It’s very tricky for platforms... these are winner-take-all markets. It really is winner-take-all. If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system and what’s that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G to company M.

Bill Gates

My hope is after reading Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory I will be better equipped to answer the question I have. Ok, so how best to approach the tech industry in a way that promotes competition when the network effect is so strong?

The app will monitor which apps are installed on a person’s phone, the time spent using those apps, the country you’re in, and additional app data

The Verge

… you don’t say

By creating a Firefox account you can increase convenience while decreasing your exposure to some harmful parts of the web. An account unlocks the full potential of tools like Lockwise, which securely manages passwords, and Monitor, a service that notifies you when your email has been part of a known data breach.

We’re offering privacy protections by default as you navigate the web because the business model of the web is broken, with more and more intrusive personal surveillance becoming the norm. While we hope that people’s digital rights and freedoms will ultimately be guaranteed, we’re here to help in the interim.

Chris Beard, CEO of Mozilla

I like that Mozilla has put in effort to diverse their offerings and become less dependent on the money from Google for default search. The idea of privacy as a product is red hot right now, while most feel opportunistic I would say this is very much inline with what Mozilla has always strived for.

Washington Post

CBP said copies of “license plate images and traveler images collected by CBP” had been transferred to the subcontractor’s company network, violating the agency’s security and privacy rules. The subcontractor’s network was then attacked and breached. No CBP systems were compromised, the agency said.

Trusted with a back door because they need it to keep us safe?

Podcasts as an industry is going to experience same defining change sooner rather than later.

Spotify begins testing curated podcast playlists

The bigger goal of these tests is to improve podcast discoverability, an issue that plagues the industry.

The podcast industry expected to create $1 billion in annual revenue by 2021

the industry generated an estimated $479.1 million in revenue in 2018 and is expected to produce more than $1 billion by 2021, according to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC

😳 that’s quite a bit of growth !!!!!

When we talk about regulation for tech, maybe we should review net neutrality for ISP’s ?🤷🏻‍♂️

King County Superior Court Judge Timothy Bradshaw found that "Comcast violated the Consumer Protection Act more than 445,000 times when it charged tens of thousands of Washingtonians for its Service Protection Plan without their consent," 

ArsTechnica

Maine lawmakers have passed a bill that will prevent internet providers from selling consumers’ private internet data to advertisers.

The state’s senate unanimously passed the bill 35-0 on Thursday following an earlier vote by state representatives 96-45 in favor of the bill.

Maine passes law preventing ISPs from selling browsing data without consent

Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

Amazon’s behavior toward open source is self-interested and rational. Amazon is playing by the rules of what software licenses allow. But these behaviors and their undesirable results could be curbed if industry associations created standard open-source licenses that allowed authors of open-source software to express a simple concept:

“I do not want my open-source code run as a commercial service.”

It will be interesting to see how open source licensing evolves over the next couple years with the ever increasing grow of cloud services. 🤔

Follow up from a previous post on blocking the IRS from creating a free tax filing option to compete with Intuit.

Lawmakers are planning to drop a proposal to prohibit the Internal Revenue Service from offering a free online tax-filing option, Politico and Pro Publica report. The provision was included in the Taxpayer First Act, which passed the House in April but has not passed the Senate. It was backed by the makers of private tax preparation software, including Intuit (makers of TurboTax) and H&R Block.

ArsTechnica

The new design places bolded headings for “music” and “podcasts” on the app’s library page that offer a much quicker way for people to find episodes of podcasts they subscribe to or might be interested in. Spotify users currently have to sift through six categories at the top of their library page to find a dedicated podcast section. 

The Verge

I wonder if the average Spotify user knows what podcasts are right out of the gate. Are they more likely to explore them now that they are front and center? There is a lot to be said for having podcasts as a default, think Apple's podcast player on iOS, but it is certainly welcomed to have podcasts as a first class citizen on a popular platform like Spotify.

I’ve had a growing number of articles in my feed that illustrate the constant behavior of telecommunication companies. As you can imagine it’s not the good kind.

AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break—it cut 23,000 jobs instead

Charter squeezes more money out of Internet users with new cancellation policy

Ajit Pai-proposed upgrade to 25Mbps starts paying off for rural ISPs - but it’ll take a decade. 😂

Best of all, the FCC’s chairman doesn’t seem interested in keeping them honest.

Ajit Pai refuses to investigate Frontier’s horrible telecom service

ArsTechinca

Pai didn't release the full Broadband Deployment Report

No kidding. 🙄 But wait, with a little digging you wouldn’t believe what the results are!

Despite the limited information available, advocacy group Free Press was able to discover a huge error that showed broadband progress under Pai's leadership was less impressive than he claimed.

So there was a big error, they fixed it, and then continue to lie about the results of their unsuccessful program. Ok. Got it.

Previously I'd given my thoughts on a Propublic article on a bill currently making it's way through the Senate to ban the IRS from making a free online tool for filing. Turns out if you dig a little deeper you'll find more of the good work from Propublic showing Intuit actively burying their free version making it as difficult to nearly impossible for regular people to find it.

To effectively bury its free filing service, TurboTax included a snippet of code in the page’s robots.txt file instructing search engines not to index it. 

Instead of pointing users toward its free file tool, TurboTax funnels the vast majority of users toward its paid and premium services, whether they qualify for free filing or not.

TurboTax and H&R Block hide their free tax filing tools from Google on purpose

Wow. I mean just wow. I really struggle to see how anyone can argue that this is in the best interest of the general public.

Ars Technica

This is a 45W processor with eight cores, 16 threads, and 16MB of cache, with a base clock speed of 2.4GHz and a turbo speed of 5GHz. The "K" on the name also indicates that the chip is overclockable: for those truly monstrous gaming laptops with high-powered cooling systems, you'll be able to go beyond the default speeds.

Yeah, I read these specs and all I can think is, "oh boy those MacBook Pro's just keep getting hotter and hotter.

At the top end is the i9-9900: eight cores, 16 threads, a base of 3.1GHz, and a peak of 5.0GHz. The big difference between this and the already-shipping 9900K and 9900KF is the power use: it's a 65W chip, whereas the other two are 95W, and it's not overclockable

Power, speed, heat. I feel like at this point Intel's chips have passed the point of diminishing returns. I'm all for more cores and power. But that isn't really what I need on a day to day basis. I am sure there are those that do, and for them the more cores the better, the tradeoff in heat and mobility is a welcomed compromise. For me, I don't hit bottlenecks in my workflow with the CPU, haven't in a very, very long time. Network, memory, possibly, and even then the times I'm waiting on my machine to preform a task is not even relative on the overall time spend in front of these things.

I'd rather have smaller chips, with longer battery lives, consuming less energy, for roughly the same amount of processing power. The idea of ARM based laptops is very exciting in this regard.

TechCrunch

Facebook has confirmed its password-related security incident last month now affects “millions” of Instagram users, not “tens of thousands” as first thought

How many times is this sort of thing going to happen? I mean it as an honest question? What is it that is so intrinsic and addictive that the average person is willing to blatantly ignore how damaging to the general public, social safety, and personal data?!?

TechCrunch

He also argued that while Twitter could “do a bunch of superficial things to address the things you’re talking about,” that isn’t the real solution.

“We want the changes to last, and that means going really, really deep,” Dorsey said.

Maybe they could throw in a few of those “superficial” systems just for kicks. A real solution would be face the problem head on, and stop fairly loose terms like “changes to last” and “go really, really deep”

More specifically, Rodgers asked about the frequent criticism that Twitter hasn’t found a way to consistently ban Nazis from the service.

“We have a situation right now where that term is used fairly loosely,” Dorsey said. “We just cannot take any one mention of that word accusing someone else as a factual indication of whether someone can be removed from the platform.”

That term is used to apply describe, um, Nazis and their behavior ?!?

There are early adopters, and then there are early adopters. Anyone who bites the bullet and picks up Samsung’s $1,980 and up Galaxy Fold falls into the former category. And then there are those who’ll be the first to Samsung’s site when the company opens up pre-orders on its inaugural foldable tomorrow.

TechCrunch

The question is when will you actually see one in the wild?

In one of its provisions, the bill makes it illegal for the IRS to create its own online system of tax filing. Companies like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block have lobbied for years to block the IRS from creating such a system. If the tax agency created its own program, which would be similar to programs other developed countries have, it would threaten the industry’s profits.

ProPublic

Having just done my taxes, and paying Intuit a hundred bucks every year to e-file my federal and state taxes, this story makes me even more wound up than usual. And yes, I could manually do them myself, but I’d rather spend that time doing other things I deem more important.

It just grinds my gears when private companies push and lobby to keep the status quo, keeping entities state, federal, or local from progressing and providing appropriate help for the public. This law only benefits share holders of companies that provide tax software. It in no way can be contorted to be “in the best interest of the public good”.

🤬

AT&T lied to investors in order to hide the failure of its DirecTV Now streaming TV service, a proposed class action alleges.
AT&T told investors that DirecTV Now was succeeding even as its subscriber base fell due to price increases and the discontinuance of promotional discounts, said the complaint filed Monday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint accuses AT&T and executives including CEO Randall Stephenson of violating the US Securities Act by "knowingly or recklessly" making false statements to investors and failing to disclose problems that were affecting DirecTV Now sales.

ars Technica

Big corporations can totally monitor and self police their behavior, uh huh, sure. 🙄

Tech Crunch

The title of this article alone could only exist in 2019.

Giving my first conference talk today at Github headquarters for Reactathon. It’s gonna be a blast, tune in live. And follow along at home if you’d like, slides. A huge thanks to my wife and family for all their support and feedback, it really does take a village. ☺️

All major ISPs denied selling or sharing their users' browsing histories and other sensitive information in 2017, when they convinced Congress and President Trump to prevent implementation of broadband privacy rules. But since then, it has been reported that T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T were selling their mobile customers' location information to third-party data brokers despite promising not to do so.

FTC investigates whether ISPs sell your browsing history and location data

This one's a give me. Yep.

A program that allows drug agents to obtain a pool of billions of call records from AT&T is “still active,” according to a watchdog report.

DEA says AT&T still provides access to billions of phone records

It’s all in the title, how is this seriously still happening? How many programs for getting private data from customers do these telecoms have? There seems to be more open programs being uncovered every day. Enough already, I am becoming numb to the constant revelation of programs like this.

“We are aware that a small number of users are having issues with their third-generation butterfly keyboard and for that we are sorry,” the company writes. “The vast majority of Mac notebook customers are having a positive experience with the new keyboard.”

TechCrunch

I am so past the keyboards, after having struggles with a 2017 MacBook Pro myself. I day dream about a Mac Mini (now that they are refreshed) and an iPad Pro lifestyle in the future, but I am still very happy with the capabilities of my Surface Book going on more than a year now. The one thing I miss daily?

$ brew install

Given the Mac love with Mini and iMac this year, if it continues, I could see having a Mac desktop and an iPad Pro for mobile / feet up work.

This might change with the a new redesign of the MacBook Pro. A year in, I’m super happy with my Surface Book. I’ve also found myself booted in Linux for some situations. And the WLS (windows linux subsystem) is fantastic.

I could also be making up a need for me to eventually get a iPad Pro. And that’s ok. 😉

Myspace has apparently lost most or all of the music files uploaded by its users before 2015, and it told users that the data was corrupted beyond repair during a server migration. Myspace apparently admitted the problem to concerned users seven or eight months ago, but so few people noticed that there wasn't any news coverage until the past 24 hours.

Myspace apparently lost 12 years’ worth of music, and almost no one noticed

Pretty good reason to continue to beat the drum about owning the content and context of publishing things onto other platforms. Consider this same scenario with all of your instagram images in 10 years? So much of our digital life is scattered across a number of closed platforms, when they’re gone, so is your content. I think services like Wordpress and Micro.Blog are leading the way in making it easy for everyone to own and Stewart where their own content goes.