Ron Amadeo writing for Ars Technica (Apple News) Unlike the clean OSes you’d get from Google or Apple, Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder via pre-installed crapware. A company like Facebook will buy a spot on Samsung’s system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that aren’t granted to app store apps, letting it more effectively spy on users. Yikes.

John Gruber writing over at Daring Fireball None of these Android clients would garner any attention at all on iOS. Tooot and the official Mastodon client are also available on iOS, and seemingly offer the same features and same basic interfaces on both platforms. There’s a reason third-party clients are overwhelmingly more popular on iOS than Mastodon’s official client — yet the Mastodon app is clearly among the best on Android.

Iron bubble time #Destiny2

Zack Zwiezen writing for Kotaku Bungie realized that this was being caused after it moved some “currently incompletable” challenges into a different area of the game’s data. To do this, Bungie used a “very powerful” tool that lets the studio tinker with a player’s game state and account. Apparently, due to a configuration error, Bungie accidentally “re-ran an older state migration process” used in a past update. Because of this error, the tool copied old data from this past update into the current version of the game, which basically undid some players’ recent in-game accomplishments

This is too funny 😂 🤦🏻‍♂️ From @nickheer@c.im over on Mastodon.

From Bungie TL;DR: Consolidation is a major theme in many of the changes you’ll be seeing today. The current (pre-Lightfall) mod system has been built piecemeal over the years and contains a lot of redundancies. The Loadouts system empowers Guardians to suit up for whatever task, on the fly. Up to ten slots available to save multiple loadouts. This single-screen system also provides opportunities for players to create and share their loadouts with the community more easily.

I converted some of my Twitter lists into RSS feeds using rss.app so I can keep up with Twitter without actually being on Twitter.

Finished watching season 1 of #SlowHorses last night, excellent show! Will probably start season 2 tonight.

Oliver Haslam writing for iMore The issue, which is affecting Twitter apps on all platforms including iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows, hasn’t yet been confirmed by Twitter, and, worryingly, it isn’t yet known whether the problem is a glitch or the result of a decision made by Twitter itself. Still no word from Twitter. My guess is this is intentional, but we’ll see.

Took a few tries, but got it done in the end. 💥

Jon Porter writing for The Verge (Apple News) Pixel 7 owners are taking to Twitter and Reddit to report that the glass covering the phone’s rear camera is shattering, despite the phone apparently not being knocked or dropped. PhoneArena and Android Police have pulled together photos from numerous owners showing the damage to their handsets, with reports stretching back at least as far as November — just a month after the phone went on general sale.

Happy new year 🥳

Joseph Menn writing for The Washington Post The step is likely to draw protests from multiple governments, some of which could take legislative or court action or deny Apple access to their markets. Top law enforcement officials in the United States, Britain and other democracies have railed against strong encryption, and some have passed laws they could use to try to force companies to cooperate against their customers. There are plenty of ways “the bad guys” can encrypt/hide their communications.

Jonas Degrave writing on Engraved Today, Frederic Besse told me that he managed to do something different. Did you know, that you can run a whole virtual machine inside of ChatGPT? This is crazy! None of these commands are actually running, the output is just what the AI thinks should be the output. Thing is, it’s almost always right.

Manuel Vonau writing for Android Police Spotted by Google malware reverse engineering expert Łukasz Siewierski (via Mishaal Rahman), the certificates in question are platform certificates meant to verify the authenticity of the “android” application that’s part of every phone, but are also used to sign individual apps from manufacturers. The problem is that this core android application has the highest level of access to the system, allowing it almost unrestricted access to user data.

Peter Johnson writing for electrek Beam’s EV ARC chargers can generate and store their own electricity by harnessing renewable energy from the sun. The charging infrastructure is designed to handle extreme weather with flood-proof capabilities up to 9.5 feet and wind resistance of 125 mph. I wonder how long this takes to charge. I assume it charges up a portable battery over time and then uses that to charge a vehicle.

Some pictures from our recent Holland America cruise through the Caribbean. Cruise Ship Nieuw Statendam Guitar Sculpture Island Bridge Sunset

Lounging on the deck, sailing to Aruba.

Finally getting around to watching #SheHulk

Trying out the very new social network Planetary at https://planetary.link/%40qF08d%2FZIS0o%2Fnjqb5zZWExTkT2ONT7EZRuAcQE09jn0%3D.ed25519

Tweet deleted 😢 What we learned from COVID? That oil is worthless in a society without consumption. That healthcare has to be public because health is public. That 50% of jobs can be done from home while the other 50% deserve more than they’re being paid. That we live in a society not an economy

I think I might get the new 12.9” iPad Pro. My iPad Air 2 is definitely showing its age.

Been reading Snow Crash on and off for a while now. I’m about 75% of the way through it 📚

Lightfall looks awesome, strand looks amazing, and season of plunder looks like loads of fun! #destiny