With a phone, anywhere else is always just a tap away. From a column: Those old enough to remember video-rental stores will recall the crippling indecision that would overtake you while browsing their shelves. With so many options, any one seemed unappealing, or insufficient. In a group, different tastes or momentary preferences felt impossible to balance. Everything was there, so there…
Tag: options
The Boring Company’s Las Vegas Tunnel Is Nearly 50 Percent Complete
According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, Elon Musk’s Boring Company is now about 50% complete with its underground tunnel. It’s about six football fields in length. Teslarati reports: The Boring Company officially started tunneling for the people mover after a ceremonial groundbreaking event on November 15. In just two months, the project is nearly halfway completed. The company’s…
Dating and Fertility Apps Among Those Snitching To ‘Out of Control’ Ad Tech, Report Finds
The Norwegian Consumer Council published an analysis of how popular apps are sharing user data with the behavioral ad industry. TechCrunch reports the findings: A majority of the apps that were tested for the report were found to transmit data to “unexpected third parties” — with users not being clearly informed about who was getting their information and what they were…
App Tracking Alert In iOS 13 Has Dramatically Cut Location Data Flow To Ad Industry
Apple’s initiatives to minimize tracking by marketers is continuing to make life harder for the advertising industry, forcing advertisers to use inefficient data sources to pinpoint users. AppleInsider reports: Over the years, Apple has enhanced how it protects the privacy of its users online, typically by limiting what data can be seen by advertisers tracking different data points. Initiatives such as…
The End of Windows 7 ‘Marks the End of the PC Era Too’
ZDNet’s UK editor-in-chief Steve Ranger argues the end of Windows 7 “marks the end of the PC era, too.” When Windows 7 launched, the iPhone and its app store were around but were still novelties, while the iPad hadn’t arrived yet. If you wanted to get work — or pretty much anything — done on a computer, you needed a PC….
This Year’s Y2K20 Bug Came Directly From ‘A Lazy Fix’ to the Y2K Bug
Slashdot reader The8re still remembers the Y2K bug. Now he shares a New Scientist article explaining how it led directly to this year’s Y2020 bug — which affected more than just parking meters: WWE 2K20, a professional wrestling video game, also stopped working at midnight on 1 January 2020. Within 24 hours, the game’s developers, 2K, issued a downloadable fix. Another…
‘Why I Finally Switched from Chrome to Firefox – and You Should Too’
In 2018 an associate technology editor at Fast Company’s Co.Design wrote an article titled “Why I’m switching from Chrome to Firefox and you should too.” Today shanen shared a similar article from Digital Trends. Their writer announces that after years of experimenting with both browsers, they’ve also finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox — “and you should too.” The biggest…
What if Amazon’s Sellers Decided They Didn’t Need Amazon?
“Companies are finally getting really good at selling directly to consumers, forcing them to question Amazon’s value to them,” writes a columnist at the Motley Fool: Rather than one single powerhouse, the threat to Amazon comes in the form of hundreds of smaller e-commerce venues that can each take a tiny, collective stab at online shopping’s 800-pound gorilla. Within the past…
Will Iran Launch a Cyberattack Against the U.S.?
“Iranian officials are likely considering a cyber-attack against the U.S. in the wake of an airstrike that killed one of its top military officials,” reports Bloomberg: In a tweet after the airstrike on Thursday, Christopher Krebs, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, repeated a warning from the summer about Iranian malicious cyber-attacks, and urged the public to brush…
Polio Eradication Program Faces Hard Choices as Endgame Strategy Falters
The “endgame” in the decadeslong campaign to eradicate polio suffered major setbacks in 2019. From a report: While the effort lost ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which recorded 116 cases of wild polio — four times the number in 2018 — an especially alarming situation developed in Africa. In 12 countries, 196 children were paralyzed not by the wild virus, but…