Jeff Horwitz, Reuters: Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show. I am not sure what the right and realistic amount of scam-based revenue is — a real mouse […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
All of the following quotes and links mention suicide, and at least some of them are more detailed than I would expect given guidance about reporting on this topic. Take care of yourself when reading these stories. I know I struggled to get through some of them. The 988 lifeline is available in Canada and […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Michael Tsai: So what happened here? What was this extra engineering work? Back in September, Apple said: For example, we designed Live Translation so that our users’ conversations stay private — they’re processed on device and are never accessible to Apple — and our teams are doing additional engineering work to make sure they won’t […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: The FBI is attempting to unmask the owner behind archive.today, a popular archiving site that is also regularly used to bypass paywalls on the internet and to avoid sending traffic to the original publishers of web content, according to a subpoena posted by the website. The FBI subpoena says it is […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Stefan Krempl, Heise: The Schleswig-Holstein state administration has taken an important step towards digital sovereignty: After a six-month conversion process, the Ministry of Digital Affairs successfully completed the migration of the state administration’s entire email system from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to the open source solutions Open-Xchange and Thunderbird at the beginning of October. […] […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Thomas Claburn, the Register: Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont. Kevin Beaumont: The Generative AI craze started in 2022. It’s over 3 years in. If you ask any serious cyber incident […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Reece Rogers, Wired: As I browse the web in 2025, I rarely encounter captchas anymore. There’s no slanted text to discern. No image grid of stoplights to identify. And on the rare occasion that I am asked to complete some bot-deterring task, the experience almost always feels surreal. A colleague shared recent tests where they […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Apple: Live Translation on AirPods is available in English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional Mandarin), Japanese, and Korean when using AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Pro 2, or AirPods 4 with ANC paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone running the latest software. Live Translation on AirPods was delayed for users in the EU due […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Alex Reisner, the Atlantic: The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database — large enough to be measured in petabytes — is made freely available for research. In recent […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
John Voorhees, MacStories: Today, Apple launched a web version of the App Store, with a twist. I’ll admit that this wasn’t on my “things Apple will do this fall” bingo card. I’ve wondered since the earliest days of the App Store why there wasn’t a web version and concluded long ago that it just wasn’t […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Jennifer Elias, CNBC: Palantir’s head of global communications said Wednesday that the company’s political shift toward the Trump administration is “concerning.” “I think it’s going to be challenging, as a lot of the company is moving pro-Trum-, you know, is moving in a certain direction,” communications chief Lisa Gordon said in an interview at The […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Corporate Europe Observatory: Over the past year, tech industry lobby groups have used their lavish budgets to aggressively push for the deregulation of the EU’s digital rulebook. The intensity of this policy battle is also reflected in the fact that Big Tech companies have on average more than one lobby meeting per day with EU […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Maximilian Henning, Euractiv: The International Criminal Court (ICC) will switch its internal work environment away from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative, the institution confirmed to Euractiv. Good. I hope to see more of this — not from a place of anti-Americanism, but as a recognition of the world’s dependence on […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
There was a time, not too long ago, when the lifespan of a computer seemed predictable and pretty short. This was partly due to performance gains year-over-year. Checking the minimum system requirements was standard routine for new software, and you could safely assume meeting those requirements would barely guarantee an acceptable experience. But computers would […]| Pixel Envy
Cabel Sasser: let me explain. the apple intelligence rainbow ring was their first (?) use of HDR UI; it drew brighter than your screen, and the vibrance was beautiful and subtle. but… …in iOS 26 they seem to have applied HDR blasts to button taps, text field selects. etc. what was a specific treat is […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
This short video demonstrating what appears to be a buggy iOS keyboard has been getting passed around a lot, but I am not sure what to make of it. The video creator is clearly typing certain characters — “u” and “m” — but iOS is inserting adjacent characters like “j” and “n”, in a context […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
I am not sure it is worth writing at length about Grokipedia, the Elon Musk-funded effort to quite literally rewrite history from the perspective of a robot taught to avoid facts upsetting to the U.S. far right. Perhaps it will be an unfortunate success — the Fox News of encyclopedias, giving ideologues comfortable information as […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Marc Hogan, New York Times (gift link): Enter Setlist.fm. The wikilike site, where users document what songs artists play each night on tour, has grown into a vast archive, updated in real time but also reaching back into the historical annals. From the era of Mozart (seriously!) to last night’s Chappell Roan show, Setlist.fm offers […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: Zoom CEO Eric Yuan says AI will shorten our workweek […] “Today, I need to manually focus on all those products to get work done. Eventually, AI will help,” Yuan said. “By doing that, we do not need to work five days a week anymore, right? … Five years out, three days or […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Andrew Kenney, Denverite: It was Sgt. Jamie Milliman [at the door], a police officer with the Columbine Valley Police Department who covers the town of Bow Mar, which begins just south of [Chrisanna] Elser’s home. […] “You know we have cameras in that jurisdiction and you can’t get a breath of fresh air, in or […]| pxlnv.com
Emmanuel Maiberg, 404 Media: Democratic U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren sent letters to the Department of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson, raising concerns about the $55 billion acquisition of the giant American video game company in part by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). Specifically, the Senators worry […]| pxlnv.com
Are you outraged? Have you not heard? Apple updated its entry-level MacBook Pro with a new M5 chip, and across Europe, it does not ship with an A.C. adapter in the box as standard any more. It still comes with a USB-C to MagSafe cable, and you can add an adapter at checkout, but those […]| pxlnv.com
If you were listening out of context to something Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel, you might think he is deeply concerned about meaningful personal friendships: There’s this stat that I always think is crazy: the average American, I think, has I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people that […]| pxlnv.com
More on Liquid Glass| pxlnv.com
The technical accomplishments of Sora 2 are laudable and, frankly, extraordinary. Just watch the first two minutes of the live-streamed announcement, or the examples from six minutes onward. If the ability to turn a few words into all kinds of video — from photorealistic to animated — with sound does not blow your mind, I […]| pxlnv.com
Lynn Hunt, in a 2010 essay for Perspectives on History: […] You cannot accumulate pages if you constantly second guess yourself. You have to second guess yourself just enough to make constant revision productive and not debilitating. You have to believe that clarity is going to come, not all at once, and certainly not before […]| pxlnv.com
A brief, throat-clearing caveat: while I had written most of this pre-launch, I was unable to complete it by the time Apple shipped its annual round of operating system updates. Real life, and all that. I have avoided reading reviews; aside from the excerpt I quoted from Dan Moren’s, I have seen almost nothing. Even […]| pxlnv.com
Something I missed in posting about Apple’s critical appraisal of the Digital Markets Act is its timing. Why now? Well, it turns out the European Commission sought feedback beginning in July, and with a deadline of just before midnight on 24 September. That is why it published that statement, and why Google did the same. […]| pxlnv.com
Apple issued a press release criticizing the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act in a curious mix of countries. It published it on its European sites — of course — and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, all English-speaking. It also issued the same press release in Brazil, China, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, and Thailand — […]| pxlnv.com
Craig Grannell, Wired: Apple revealed Liquid Glass as part of its WWDC announcement this June, with all the pomp usually reserved for shiny new gear. The press release promised a “delightful and elegant new software design” that “reflects and refracts its surroundings while dynamically transforming to bring greater focus to content.” Today it launches globally […]| pxlnv.com
Tim Hardwick, MacRumors: Apple says on its feature availability webpage that “Apple Intelligence: Live Translation with AirPods” won’t be available if both the user is physically in the EU and their Apple Account region is in the EU. Apple doesn’t give a reason for the restriction, but legal and regulatory pressures seem the most plausible […]| pxlnv.com
Last year, Robb Knight figured out how Perplexity, an artificial intelligence search engine, was evading instructions not to crawl particular sites. Knight learned that Perplexity’s engine would use an unlisted user agent to scrape summaries of pages on websites where Perplexity was blocked. In my testing, I found the summaries were outdated by hours-to-days, indicating […]| pxlnv.com
It is baffling to me that, in 2021, I still do not know the security practices of the devices and cloud services I use more frequently than ever. This became particularly worrisome last year when I began working my day job from my personal computer. I have several things in my favour: it is an […]| pxlnv.com
Pew Research Centre made headlines this week when it released a report on the effects of Google’s A.I. Overviews on user behaviour. It provided apparent evidence searchers do not explore much beyond the summary when presented with one. This caused understandable alarm among journalists who focused on two stats in particular: a reduction from 15% […]| pxlnv.com
Thomas Germain, BBC News, covered the Pew report about the relationship between Google’s A.I. Overviews and click-through traffic: Pew says it’s confident in its research. “Our findings are broadly consistent with independent studies conducted by web analytics firms,” [Pew’s Aaron] Smith says. Dozens of reports show AI Overviews cut search traffic as much as 30% […]| pxlnv.com
Dan Moren ended his “Stay Foolish” column at Macworld with a tremendous essay about what it means to be a “fan” of Apple or its products in 2025: Over the years, those in the Apple community have long been called everything from the liturgical “Apple faithful” to the insipid “iSheep”, dating back to the days […]| pxlnv.com
Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy, in a statement provided seemingly first to both Stephen Nellis, of Reuters, and John Gruber: […] We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to […]| pxlnv.com
Michael Tsai, commenting in relation to the “tyranny of apps” article: I think Apple News would have a better user experience with a Web site and an RSS feed than as an app. I agree, but I think it is a worse situation than that suggests. Apple News is not only a mediocre app experience, […]| pxlnv.com
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned. […] The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows these posts [announcing the […]| pxlnv.com
Zoe Kleinman, Liv McMahon, and Natalie Sherman, BBC News: “Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that receiving the summaries is optional. “A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text […]| pxlnv.com
The ads for Apple Intelligence have mostly been noted for what they show, but there is also something missing: in the fine print and in its operating systems, Apple still calls it a “beta” release, but not in its ads. Given the exuberance with which Apple is marketing these features, that label seems less like […]| pxlnv.com
Matthew Green on Bluesky: I love that Apple is trying to do privacy-related services, but this [“Enhanced Visual Search” setting] just appeared at the bottom of my Settings screen over the holiday break when I wasn’t paying attention. It sends data about my private photos to Apple. The first mention of this preference I can […]| pxlnv.com
In the United States, donations to the extravagant presidential inauguration ceremony by U.S. citizens and corporations are unlimited. As a result, it is the perfect vehicle with which to get comfortable with the incoming administration. It is not a bribe, though. Money or goods given to holders of public office with the implication of favours […]| pxlnv.com
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor for the Clinton administration and Sam Reich’s dad, wrote about Elon Musk’s political influence in an editorial for the Guardian. It begins as a decent piece, comparing the power of owning a social media platform with Musk’s childlike gullibility — my words, not Reich’s. But, in a section […]| pxlnv.com
An un-bylined report in Le Monde: French judicial authorities on Sunday extended the detention of the Russian-born founder and chief of Telegram Pavel Durov after his arrest at a Paris airport over alleged offenses related to the popular but controversial messaging app. I believe it is best to wait until there is a full description […]| pxlnv.com
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten […]| pxlnv.com
