In the News Archive

Even thought it was clear this message was the lead-in to a swindle of some kind, I had to pause and admire the craft that went into its composition. Like everyone else, I get scam text come-ons pretty frequently, and they’re always poorly pitched and low-energy. In contrast, this text opened up a rich world, animated by detail and alive with mystery. I didn’t care about packages missing their intended destinations, or Bitcoin investing advice, or whatever scammers usually texted me about, but I was interested in Tony: How many charity galas did he go to, anyway? And why hadn’t he seen his/my unknown interlocutor in such a long time? Before I reported the number to WhatsApp, I took a screenshot of the message to better remember it. There’s something to be written about here, Mark texted. What is the deal with these texts? Why do they sound like that? Who is sending them? I rarely get spam messages, and I’ve never seen messages like these before. There is some real craft going on here, even if the goal is malicious. I have to admire the thought that goes into these.

The Register reports: Broadcom has confirmed it intends to acquire VMware in a deal that looks set to be worth $61 billion, if it goes ahead: the agreement provides for a “go-shop” provision under which the virtualization giant may solicit alternative offers. That “go-shop” provision: However, the merger agreement has a “go-shop” provision under which VMware may seek alternative offers from other interested parties and potentially enter negotiations with them during the next 40 days. VMware has a backup, maybe? Broadcom is a weird one to buy VMware, but it makes some sort of sense. Broadcom make chips which are widely used, specifically networking equipment, and baking VMware support into their chips is probably the value proposition, or vice versa. Let’s see what happens. I would think another company (Microsoft, IBM, or Cisco?) would be interested in VMware enough to top the $61 billion Broadcom has on the table.

Someone or multiple people are blasting “antiwork” manifestos to receipt printers at businesses around the world, according to people who claim to have seen the printed manifesto, dozens of posts on Reddit, and a cybersecurity company that is analyzing network traffic to insecure printers. An intersection between technology and social issues – and an inventive and effectively harmless one, too. Especially the United States, but a lot of other countries too, desperately needs a lot more strong unions, and if this plays even a small role in getting there, it’s worth it.

Apple today filed a lawsuit against NSO Group and its parent company to hold it accountable for the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. The complaint provides new information on how NSO Group infected victims’ devices with its Pegasus spyware. To prevent further abuse and harm to its users, Apple is also seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using any Apple software, services, or devices. I wonder if this means Apple will sue itself next, because what the NSO Group does is not that different from what Apple itself does in, for instance, China. Apple has given the Chinese government full access to the iCloud data of all Chinese Apple users, so much so that even Apple itself cannot enter the date centres where Chinese iCloud data is stored. If Apple is suing the NSO Group for the “surveillance and targeting of Apple users”, why isn’t Apple saying anything about how it is aiding China to do the exact same thing? Don’t get me wrong – the NSO Group is terrible and if they get sued out of existence that’s a major win, but the blatant hypocrisy here is so obvious I almost feel like Apple is doing this just to see how far its supporters are willing to go to defend them. It’s easy to stick to your morals in countries with fair and open judicial systems. It’s how you act in those that don’t that show who you really are.

More than a century after the artists of the Vienna Secession declared “to every age its art; to art its freedom”, the Austrian capital has found a new site for artistic expression free from censorship: the adults-only platform OnlyFans. Vienna’s tourism board has started an account on OnlyFans – the only social network that permits depictions of nudity – in protest against platforms’ ongoing censorship of its art museums and galleries. Censoring nude paintings from some of the greatest painters in human history is peak pearl-clutching.

Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing home computers to the masses, has died at the age of 81. His daughter, Belinda, said he died at home in London on Thursday morning after a long illness. Sinclair invented the pocket calculator but was best known for popularising the home computer, bringing it to British high-street stores at relatively affordable prices. One of the greatest.

Every old video game console dies eventually. Moving parts seize-up, circuit boards fail, cables wear out. If a user needs a replacement connector, chip, ribbon, gear, shell—or any of the thousands of other parts that, in time, can break, melt, discolor, delaminate, or explode—they’re usually out of luck, unless they have a spare system to scavenge. But there is an exception to this depressing law of nature. In San Jose, on a side street next to a highway off-ramp, inside an unmarked warehouse building, is part of the world’s largest remaining collection of factory-original replacement Atari parts — a veritable fountain of youth for aging equipment from the dawn of the home computing and video gaming era. This is the home of Best Electronics, a mail-order business that has been selling Atari goods continuously for almost four decades. But if you’d like to share in Best’s bounty, as many die-hard Atari fans desperately do, there’s a very important piece of advice you need to keep in mind: whatever you do, don’t piss off Bradley. I love this story. There’s a lot you can say about having one person dictate nebulous terms like this, but we’re not talking a primary, secondary, or even tertiary life need here. It’s his way, or the high way, and I like that, in a romantic, old-timey kind of way. His website is glorious, the outdated catalog that is entirely outdated unless you combine it with decades of online updates – it’s almost mythical, a modern fairy tale.

I don’t know why I found this account so delightful. I guess it’s just the can-do spirit. I’ve had an iPhone 12 Pro for a while, and I’m a fan of the new MagSafe feature. I find it convenient for daily charging, and it eliminates the danger of failing to line up the phone just right on a Qi charger. I also have a handy 3rd party car mount that’s great for cars without CarPlay. The magnet on the iPhone is pretty strong, and now I know that if I ever drop my phone into a canal, I may be able to retrieve it by “magnet fishing.” When an unlucky Berliner dropped his phone into a mucky canal, his friend suggested using the MagSafe magnet to fish it out. After several hours of experimentation, they succeeded!

The Commerce Department plans to restrict access to TikTok and WeChat on Sunday as the Trump administration’s executive orders against the two apps are set to take effect. The Department said Friday that as of Sunday, any moves to distribute or maintain WeChat or TikTok on an app store will be prohibited. Apple and Google didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. While users who have already downloaded the apps may be able to continue using the software, the restrictions mean updated versions of the apps cannot be downloaded. This will hit American companies doing business in China hard, since virtually all consumer purchases there take place via WeChat.

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News. The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them. Facebook needs to be investigated, broken up, and its executives prosecuted. I don’t care who does it – the United States, the European Union – but it’s clear this company is one of the very worst excesses of the tech industry’s arrogance and dominance, and it needs to be held accountable.

U.S. President Donald Trump has issued executive orders to ban any U.S. transactions with WeChat, the messaging app owned by Tencent Holdings, and ByteDance, owner of TikTok, within 45 days, describing the Chinese-owned companies as threats to national security. “The spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China . . . continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” said Trump in the two executive orders signed on Thursday. I definitely think the world should impose severe sanctions on China and western companies working with them for the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs and other minority groups, as well as the forced labour used to make Apple computers and Nike shoes. There’s also something intuitively wrong with China blocking and censoring western applications, platforms, and media – something many western companies comply with all too eagerly – all the while expecting Chinese state-owned or state-controlled companies to have complete freedom to collect and possibly spy everywhere else. That being said, the Trump regime is not exactly known for coherent, consistent, and well thought-out policies, and these executive orders probably have more to do with diverting attention away from the complete and utter failure of the regime’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis and the upcoming election than anything else. These orders will probably be watered down over the coming weeks, so their value in putting pressure on China will be minimal. Two things always happen when you point out atrocities committed by China. First, people point to problems in the US in a massive case of whataboutism, as if the problems in the US excuse a genocide in China. On top of that, if you think the admittedly big problems in the US means the US is a genocidal totalitarian fascist dictatorship, your false equivalency is so false it can shatter glass for kilometres around. Second, apologists will say something along the lines of “okay, so you have nothing made in China?” This is a silly point to make. As individual consumers, it is literally impossible to avoid products made in China or other murderous regimes – just think of where your oil comes from. No, it’s governments and large corporations that have the power to put pressure on China, and so far, they have failed hard. They’ve been letting a genocide happen under their very noses, and once again, they choose to look away, because they value money more than human lives. It’s always a struggle to go into politics on a tech website and it almost certainly makes me impopular, but since virtually all our technology is almost entirely or partly made in China, it’s impossible to ignore it and look away. Awareness is the first step, and covering your ears and eyes won’t make the problems go away. By letting our governments and the corporations we buy from get away with choosing money over human lives – money that we ordinary people do not benefit from anyway, since most of it ends up in the pockets of the ultra-wealthy anyway – none of this will ever change.

Due to draft and development work in the area of branding and product naming, some speculation, in particular related to the “Personal Edition” tag shown in a LibreOffice 7.0 RC (Release Candidate), has started on several communication channels. So let us, as The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, please provide further clarifications: 1. None of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members. Basically, The Document Foundation intends to offer – through partners – professional paid-for support for LibreOffice to enterprise customers, and hence the tentative name to differentiate the LibreOffice we all know from the supported one.

Since the UK entered lockdown in March, engineers like Qureshi had unwillingly found themselves on the front line of a strange global crusade. Conspiracy theorists had linked the spread of the novel coronavirus to the installation of new 5G mobile networks, with some claiming the cellular network weakened the immune system and allowed the virus to thrive, while others said 5G masts were broadcasting the virus through the ether (all “crackpot” claims, to quote the UK government). The thing these theories have in common is that they give people someone to blame. And though some of that paranoia comes from a reasonable mistrust of large corporations and institutions, the end target was always workers like Qureshi, out on the street in high-visibility vests, just trying to do their job. These people are what the facepalm was invented for.

Bill Gates is now the favorite target for coronavirus misinformation according to data compiled by the New York Times and Zignal Labs, a company that analyzes media sources. Conspiracy theories conflating Gates with the virus were mentioned 1.2 million times on TV and social media from February to April, 33 percent more often than the 2nd most popular conspiracy theory linking 5G with COVID-19, according to Zignal Labs, peaking at 18,000 mentions a day in April. It’s cheaper to be an idiot than to be responsible.