Rosenberg on Twitter shutting down he bot he co-created which pointed out neo-nazis who were impersonating other people: The real threat, apparently, was not these trolls — who today continue to roam the platform unchallenged — but our effort to combat them. Absurd.

MG Siegler talking about his comfort and like of Alexa devices, has this to say about Siri: Yes, I could ask Siri to do this as well. But, well, that’s not the relationship I have with Siri. Our relationship is more about pulling up random facts about a city when we’re out and about, walking […]

John Gruber, in a footnote about the iPhone X gestures and navigation coming to iPads: As for how the iPhone X-style Face ID/no-home-button experience will work on iPad, it’s unclear to me whether Apple has already thought this all the way through. Why, for example, did Apple just this year introduce a new small-swipe-up-from-the-bottom gesture […]

Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier: Facebook has embedded itself in some of the globe’s most controversial political movements while resisting transparency. Since 2011, it has asked the U.S. Federal Election Commission for blanket exemptions from political advertising disclosure rules that could have helped it avoid the current crisis over Russian ad spending ahead of the […]

In yesterday’s link I mentioned a poster I saw, this is the link to the story behind that. Thanks to Tony.

Mike Monteiro: Jack, and to an extent Twitter’s pet porg Biz Stone, have always believed that absolute free speech is the answer. They’re blind to the voices silenced by hate and intimidation. The voices that need to be protected. There’s this photo, in a children’s doctors office I saw once, where it said “equal”. The […]

Rebekka: This has now been fixed, and here’s how we fixed it: We will now try to out-smart the operating system, by doing educated guesses on when, exactly, a user might not want to use Smart Punctuation at all. For example, we now auto-disable Smart Punctuation within code blocks, and we prioritize paragraph tags such […]

While we are on the topic of stupid: Default security settings for S3 buckets usually allow only authorised users to access the contents; however, UpGuard reports the bucket was configured via permission settings to allow any AWS “Authenticated Users” to download its stored data. What’s that mean you ask? Authenticated users are any user that […]

Basically, all kinds of stupid from both sides.

Good news: Drinking three to four cups of coffee a day is associated with health benefits across a range of diseases and conditions.

Anita Ramasastry: Facebook says it will not advertise to children within the app or sell any data it collects to advertisers. There are also, at present, no in-app purchases offered. Note that they don’t say they won’t collect data at all, which would be something that people who wanted to protect kids would do. Just […]

Mike Isaac reporting: Uber is facing at least five separate federal investigations, including at least one over a software tool called “Greyball,” which the company created to evade law enforcement in cities around the world. It is also facing an investigation into whether the company broke the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for bribery overseas, a […]

This is a great post from Bianca Bosker. Some choice quotes: Harris began to see that technology is not, as so many engineers claim, a neutral tool; rather, it’s capable of coaxing us to act in certain ways. And: In the end, he says, companies “stand back watching as a billion people run around like […]