Dan Goodin, reporting for Ars Technica:

[…] a researcher has provided a side-by-side comparison that suggests that, while both iOS and Android collect handset data around the clock—even when devices are idle, just out of the box, or after users have opted out—the Google mobile OS collects about 20 times as much data as its Apple competitor.

Google and Apple have both disputed aspects of this “research,” and there are glaringly obvious shortfalls to the methods the researchers used, but the basic findings are still probably pretty close to the truth. Of course Google collects as much data as they can, that’s how they make money. Their statement saying that the research was off by an order of magnitude probably means that they’re underestimating how much data Google scrapes: I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 200x the amount Apple takes.

Katie Deighton, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. said its Hold to Talk feature, introduced on hand-held devices in 2015, already lets users control how long they want the voice assistant Siri to listen for, preventing the assistant from interrupting users that have a stutter before they have finished speaking.

The company is now researching how to automatically detect if someone speaks with a stutter, and has built a bank of 28,000 audio clips from podcasts featuring stuttering to help do so, according to a research paper due to be published by Apple employees this week that was seen by The Wall Street Journal.

The data aims to help improve voice-recognition systems for people with atypical speech patterns, an Apple spokesman said.

Maybe they can train Siri to understand users with typical speech next.

In all serious, Apple’s commitment to accessibility is a good thing, but you’d think they would start by making Siri work well for the vast majority of the population.

Stephen Collinson, reporting for CNN:

Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.

Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters in a battleground vital to the 2020 election and future presidential and congressional contests.

[…]

The new law in Georgia requires more stringent voter verification requirements for absentee ballots, allows state officials to take over election boards and limits ballot drop boxes that make it easier for people to vote. The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.

Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.

The part of this bill that makes it illegal to give water to voters waiting in lines has easily gotten the most attention, but some pundits have pointed out the scariest parts are the provisions that allow the Georgia state legislature to oversee elections and toss out ballots.

In any case, this should be a warning to southern voters in states that are inching left: don’t split the ticket with your state legislature picks. Even if you vote blue at the national level because you think it’s important to get rid of someone like Trump, that’s not enough. If you don’t get rid of bad faith Republican politicians down the ballot, they’ll come for you with a vengeance. Jim Crow voter suppression is alive and well, and the link between Republicans slowly losing power and Republicans passing voter suppression laws is 100% linear.

I do take issue with Collinson for framing this story as a win for Trump, whom I think should be getting the amount of national media coverage he deserves: none. Let’s not exaggerate his influence here. Yes, there’s a connection between the “big lie” narrative and this bill, but it’s not nearly as direct as the connection to Democrats and their policies simply being more popular among Georgian voters. Republican lawmakers in Georgia don’t really believe the election was stolen, it’s just a convenient cover to pass these laws, but Republicans can create a permission structure for themselves to do horrendous things out of thin air, and I feel certain this would’ve happened without Trump. Let’s not give him undue credit.

Dakin Andone, reporting for CNN:

An Instacart shopper who entered an Atlanta supermarket bathroom this week told police he saw an AR-15 style rifle and heard what he believed was the sound of someone loading guns in a bathroom stall. 

The witness rushed out of the bathroom and notified staff at the Publix Supermarket. When police arrived soon after, they arrested a suspect as he was exiting the bathroom -- with six loaded guns in his possession.

The suspect, identified as 22-year-old Rico Marley, now faces a slew of charges related to the incident, which came just days after 10 people were killed in a mass shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.

It was that tragedy that was fresh in the mind of the Instacart shopper, Charles Russell, he told CNN affiliate WSB.

"I saw an AR-15," he said. "And I was like, you know, this kind of startled me just again with events that recently happened in the grocery store up in Colorado."

Authorities have not said what they believed Marley intended to do with the weapons.

Yeah “authorities,” I fucking wonder.

This might as well count as a mass shooting. Real nice country we got here.

It’s also worth pointing out that rather than do anything about this near miss massacre, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp spent that day passing a modern day Jim Crow voter suppression bill that makes it illegal to give water to someone waiting in line to vote.

This piece began well before the Biden Administration did, well before the election, even. I thought about this a lot, considered different directions I could go with this article to make my point, but I think it’s actually better off as a short commentary on reputations.

Donald Trump and Henry Ford are two of the most well known businessmen of the past 100 years, both seen as moguls in their fields.

The story with Ford is that while he himself was not an expert at many of the various processes vital to the growth of his company, his management skills and business savvy helped him create one of Americas most famous automobile companies. It’s said that he had a button on his desk that he could press to summon a subject matter expert on any number of topics, bridging the gap between his lack of specific expertise and the needs of his company.

Let’s quickly contrast this with Donald Trump. Trump also had a button on his desk as president, but his button summoned diet cokes, not experts. In fact, Trump’s narcissism often got in the way of him actually taking advantage of the experts he had access to. Remember when he drew his own hurricane map? Or when he said we should drink bleach?

Trump’s arrogance and ignorance led him to be an antithesis to Ford. To suggest anything else is to romanticize Trump beyond recognition.

If the rest of the “From the Vault” songs are this good, Taylor could seriously be looking at a second Album-of-The-Year Grammy for “Fearless.” I guess I was expecting 13 year old scraps from the original “Fearless” album, but this is not that. This song is terrific, better than several of the songs that made it on the album. It makes you wonder how much of it was written at the time and how much of it was fleshed out present day.

To me, it doesn’t sound exactly like the rest of “Fearless.” It’s certainly country so the similarities are there, but it doesn’t sound like 2008 country. It sounds like what great country music could be in 2021, if it weren’t for the repetitive pop-hybrid garbage that’s been coming out of Nashville for the past decade. Given the slight changes made to “Love Story,” I wonder if perhaps that’s what she’s going to give us, a timeless country album remade to be just a little more timeless and show the country music industry how off base they’ve been since she left.

Check out “You All Over Me” here.

Joe Biden’s top legislative priority was signed into law last week, and working class Americans are already enjoying the benefits of a loosened financial noose, but they didn’t get as much relief as they could've.

Thanks to peculiarly moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia who wanted to appear bipartisan by kowtowing to bad faith Republicans’ cynical demands of reducing the bottom line for the COVID relief package from $1.9T to a smaller figure — their proposal was just $600B, despite the fact that they had no qualms passing Trump’s $2.2T CARES act and a $1.9T tax cut for the wealthy in 2019 — there were several last minute changes to the bill. These changes resulted in fewer people receiving stimulus checks (roughly 17 million people making between $80k-$100k were excluded, a move which saved a paltry total of $12B from the bottom line number) and a 25% decrease in the amount of supplemental unemployment insurance that would be received by those filing unemployment (keep in mind that the current unemployment rate is still roughly double what it was before the pandemic, and also that the unemployment rate disproportionately reflects a healthier workforce than we actually have, since it calculates individuals who work multiple low wage jobs as multiple employed individuals).

It’s worth noting that despite Democrats having made these legislative concessions, not a single Republican in either chamber of Congress voted for the bill. Presumably, they were too preoccupied bitching about Dr. Seuss. Though, in the time since it passed, several Republican congressmen have actually tried to take credit for elements of the bill, despite having voted ‘no.’ The hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Several of the pieces of legislation they chose to limit had broad, bipartisan support among the American electorate. At the time it passed, the bill as a whole was polling very well, with 69% of likely voters supporting it compared to 24% opposing it. When polled on specific elements of the bill, nearly every element had more support than the bill as a whole. According to Data for Progress:

Likely voters continue to overwhelmingly back the bill’s substance, including grants to small businesses (83 percent), additional stimulus checks to most Americans (78 percent), funding to help schools reopen (75 percent), and extensions to unemployment benefits (71 percent).

This should be a lesson to Democrats for the next two years, and it highlights why we need filibuster reform/abolition. They need to use the political power they earned in the 2020 elections with brute force, focusing next on the For The People Act, which aims to protect voting rights from the barrage of hundreds of Republican voter suppression bills snaking through state legislatures across the country by ending partisan gerrymandering and changing campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics.

Matthew Panzarino, reporting for TechCrunch:

Apple has discontinued its original HomePod after four years. It says that it will continue to produce and focus on the HomePod mini, introduced last year. The larger HomePod offered a beefier sound space but the mini has been very well received and clearly accomplishes many of the duties that the larger version was tasked with. The sound is super solid (especially for the size) and it offers access to Siri, Apple’s assistant feature.

The original HomePod was a feat of audio engineering that Apple spent over five years developing. In order to accomplish its development, the team at Apple built out a full development center near its headquarters in Cupertino, with a world-class development environment with a dozen anechoic chambers, including one of the bigger anechoic chambers outside of academic use in the US. I visited the center before its release, noting that Apple took it the extra mile to get the incredibly complex series of tweeters and woofer that built its soundspace:

But slathered on top of that is a bunch of typically Apple extra-mile jelly. Apple says that its largest test chamber is one of the biggest in the US, on a pad, suspended from the outside world with nothing to pollute its tests of audio purity. Beyond testing for the acoustic qualities of the speaker, these chambers allowed Apple to burrow down to account for and mitigate the issues that typically arise from having a high excursion subwoofer in such a small cabinet. Going even further, there are smaller chambers that allow them to isolate the hum from electronic components (there is a computer on board after all) and make attempts to insulate and control that noise so it doesn’t show up in the final output.

I found it to be one of the best speakers ever made for the home when I reviewed it in 2018. From the booming base and well-shaped nature of the tweeter assembly inside; the cloth cover that was specially shaped to avoid interfering with sound quality in any way; the way that it sensed the way that audio was being shaped by walls and other obstructions and adjusted its output to compensate. It was the definition of ‘no effort spared’ in the speaker department.

I found this news surprising and disappointing, but not shocking. Plenty have tech pundits have already remarked that the HomePod’s demise was almost certainly a direct result of its high price. Not enough consumers care enough about audio quality to pay $300 (or $350, when it first launched) for what they understood to be a smart speaker whose virtual assistant was actually rather dim witted. The public perception was the problem all along: the HomePod was always intended to be an incredible sounding speaker, not an astonishingly intelligent one, but the market was (and still is) captivated by shitty little Amazon pucks that can do about a billion “smart” tasks but have sound quality akin to an iPhone 4 speakerphone inside a Folgers can. Apple wasn’t playing the same game as their competitors, and the market didn’t understand that.

The only thing I do find odd is that Apple was rolling out brand new, meaningful HomePod (proper) features as little as a couple months ago. The ability to use a pair of them as the default audio output for your Apple TV 4K just launched late last year, and it’s a great feature that is easy to set up, works flawlessly most of the time, and makes your tv sound incredible. Perhaps we’ll continue to see new features despite its discontinuation? Maybe they’ll revamp the HomePod, or come out with some sort of HomePod Pro? One can dream.

From a Twitter press release:

[…] we want to hear from the public on whether or not they believe world leaders should be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter. And, should a world leader violate a rule, what type of enforcement action is appropriate.

Starting on March 19, we’ll be calling for responses to a public survey that will help inform the development of our policy framework […]

Crowdsourcing advice for platform rules seems like a great way to quickly sink a social network.

Jonathan Stempel, reporting for Reuters:

Google was sued on Tuesday in a proposed class action accusing the internet search company of illegally invading the privacy of millions of users by pervasively tracking their internet use through browsers set in “private” mode.

The lawsuit seeks at least $5 billion, accusing the Alphabet Inc unit of surreptitiously collecting information about what people view online and where they browse, despite their using what Google calls Incognito mode.

According to the complaint filed in the federal court in San Jose, California, Google gathers data through Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager and other applications and website plug-ins, including smartphone apps, regardless of whether users click on Google-supported ads.

This helps Google learn about users’ friends, hobbies, favorite foods, shopping habits, and even the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” they search for online, the complaint said.

Real shocker.

Last night at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift took home one of the biggest awards of the night, when her surprise eighth album “folklore” was named album of the year. This honor follows several other album-of-the-year awards for “folklore,” including titles from Rolling Stone and the Apple Music Awards.

Many people were talking about Beyoncé’s record setting wins, but nobody mentioned the historic nature of Swift’s most recent award. Prior to last night, there were only two artists in Grammys history who had won the “album of the year” title three times, and they were Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder. But last night, Taylor Swift joined their ranks, as only the third person to ever win the Grammy for album of the year three times, and the only female act ever to do so. She had previously won the title in 2010 (for her second album, “Fearless”) and in 2016 (for her fifth album, “1989”).

Regardless of how you felt about “folklore” and whether or not it was your style of music, it was clear that there was something special about it from the very start, and I’m glad it’s gotten the recognition it deserves. It was the perfect quarantine album, and it was a masterful showcasing of Swift’s talent for songwriting and storytelling.

Robert Schlesinger, writing for NBC News:

Dr. Seuss Enterprises — the very profitable company which controls the estate of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel, the man behind the pen name — has decided of its own free will to stop publishing a half-dozen of his books because, the company told The Associated Press, they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” deploying stereotypes about Black and Asian people in a manner that Seuss’s own estate thinks is offensive and inappropriate.

The Fox outrage machine revved itself to high dudgeon over how this private company has decided to conduct its business, bemoaning the Seussian scalp-taking; the GOP’s culture-war ambulance chasers quickly followed suit. “First, they outlaw Dr. Seuss” — mind you, Theodore Geisel died in 1991 and its his own estate taking this action — “and now they want to tell us what to say,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a mendacious non sequitur while debating proposed election law reforms.

[…]

Let’s get some perspective here: Seuss Enterprises made $33 million last year, more than 650 million of his books have been sold around the world and they’re available in more than 100 countries. There is no significant move — and certainly not from Seuss Enterprises — to ban, burn or otherwise cancel Dr. Seuss. A private company has made a considered business decision by pulling a small fraction of the Seuss catalog (none among its top sellers).

Exactly why is this any of the business of the federal government? Surely Republicans, who supposedly believe the government should interfere in private business decisions as little as possible, don’t think the market should cease to work its infallible will; surely if Seuss Enterprises is erring and catering to a political correctness that nobody wants, market forces will correct it.

Schlesinger hammers his broader point home with a sharp analogy to Republicans’ persistent hard-on for the “free market” and voting rights:

Republicans have long declared their supposedly unwavering obeisance to the great invisible hand of the market; as former House GOP Leader Dick Armey liked to say, “Markets are smart; government is dumb.”

And yet several recent moments have made that commitment seem situational. Whether discussing Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, voting rights or Twitter, Republicans seem ill at ease with — or just ignorant of — the ways the mighty market actually functions.

[…]

Republicans have lost the presidential popular vote in seven of the last eight elections — or to put it another way, they have been losing political market share. But instead of adjusting their product (their candidates and policies) or how they sell it (their messaging), the GOP increasingly relies on government interference to maintain power, including the distortionary nature of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate (which is evenly split despite the fact that Democrats represent 41 million more constituents), radical gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws

The whole Seuss issue was just manufactured outrage that actually led ignorant Republican consumers to purchase more Seuss books, directly benefiting the enterprise that made the decision to stop publishing six of his books in the first place.

The Republican Party doesn’t know who they are anymore; they didn’t even put together a party platform last year. Their only agenda is to obstruct real governance and “own the libs” whenever possible, hoping that concocted fury will be enough to hold their voting bloc together because they can no longer sell most of their (racist, homophobic, intolerant, bigoted) “principles” to a majority of the American electorate.