Monthly Archive:: November 2019

Microsoft is planning to release its Edge Chromium browser early next year with a new logo. The software maker is targeting January 15th as the release date for Edge Chromium, with availability for Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, and macOS. Microsoft is releasing what it calls a “release candidate” today, which should demonstrate most of the final work that will make it into the stable release in January. The new Edge will join a slew of interesting Chromium-based browsers, such as Vivaldi and Brave.

A month ago, we discussed an article about just how difficult text rendering is, and today we get to take a look at the other side of the coin – text editing. Alexis Beingessner’s Text Rendering Hates You, published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart. Back in 2017, I was building a rich text editor in the browser. Unsatisfied with existing libraries that used ContentEditable, I thought to myself “hey, I’ll just reimplement text selection myself! How difficult could it possibly be?” I was young. Naive. I estimated it would take two weeks. In reality, attempting to solve this problem would consume several years of my life, and even landed me a full time job for a year implementing text editing for a new operating system.

Apple today announced a comprehensive $2.5 billion plan to help address the housing availability and affordability crisis in California. As costs skyrocket for renters and potential homebuyers — and as the availability of affordable housing fails to keep pace with the region’s growth — community members like teachers, firefighters, first responders and service workers are increasingly having to make the difficult choice to leave behind the community they have long called home. Nearly 30,000 people left San Francisco between April and June of this year and homeownership in the Bay Area is at a seven-year low. 2.5 billion dollar sure does sound like a big number. But wait a second – rewind to the middle of last year: For years, Apple has held billions of dollars of cash overseas and insisted it won’t bring it home until the US gives it a better deal on the taxes it would have to pay to repatriate the funds. As of 2017, that cash pile had grown to an astonishing $252 billion. Now that lawmakers have passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut that primarily benefits corporations and the wealthy, Apple sees its chance to go forward with bringing that cash home before anyone changes their mind. According to Apple’s announcement, it’ll pay a one time tax of $38 billion. If Apple had paid the previous tax rate of 35 percent, its bill would have come out to around $88 billion. Now, that money can go into making the company even larger and providing more cash to hold overseas until Uncle Sam cries uncle again. Apple got a massive tax cut of 50 billion dollars just last year, so this 2.5 billion dollar represents 5 percent of said tax cut. Such generosity.

You’ve got to hand it to Apple when it comes to saying the loud part loud and the quiet part quiet. The company has spent the last few years cranking up an enormous services business that’s growing by double digits quarter after quarter and generated nearly 50 billion dollars in the past 12 months—yet it tries very hard to emphasize that making customers happy comes first. This week, Apple launched its subscription video streaming service, Apple TV+, and also released its quarterly financial results. In the regular phone call with Wall Street analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook tried very hard to get investors excited about Apple’s opportunities to make lots of money while not making it seem like Apple’s lost its soul in the process. The goal of services companies is to trick you into signing up for as many different confusing services as possible, so that you forget about them or find it too burdensome to cancel them. Apple has already gone well down this path, and instead of tiptoeing around it all the time out of fear of pissing off Tim Cook, I wish the media would just flat-out say it: it’s sleazy. It’s not illegal or wrong or anything like that – but that doesn’t make it any less sleazy.

Germany and France are introducing a government-backed project to develop European cloud infrastructure in an effort to help local providers compete with U.S. technology giants, which dominate the global cloud market. Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. criticized the initiative announced this week, called Gaia-X, saying the project will restrict data services along national borders. The reach of Amazon, Microsoft and other U.S. giants worries European politicians and corporate executives. Companies in Germany and France, the continent’s economic powerhouses, and in other European Union countries are concerned about depending on technology providers that must comply with the U.S. Cloud Act, WSJ Pro Cybersecurity reported in October. The 2018 law requires American firms to provide law enforcement with customers’ personal data on request, even when the servers containing the information are abroad. The European Union should’ve invested in efforts like this years ago, but rather late then never. And of course, it’s entirely unsurprising that US cloud providers are unhappy about this move, but that really shouldn’t be of any European legislator’s concern.

The U.S. government has launched a national security review of TikTok owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly, according to two people familiar with the matter. While the $1 billion acquisition was completed two years ago, U.S. lawmakers have been calling in recent weeks for a national security probe into TikTok, concerned the Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content, and raising questions about how it stores personal data. TikTok – Wikipedia link for those of us who have no idea what it is – is incredibly popular among younger people, but since it’s an entirely Chinese platform, there’s concerns about what, exactly, the data it stores is being used for.