Tag Archives: cross-site tracking

Weekly output: Celona, streaming TV, social media moderation, Android 12, Google’s privacy pitch, Mark Vena podcast

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This afternoon, I went to a baseball game for the first time since Oct. 27, 2019. I also brought a much better camera than usual, thanks to my neighbor across the street loaning me a Panasonic point-and-shoot model with a 30x zoom, and you can now see the results in the Flickr album I just posted.

5/18/2021: Celona unveils ‘edgeless enterprise’ architecture, Light Reading

My new trade-pub client asked me to write up embargoed news from this business-wireless firm, allowing me to reacquaint myself with that branch of industry jargon.

5/19/2021: Streaming Services, WWL First News with Tommy Tucker

I spent about 40 minutes talking about streaming-TV services with this New Orleans radio station. A major theme of the host’s questions: Why is all this so complicated?

5/19/2021: Social media moderation, Al Jazeera

I made a rare phone-only appearance on the Arabic-language news channel to talk about reports of social-media companies suppressing Palestinian and Arabic voices.  I emphasized, as I have before, that on one hand, content moderation gets increasingly difficult as social platforms get larger; on the other hand, Facebook has a history of waiving its own rules only for right-wing voices in the U.S.

Screen grab of the article as seen in an Android phone's Chrome browser5/20/2021: Here’s what’s new in Android 12, from big changes to subtle tweaks, Fast Company

Google’s I/O developer conference returned in an online-only form after last year’s pandemic-forced cancellation, and in this post I covered the key features in the next version of its Android mobile operating system. The screen grab you see here was taken in a loaner Pixel 4 XL phone on which I’d installed the beta release of Android 12; if you have any questions about how this release works, please ask and I’ll try to answer them here.

5/20/2021: Google touts ‘privacy by design’ at I/O conference, but privacy from whom?, USA Today

Two years ago, I wrote a USAT column about the somewhat nebulous privacy pitch at Google I/O 2019; this column advances that story and finds more cause for optimism in Android than in Chrome.

5/21/2021: SmartTechCheck Podcast (5-20-21), Mark Vena

This week’s edition of this podcast from my tech-analyst pal at Moor Insights & Strategy initially featured two other tech journalists, but John Quain’s Starlink satellite-Internet connection dropped out too many times, leading Vena to decide to continue the podcast with just me and my fellow tech journalist (and baseball fan) Stewart Wolpin.

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A Safari upgrade I like: accountability for resource-hogging pages

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Apple is a few days away from shipping its next big update to its desktop operating system, but people running its current and previous macOS releases can already benefit from one of macOS High Sierra’s components.

Yes, I’m writing something nice about Safari for a change.

The browser that I’ve spent much of the past few years cursing at for its weak memory management and general inability to let me run the computer instead of the other way around got a welcome, pre-High Sierra update Tuesday.

The most talked-about feature in Safari 11.0 may have been its ability to automatically silence sites that without invitation play videos with audio on (yes, I know that includes some of my freelance clients), followed by its blocking of cross-site ad tracking. But the option I’m enjoying most at the moment is Safari 11’s ability–stashed in a new “Websites” tab of its preferences window–to open every page at a given site in the minimalist Reader view.

Where ad blockers are often clumsy and random, Reader can be an elegant weapon against sites that demand attention with junky ads and auto-playing media. It might also spare you from a particularly piggy page locking up your Mac with a demand for more memory than the system can allocate.

“Isn’t that the system’s damn job,” you say? Yes, it is. Fortunately, Safari 11 also now seems able to quash a site in the middle of a memory binge, to judge from the banner I saw atop a page advising me that Safari had reloaded it “because it was using significant memory.”

I’m not going to tell the Safari developers to kick back with a nice vacation – since this update, the browser has already forced a reboot when it somehow refused to restart or fully quit–only a week after I’d had to go through the same routine with Google’s Chrome. But at least I don’t feel like this app is conspiring against me.