Favorites April 24, 2021

Gonna start this week with relatively old news, this is from Wednesday:

nilay patel @reckless

Apple faced down a congressional hearing in Congress about the App Store today. ⁦@kellymakena⁩ with highlights: theverge.com/2021/4/21/2239…

So, right off the top, that ‘one fifth’ number is wild. Apple appears to have been under more scrutiny because their policies are harsher. My favorite detail is that not only are you not allowed to take digital payments via the app, but you can’t even say that you accept payments on your website. You can’t even mention that Apple gets a 30% cut.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I’m a little surprised they’ve backed themselves into this position, normally companies get better legal/lobbying advice about how to not press things to the point where you end up with zero friends and no credible defenders.

Apple appears to have had zero friends in the senate during this hearing.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

“In Surat, an industrial city in Gujarat, the grills used to burn bodies have been operating so relentlessly that the iron on some has actually melted.”

nytimes.comAs Covid-19 Devastates India, Deaths Go UndercountedFatalities have been overlooked or downplayed, understating the human toll of the country’s outbreak, which accounts for nearly half of all new cases in a global surge.

Things are bad in India.

NBC News @NBCNews

JUST IN: President Biden officially recognizes the killing of more than a million Armenians by Ottoman Turks more than a century ago as genocide.

nbcnews.toBiden calls mass killing of Armenians a genocideNBC’s Monica Alba reports on President Biden’s statement released earlier where he becomes the first U.S. president to acknowledge the mass killing of Armenians as a “genocide.” Leaders before Biden failed to acknowledge the event as a genocide over diplomatic fear of angering Turkey.

And here’s an analysis on how Biden’s position differs from previous presidents

Viz Comic @vizcomic

subscribe.viz.co.uk

As one commenter noted, don’t forget to pump up the balloons while *outside* your now argon-filled house.

Those are drones

Charlie Stross @cstross

Your next-level cyberwar attack is to put a drone QR code in the sky that downloads a zero-day exploit to onlookers’ phones that co-opts them into a botnet targeting NATSEC assets. Paid for by a shell Scottish limited-liability partnership using untraceable Dogecoins, of course.

John Pathfinder Lester @Pathfinder

A scannable QR code advertisement created by drones above the skies of Shanghai. Beautiful. https://t.co/s3T4Fb9314

Finally, I thought I’d mention this year I got another of my photos featured on Chromecast as a background.

Photo taken by me in 2017 in Howth, Ireland

You can see the other photos I’ve had featured on Chromecast here.