Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

David Shayer, who worked as a software engineer at Apple for 18 years across iPod, the Apple Watch, and Apple’s bug-tracking system Radar, among other projects, looks at the current iOS and macOS releases and tries to work out why they are so buggy. He writes: 1. Overloaded Feature Lists Lead to Schedule Chicken: Apple is aggressive about including significant features…

Germany’s Cybersecurity Agency Recommends Firefox As Most Secure Browser

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Firefox is the only browser that received top marks in a recent audit carried out by Germany’s cyber-security agency — the German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik — BSI). The BSI tested Mozilla Firefox 68 (ESR), Google Chrome 76, Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, and Microsoft…

Apple Responds To Reports That It is Sharing Data With Tencent

Over the weekend, reports emerged that claimed that Apple was sending users’ browsing details to Tencent to run it against Chinese company’s safe browsing feature. In a statement on Monday, an Apple spokesperson has offered a clarification: Apple protects user privacy and safeguards your data with Safari Fraudulent Website Warning, a security feature that flags websites known to be malicious in…

South Taurid meteors to peak in October?

The South Taurid meteor shower rarely produces more than 5 meteors per hour, but it’s been known to produce fireballs. The shower is long-running. Watch for these meteors in October and November. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/south-taurid-meteors-to-peak-in-october…

Solving the “Data Explosion” Problem with University of Illinois Data Mining Pioneer Jiawei Han

Jiawei Han, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was recently named a Michael Aiken Chair, one of the University’s highest awards. The endowed chair is the latest honor in Han’s distinguished and pioneering career, with notable accomplishments including creating core data mining algorithms and co-authoring the textbook that is […]
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We Are in the Middle of a Wave of Interesting New Productivity Software Startups

VC fund A16z’s Benedict Evans writes: We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups — there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares. Instead…

AI Reads Privacy Policies So You Don’t Have To — and It’s Actually Pretty Good

An anonymous reader shares a report: Don’t you absolutely hate how dense and confusing privacy policies are? Considering they’re full of gotchas and intentionally obscure legalese, it’s no surprise that hardly anyone bothers to even read them — we’ve simply accepted we’re giving up our data, and with it, our sense of privacy. But thanks to this new policy-reading AI, things…

No, asteroid 2007 FT3 won’t hit Earth in October

Why is the internet so chock-full of stories about asteroids on a collision course with Earth? At this rate, we should have been obliterated many times over already. Here comes the newest scare story: asteroid 2007 FT3. No, it won’t hit us, either. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-2007-ft3-wont-hit-earth-october-2019…

Google Unveils Code Completion Powered by Machine Learning in Dart SDK

Google’s previewing something new in the SDK for their Dart programming language: machine learning-powered automatic code completion. ZDNet reports:
ML Complete works with the editor to offer developers completions as they type their code. It’s also meant to help developers quickly explore lists of completions that are likely to be what they want next, rather than having to sort through options alphabetically….

Wired Lists ‘The Windows 10 Privacy Settings You Should Check Right Now’

“If you’re at all concerned about the privacy of your data, you don’t want to leave the default settings in place on your devices — and that includes anything that runs Windows 10,” warns a new article in Wired, listing out the “controls and options you can modify to lock down the use of your data, from the information you share…