Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek:
A friend of the site and Tesla tinkerer known as Green, who brought us Tesla’s new maps and navigation engine and the Autopilot debugging mode, has found a new client in Tesla’s most recent updates for the new streaming service.
It’s called ‘TTunes’, which could likely only be a placeholder name for the actual service.
Jon Fingas, writing for Engadget:
Only half of Americans who face depression get help for it, and Google is determined to increase that percentage. As of today, it’s offering a medically validated, anonymous screening questionnaire for clinical depression if you search for information on the condition. This won’t definitively indicate that you’re clinically depressed, to be clear, but it will give you useful information you can take to a doctor. And importantly, the very presence of the questionnaire promises to raise awareness and promote treatment beyond what a basic information card would offer.
When you walk into the San Francisco office of the cloud network and security firm Cloudflare, you’re greeted by a receptionist–and a giant wall of 100 lava lamps. It isn’t just a throwback to the 1960s. The lava lamps act as a random number generator, helping to encrypt the requests that go through Cloudflare, which make up 10% of all internet requests.[…]
Cloudflare turns the “Wall of Entropy” into encryption using a camera that photographs the wall every millisecond of every day of the year. Any one of the company’s systems can turn the display of pixels–which changes based on a multitude of factors, like the movement of the lava, the inclusion of anyone who’s walking by, and the shifting daylight–into random numbers.[…]
In London, they use dual pendulums. While a single pendulum swinging back and forth is very predictable, mathematicians have shown that if you take a pendulum and hang another pendulum from it, you’ll create a system that no one has figured out how to model.
White supremacist site the Daily Stormer needs to find another domain provider after getting the boot from GoDaddy. In a tweet, the company said “We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.”
They tried to move to Google, and Google rejected them as well:
Google has canceled the domain registration for The Daily Stormer, a company spokesperson confirmed Monday.
“We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service,” the spokesperson told Business Insider.
Good.
A 1 percent pop in the shares of Amazon.com — the internet company Mr. Bezos founded, which accounts for the vast majority of his wealth — was enough to bump him over the wealth of Mr. Gates, the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, according to a real-time list of billionaires by Forbes.com, which has tallied the fortunes of the uber-rich for decades.
Forbes now estimates the wealth of Mr. Bezos, currently Amazon’s chief executive, at about $90.6 billion, compared with $90 billion for Mr. Gates.
Frederic Lardinois, writing for TechCrunch:
Adobe today announced that Flash, the once-ubiquitous plugin that allowed you to play your first Justin Bieber video on YouTube and Dolphin Olympics 2 on Kongregate, will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash. Until then, Adobe will still partner with the likes of Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft and Google to offer security updates for Flash in their browsers and support new versions of them, but beyond that, Adobe will not offer any new Flash features.
Good riddance.
A collection of bands, artists, songwriters, and producers have signed a letter opposing the rolling back of net neutrality protections. The full press release can be found below.
Read More “Musicians, Record Labels Decry FCC’s Plans To Roll Back Net Neutrality Rules”
Panic at have released a great update to my favorite file transfer app:
Seven years after the first release of Transmit 4, our well-loved and widely-used macOS file transfer app, we sat down with an incredibly exhaustive list of ideas, and — this’ll sound like I’m exaggerating but I’m mostly sure I’m not — we did it all.
With one massive update we’ve brought everyone’s favorite file-transferring truck into the future with more speed, more servers, more features, more fixes, a better UI, and even Panic Sync. Everything from the core file transfer engine to the “Get Info” experience was rethought, overhauled, and improved.
It’s ten bucks off this week only.
Net Neutrality is important for the future of the internet. For smaller websites like this, it’s absolutely vital. If you have a moment to check out this website and send a letter to the FCC and congress about its importance, that would be great:
Net neutrality is the basic principle that protects our free speech on the Internet. “Title II” of the Communications Act is what provides the legal foundation for net neutrality and prevents Internet Service Providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T from slowing down and blocking websites, or charging apps and sites extra fees to reach an audience (which they then pass along to consumers.)
For those looking for more info, John Oliver’s segment is a good place to start and his follow-up from this year talks about how the new administration is making this a thing again.
Read More “Net Neutrality Is Important and It’s Kinda Stupid We Have to Keep Fighting for It”
Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch:
A new report from Nielsen out this week paints a picture of the booming on-demand audio streaming business, pointing to a significant increase in consumers’ use of streaming services and record numbers of streams being served. According to the mid-year report, which focuses only on the U.S. market, on-demand audio streams surpassed the 7 billion figure for the first time ever during March of this year.
That’s audio streams, to be clear – not just music.
That is, the term “audio” also includes non-music streams like spoken word recordings and podcasts – the latter of which has also seen rapid growth.
SoundCloud Ltd. is cutting about 40 percent of its staff in a cost-cutting move the digital music service says will give it a better financial footing to compete against larger rivals Spotify Ltd. and Apple Inc.
SoundCloud, which in January said it was at risk of running out of money, informed staff on Thursday that 173 jobs would be eliminated. It had 420 employees. The company’s operations will be consolidated at its headquarters in Berlin and another office in New York. Offices in San Francisco and London will be shut.
Guess I should start giving serious thought to where I’d host the podcast if they go under.
Katie Benner, writing for The New York Times:
Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first. Then in a rush.
One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start-up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website.
Nicholas Thompson, writing at Wired:
The algorithms that resulted were then tested on the one-fifth of the data that hadn’t been given to DeepText, to see how well the machines had matched the humans. Eventually, Instagram became satisfied with the results, and the company quietly launched the product last October. Spam began to vanish as the algorithms did their work, circling like high-IQ Roombas let loose in an apartment overrun with dust bunnies.
Brian Feldman, writing at New York Magazine:
The future of Tumblr is still an open question. The site is enormously popular among the coveted youth crowd — that’s partly why then-CEO Marissa Mayer paid $1 billion for the property in 2013 — but despite a user base near the size of Instagram’s, Tumblr never quite figured out how to make money at the level Facebook has led managers and shareholders to expect.
I haven’t read a Tumblr blog regularly since Property of Zack closed down. I haven’t even logged into my account in quite a while now. What’s the main Tumblr use case these days?
Daniel Jalkut has announced the beta for MarsEdit 4:
It’s been over 7 years since MarsEdit 3 was released. Typically I would like to maintain a schedule of releasing major upgrades every two to three years. This time, a variety of unexpected challenges led to a longer and longer delay.
The good news? MarsEdit 4 is finally shaping up. I plan to release the update later this year.
I’ve used MarsEdit for quite a while and I used to use it to publish to my original Chorus.fm Tumblr blog. Once I moved to WordPress for Chorus, I’d made so many minor tweaks to the system and my workflow that it didn’t quite do all I needed to anymore. However, this update looks like it’ll be adding in a bunch of features that may let me use it again for posting. That’d be exciting.