I’ve seen a little bit of Android versus iPhone talk come up lately. MKBHD recently did a video on it, and it’s balanced and well considered like most of his takes are. I guess I’m mostly a single issue voter on this. As long as there is relative parity when it comes to cameras and usable performance, software support will keep me in iOS for a long time.
I bought an iPhone 8 soon after my son was born. I remember standing in a Sprint store and trying to keep a baby occupied while the rep took forever to port numbers over and set up a family plan with some friends of ours. It was interminable. My son is now in Kindergarten. The phone runs the latest version of iOS. I couldn’t say nearly the same thing if I had bought a Galaxy S8 or Pixel 2 that same year.
I used Android from 2011 until 2016. I was a power user. Set up Tasker automations. Rooted and ran Cyanogen. I put Android on an HP Touchpad. I bought a Samsung Galaxy Nexus a year after it came out. I knew it was not a good phone then, but I wanted that Google-direct Nexus experience and was willing to put up with a bad camera and horrific early-4G battery life to do it.
The Android phone I liked the best was my last, a Droid Turbo. It had a cool kevlar back, Motorola put in some meaningful customizations (wrist twist to open camera is great). Battery life was decent. The camera was…. a mid-teens Android camera. The downside? Software support. While it did get updates to two Android versions (actually good in that time), it was consistently a year and a half behind the current Android release.
Compare that to my wife’s iPhone. It got 4 major OS updates in its lifespan, delivered same day the OS hit general availability. It got security updates for years even after she upgraded to the iPhone 7 in 2016. See an old device keep getting the new software hotness while my Android phones remained entirely forgotten pushed me over the edge. I know the situation with Qualcomm drivers makes it a nightmare to provide long-term software upgrades for OEMs. I know Samsung and Google have gotten better, promising 3-4 years of OS upgrades on flagship phones. But as a consumer, I kind of don’t care about that. Not my problem, figure this out if you want me as a customer. I know if I buy an iPhone, I will get better software support long term.
I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max now and don’t see any reason to upgrade any time soon. It performs well enough, the camera is still great (if a little too HDR happy), and the battery life remains serviceable. When I do upgrade, either my parents will get it or it will turn into a car toy for the kids. But unless Android OEMs meaningfully differentiates on hardware from iOS (maybe a really killer foldable experience), I’m a single-issue phone buyer.
But the 4 million users it had at the time would increase to just 12 million four years later, while Microsoft — which added Teams to its 365 bundle without increasing the price — took Teams from zero to 115 million users.
No one brandishes the cudgel of Office like Microsoft.
Death, taxes, and…
Pleasantly surprised that the Beeper cross messaging app doesn’t break or punish you for switching back to first party clients. Occasionally need to do that if you want to send gifs or other rich media. I’ve had email clients that made going back to webmail a pain.
Why is the Washington Post offering an 11% discount to not subscribe annually? Their monthly special works out to $26 a year versus $29 all up front…
The former e-bike giant VanMoof found a buyer, the private equity-owned former tech arm of McLaren. Not surprising, but I can’t imagine it won’t be long before VanMoof owners are faced with paying a subscription to maintain access to previously free services for their bikes.
One of the under appreciated joys of the Aeropress is that it’s almost more difficult to leave it dirty than to just clean it right away. Love my French press but that thing languishes in squalor after I use it.
There’s been reporting on this before but people are being trafficked and forced to run cyber scams. A reason I find those “we scammed the scammer” video on YouTube distasteful.
I’ve really been enjoying using Micro.blog. Something about having a little bit ownership of one feed and having that go to other channels. Admittedly, Micro.blog is still a service that can go away, but at least its a more easy exported RSS-supported blog.
It is always funny to me that Nissan does not own nissan.com. It belongs to some kind of computer company that posts very Web 1.0 content. Keep on holding out!
What’s the oldest piece of tech you use regularly? I started thinking of this when I saw my mom was still using her original iPad we got her back in Christmas 2010 (its a tethered solitaire machine now). Mine is probably my Nikon N90s SLR, which date back to the mid-90s.
It’s amazing the coverage Bluesky gets from where it is at as a network. It saw outages and performance degradation after adding 5000 users in a day. For comparison, Mastodon regularly adds almost twice that many in a day. Of course, this also underscores the other issue with Bluesky, although often billed as decentralized, it actually isn’t federated. So it still has a centralized point of failure.
Of course, Mastodon servers have buckled under the strain of no users. But the seemingly paultry numbers that put Bluesky in fits speaks to just how small it still is.
So Cyber Security Headlines just turned 3! It’s really weird to think I started this deep in the pandemic. The time has flown and I’m really proud of how the show has grown and developed since we started. Can’t wait to bring in more new voices over the course of this year.
Zoom caused a minor internet kerfuffle with some overly broad ToS. These terms made it sound like Zoom could train AI systems on customer logs and potentially calls, the latter with vaguely defined consent. Now it’s walking that back with specifics:
Zoom has updated its terms of service and reworded a blog post explaining recent terms of service changes referencing its generative AI tools. The company now explicitly states that “communications-like” customer data isn’t being used to train artificial intelligence models for Zoom or third parties. What is covered by communications-like? Basically, the content of your videoconferencing on Zoom.
In the arms race for datasets to train LLMs, it’s easy to see this as Zoom trying to open up a customer treasure trove on the sly. But enough years on Daily Tech News Show taught me never to ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence, or at least over zealous lawyers. We’ve seen this pattern over and over again, lawyers trying to give a company plenty of wiggle room, people see this and assume there is a larger objective, company revises terms.
This isn’t to say we should give these companies a pass for shoddily written ToS. We should highlight obvious overreach and potential for abuse. These terms are obscure by design and without (occasionally) hyperbolic coverage of them, we’d likely never see them. Still it’s always my instinct to withhold ire in these cases until the company responds.
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…
