Joe Rosensteel (Mastodon): Jason didn’t get that speed boost from an Apple-made wireless router, because Apple got out of making those long ago. He didn’t get that speed from a wireless router currently for sale at the Apple Store because the only two options are the Linksys Velop AX4200 WiFi 6 Mesh System, and AmpliFi Alien Router (with optional mesh extenders). Linksys does make a version of their Velop mesh network with 6E, but it’s not for sale through Apple. Jason used an Eero 6E router, and wasted half a day trying to change his network topology to allow for it so he could see that spee ..read more

Mike Wuerthele and Malcolm Owen (via Ric Ford): An issue preventing some external drives from mounting onto a Mac running macOS Sonoma has plagued users for months, and it probably was caused by changes Apple made to drive handling. […] Unlike the Windows-preferred NTFS or Apple’s APFS, exFAT can be read from and written to by both Macs and Windows PCs without requiring any extra software assistance. In a multi-platform environment, it’s almost always the best formatting option for external drives. […] Shortly after the introduction of macOS Sonoma, complaints started to surface on Apple’s Co ..read more

Google (via Hacker News): To improve on this, we are introducing Jpegli, an advanced JPEG coding library that maintains high backward compatibility while offering enhanced capabilities and a 35% compression ratio improvement at high quality compression settings. […] When images are compressed or decompressed through Jpegli, more precise and psychovisually effective computations are performed and images will look clearer and have fewer observable artifacts. […] While improving on image quality/compression density ratio, Jpegli’s coding speed is comparable to traditional approaches, such as lib ..read more

Jan-Piet Men (2020, via Hacker News): I can no longer sync iOS’ Contacts with my macOS Catalina’s Finder (the iOS sync portion of iTunes is now built into the Finder in macOS Catalina); the OS insists I’ve iCloud configured for Contacts which I do not. […] I was spilling my sorrows on Christoph who simply said he avoids all those issues by using CardDAV. I slapped my forehead: I’ve been using CalDAV for years, for synchronizing two calendars across devices: my own calendar across two Macs, an iPad, and an iPhone, and the family calendar across the family’s devices. How could I have forgotten ..read more

Brian Krebs (Hacker News): On April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead. But over the past 48 hours, dozens of new domain names have been registered that demonstrate how this change could be used to craft convincing phishing links — such as fedetwitter[.]com, which until very recently rendered as fedex.com in tweets. […] The apparent oversight by Twitter/X was cause for amusement and amazement from many former users who have migrated to other social media platforms since the new CEO took over. Matthew Garrett, a lecturer at U.C ..read more

Daniel Stenberg (Hacker News, Slashdot): The friendly reporter showed how the curl version bundled with macOS behaves differently than curl binaries built entirely from open source. Even when running the same curl version on the same macOS machine. The curl command line option --cacert provides a way for the user to say to curl that this is the exact set of CA certificates to trust when doing the following transfer. If the TLS server cannot provide a certificate that can be verified with that set of certificates, it should fail and return error. […] When this command line option is used with ..read more

Steven Vaughan-Nichols (via Hacker News): For those of you who aren’t open-source licensing experts, this means developers can no longer use Redis’ code. Sure, they can look at it, but they can’t export, borrow from, or touch it. Redis pulled this same kind of trick in 2018 with some of its subsidiary code. Now it’s done so with the company’s crown jewels. Redis is far from the only company to make such a move. Last year, HashiCorp dumped its main program Terraform’s Mozilla Public License (MPL) for the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1. Here, the name of the new license game is to prevent an ..read more

gastropod: A bunch of universities have just sent out notices that email forwarding is going to increasingly break in the very near future. The big email services, gmail, yahoo, outlook and apple, are going to start tightening the thumbscrews (strict SPF, DMARK and DKIM, but also other stuff) on April 1 (bad timing, that). I’d vaguely seen that gmail was planning to block much more bulk mail to individuals, but hadn’t really thought about the consequences to normal email forwarding. […] It’s a good time to audit your email situation, especially if you currently forward mail to large provider ..read more

Edvinas Byla (via Dave Verwer): The [LazyVGrid] user experience isn’t great, but it’s still probably okayish for a version 1.0.0 release. The performance issues are less noticeable with fewer items unless you’re used to high-quality apps. But then there was this one thing that bugged me: the behavior of the context menu. On macOS, right-clicking an item usually selects it and shows the context menu. SwiftUI’s .contextMenu shows the menu but doesn’t select or give you any callback for selecting the item. This can be confusing because you don’t know if you’re seeing the menu for the right item ..read more

Minna Tiainen (via Hacker News): The researchers studied eight apps: Safari, Siri, Family Sharing, iMessage, FaceTime, Location Services, Find My and Touch ID. They collected all publicly available privacy-related information on these apps, from technical documentation to privacy policies and user manuals. The fragility of the privacy protections surprised even the researchers. ‘Due to the way the user interface is designed, users don’t know what is going on. For example, the user is given the option to enable or not enable Siri, Apple's virtual assistant. But enabling only refers to whether ..read more