All Posts (5,293)
Spotify’s Google Play Store Deal
mjtsai,
Adi Robertson and Sean Hollister (Hacker News): Music streaming service Spotify struck a seemingly unique and highly generous deal with Google for Android-based payments, according to new testimony in the Epic v. Google trial. On the stand, Google head of global partnerships Don Harrison confirmed Spotify paid a 0 percent commission when users chose to […]
Nothing’s iMessage App Was a Security Catastrophe
Ron Amadeo (via Hacker News): Last Tuesday, Nothing Chats—a chat app from Android manufacturer “Nothing” and upstart app company Sunbird—brazenly claimed to be able to hack into Apple’s iMessage protocol and give Android users blue bubbles. We immediately flagged Sunbird as a company that had been making empty promises for almost a year and seemed […]
Privacy Is Priceless, But Signal Is Expensive
Meredith Whittaker and Joshua Lund (Hacker News): Signal is also a nonprofit, unlike almost every other consumer tech company. This provides an essential structural safeguard ensuring that we stay true to our privacy-focused mission. To put it bluntly, as a nonprofit we don’t have investors or profit-minded board members knocking during hard times, urging us […]
Safari Share Menu Now Violates Privacy
Jeff Johnson: Looking at the packet trace, the share menu attempts to fetch the icon files favicon.ico, apple-touch-icon.png, and apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png from the site.[…]And of course your IP address is leaked.My belief is that a website should not be notified and given your IP address and other information such as hardware device type and web browser […]
Curated list of awesome engineering games
Boing Boing,
The term "engineering games" covers a lot of things, from casual Theme Park clones to elaborate Factorio-style machinery, but all of them scratch the itch for building systems that work within the rules of a computer simulation. Check out Awesome Engineering Games, Roger Tuan's list of contemporary offerings neatly organized by genre. — Read the rest
Sonos Is Also Going to Make Headphones Now
Gizmodo,
Sonos is now experimenting with headphones. In fact, calling it an experiment would be an understatement, considering the company plans to directly compete with Apple and Bose in the headphone market. Rumors started to emerge of a Sonos headset last year after it acquired T2 Software, a Bluetooth audio startup. Read more...
Former OpenAI CEO: My Job Here Is Done
For 55 hours and 32 minutes, Emmett Shear steered the world’s leading artificial intelligence company, OpenAI, through its largest crisis ever. That chapter of Shear’s life and OpenAI’s history has now come to a close. It seems that no one listened to the former Twitch CEO’s concerns about AI safety, and returning CEO… Read more...
Tim Allen seems pretty excited about Toy Story 5
AV Club,
It seems like Toy Story is getting sequels to infinity and beyond, whether we like it or not. While Toy Story 5 was initially announced back in February (alongside the grimmer news of 7,000 company layoffs), it seems like the studio is actually starting to move forward with the project. Does this mean the recently… Read more...