Technology

The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

Call it "Apple exceptionalism" – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest.

Take the claim that Apple is "privacy respecting," which is attributed to Apple's business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the "surveillance capitalism" hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.

Now Windows' only built-in text editor, there's more room for Notepad to grow.

The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $3 trillion public company.

It turns out that the “Internet of Things” is full of automated snoops and spies. Data collection, now integrated into new car designs, is more pervasive than ever and is ushering in a brave new world of surveillance and corporate collusion.

X has locked and suspended the accounts of journalists and researchers who shared the alleged identity of a neo-Nazi cartoonist known as Stonetoss after the cartoonist appealed to site owner Elon Musk.

The incident, critics say, highlights once again how Musk has not only welcomed extremists onto his platform but has repeatedly boosted their conspiracies, engaged with their accounts, and seems to have protected them from scrutiny.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13412490

Alibaba's research arm promises server-class RISC-V processor due this year

Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees' reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor's support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name.

Although it's common for many online users to link services at sign-up to Facebook or Gmail accounts to verify identity and streamline logins, for years, Glassdoor has notably allowed users to sign up for its service anonymously. But in 2021, Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl, a professional networking app that integrated with Glassdoor last July. This acquisition meant that every Glassdoor user was automatically signed up for a Fishbowl account. And because Fishbowl requires users to verify their identities, Glassdoor's terms of service changed to require all users to be verified.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4023266

The Dangerous Propaganda Of Techno-Optimism

But EU privacy advocates like NOYB have protested Meta's plan to offer a subscription model instead of consenting to data sharing, calling it a "pay or OK model" that forces Meta users who cannot pay the fee to consent to invasive data sharing they would otherwise decline. In a statement shared with Ars, NOYB chair Max Schrems said that even if Meta reduced its fees to 1.99 euros, it would be forcing consent from 99.9 percent of users.

Element Call is an open source end-to-end encrypted video and voice conferencing solution built on the Matrix protocol for secure communication.

We’re developing Element Call to provide the best possible security properties with compulsory end-to-end encryption, supporting sender verification, forward secrecy, post-compromise secrecy, zero-trust decentralisation and cross-domain capability. It achieves this by building on the foundations of Matrix as a mature, audited [1], open standard protocol for secure communication.

The final utterances of Steve Jobs, the highly praised and frequently cited co-founder of Apple, were disclosed nearly a month following his passing

This release updates the Caret Browsing mode to also work in the PDF viewer and adds support for the Screen Wake Lock API.