TMO Link

U.S. Senators agreed to subpoena the CEOs of Twitter, Alphabet’s Google and Facebook on Thursday, Reuters reported. It is part of the lawmakers’ investigation into Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The panel’s top Democrat Maria Cantwell, who opposed the move last week, saying she was against using “the committee’s serious subpoena power for a partisan effort 40 days before an election,” changed her mind and voted to approve the move. “I actually can’t wait to ask Mr. Zuckerberg further questions,” Cantwell said. “I welcome the debate about 230.” The committee, chaired by Republican Senator Roger Wicker, had originally asked the executives to come on Oct. 1 on a voluntary basis and was ready to issue subpoenas last week. On Thursday, he said Section 230’s “sweeping liability protections” are stifling diversity of political discourse on the internet. “After extending an invite to these executives, I regret that they have again declined to participate and answer questions about issues that are so visible and urgent to the American people,” Wicker said.

The battle between Apple and Epic Games is heating up. Reporting from John Gruber at Daring Fireball shed an interesting light on one element of the row regarding Sign In With Apple (SIWA). Epic claimed it had been told that Fortnite players would access to the service on September 11, 2020.

Worth noting: Apple publicly stated that it was not doing anything to stop SIWA from working for Epic… I spent a few hours back on September 9 digging into this SIWA story, and multiple sources at Apple told me Epic’s claims were simply false. There was never a September 11 deadline for their SIWA support to stop working, and in fact, Apple’s SIWA team performed work to make sure SIWA continued working for Fortnite users despite the fact that Epic Games’s developer account had been revoked. There was no “extension” because Apple was never going to revoke Epic’s SIWA access.

Apple hiring Siri Annotation Analysts, as it apparently prepares to expand the use of its voice assistant, MacRumors. The countries covered include Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, amongst others.

Apple’s office in Cork, Ireland is hiring people fluent in Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Croatian, Greek, Flemish, Romanian, and as ThinkApple points out, Polish. Apple is also hiring people fluent in Indonesian and Vietnamese out of a Singapore office. As described in job listings, Annotation Analysts that work for Apple listen to and transcribe snippets of ‌Siri‌ conversations to evaluate ‌Siri‌’s responses… These kinds of ‌Siri‌ evaluations were previously done by third-party contracting companies but Apple brought the work in-house following a mid-2019 uproar over the way Apple used ‌Siri‌ recordings for evaluation with little notice to customers.

I remember when Windows 7 came out, there were lots of raised eyebrows and jokes that it looked rather a lot like Mac OS X. (“I’m a Mac… and Windows 7 was my idea.”) Of course, the rivalry and accusations of copying from both sides had begun long before that. The Verge reported that a leak of Windows XP code revealed some very Apple-like features in one theme. (Image credit: The Verge.)

A recent Windows XP source code leak has revealed Microsoft’s early work on the operating system and some unreleased themes the company created during its early XP development back in 2000. One is labeled “Candy” and includes a design that closely resembles Apple’s Aqua interface that was first introduced at the Macworld Conference & Expo in 2000. Although the theme is incomplete, the Windows XP Start button and various buttons and UI elements are clearly themed to match Apple’s Aqua. Microsoft never released its Aqua theme for Windows XP, and we understand it was used in early source code for the OS. Windows developers appear to have used the theme as a placeholder to build the theme engine for Windows XP.