With another day comes another company making a push for more podcasts in it’s lineup. Today that’s iHeart Radio

From The Verge

iHeartMedia will harness more than 850 radio stations to build its podcast audience and entice potential advertisers. The company today announced Sunday Night Podcasts, in which 270 stations will play a prerecorded podcast episode in between music or talk radio. The initiative will bring podcasts to the airwaves in every one of iHeart’s markets.

I like the idea of using other avenues besides the ‘podcast app’ to expose people to podcasts as a medium. I have friends and family that continue to listen to FM radio to this day, even with dozens of other options, their car is tuned into some random station I don’t know. They are unlikely to fire up their podcast app and find something interesting to listen to. This might be a soft sell that gets them over the hump? I guess we’ll see.

From 9To5Mac

According to a promotional message found in the service, the price for Apple Arcade will be $4.99 / month, including a one-month free trial. As Apple previously announced, the service will allow access to all members in a Family Sharing account.

If this is the case, I’m all in. I would have been in the fence about it at $10. That compounded with the Switch Lite at a lower price is gonna make gaming at my house with young kids awesome for everyone !!!!!

Buttigieg isn’t the only Democratic candidate calling for more broadband in rural areas. Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) announced her big broadband plan that would include an $85 billion grant program for nonprofits and local governments to build their own networks.

Pete Buttigieg rolls out $80 billion plan to improve rural broadband

It would be great if this sort of talk actually made it through election cycles. Like so man promises before it, ISP’s have and will continue to spend millions of dollars annually to keep their respective monopoly on providing subpar internet to rural Americans. 😢 Making promises like these nothing more than campaign rhetoric.

Facebook agrees to some kind of privacy law, which for some reason is very hard for new entrants to adhere to. Amazon may try and instantiate itself as basically the national e-commerce monopolist, kind of like a Bell-regulated monopoly.

Jonathan Shieber for Tech Crunch

When I hear big tech companies say, “we’d love government regulation” what I hear is something similar to what Jonathan points out. That monopolist regulation that makes it even more difficult for new or existing companies to compete, further entrenching these big companies.

the focus should be less on the global ambitions of these technology companies and more on the practices they’ve enacted to stifle competition.

We’ll see if congress can keep their eye on the ball, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Starbucks feels like a digital library for those that can can afford $5 coffee. I tend to see more people on their device or sharing content then anything else.

So the cross posting from here wasn’t working, and it wasn’t until I figured out that the RSS feed didn’t have the updated URL scheme that the rest of the site has. 🤦‍♂️ It was only setup to populate the post slug, missing the month and year path.

Facebook also denies that it collects, records, and maintains data on users' "information and activity," though it does admit that "users can provide Facebook with certain information."

Facebook denies allegations that you make friends on Facebook

It is strange to me that anyone could say this, much less write it up in an official legal document, with a straight face.

And then Apple comes along and introduces a security feature to Safari that requires a confirmation click when any link in a web browser attempts to open an external app. Zoom, which likes to pass around web links as a way of driving users into conference calls, didn’t look at this security measure as something to help keep their customers secure—it viewed it as an addition of friction by the platform owner.

Zoom saved you a click—by giving you a security hole

Jason Snell is able to very articulately sum up the events and motivation behind Zoom creating a locally running server, and believing that it was ok to do in the first place.

This is important, because when digital projects fail, it’s often not the technology, but the underlying culture that sets the precedence for success or failure. Operating inside a culture of fear will inevitably lead to digital project failure.

Find the truth. Tell the truth.

This really echos my sentiment. That technology is the easy part, the people and the culture are the really tough challenges.

With FCC Chairman Ajit Pai having deregulated the broadband industry, there's little to no chance of the commission taking action to stop fees like the one charged by Frontier.

ArsTechnica

Another example of “death by a thousand cuts”. Frontier can charge you 10 dollars for a router you don’t want or need, 5 more for a “warranty” you can’t opt out of, continue to track and sell your data because it’s in the “T & C”, and as the customer a majority of us only have one option for high speed internet, leaving little to no recourse but to complain of reddit and pay it. The alternative is to go without, which is simply not practical on any level.

☹️

While the FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau granted Verizon's request for a partial waiver from the open-access rule, it denied Verizon's request for a declaratory ruling "finding the handset unlocking rule already permits such temporary locking."

ARS Technica

As T-Mobile put it, they knew what the rules were when they bought in during the spectrum auction. I’m a little surprised at even the 60 day wavier. I’m struggling to find any tangible benefit to the customer, and not just some made up problems for Verizon. 🤷‍♂️

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?!?