Andrew Orr

Although Silicon Valley has changed the world through its proliferation of tech companies, it has also created a bunch of problems, says Antonio Martínez from Wired. He says that Silicon Valley has created a modern caste system.

But it is the vision of the future that San Francisco offers: highly stratified, with little social mobility. It’s feudalism with better marketing. Today’s “sharing” economy resembles the “sharecropping” of yesteryear, with the serfs responding to a smartphone prompt rather than an overseer’s command…Inequality rarely decreases, and when it does it’s often as the result of wars, revolutions, pandemics, or state collapse.

Actress Rosey Blair and her husband were on a plane recently, and they live tweeted a “love story” between passengers sitting in front of them. It was rife with photos and details to her followers, and many saw it as an invasion of privacy where the people didn’t consent.

Of course, the sexual implication is something [the man is] praised for, while the woman is attacked…There’s another unfortunate dimension to this whole saga that mimics the coercive effect of public marriage proposals: everyone innocently cheers on the romance because it tells a good story, but it places the woman in the invidious position of being the “bad guy” if she says no.

Leif Johnson writes how the App Store changed his life.

All the recent talk about the App Store’s 10th anniversary makes me wonder if I’d have finished it if I had access to the same apps I now enjoy on my iPhone and my iPad. That sometimes makes the frustrations feels almost fun. Discussions of the App Store’s impact tend to focus on how it gave thousands of small-time developers a good way to make money or how it changed our social lives; we give relatively little attention to how it simplified our routines. I don’t think I’d be the same person I am today without it. Heck, I’ll bet the same could be said about you.

Writing for Macworld, Dan Moren wants Apple products to be colorful again. Apple products like the iPhone and IPad come in metallic colors like silver, gray, and gold, but they aren’t as colorful as the products of old with the six colors of the old Apple logo.

The recent chromatic identity of Apple has clearly been one of simplicity and elegance. From the featureless white room in which Jony Ive seems to give all his product spiels to the non-illuminating Apple logo on the latest notebook computers, the company’s design over the past decade and change has often seemed to treat colors as frivolous and silly. Even that six-color Apple logo, long the distinctive badge of the company, was retired in 1998; for the last 15 years or so, it’s merely been a monochromatic silhouette.

Thousands of iOS and Android apps are leaking data. Over 113 GB of data have been exposed because of 2,271 misconfigured Firebase databases. Firebase is a service that Google offers that contains tools that developers use to create mobile and web apps. Cloud messaging, push notifications, database, analytics, advertising, and more are all tools that Firebase offers, which makes it a popular tool, at least among Android developers.

Starting with January 2018, Appthority researchers scanned mobile apps that used Firebase systems to store user data, analyzing the app’s communications pattern for requests made to Firebase domains.

After scanning more than 2.7 million iOS and Android apps, researchers said they identified 28,502 mobile apps (27,227 Android and 1,275 iOS) that connected and stored data inside Firebase backends.

The EU is considering a new copyright law, and critics say it could endanger parts of the internet. Everything from memes, music remixes, and even news would be affected. Italy Wikipedia shut down in protest because editors say “Wikipedia itself would be at risk of closing.”

Two particular parts of the new rules – articles 11 and 13 – have been the focus of much criticism online. Article 13 has been the most controversial, requiring websites to enforce copyright, even on content uploaded by users. Article 11 of the proposed law requires online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content.

Writing for AppleInsider, Daniel Dilger makes the argument that iPads are the new PC, and Apple isn’t targeting PC switchers anymore. The “What’s a Computer” commercial seems to be one of the most hated ads of all time. It sends a clear message that the iPad is the computer for the majority of people, and only people in specialized professions need a Mac.

This year, Apple again devoted massive new attention to macOS Mojave at its Worldwide Developer Conference. And fittingly so, because developing software for its massive mobile iOS platform requires a Mac. Apple’s macOS Mojave is still a work in progress, but the strategy is clear: Welcome to the Mac for iOS users.

Popular website StumbleUpon is closing down. First launching in 2002, it was a content discovery platform that helped people find cool stuff before the likes of Facebook and Twitter. I was a big user of StumbleUpon back in the day, and when I got my first computer the service was my main tool to explore the internet.

Creating StumbleUpon has been an amazing experience. It was the first project I worked on back in college in 2002. I have personally clicked the stumble button hundreds of thousands of times, and learned a lot in the process. But it’s now time to focus on the future, and create the next discovery platform that will uncover hidden gems we would never think to search for.