We’re finally getting more vault space!

The standard is being called either a “multi-device FIDO credential” or just a “passkey.” Instead of a long string of characters, this new scheme would have the app or website you’re logging in to push a request to your phone for authentication. From there, you’d need to unlock the phone, authenticate with some kind of pin or biometric, and then you’re on your way. This sounds fantastic. I want to learn more about the implementation details though.

I came up with a shortcut that lets me post to this blog quickly from my phone. I didn’t want it to be too involved, with a lot of prompts for tags and categories, etc… more like posting to Twitter. One thing I wanted to be able to do was include hashtags in the post and have those be automatically converted into Hugo tags, ideally clickable within the post too.

Now we see that the Mac Studio shot up to just over 180 GFlops performance on 16 cores (using only performance cores), over twice the performance that the 2019 Mac Pro reached with 28 cores. What’s more, the slope of the performance curve is dramatically different. Whereas the 2019 Mac Pro labored to add additional performance past about 14 cores, the Mac Studio shows very little fall off, indicating that the 16 cores had plenty of bandwidth for memory access and parallel communication without competing with each other very much.

If the sources quoted in this report are correct, however, Apple could expand Private Relay as an always-on feature for other in-app traffic. This is great, more like this please. source (Apple News)

Mr. Musk’s proposed changes for the platform include softening its stance on content moderation, creating an edit feature for tweets, making Twitter’s algorithm open source—which would allow people outside the company to view it and suggest changes—and relying less on advertising, among other ideas. Well, there goes the neighbourhood. source (Apple News)

Just amazing.

Senator Lana Theis accused me by name of grooming and sexualizing children in an attempt to marginalize me for standing up against her marginalizing the LGBTQ community...in a fundraising email, for herself.

Hate wins when people like me stand by and let it happen. I won't. pic.twitter.com/jL5GU42bTv

— Mallory McMorrow (@MalloryMcMorrow) April 19, 2022

Here it is. ❤️ + ⚡️ pic.twitter.com/PImDUFzM04

— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) April 18, 2022

This is a long video, but if you want to understand crypto, NFTs and how it’s all a scam, this is a must watch video.

Microsoft is acquiring Activision, the troubled publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo. The deal will value Activision at $68.7 billion, far in excess of the $26 billion Microsoft paid to acquire LinkedIn in 2016. It’s Microsoft’s biggest push into gaming, and the company says it will be the “third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony” once the deal closes. source

Having Google give other companies advice on a messaging strategy is a laughable idea though, since Google probably has the least credibility of any tech company when it comes to messaging services. If the company really wants to do something about iMessage, it should try competing with it. As we recently detailed in a 25,000-word article, Google’s messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google’s CEO, no division is really “in charge” of messaging.

86% of iOS devices are running a recent enough version of the software to be presented with ATT prompts, according to an October report from AppsFlyer. Of the people who see the pop-up, 38% are opting-in, and 62% are opting-out. Overwhelmingly people do not want to be tracked online for the chance of “personalized” ads. source (Apple News)

The handheld PC will first start shipping to fans in February 2022, two months past its original schedule. Valve blamed the global supply chain for the device’s delay. source

Kuo explained that the “simplest scenario” for providing LEO connectivity to users is if individual network operators work with Globalstar. This means that customers of a partner network operator could use Globalstar’s satellite communication service on the ‌iPhone 13‌ directly through their network operator with no additional contracts or payments required. source

While the foundation says it kept the concept of a “regret” vague on purpose, it judged that 12.2 percent of reported videos violated YouTube’s own rules for content, and noted that about nine percent of them (nearly 200 in total) have been removed from YouTube Not good source

Windows 11 will only officially support 8th Gen and newer Intel Core processors, alongside Apollo Lake and newer Pentium and Celeron processors. That potentially rules out millions of existing Windows 10 devices from upgrading to Windows 11 with full support, and even devices like Microsoft’s own Surface Studio 2 which the company is still selling right now for $3,499. Pretty sure the CPU in my desktop is not supported considering I bought the machine 7+ years ago.

Signal at it again We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea. source

Looking at both UFED and Physical Analyzer, though, we were surprised to find that very little care seems to have been given to Cellebrite’s own software security. Industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses are missing, and many opportunities for exploitation are present. And For example, by including a specially formatted but otherwise innocuous file in an app on a device that is then scanned by Cellebrite, it’s possible to execute code that modifies not just the Cellebrite report being created in that scan, but also all previous and future generated Cellebrite reports from all previously scanned devices and all future scanned devices in any arbitrary way (inserting or removing text, email, photos, contacts, files, or any other data), with no detectable timestamp changes or checksum failures.

The Rich Communication Services (RCS) rollout continues to be a hopeless disaster. A year and a half ago, the cellular carriers created the “Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI),” a joint venture between AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon that would roll out enhanced messaging to the masses in 2020. Now, Light Reading is reporting that initiative is dead, meaning that the carriers have accomplished basically nothing on the RCS front in the past 18 months.

Really digging my new mask