Andrew Orr

Technology or not, at the end of the day Google is an advertising company. So how is it going to make money when a large percentage of people are blocking ads? Nothing short of offline surveillance.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Mastercard Inc. brokered a business partnership during about four years of negotiations, according to four people with knowledge of the deal, three of whom worked on it directly. The alliance gave Google an unprecedented asset for measuring retail spending, part of the search giant’s strategy to fortify its primary business against onslaughts from Amazon.com Inc. and others.

Google made a secret deal with Mastercard to track your purchases in the offline world. And I’m sure it will move to partner with other banking institutions as well. This is how it will win the war against adblockers.

A hacking team called WindShift has been responsible for hacking Macs for the past couple of years. They target certain individuals working in government departments in the Middle East.

Karim, a researcher at cybersecurity company DarkMatter, said the attackers had found a way to “bypass all native macOS security measures.” Once they’d penetrated those defenses, the malware would exfiltrate documents of interest and continuously take screenshots of the victims’ desktops. The attacks have been ongoing from 2016, through to today, the researcher added.

Scary stuff, and it sounds like whatever vulnerabilities WindShift is finding affect all Mac models. That being said, these are highly targeted attacks, so the rest of us probably don’t have to worry.

Imran Chaudri—an original iPhone designer—worked on the first iPhone’s user interface, and was once director of Apple’s human interfaces group. He talked to Fast Company about his time at Apple and some of Apple’s flaws.

There are issues any time you do something unnatural, when you ask humanity to interact with machines. It’s that simple. The side effects of interfacing with machines, whether it’s knobs and dials, or clicks and taps, or swipes and gestures, are always going to be there. You have to be smart enough to be ahead of them and anticipate what they are.

Even when using the first iPhone, Mr. Chaudri knew that a feature like Do No Disturb would be important.

Auckland energy company Vector partnered with AI company Soul Machines to create a digital teacher called Will.

Will’s there to teach children about energy use. Students interact with Will — essentially just a face on a screen — via their desktop, tablet, or mobile device. He teaches them about different forms of renewable energy, such solar and wind. Will can then ask the students questions about what they’ve learned to ensure the lessons stick.

Thankfully it’s not teaching an entire curriculum, because education probably doesn’t need AI teachers. Maybe in developing countries, where lack of education/teachers is a problem. But in first-world countries, we should just pay human teachers better.

Ian Bogost writes that these recent scandals involving Google and Facebook mistreating is just the tip of the iceberg. Data collection, along with data brokers, has been happening for decades.

But none of this is new, nor is it unique to big tech. Online services are only accelerating the reach and impact of data-intelligence practices that stretch back decades. They have collected your personal data, with and without your permission, from employers, public records, purchases, banking activity, educational history, and hundreds more sources. They have connected it, recombined it, bought it, and sold it. Processed foods look wholesome compared to your processed data, scattered to the winds of a thousand databases.

I hope that the U.S. adopts its own federal privacy law like GDPR. Talks have been underway, so there’s a glimmer of hope.

Certain smartphone apps help you to report sexual assault, and many who have used them say it’s less traumatizing than reporting face-to-face:

One student who says she was sexually harassed on campus by another student says she was too full of fear, and shame to take her complaint to campus administrators. Even as, she says, the harassment started to cause depression and anxiety, she couldn’t bring herself to walk into the school’s Title IX office to tell a stranger her story. Fighting back tears, she recalls being “afraid of being blamed,” and afraid that she wouldn’t be believed. She also worried it would have been too embarrassing to recount the explicit, vulgar language that was involved.

These apps encrypt a person’s report, and you can either send it directly to authorities or use it as a time-stamped record to hold on to until you’re ready to submit it.

Rebecca Dolan writes about various reasons why people wear AirPods besides listening to music. Some people are wearing AirPods because they don’t want other people to talk to them in certain settings.

Zach Miles learned a valuable lesson shortly before graduating this year from Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. Walking across campus while wearing his AirPods earphones kept people at a distance. “If you’re not in the mood to talk to somebody, or if you’re in a hurry, it gives someone a visual signal,” he said.

Mr. Miles brought that knowledge to his working life in Colorado Springs, Colo., where his AirPods remain a shield against awkward small talk. “It’s a crutch,” admitted the 22-year-old app developer.

Beware of rich people wanting to change the world. Changing the world is something we hear quite often in Silicon Valley, but it usually rings hollow.

At first, you think: Rich people making a difference — so generous! Until you consider that America might not be in the fix it’s in had we not fallen for the kind of change these winners have been selling: fake change.

Of course, world-changing initiatives funded by the winners of market capitalism do heal the sick, enrich the poor and save lives. But even as they give back, American elites generally seek to maintain the system that causes many of the problems they try to fix — and their helpfulness is part of how they pull it off. Thus their do-gooding is an accomplice to greater, if more invisible, harm.

A good example of this is Elon Musk. If he can’t turn it into a publicity stunt, it doesn’t matter to him. Whatever happened to his “fixing” of the Flint water crisis?