Tag: tech

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AI Scrolling

I may be very skeptical of all the buzz surrounding AI right now, but there are practical uses for the technology. Ancient scrolls dating back to A.D. 79 were burned in a volcanic eruption. Unrolling them is impossible and over the years scanning technology has tried to see anything inside. But using some AI, a college student assisted with deciphering the ancient text. Kyle Melnick at The Washington Post has more. The text message he received at the party included an image from one of the scrolls. [Luke] Farritor sat down in a corner to review the picture and uploaded…

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Apple Adopts RCS

Color me more than surprised about this out-of-nowhere announcement from Apple. Let’s cut to the chase: late next year Apple will replace SMS with RCS on iPhone later next year. I have thoughts. Firstly, this is not replacing iMessage. There will still be green bubbles. iMessage will still be the default when messaging another person with an Apple ID. However, the fallback messaging with Android phones will now be via RCS. Back in August I declared “I would never bet Apple adopts RCS. They won’t. The only way is if SMS becomes deprecated and no longer supported by carriers in a few…

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The WhyMac

Apple’s transition to their own in-house chips, Apple Silicon, has been a humongous boon for the Mac. For years the Intel-powered computers were good but Apple was at the mercy of Intel’s roadmap. And many times it was underwhelming. The first M1 computers were stellar in every way, none more striking than the redesigned iMac. But lost in all the excitement was a simple observation: Apple seems disinterested in the iMac altogether. The M-series iMac was released in May of 2021. Apple redesigned the whole thing. They went back to a set of colors, invoking the whimsy of the original.…

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DNA Insecurity

Reinforcing my number one reason I won’t enroll in the CLEAR program for flying or to ever submit my DNA for genetic testing is this report from Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai over at TechCrunch detailing 23andMe’s data breach. The same hacker who leaked a trove of user data stolen from the genetic testing company 23andMe two weeks ago has now leaked millions of new user records. On Tuesday, a hacker who goes by Golem published a new dataset of 23andMe user information containing records of four million users on the known cybercrime forum BreachForums. TechCrunch has found that some of the newly…

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Junk In Spaaace

While there have been efforts for decades to stop polluting Earth, nobody said we can’t do it off-world. So, sure, why not? That’s basically what’s been going on as a certain someone endlessly launches satellites into low orbit, NASA and other organizations work to explore space, and we build a hodgepodge of infrastructure in zero gravity. But what happens when all that stuff becomes junk? Well, debris in space is supposed to be ‘deorbited’. However, it seems that Dish Network didn’t quite do that to their decommissioned equipment, and the FCC is none too pleased. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The…

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Apple’s Problem With Jon Stewart

It’s no secret I’m an Apple fan and generally support what the company does. Today is certainly not that day. Buried in the plethora of Apple TV+ content is the fantastic show The Problem With Jon Stewart. It’s a topical half-hour show that’s a cross between the Daily Show and Last Week Tonight. Stewart doesn’t pull any punches, as is his personality. But it seems there’s a line that was crossed… by Apple. Charles Pulliam-Moore at The Verge has more. Along with concerns about some of the guests booked to be on The Problem With Jon Stewart, Stewart’s intended discussions…

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Getty AI-Generated Images

The age old saying “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” has no better example than this: Getty Images has announced it is releasing its own AI Image Generator that’s been trained on its own images and will be exclusive to its service. Matt O’Brien at AP News has more. CEO Craig Peters said the new service, called Generative AI by Getty Images, emerged from a longstanding collaboration with California tech company and chipmaker Nvidia that preceded the legal challenges against Stability AI. It’s built upon Edify, an AI model from Nvidia’s generative AI division Picasso.  It promises “full indemnification…

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Even Netflix Doesn’t Want its DVDs Back

I know we all thought it was long gone already, but it’s only now that Netflix is winding down its DVD rental service. Those once-ubiquitous red envelopes are no more and it’s been a good run. But after this week, Netflix has informed customers still getting those round piece of plastic to simply keep ’em. Jay Peters at The Verge has more. Netflix won’t charge DVD.com customers for any discs they still have after September 29th, the company announced. That generous offer, combined with Netflix’s recent announcement that it may send customers as many as 10 extra discs from their queues, means that…

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The Fall of CNET

It’s hard to imagine a website that has endured as long as CNET. One of the big, early websites of the mid-90s internet is still around today. CNET has been in the game of tech news reporting since its inception and been a notable landing place for not only news but product reviews. But it’s been a company finding itself looking to make money and stand out. And part of that is doing the unthinkable: deleting articles. Benj Edwards at Ars Technica has more. The deletion process began with small batches of articles and dramatically increased in the second half…

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Data Recovery Exonerates A Man

Every justice system has failures where innocent people are wrongly convicted. A recent story I saw on Mastodon recounts how the Bloop Museum, a technology archive project, was called upon to try to recover crucial data from old floppy disks. Why? Because court records were stored on them, and it was vital to retrieve that information in order to exonerate an innocent man. You can find more details on the museum’s Patreon page. Okay, it was just last year, and the museum received a visit from the Wicomico County Prosecution Integrity Unit. We weren’t in any trouble, but any time…

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SegWhy

The Segway is two things: a thing mall cops ride and a thing you may ride on a tour. That’s it. And what a fall from grace it is for this weird device, because it’s an innovative piece of tech that never stood a chance. For the unfamiliar, the Segway was marketed as a revolutionary way to get around when you didn’t want to walk and distances were too short for a car. Dean Kamen invented it and tried to market it as “the “the next big thing.” We know that never panned out, but the “why” that defined its…

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Bike Brick

Yet again we find another glaring example of why you should never buy physical devices that depend on a cloud service or app or company remaining in business. This time around it’s VanMoof and its series of e-bikes. The Dutch company is now bankrupt leaving customers with bikes made with non-standard parts and features that won’t work without its app. Rob Schmitz at WGBH has more. VanMoof’s creators fancied their company to be like Apple — creating unique products that would spawn its own ecosystem — but Hartogs says the company ran out of money because, unlike Apple’s products, VanMoof’s…

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Eroding the iMessage Moat

RCS has long been the battle cry for Google and Android in the “messaging wars”. The better way to text has had an uphill battle, but Google has stuck with it and continues to push to make it a standard. Unsatisfied with carriers’ dragging its feet, Google made RCS the default way to message on Android and now has turned on end-to-end encryption by default. That is a big deal. Abner Li at 9to5Google has more on why. Google is making this big move to “ensure more people benefit from this added security.” E2E encryption for 1:1 conversations fully launched…

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What’s Mine is Mine and What’s Yours is Mine

We’re hot in the AI movement right now, regardless if most of the generative stuff out there is a giant BS machine. It hasn’t stopped the likes of Microsoft adding ChatGPT to Bing and Google rolling out Bard. But all that AI needs to be trained on real data and so Google is doing what they always do: taking the entire internet for themselves. Because they can. Thomas Germain at Gizmodo has more. Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI…

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Too Good to Go

Just when you think a brand is done for, they sometimes get a last-minute reprieve. Recently on TimeMachiner, I’ve written about some companies going belly-up: mainly Brydge and DPReview. But in true Monty Python fashion, they’re not dead yet. Incredibly those two plus Bed Bath and Beyond, a third well-known company name, aren’t going anywhere. Firstly we get Brydge, the iPad and tablet keyboard company. I have a Brydge I bought many years ago, my second, after getting one from their initial Kickstarter. Back in May Chance Miller at 9to5Mac reported its sudden disintegration. Creditors were left unpaid and customers…

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IRS’s Impending Software

For way too long the IRS has been at the mercy of an agreement they made with Intuit and others when it comes to tax filing software in the US. The deal it struck was to allow companies to develop their own software but also prevent the IRS from doing the same. We all know how that turned out. Now, the IRS will roll out its own homegrown system beginning in January. This may finally bring an end to the complicated (and annoying) process of filing taxes. Jacob Bogage at the Washington Post has more. The system will be available…

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Wendy’s AI

While I don’t think ChatGPT is taking over the world any time soon, one technology that has come far in the last decade is voice recognition. In the early days of Siri and Google Assistant, they were wrong a lot. Now, those and other assistants capture our speech with extremely high accuracy. Using this, Wendy’s is piloting a program to let their Drive-Thrus be staffed by Google’s AI. Michael Crider at PC World has more. The system has been trained to tune out extraneous noises, like the sound of a passing conversation or kids fighting in the backseat, and can…

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Rivian Joins the Plug Club

Last week I wondered how other EV manufacturers would fare in the sudden rapid adoption of Tesla’s “NACS” charger plug: “Only time will tell but the dominoes are falling.” https://timemachiner.io/2023/06/13/teslas-supercharger-superpowers/ Now today Rivian has announced they’ll switch from CCS to NACS beginning next year. This adds a third non-Tesla manufacturer to the list of companies outright changing the types of plugs on their cars. Jonathan M. Gitlin at Ars Technica has more. [T]oday Rivian revealed that it, too, is switching from CCS to NACS, Tesla’s competing standard, in 2024. Unlike the two automakers that preceded it, Rivian did not have…

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AI Objection

We know that for all the hype surrounding ChatGPT and these “AI” models, they’re actually big liars. I showed personal examples of this in March. Now a lawyer is also learning the hard way that if ChatGPT doesn’t know something, it confidently lies about it. Wes Davis at The Verge has more. After opposing counsel pointed out the nonexistent cases, US District Judge Kevin Castel confirmed, “Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations,” and set up a hearing as he considers sanctions for the plaintiff’s lawyers. Lawyer Steven A.…

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Before and After Reality

I’m doing something a bit different and writing my thoughts on Apple’s headset both before and after their WWDC conference, which took place yesterday. I’m no prognosticator but I have a lot of questions. Let’s dive in. Before It’s Friday, June 2 and I am completely intrigued by all this “Apple VR / AR / headset” news. Is it bunk? Maybe. But there are a few things going on leading me to believe, now more than ever, that Apple is announcing its next hardware platform on Monday. It comes down to a simple observation: Where there’s Apple smoke, there’s Apple…

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Talking About Money

Here in the US, the rise of Square payment systems has helped every small shop and flea market merchant accept digital payments. It’s quick and simple. But what about the rest of the world? Especially in countries where mobile data is unreliable and people are quick to get scammed? Enter the payment “sound box”. Adnan Bhat at Rest of World has more on this innovative solution. Eventually, a fellow vendor suggested he subscribe to a “sound box” — a nifty internet-connected device that reads out payment confirmation messages. “Earlier, I had to wait for five to 10 minutes after every…

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Chromebook Trash

One interesting part of the 2020 COVID lockdowns was the frenzy of school districts to procure computers to facilitate remote learning for all students. There were months-long waits for Chromebooks specifically because these low-cost machines worked with a school’s budget and integrate well with Google Classroom. But due to a literal Expiration Date, hundreds of thousands of Chromebooks will become e-waste. How is this possible? Monica Chin at The Verge explains. Chromebook Churn also discusses the Chromebook’s auto-update expiration date — something users have been complaining about for years.  While Google currently guarantees eight years of automatic updates to Chromebooks, that period…

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The Lisa That Started It All

Every time Apple talks about its history during a keynote, they focus on the Macintosh. Its 1984 debut was industry-shifting. However, nearly every groundbreaking idea it embodied stood on the shoulders of its lesser-known predecessor. The Apple Lisa was a much-chunkier computer released 40 years ago. It was a complete flop. Apple poured boatloads of resources into its list of firsts: GUI, a mouse, menus, file systems, multiple apps, usability, and friendly computing. The Lisa was also incredibly expensive. The machine started at $9,995 (equivalent to $27,190 in 2021). But, without the Lisa, the Macintosh would never have been the success…

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FaceTime For The Birds

When Steve Jobs debuted FaceTime back on the iPhone 4, it felt like the future had arrived. For decades we dreamed of portable video calls that The Jetsons had promised. Now it connects people millions of times daily. But would that connection work for other species? A fascinating report from Emily Anthes at the NY Times shows how parrots are benefitting from this too. First, participants taught their parrots how to request a video call. When the birds rang a bell. Their owners would offer a tablet or phone with photos of other participating parrots, like a digital avian Rolodex.…

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Phone Crocs

Crocs are all the rage right now. Collabs with 7-Eleven and Wu-Tang Clan are some of the unforeseen ways in which these kinda-ugly clogs have struck gold. Hoping to piggyback onto this trend is smartphone case maker Casetify which has launched a series of iPhone cases that resemble Crocs shoes, with 13-14 holes designed to hold pushpins that are sold in sets of five. Sounds crazy, right? Sarah Perez has more of this absolutely real line of cases. We regret/are happy to inform you that these cases are real. We have them in hand and have put them through their…

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A Brydge Too Far

In late-breaking news last week, I was stunned to find out that iPad accessory maker Brydge had closed up shop, ceasing operations immediately. On its own, this is a sad story because I’ve held their products in high regard. However, the out-of-nowhere aspect looks to be due to the co-CEOs hiding how bad things really were. Chance Miller at 9to5Mac has more. One red flag that multiple former employees cited was a notable period during which Brydge did not have a chief financial officer… Instead, Brydge internally promoted someone from their head of finance role to act as CFO. Multiple…

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DPReview’s Shutdown is a Reminder That the Internet is Ephemeral

I’m the first to admit I’m not a camera buff. When my kids were born I splurged on a Canon T2i DSLR camera because I wanted to take the best photos possible. Those photos look amazing, but I (like most) still default to using my phone to snap 99% of what’s around me. I couldn’t tell you the last time I took my T2i out of its bag. I am recounting my DSLR tale because when I was camera hunting I came across DPreview, a long-running and in-depth camera review website. For camera nerds (unlike me) it is THE place…

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Belkin May Not Matter

Matter, a common language for smart home tech, faces issues with Belkin pausing adoption. Belkin’s devices don’t offer anything unique and can become commodities, making it hard to stand out. The company plans to differentiate its products, but it is unclear when.

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Pepperoni Hug Spot

I know there is endless hype around AI. And as I’ve said previously AI chatbots are nothing more than a next-word-prediction algorithm (that loves to lie). But sometimes when you mix different AIs together, you get something really funny. Enter Reddit user SharpCartographer831 and their AI-Generated pizza commercial. This person used a series of AIs to write the script, do the voiceover, and generate the video for a 30-second ad. It’s incredibly weird, creepy, and funny because it’s so random and dumb. But in some weird way, it works. One thing that didn’t even occur to me is the time…

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Voice Password Failure

AI-powered voice cloning technology has advanced to the point where scammers can now easily create convincing fake audio of someone’s voice. In a proof-of-concept video, Watch how Joseph Cox from Vice demonstrates how he was able to access his bank account by simulating his voice using AI.