Demetri Sevastopulo and James Fontanella-Khan (2020, Hacker News, CNBC): TikTok will be removed from US app stores from midnight on Sunday as Washington implements executive orders from President Donald Trump that also target WeChat, a Chinese social media app. […] Oracle and ByteDance have submitted a proposal that would spin out TikTok’s global business into a new US company that would have an all-American board and a security committee headed by someone with government security clearances. The new company would initially be majority owned by ByteDance, but would seek to list publicly ..read more

H.R.7888: Section 701(b)(4) is amended[…] by inserting after subparagraph (D) the following new subparagraph[…] any other service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications[…] Elizabeth Goitein: Buried in the Section 702 reauthorization bill (RISAA) passed by the House on Friday is the biggest expansion of domestic surveillance since the Patriot Act. […] If the bill becomes law, any company or individual that provides ANY service whatsoever may be forced to assist in NSA surveillance, as long as they have access t ..read more

Fatbobman (Mastodon): This article aims to explore how to introduce elegant and safe concurrency operations similar to those of SwiftData into Core Data, implementing a Core Data version of @ModelActor. […] Following the fundamental principles of Core Data concurrency operations, all operations on managed objects must be performed on the thread of their owning context. This restriction means that the Actor model cannot be directly applied to Core Data’s concurrent operations. However, the Swift community proposed the concept of custom Actor executors through SE-392, and this functionality was ..read more

Adam Engst: News started to spread this morning on the MacAdmins Slack, Rich Trouton’s Der Flounder blog, and Tom Bridge’s site about how our friend and Take Control author Charles Edge died suddenly and unexpectedly on 19 April 2024. He was in his late 40s, and yes, his standard bio picture below gives you a feel for his sense of humor and irreverence. I met Charles at a MacTech event in New York in 2012, but I already knew that he had written a bunch of tech books and thousands of Krypted blog posts on sysadmin topics. We exchanged some email about the possibility of him writing a Take Cont ..read more

Samuel Gibbs: Fairphone, the repairable and ethical electronics pioneer, is back with a pair of some of the first Bluetooth earbuds to make it so easy and cheap to replace their batteries that you can do it at home in minutes. […] The earbuds have a little door hidden behind a silicone sleeve, which opens to reveal a small button battery ready to be replaced once it wears out. The design seems so simple you wonder why no one has tried it before. The oval top of the earbuds has a touch-sensitive surface for a good set of controls. Tap once, twice or thrice for playback controls, slide your fin ..read more

Donny Wals: We can click the Universal download link to install the Swift toolchain that you’re interested in. For example, if you’re eager to try out a cutting edge feature like Swift 6’s isolation regions feature you can download the trunk development toolchain. Or if you’re interested in trying out a feature that has made its way into the Swift 6 release branch, you could download the Swift 6.0 Development toolchain. Once you’ve downloaded your toolchain and you can install it through a convenient installer. This process is pretty self explanatory. After installing the toolchain, you can a ..read more

MacRumors (CNN, Hacker News): Apple on late Thursday into Friday removed the popular messaging and social media apps WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Threads from its App Store in China at the request of the Chinese government, The Wall Street Journal reported. […] In a statement shared with several media outlets, Apple said China’s national internet regulator ordered the removal of the apps from the App Store in the country due to unspecified “national security concerns.” Apple said it is “obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.” However, it’s A ..read more

VideoLAN (via Hacker News): App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users… For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when? VideoLAN: If you do wonder why we don’t update VLC on the Windows Store or why VLC/iOS can’t connect properly to OneDrive shares, it’s because Microsoft Kafkaïesque bureaucracy refuses to help us. We’re only trying to contact someone since 2years… VideoLAN (Anisse, Hacker News): If you wonder why we can’t update t ..read more

Alan Baradlay et al.: We made our fast JSON stringifier work for unicode characters. We also analyzed profile data carefully and made JSON.parse faster than ever. […] We took the release of the new Speedometer 3.0 benchmark as an opportunity to adjust inlining heuristics based on data collected in modern Apple silicon Macs with the latest JavaScriptCore. […] Prior to the opportunistic task scheduler, incremental sweeping in JavaScriptCore was automatically triggered by a periodically scheduled 100 ms timer. This had the effect of occasionally triggering incremental sweeping during asynchronou ..read more

Katie Hafner (via Hacker News): In 1986, Mr. Lynch decided to hold a workshop to train vendors and developers to configure equipment for routing traffic through the internet. The point was to make different manufacturers’ equipment work together and demonstrate the uses the internet could have for businesses. The first event, attended by 300 vendors, was run largely by volunteers, who snaked cable through the room and programmed specialized computers called routers, which were just becoming commercially available, to communicate with one another. “His brainstorm was that you couldn’t be there ..read more