Despite the seemingly universal outrage about tech companies scraping the open Web to train their models, Adam Engst finds himself largely unperturbed.
If Slack on the iPhone displays “Only some people can post.” in channels where you should have posting permissions, force-quit it to fix the problem.
Slack will be reducing its data storage needs and trying to incentivize free teams to upgrade by deleting data older than a year from free workspaces. Only the last 90 days of data is visible anyway; the change affects only those who upgrade to a paid plan and would previously have recovered all old data.
We’re starting the process of moving TidBITS servers to the Cloudways managed hosting service, so don’t worry if you see occasional hiccups in the next few weeks.
University of Maryland security researchers used a clever approach to querying Apple’s location API to determine the locations of more than two billion Wi-Fi access points worldwide. You can opt out.
Want to wax nostalgic? This history of online messaging system is sure to trigger some memories of when the Internet was a smaller, kinder place.
An update to the Arc Search app for the iPhone gives Arc users using macOS and Windows access to all their tabs and the ability to save pages from the iPhone to the Arc sidebar.
Google’s new Find My Device network works nearly identically to Apple’s Find My network with a few exceptions: Google’s design offers more anti-stalking and privacy features than Apple.
This must-read from The Verge weaves background about the undersea fiber optic connections that make the modern Internet possible with the story of what one maintenance ship went through repairing cables in the aftermath of the 2011 undersea earthquake off the coast of Japan.
The Browser Company has been busy with its Arc Web browser, adding features to speed up searching, organize tab clutter, and more. Also new is an Arc Search app for the iPhone.
After a network hiccup caused his HomeKit-enabled smart thermostat to lose its network connection, Glenn Fleishman had to do tweaky network reconfiguration to get it to rejoin his Home setup.
The results of our poll asking which Apple services TidBITS readers use are in, with iCloud+ proving the most popular by far, followed by a surprisingly strong showing from Apple TV+. Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness+ brought up the rear, but remember, TidBITS readers aren’t representative of the overall Apple audience.
In an announcement that the tech press likely cares about more than everyday users, Apple said Messages will support the RCS messaging standard alongside SMS and MMS sometime next year.
We’ve been dealing with some server-side issues of late, and Adam Engst takes you behind the curtains to apologize for an email delivery failure and explain how we blocked an onslaught of spambot-created accounts.
Apple has released details about Contact Key Verification, an upcoming option in Messages that lets you manually verify an iMessage correspondent’s identity without relying on encryption data managed centrally by Apple. The feature also watches for anomalies, warning you when changes prevent it from guaranteeing a conversation is with the same person.