Technology
technology
LATEST ARTICLES - PAGE 13

Cloudflare Announces Privacy-First DNS Service

Jason Tate

Cloudflare:

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We’re excited today to take another step toward that mission with the launch of 1.1.1.1 — the Internet’s fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service. This post will talk a little about what that is and a lot about why we decided to do it.

Lucas Matney, writing at TechCrunch:

The company says that the new service will help keep some data out of ISPs’ hands and that they won’t keep data in their hands for long either. Cloudflare has pledged to both never write users’ IP addresses to disk and that they’ll purge all logs from their system after 24 hours.

You can find out how to use this service on different devices here.

Amazon’s Music Storage Shutting Down in April

amazon
Jason Tate

Nick Statt, writing at The Verge:

We’ve known since last year that Amazon Music was planning to shut down its dedicated cloud music locker. Now, we have a date for when that process will begin. In an email to Amazon Music users, the company says uploaded songs will be removed from a user’s library on April 30th, 2018. You can however keep any music in the cloud by proactively going to your Music Settings and clicking the “Keep my songs” button.

The (Not Great) Business of Streaming Music

Pandora
Jason Tate

Keith Nelson Jr. sat down with Pandora’s vice president of global content licensing, Elizabeth Moody, to talk about streaming services, the future of music licensing, and the inherent issues these services are seeing trying to turn a profit:

I think that it’s going to take a shift in the structure of the industry to really allow digital services like Spotify or other competitors to have a fully sustainable business. You see pure-play services like Spotify and Pandora suffering while there are companies like Amazon and Google and Apple that can use music as a loss leader for other services. […] I mean, right now, the record labels (and then the music publishers) are really taking the lion’s share of the revenue. You know, sometimes the artists or others will argue it’s getting stuck at the labels. I think it’s a more complicated problem than just saying, “Oh they’re not paying the artists.”

YouTube Will ‘Frustrate’ Some Users With Ads So They Pay for Music

YouTube
Jason Tate

Lucas Shaw, writing for Bloomberg:

People who treat YouTube like a music service, those passively listening for long periods of time, will encounter more ads, according to Lyor Cohen, the company’s global head of music. “You’re not going to be happy after you are jamming ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and you get an ad right after that,” Cohen said in an interview at the South by Southwest music festival.

Correct, in fact I’d be so annoyed I’d go sign up for a music service like Spotify or Apple Music instead.

How Claire Evans Is Writing Women Back Into the Internet

Jason Tate

Addie Wagenknecht interviewed Claire Evans, the author of the new book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, for Forbes:

The easy thing is to say that Broad Band is a feminist history of the Internet. That’s what I’ve been telling people. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a history of the Internet told through women’s stories: boots-on-the-ground accounts of where the women were, how they were feeling and working, at specific, formative moments in Internet history. It emphasizes users and those who design for use, while many popular tech histories tend to zero in on the box

This book looks extremely in my wheelhouse. Can’t wait to read it.

Amazon Echo Is Randomly Laughing at People

amazon
Jason Tate

Shannon Liao, writing at The Verge:

Over the past few days, users with Alexa-enabled devices have reported hearing strange, unprompted laughter. Amazon responded to the creepiness in a statement to The Verge, saying, “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.”

As noted in media reports and a trending Twitter moment, Alexa laughs without being prompted to wake. People on Twitter and Reddit reported that they thought it was an actual person laughing near them, which can be scary when you’re home alone. Many responded to the cackling sounds by unplugging their Alexa-enabled devices.

Cool. Cool. Not creepy at all.

Shazam Gets an Updated Design

Apple
Jason Tate

MacStories:

As it turns out, Shazam has continued to be updated and support Spotify since Apple’s acquisition. In fact, there have been at least four updates to Shazam since the acquisition including one today that adds synchronized lyrics and a design refresh of the app’s results screen.

The new UI looks great. The results screen is dominated by a background image of the artist. In the foreground is a big play button, the name of the song the app recognized, and the name of the artist. If you tap on the artwork, you get an image of the artist and album in some cases, plus more details on the artist, album, song, and release date.

It looks pretty good.

Blog: Everything Easy is Hard Again

Jason Tate

Frank Chimero, writing on his blog:

This past summer, I gave a lecture at a web conference and afterward got into a fascinating conversation with a young digital design student. It was fun to compare where we were in our careers. I had fifteen years of experience designing for web clients, she had one year, and yet some how, we were in the same situation: we enjoyed the work, but were utterly confused and overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing complexity of it all. What the hell happened?

Great post.

Podcast Listeners Really Are the Holy Grail Advertisers Hoped They’d Be

Podcast
Jason Tate

Miranda Katz, writing for Wired:

Podcasters and advertisers alike have long suspected that their listeners might just be a holy grail of engagement. The medium is inherently intimate, and easily creates a one-sided feeling of closeness between listener and host—the sense that the person talking into your ear on your commute is someone you know, whose product recommendations you trust, and whose work you want to support.

I really need to find the time to get Encore rolling again on a more consistent basis. I miss doing the show every week.

I Quit Twitter and It Feels Great

Twitter
Jason Tate

Lindy West, writing for The New York Times:

When you work in media, Twitter becomes part of your job. It’s where you orient yourself in “the discourse” — figure out what’s going on, what people are saying about it and, more important, what no one has said yet. In a lucky coup for Twitter’s marketing team, prevailing wisdom among media types has long held that quitting the platform could be a career killer. The illusion that Twitter visibility and professional relevance are indisputably inextricable always felt too risky to puncture. Who could afford to call that bluff and be wrong? So, we stayed, while Twitter’s endemic racist, sexist and transphobic harassment problems grew increasingly more sophisticated and organized.

I think about this all the time. There are times when I find Twitter indispensable (while watching a sporting event and following experts, or when huge news breaks), but at what cost?

Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

Jason Tate

The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc.’s streaming-music service, introduced in June 2015, has been adding subscribers in the U.S. more rapidly than its older Swedish rival—a monthly growth rate of 5% versus 2%—according to people in the music business familiar with figures reported by the two services. Assuming that pace continues, Apple will overtake Spotify in the world’s biggest music market this summer.

Interesting.

Blog: Your Twitter Followers are Probably Bots

Twitter
Jason Tate

Elaine:

The New York Times had an interesting feature over the weekend in which it calls out various social media influencers for follower fraud. Many people who appear to have huge Twitter followings actually don’t, and their fans are in fact paid-for bots. Oooh, busted! Apparently there’s a class of people who make a career out of being popular on Twitter, and it is terribly scandalous that they are not as cool as they might seem. […]

The NYTimes analysis is compelling, but their target account selection was awfully limited. So I reproduced their Twitter tool to continue the investigation.

This is pretty cool. I’ve told this story before, but a few years back we ran a story on AbsolutePunk.net about how a certain band member in a certain band had most certainly paid for followers on Twitter. His (very mature) response was to buy a bunch of followers on my account. To this day I don’t really know how many were part of that (I tried to block and report a bunch of them at the time), but I do know that once my account got “verified” I see random, clearly bot, accounts start following me all the time.

Letterboxd Comes to iPad

Apps
Jason Tate

Letterboxd, an app for tracking movies that I’ve talked a bit about before, has launched version 2.0:

In the 22 months since the launch of our iPhone app, we’ve consistently received the same feedback: please make this work on my iPad! We’re pleased to announce that today we’ve shipped Letterboxd 2.0 for iOS, a universal app with native iPad support that brings the richness of our community to the larger form factor.

You can follow me here if you’re interested.