She also met talent agents at Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency as well as A-list celebrities in Hollywood last month, as the platform tries to win high-profile entertainers to boost engagement.
Like I get that all platforms these days work in some way with their top users, obviously in their interest. I know Meta had celebrity commitments before the Threads launch.
Cox said the company already has celebrities committed to using the app, including DJ Slime, and was in discussions with other big names, including Oprah and the Dalai Lama.
I have context for how common this kinds of celebrity outreach is. For Threads it makes sense to want to have it filled with big names at launch, avoid having the empty room problem. But Twitter… is old. Everyone knows about it. Does Snapchat do this kind of outreach, beyond influencer partnerships? Organic use by celebs was THE use case on Twitter, why so many consumed their feed. Maybe these kind of talks are extremely common and we just have no context. But that struck me as odd.
We’re just naming threat groups from old Reddit usernames:
Our analysis attributes the email server compromise to the ScarCruft threat actor.
I hate that every time I go to open a Microsoft Office app, it reminds me that I don’t own the app. That maddening little authentication window pop-up checking to see if I have a right to use this app. And it makes the app slower to open to boot.
AMD posted it’s Q2 earnings, with revenue down everywhere except it’s embedded unit. What’s remarkable though is because it’s PC chip business fell 54%, it’s now AMD’s smallest business unit by revenue.
AMD’s client group, which includes sales from PC processors, dropped a massive 54% year over year to $998 million because of a “weaker PC market,” it said. AMD noted that market conditions are improving.
It’s interesting to note that it’s gaming segment saw more modest declines and is now its biggest source of revenue. AMD is ramping up its AI-chip business, but that’s not reflected in the earnings this quarter. Instead a big part of that is chips for gaming consoles. Another sign of the rise of semi-custom silicon.
Canon even took the joy out of throwing away a printer:
Canon is warning users of home, office, and large format inkjet printers that their Wi-Fi connection settings stored in the devices' memories are not wiped, as they should, during initialization, allowing others to gain access to the data.
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands was one of the games that I spent the most time on growing up. My brother and I found it on a CD of a few other old Dungeons and Dragons PC games at K-Mart for $0.99. The thing about it that has endured the most is its soundtrack. Just an hour of solid Sound Blaster chunky jams. Someone keeps posting it to YouTube Music. It’s intermittently taken down, but it’s my favorite work music when it’s available.
People could potentially lose more than just pounds by using a Peloton treadmill, as the Internet-connected fitness equipment also can leak sensitive data…
I am a big fan of the Arc browser, so happy to see it’s no longer behind what seemed like a token waitlist. I was doing a screen share today and I had a Windows user jealous they could not try it out. Really helps make for more organized browsing.
So I haven’t done a great job of announcing it, but I officially started a new job today! For the past three years I’ve been working with David Spark to launch and run the Cyber Security Headlines podcast. I’ll be taking a full time job with the CISO Series as a producer, working on helping to run their existing shows and other content and giving David Spark time to help create some new exciting stuff on the network.
I’m truly excited for this opportunity! I’ve gotten to know a lot of the team over at the CISO Series working freelance for David and it’s nice to know you’re coming into the place with top notch people already in place. Having already seen the roadmap for where the CISO Series plans to go, I can’t wait to help make that happen. It’s a whole new world brimming with challenges and opportunities.
Where I’ve Been
This of course means I’ve had to leave full time employment with the Daily Tech News Show family. I’ve been “officially” involved with Daily Tech Headlines since 2016. Tom Merritt founded the show, but asked me to help out with some light writing for it since day one. Since then he graciously found ways to gradually roll me into the show, until I became the regular host in 2021.
I say “officially” involved because I had probably been nagging Tom, Sarah Lane, Jennie Josephson and production staff through email for at least a good six years before that. Besides emails in with comments on their most recent episode, I also sent in enough show suggestions that Tom just told me to do my ideas and he’d see how they could be incorporated. It may sound silly, but having someone tell you to just go do something, get out of the self-nullifying “planning” stage and just do the thing, was incredibly liberating. That bit of advise proved so powerful in my life.
In A Career
It doesn’t seem too long ago that I wondered if I’d ever have a career, or just bounce from jobs I didn’t really like. I spent a good six years after a shorted college stint working a dead end data entry job at a law firm. There didn’t seem to be a path forward from that, just more of the same. Podcasts helped pass the time in those years. Truly they were an escape from office drudgery. The only downside were they made it tolerable enough to stay. I started doing college radio production at WRUW in those years, with a notion that it would be nice to get paid to do that kind of stuff. But it never seemed realistic.
Doing podcasts, my own, DTNS, DTH, seemed like a good hobby at first. One I enjoyed and was happy to do. But somehow, I’ve ended up with a career in podcasting. I’d like to say it came from hard work, keen industry instincts, or just having some golden pipes, but none of it would have been remotely possible without Tom Merritt continually opening doors for me. I am eternally grateful for his mentorship and friendship. I hope one day I can pass along those same things to other people coming up in their careers.
END: Navel Gaze Reflection
Oh but don’t worry! I still plan to write up tech thoughts on this blog. I still plan to regularly guest on DTNS (Roger Chang’s scheduling permitting), and I’m still producing It’s a Thing with Tom and Molly Wood!
Sometimes life is very weird and you get to do a lot of cool things with cool people.
A movie in its third round of reshoots being edited by screening committees, what could go wrong!
The movie was in the middle of postproduction and beginning test screenings that summer. While a timeline is not clear, from summer 2022 to the beginning of 2023, The Lost Kingdom underwent two rounds of reshoots and held several uninspiring test screenings.
Also shoutout to the Hollywood Reporter for ad tech that makes the site hatefully unreadable.
Forget Oppenheimer, we need a movie about Edward Teller’s dream of nuking Alaska to create a pointless artificial harbor en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proj…
When Intel announced it was discontinuing its diminutive NUC PCs last week, my first thought was why hadn’t Intel made this an open design spec years ago. Well it looks like they are doing just that. It’s giving Asus a non-exclusive license on its designs, opening the door for other firms to jump on board.
Intel doesn’t make money on PCs, its a chip company to the bone. It never made any sense why they made the NUC lineup, other than to show OEMs what was possible with its silicon in a very small form factor. Don’t get me wrong, Intel has made some cool NUC units over the years. They had some potential as console-sized gaming PCs, especially the AMD graphics collab with its Hades Canyon version.
When I worked for Gestalt IT, my boss loved to run our office infrastructure off of these little NUCs. They were quiet, reasonably powerful, and surprisingly configurable. Plus if you waited a few chip generations, the price was right. I also know they’ve found a niche in the HTPC market, and just people like the form factor. There’s already a flourishing tiny-PC market out there, but hopefully we’ll see a few OEMs keep the NUC designs alive.
Wow, a man working for a company that had it’s revenue slashed by an Apple privacy change thinks that the Apple OS is worse. Not that this isn’t a perfectly valid take, just love the idea this isn’t the default company line from Meta these days.
As mentioned, Dolittle, which tells the story of a Welsh veterinarian with the ability to communicate with animals, failed to meet expectations among critics and at the box office. The film, which also stars Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, and Emma Thompson, currently holds a 14% critics' approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and earned $77 million at the domestic box office, falling short of its overall budget.
It’s not often you see product reviews or previews where the excitement for the product is palpable. But Sean Hollister seems almost giddy in his first look at the Framework 16, and I don’t blame him:
I don’t trust any company — no ethical journalist should. This is a pricey machine that could let you down. But I think Framework is one of the only companies, maybe the only one, that could get this right. I sincerely hope Patel and his team do, because it’s the kind of computer I’d like to own.
For VanMoof owners, the company says its e-bikes “will remain functional and rideable, as we aim to keep our app and servers online and aim to secure the ongoing services for the future.” It also confirms that all repair work and deliveries of parts is currently stopped, and that repaired and un-repaired e-bikes at shops in the Netherlands will eventually be made available for riders to pick up.
One of the constant criticisms of VanMoof’s bikes was its proprietary parts supply chain. Now bike owners are locked out of repair parts, and hoping that the company can keep its “aim” of keeping its servers online. While I think a sale is likely given their considerable customer base, it also likely means a buyer would have to convert those customers into revenue, ie a subscription for previously free services. Would suck for customers but I guess better than losing access to their bike.
The recent trend to make all software a subscription is irksome. I am sympathetic to the fact that this does make software more immediate accessible. I well remember my college days where Adobe’s Creative Suite was priced well out of reach. At that time, I would have welcomed a Creative Cloud subscription option. But the industry seems increasingly bent on making these the mandatory model.
One piece of software I use all the time seems to split the difference nicely. I use VueScan from Hamrick Software for scanning film. For a scanner, I use a Pacific Image PrimeFilm XA, and while it comes with a license for a free Silverfast scanning suite, my shift to Apple Silicon meant I needed to pay for a newer version. VueScan essentially provides third-party scanning suite and drivers for a while variety of scanners, many of them out of support. So if nothing else, I like supporting a company helping to keep these old machines out of a landfill.
In terms of obtaining the software, VueScan has a sweet spot. You can either buy the software outright, with a guarantee of a year of software updates and perpetual usage. Or you can pay an ongoing subscription. There’s also a free trial that watermarks all your scans. For an old scanner like this, I like that I can support this company, but I’m not on the hook for bug fixes for something that I likely don’t need. But in the event I run into compatibility issues with a new machine down the line, likely I can pay for a newer version of VueScan that will work.
VueScan isn’t perfect. I wish they didn’t put film scanner functionality behind their most expensive licensing tiers (the lower tiers are more designed for old flatbeds). Its UI is Audacity-esque. But given the fairly niche market for this, I don’t blame them. I’m at the age where I appreciate the economies of software development. The ecosystem works only if devs are fairly paid for their work. But that also doesn’t mean I want to have to constantly pay to keep any software functionality. VueScan seems like a good model to give users meaningful choices.
Purely anecdotal but I asked my two teenage nephews about if they tried Threads. Neither had heard of it and after I explained it kind of laughed at the idea of using Twitter.
I don’t need a phone to be exciting. I use an iPhone because it’s the Toyota Camry of phones. But foldables are getting to the point where they look freaking nice, sort of practical, and only at a slight price premium. I think seeing the Honor Magic V2 put me over.
“This means that creators can get a share in ad revenue starting in the replies to their posts,” a Twitter help article published today reads. “This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter.” Musk tweeted today that payouts “will be cumulative from when I first promised to do so in February.”
Not Just Consumption
Twitter came late to this game. YouTube has been doing this for years, TikTok and Snap both run similar programs with short form video. Still at least it beat Instagram to launching something.
But the format of the program is novel. All these other systems focus focus on consumption. Now creators know that engagement leads to better algorithmic visibility, which directly feeds views. But still, the onus for that is on the creator, it’s not baked into the program itself. Twitter is directly saying that mere tweet consumption isn’t enough to monetize. Instead users must literally spur more tweet creation for the program.
A Moderating Influence?
For another company, I might suspect this as a backdoor way to motivate creators to moderate their own comments. After all, if you’re monetizing based on ads run in replies, you’d want to keep those replies brand friendly. Twitter has run fast and loose with moderation since the Musk takeover, so not sure if that’s the case with this program. Still given how drastically the company cut costs, I wouldn’t be surprised if they see it as a potential benefit.
Also this whole system seem to just feed into the most blatant engagement hacking. Looking at Twitter’s Creator Monetization Standards, I don’t see anything in there that would prevent someone from doing legit giveaways of cash to just feed enough comments to qualify for ad-rev share. Good for the creator, but not sure how much value that gives Twitter long term.
Just installed the watchOS beta and I’m shocked how much the Snoopy watch face delights me.
Archive.org is an amazing resource. I recently found a collection of old arcade posters. Included is one for the game Thunder Jaws, an Atari game I’ve never heard of. The poster itself is exceptional:
It includes this amazing copy:
If one Great White lurking in the waters can become a smash hit, imagine the feeding frenzy when you have giant cybernetic sharks!
Just got a notice from Teenage Engineering that they restocked some of their Pocket Operator models, including their chiptune synth, the PO-20 Arcade. I thought they had just stopped production on all by their PO-33, so glad to see fresh stock (even if they are all $100 now).
White Hats Love Them Some Chatbots
An interesting study on how generative AI tools are being used in security research:
Many of the respondents are already using generative AI in their work, including in automating tasks (50%), analyzing data (48%), identifying vulnerabilities (36%), validating findings (35%) and conducting reconnaissance (35%). The report noted a trend of hackers using AI chatbots to help write reports, with the initial text generated by AI “a good jumping off point.”
Interestingly, researchers are doing this with off-the-shelf chatbots, overwhelmingly ChatGPT. What’s interesting is that Microsoft offers its own Security Copilot model for these types of tasks. Obviously the interest in using these tools is outpacing the speed that organizations can validate them (or at least the more specialized ones). Justin Robert Young made this point on Daily Tech News Show this week, even if chatbots aren’t “cleared” for a given use case, people are already using them.
The Threads app is a week old and Meta is still on version 1.0 on iOS. Like I don’t expect feature updates, but on a device used by over 100 million people, I’d expect a bug fix by now. Not sure if that means the team is still fairly small or they are waiting to push out new features.
It includes this amazing copy: