In the News Archive
There isn’t a lot to this story beyond the fact that in around 1990 I helped debug someone’s Lotus 1-2-3 set up via fax. But it’s a good reminder of how important the Zeroth Law of Debugging is (see below). Without some sort of online connection with these folks, and with transatlantic phone calls being very, very expensive (I was in the UK, they were in the US) fax was the obvious answer. ↫ John Graham Honestly, this would still be easier today than some of the bug reporting systems I’ve seen.
How do you create a brain drain and lose your status as eminent destination for scientists and researchers? The United States seems to be sending out questionnaires to researchers at universities and research institutes outside of the United States, asking them about their political leanings. Dutch universities are strongly advising Dutch researches not to respond to the questionnaires, and warn that they are designed to stifle free speech and independent research through intimidation. Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) has also warned researchers about the questionnaire. The USGS questionnaire asks, for example, whether the researcher’s organisation works with ‘entities associated with communist, socialist, or totalitarian parties’, whether the research project has taken ‘appropriate measures’ to ‘defend against gender ideology’ and whether the project has ‘measurable benefits for US domestic industries, workforce, or economic sectors’. ↫ Universiteit Leiden Researchers trying to enter the United States are also facing intimidation tactics, with the United States government going so far as to refuse entry to scientists critical of the Trump regime: A French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, said a French minister. “I learned with concern that a French researcher who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry to the United States before being expelled,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, said in a statement on Monday to Agence France-Presse published by Le Monde. ↫ Robert Mackey at the Guardian Being denied entry is one thing – being arrested and sent to a string of prisons is another, like this Canadian woman: Our next stop was Arizona, the San Luis Regional Detention Center. The transfer process lasted 24 hours, a sleepless, grueling ordeal. This time, men were transported with us. Roughly 50 of us were crammed into a prison bus for the next five hours, packed together – women in the front, men in the back. We were bound in chains that wrapped tightly around our waists, with our cuffed hands secured to our bodies and shackles restraining our feet, forcing every movement into a slow, clinking struggle. ↫ Jasmine Mooney at the Guardian If you’re a scientist or researcher planning on going to a conference in the US (or, say, a developer wanting to go to a tech conference), you should reconsider. Even if your papers are in order, you could end up on a plane to a concentration camp in El Salvador before you can even call a lawyer – while being told that any judge standing up for your rights should be impeached. The United States’ war on free speech, science, and research goes far beyond intimidating individual scientists and researchers. The Trump regime is actively erasing and deleting entire fields of science, most notably anything involving things like climate and gender, and openly attacking and cutting funding to universities that disagree with the Trump regime. Almost immediately after being sworn in as president on 20 January, Trump put his signature to piles of executive orders cancelling or freezing tens of billions of dollars in funding for research and international assistance, and putting the seal on thousands of lay-offs. Orwellian restrictions have been placed on research, including bans on studies that mention particular words relating to sex and gender, race, disability and other protected characteristics. ↫ Nature US President Donald Trump’s latest war on the climate includes withdrawing support for any research that mentions the word. He has also launched a purge on government websites hosting climate data, in an apparent attempt to make the evidence disappear. ↫ Corey J. A. Bradshaw at The Conversation The Trump administration has fired hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency housed within the Department of Commerce, the Guardian has learned. “There is no plan or thought into how to continue to deliver science or service on weather, severe storms and events, conservation and management of our coasts and ocean life and much more,” he said. “Let’s not pretend this is about efficiency, quality of work or cost savings because none of those false justifications are remotely true.” ↫ Dharna Noor and Gabrielle Canon at the Guardian Intimidating current scientists isn’t enough, either – the scientists of the future must also suffer: US President Donald Trump has signed an executive orderto dismantle the Department of Education, fulfilling a campaign pledge and a long-cherished goal of some conservatives. In its statement, the American Federation of Teachers said: “No-one likes bureaucracy, and everyone’s in favour of more efficiency, so let’s find ways to accomplish that. “But don’t use a ‘war on woke’ to attack the children living in poverty and the children with disabilities.” ↫ Ana Faguy at the BBC But what about intimidating university students who don’t fall in line with the regime? Well, we can’t forget about those, now, can we? After immigration agents detained Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil over his involvement in pro-Palestine protests on campus, President Donald Trump promised it was just the beginning. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since arrested at least two more students who are in the country on visas — one of whom had recently sued the Trump administration on First Amendment grounds. ↫ Gaby Del Valle at The Verge A Cornell University PhD student earlier this month sued the Trump administration seeking to stop the president’s order aimed at foreign students accused of “antisemitism”. Days later, lawyers at the justice department emailed to request that the student “surrender” to immigration officials ↫ Maanvi Singh at the Guardian These are just a small selection of stories, and I could’ve picked a dozen more still if I wanted to. The point should be squarely (roundly?) driven home by now: the United States government seems to be doing everything in its power to scare off the very people an economy based on science,
In Canada, where the American national anthem has been booed during hockey matches with US teams, a slew of apps has emerged with names such as “buy beaver”, “maple scan” and “is this Canadian” to allow shoppers to scan QR barcodes and reject US produce from alcohol to pizza toppings. In Sweden, more than 70,000 users have joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott of US companies – ironically including Facebook itself – which features alternatives to US consumer products. In Denmark, where there has been widespread anger over Trump’s threat to bring the autonomous territory of Greenland under US control, the largest grocery company, the Salling group, has said it will tag European-made goods with a black star to allow consumers to choose them over products made in the US. ↫ Peter Beaumont at the Guardian These are just a few of the examples of a growing interest in places like Canada and Europe to boycott American products to the best of one’s ability. It’s impossible to boycott everything coming from a certain country – good luck finding a computer without American software and/or hardware, for instance – but these small acts of disapproval and resistance allow people to vent their anger. It’s clearly already having an effect on Tesla, whose sales have completely collapsed in Europe, so much so that the president of the United States has to do his best Billy Mays impression in front of the White House to help his buddy sell cars. Very classy. With the United States threatening war on Canada, Greenland and Denmark, and Panama, it’s only natural for citizens of those countries, as well as those of close friends of those countries, to want do something, and being more mindful or what you spend your money on is a tried and true way to do that. Technology can definitely help here, as we’ve talked about before, and as shown in the linked article. While no tool to determine place of origin of products will ever be perfect, it can certainly help to avoid products you don’t want to buy. I can only hope this doesn’t get even more out of hand than it already has. The United States started a trade war with the European Union today as well, and of course, the EU retaliated. I doubt the average person has any clue just how intertwined the global economy and supply chains are, and that the only people paying for this are people like you and I. The tech billionaires and career politicians won’t be the ones screwed over by surging prices of basic necessities because of tariffs, and it won’t be the children of the rich and powerful being sent to war with Canada or Panama or whatever. The very companies that OSNews has reported on for almost 30 years are the ones pushing and enabling most of this vile nonsense, so yes, you will be seeing items about this here, whether you and I like it or not. Only cowards and the privileged have the luxury of ignoring what the United States is doing right now.
The future of the United States is no longer decided in Washington. That ship has sailed. It’s now dictated in the bunkers, private jets, and compounds of an ideological Silicon Valley, by billionaires and wealth extremists intent on treating democracy as a nuisance that must be swatted away. These men – raised on a rabid press that mythologized their existence in their lifetimes, called them Wunderkind and treated them as something above and beyond mere mortality – have consumed a steady diet of libertarian and authoritarian fan fiction and conceived a new order, designed to elevate their lofty egos at any and all cost. The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. It was meant to be a force that shattered hierarchies and gave power to ordinary people. Instead, it enabled the wealth extraction and avarice of a cartel of overfed, over-pampered despots who enriched themselves in the name of innovation, bled the world to the point of near-total collapse, intellectualized their power fetish and now view public institutions as the final obstacles to be dismantled in their megalomanic pursuit of More. ↫ Joan Westenberg The US has only itself to blame. Let’s hope they don’t drag the rest of us with them.
The utter chaos in the United States and the country’s antagonistic, erratic, and often downright hostile approach to what used to be its allies has not gone unnoticed, and it seems it’s finally creating some urgency in an area in which people have been fruitlessly advocating for urgency for years: digital independence from US tech giants. Efforts to make Europe more technologically “sovereign” have gone mainstream. The European Commission now has its first-ever “technology sovereignty” chief, Henna Virkkunen. Germany’s incoming ruling party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union, called for “sovereign” tech in its program for the February election. “Mounting friction across the Atlantic makes it clearer than ever that Europe must control its own technological destiny,” said Francesca Bria, an innovation professor at University College London and former president of Italy’s National Innovation Fund. ↫ Pieter Haeck at Politico This should’ve been a primary concern for decades, as many have been trying to make it. Those calls usually fell on deaf ears, as relying on Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other US tech giants was simply the cheapest option for EU governments and corporations alike. However, now that the US is suffering under a deeply dysfunctional, anti-EU regime, the chickens are coming home to roost, and it’s dawning on European politicians and business leaders alike that relying on US corporations that openly and brazenly cheer on the Trump/Elon regime might’ve been a bad idea. To the surprise of nobody with more than two brain cells. It’s going to take a long, long time for this situation to get any better. Europe simply doesn’t have any equivalents to the services offered by companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and even if does, certainly not at their scale. Building up the resources these US companies offers is going to take a long time, and it won’t be cheap, making it hard to sell such moves to voters and shareholders alike, both of which are not exactly known for their long-term views on such complex matters. Still, it seems consumers in the EU might be more receptive to messages of digital independence from the US than ever before. Just look at how hard Tesla is tanking all over Europe, part of which can definitely be attributed to Europeans not wanting to buy any products from a man openly insulting and lying about European elected officials. If this groundswell of sentiment spreads, I can definitely see European politicians tapping into it to sell massive investments in digital independence. Personally, banning Twitter and Facebook from operating in the EU should be step one, as its owners have made it very clear that illegal election interference and nazi propaganda is something they have no issues with, followed by massive investments in alternatives to the services offered by the US big tech companies. China has been doing this for a long time now, and Europe should follow in its footsteps. There are enough bases to work from – from open source non-Google Android smartphones to EU-based Linux distributions for everything from desktops to server farms, and countless other open source services – so it’s not like we have to start from nothing. If we can spend €800 billion to finally get EU defense up to snuff, we should be able to spare something for digital independence, too.
With the United States having started an incredibly dumb and destructive trade war with Canada, Mexico, and most likely soon the European Union, there’s quite a few people who want to avoid American products. With how interconnected the global production chain and corporate ownership structures are, it’s often difficult to determine where products actually come from. Luckily, technology can help. There’s online directories like Buy European Made, which lists European companies in all kinds of markets, or European Alternatives, which focuses on listing European alternatives to online services. As nice as these are, they are quite manual, and require people to actively search around, which is kind of a hassle when you’re making a quick grocery store run. What if we could use image recognition to just take a photo of a product’s box, and have our phone tell us where a product’s made? That’s exactly what Made O’Meter does: take a photo of a product, wait for a few seconds, and it’ll tell you exactly where it’s made. It’s made in Denmark, with the goal to “support Europe, Canada & friends”. I’ve been trying it out on various products around the house, from groceries like cereals and cookies, to tech products and clothing we just bought that still had the tags on them. Every result turned out to be 100% accurate, and it takes only a few seconds to analyse each photo. It also doesn’t seem to be too fussy with the quality of the photos themselves – it doesn’t care about hands and fingers in the frame, or weirdly-shaped boxes that don’t fit nicely in a view finder. It’s a website, not an app – very platform-agnostic, which is great – and I was using it in Firefox for Android without issue. If you want to avoid American products, Made O’Meter is a great tool to have with you the next time you order something or run to the store.
After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font. Problem solved! Can you imagine if, *gasp*, your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror! ↫ Ryan Geyer Silicon Valley corporations are nothing if not massive cowards, and this is just another one of the many, many examples that underline this. Firefox solves this by including the flags on its own, but Google refuses to do the same with Chrome, because, you guessed it, Google is also a cowardly organisation. There are some ways around it, as the linked article details, but they’re all clumsy and cumbersome compared to Microsoft just not being a coward and including proper flag emoji, even if it offends some sensibilities in pro-China or western far-right circles. Your best bet to avoid such corporate cowardice is to switch to better operating systems, like any desktop Linux distribution. Fedora KDE includes both the Taiwanese and Palestinian flags, because the KDE project isn’t made up of cowards, and I’m sure the same applies to any GNOME distribution. If your delicate snowflake sensibilities can’t handle a Palestinian or Taiwanese flag emoji, just don’t type them. Bitter sidenote: it turns out WordPress, what OSNews uses, doesn’t like emoji, either. Adding any emoji in this story, from basic ones to the Taiwanese or Palestinian flag, makes it impossible to save or publish the story. I have no idea if this is a WordPress issue, or an issue on our end, since WordPress does mention they have emoji support.
OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. ↫ Cristina Criddle and Eleanor Olcott for the FT This is more ironic than writing a song called Ironic that lists situations that aren’t actually ironic. OpenAI claims it’s free to suck up whatever content and data it can find on the web without any form of permission or consent, but throws a tamper tantrum when someone takes whatever they regurgitate for their own use without permission or consent? Cry me a river.
Speaking of “AI”, the Chinese company DeepSeek has lobbed a grenade dead-centre into the middle of the “AI” bubble, and it’s been incredibly entertaining to watch. DeepSeek has released several new “AI” models, which seem to rival or even surpass OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT models – but with a massive twist: DeepSeek, being Chinese, can’t use NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, and as such, was forced to work within very tight constraints. They’ve managed to surpass ChatGPT’s best models with a fraction of the GPU horsepower, and thus a fraction of the cost, and a fraction of the energy requirements. But unlike ChatGPT’s o1, DeepSeek is an “open-weight” model that (although its training data remains proprietary) enables users to peer inside and modify its algorithm. Just as important is its reduced price for users — 27 times less than o1. Besides its performance, the hype around DeepSeek comes from its cost efficiency; the model’s shoestring budget is minuscule compared with the tens of millions to hundreds of millions that rival companies spent to train its competitors. ↫ Ben Turner at LiveScience The fallout has been disastrous for NVIDIA, in particular. The company’s stock price tumbled 17% today, and more entertaining yet, the various massive investments of hundreds of billions of dollars into western “AI” seem like a huge waste of money. The DeepSeek models are also nominally open source, and are clearly showing that most likely, there simply isn’t a huge “AI” market worth hundreds of billions of dollars dollars at all. On top of that, the US is clearly not ahead in “AI” at all, as was the common wisdom pretty much until yesterday. Of course, DeepSeek is Chinese, and that means censorship – the real kind – is a thing. Asking the latest DeepSeek model about the massacre at Tiananmen Square returns nothing, suggesting the user ask about other topics instead. I’m sure over the coming weeks more and more or these kinds of censorship will be discovered, but hopefully its open source nature will allow the models to be adapted and changed to remove such censorship. Do note that all of these “AI” models are all deeply biased because they’re trained on content that is itself deeply biased, thereby perpetuating and amplifying damaging stereotypes and inaccuracies, especially since people have a tendency to assume computers can’t be biased. Whatever may happen, at least OpenAI losing its job to “AI” is hilarious.
Apparently, since the beginning of the year, AI bots have been ensuring that websites can only respond to regular inquiries with a delay. The founder of Linux Weekly News (LWN-net), Jonathan Corbet, reports that the news site is therefore often slow to respond. The AI scraper bots cause a DDoS, a distributed denial-of-service attack. At times, the AI bots would clog the lines with hundreds of IP addresses simultaneously as soon as they decided to access the site’s content. Corbet explains on Mastodon that only a small proportion of the traffic currently serves real human readers. ↫ Dirk Knop at Heise.de I’m sure someone will tell me we just have to accept that a large percentage of our bandwidth is going to overpriced bullshit generators, and that we should just suck it up and pay for Sam Altman’s new house. I hope these same people realise “AI” is destroying the last vestiges of the internet that haven’t fallen victim to all the other techbro fads so far, and that sooner rather than later there won’t be anything left to browse to. The coming few years are going to be fun.
I believe consumers, as a right, should be able to install software of their choosing to any computing device that is owned outright. This should apply regardless of the computer’s form factor. In addition to traditional computing devices like PCs and laptops, this right should apply to devices like mobile phones, “smart home” appliances, and even industrial equipment like tractors. In 2025, we’re ultra-connected via a network of devices we do not have full control over. Much of this has to do with how companies lock their devices’ bootloaders, prevent root access, and prohibit installation of software that is not explicitly sanctioned through approval in their own distribution channels. We should really work on changing that. ↫ Medhir Bhargava Obviously, this is preaching to the choir here on OSNews. I agree with Bhargava 100%. It should be illegal for any manufacturer of computing devices – with a possible exception for, say, things like medical implants, certain aspects of car control units, and so on – to lock down and/or restrict owners’ ability to install whatever software they want, run whatever code they want, and install whatever operating system they want on the devices that they own. Computers are interwoven into the very fabric of every aspect of our society, and having them under the sole control of the biggest megacorporations in the world is utterly dystopian, and wildly dangerous. Personally, I would take it a step further: any and all code that runs on products sold must be open. Not necessarily open source, but at the very least open, so that it can be inspected when malice is suspected. This way, society can make sure that the tech billionaire oligarchs giving nazi salutes aren’t in full, black-box control over our devices. Secrecy as a means of corporate control is incredibly dangerous, and forcing all code to be open is the perfect way to combat this. Copyright is more than enough intellectual property protection for code. The odds of this happening are, of course, slim, especially with the aforementioned tech billionaire oligarchs giving nazi salutes effectively running the most powerful military in human history. Reason is in short supply these days, and I doubt that’s going to change any time soon.
It’s hard to see how to move forward from here. I think the best bet would be for people to rally around a new community-driven infrastructure. This would likely require a fork of WordPress, though, and that’s going to be a messy. The current open source version of WordPress relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls. Joost de Valk, the original creator of an extremely popular SEO plugin, wrote a blog post with some thoughts on the matter. I’m hoping that more prominent people in the community step up like this, and that some way forward can be found. Update: Moments after posting this, I was pointed to a story on TechCrunch about Mullenweg deactivating the WordPress.org accounts of users planning a “fork”. This after he previously promoted (though in a slightly mocking way) the idea of forking open source software. In both cases, the people he mentioned weren’t actually planning forks, but musing about future ways forward for WordPress. Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the push they need to get started. Remember that WordPress.org accounts are required to submit themes, plugins, or core code to the WordPress project. These recent events really make it seem like you’re no longer welcome to contribute to WordPress if you question Matt Mullenweg. ↫ Gavin Anderegg I haven’t wasted a single word on the ongoing WordPress drama yet, but the longer Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO and thus owner of WordPress, keeps losing his mind, I can’t really ignore the matter any more. OSNews runs, after all, on WordPress – self-hosted, at least, so not on Mullenweg’s WordPress.com – and if things keep going the way they are, I simply don’t know if WordPress remains a viable, safe, and future-proof CMS for OSNews. I haven’t discussed this particular situation with OSNews owner, David Adams, yet, mostly since he’s quite hands-off in the day-to-day operations and has more than enough other matters to take care of, but I think the time has come to start planning for a potential worst-case scenario in which Mullenweg takes even more of whatever he’s taking and WordPress implodes entirely. Remember – even if you self-host WordPress outside of Automattic, several core infrastructure parts of WordPress still run through Automattic, so we’re still dependent on what Mullenweg does or doesn’t do. I have no answers, announcements, or even plans at this point, but if you or your company depend on WordPress, you might want to start thinking about where to go from here.
I’ve never been to a LAN party, not even back in the ’90s and early 2000s when they were quite the common occurance. Both my family and various friends did have multiple computers in the house, so I do have fond memories of hooking up computers through null modem cables to play Rise of the Triad, later superseded by direct Ethernet connections to play newer games. LAN parties have left lasting impressions on those that regularly attended them, but since most took place before the era of ever-present digital camera and smartphones, photos of such events are rarer than they should be. Luckily, Australian software engineer Issung did a lot of digging and eventually struck gold: a massive collection of photos and a few videos from LAN parties that took place from 1996 and 2010 in Australia. After trying a few other timestamps and a few more web searches I sadly couldn’t find anything. As a last ditch effort I made a few posts on various forums, including the long dormant Dark-Media Steam group, then I forgot about it all, until 2 months ago! Someone reached out and was able to get me into a small private Facebook group, once in I could see I had gotten more than I bargained for! I was just looking for Dark-Media photos, but found another regular LAN I had forgotten about, and photos from even more LANs from the late 90s. I was able to scrape all the photos and now upload them to archive.org where they can hopefully live forever. ↫ Issung I love browsing through these, as they bring back so many memories of the computers and dubious fashion choices of my teenage years – I used to combine different colours zip-off pants, and even had mohawks, spikes, and god knows what else before I started losing all my hair in my very early 20s. Anyway, the biggest change is the arrival of flat displays signalling the end of the widespread use of CRTs, and the slow dissappearence of beige in favour of black. Such a joy to see the trends change in these photos. If anyone else is sitting on treasure troves like these, be sure to share them with the world before it’s too late.
It’s a Christmas miracle! The Moxie, that support robot thing for kids we talked about two weeks ago, seems to be getting a new lease on life. The start-up that makes the Moxie has announced it’s going to not only release a version of the server software for self-hosting, but will also publish all of the source code as open source. We understand how unsettling and disappointing it has been to face the possibility of losing the daily comfort and support Moxie provides. Since the onset of these recent challenges, many of you have voiced heartfelt concerns and offered suggestions, and we have taken that feedback seriously. While our cloud services may become unavailable, a group of former technical team members from Embodied is working on a potential solution to allow Moxie to operate locally—without the need for ongoing cloud connectivity. This initiative involves developing a local server application (“OpenMoxie”) that you can run on your own computer. Once available, this community-driven option will enable you (or technically inclined individuals) to maintain Moxie’s basic functionality, develop new features, and modify her capabilities to better suit your needs—without reliance on Embodied’s cloud servers. ↫ Paolo Pirjanian Having products like this be dependent on internet connectivity is not great, but as long as Silicon Valley is the way it is, that’s not going to change. You can tell from their efforts that the people at Embodied do genuinely care about their product and the people that use it, because they have zero – absolutely zero – financial incentive or legal obligation to do any of this. They could’ve just walked away like their original communication said they were going to, but instead they listened to their customers and changed their minds. Regardless of my thoughts on requiring internet connectivity for something like this, they at least did the right thing today – and I commend them for that.
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products. ↫ Ed Zitron This is the reality we’re all living in, and it’s obvious from any casual computer use, or talking to anyone who uses computers, just how absolutely dreadful using the mainstream platforms and services has become. Google Search has become useless, DuckDuckGo is being overrun with “AI”-generated slop, Windows is the operating system equivalent of this, Apple doesn’t even know how to make a settings application anymore, iOS is yelling at you about all the Apple subscriptions you don’t have yet, Android is adding “AI” to its damn file manager, and the web is unusable without aggressive ad blocking. And all of this is not only eating up our computers’ resources, it’s also actively accelerating the destruction of our planet, just so lazy people can generate terrible images where people have six fingers. I’m becoming more and more extreme in my complete and utter dismissal of the major tech companies, and I’m putting more and more effort into taking back control over the digital aspects of my life wherever possible. Not using Windows or macOS has improved the user experience of my PCs and laptops by incredible amounts, and moving from Google’s Android to GrapheneOS has made my smartphone feel more like it’s actually mine than ever before. Using technology products and services made by people who actually care and have morals and values that don’t revolve around unending greed is having a hugely positive impact on my life, and I’m at the point now where I’d rather not have a smartphone or computer than be forced to use trashware like Windows, macOS, or iOS. The backlash against shitty technology companies and their abusive practices is definitely growing, and while it hasn’t exploded into the mainstream just yet, I think we’re only a few more shitty iOS updates and useless Android “AI” features away from a more general uprising against the major technology platforms. There’s a reason laws like the DMA are so overwhelmingy popular, and I feel like this is only the beginning.
Some news is both sad and dystopian at the same time, and this is one of those cases. Moxie, a start-up selling $800 emotional support robots intended to help children is shutting down operations since it can’t find enough money, and since their robots require constant connectivity to servers to operate, all of the children’s robots will cease functioning within days. They’re not offering refunds, but they will send out a letter to help parents tell their children “in an age-appropriate way” that their lovable robot is going to die. If you have kids yourself, you know how easily they can sometimes get attached to the weirdest things, from fluffy stuffed animals designed to be cute, to random inanimate objects us adults would never consider to be even remotely interesting. I can definitely see how my own kids would be devastated if one of their favourite “emotional” toys were to suddenly stop working or disappear, and we don’t even have anything that pretends to have a personality or that actively interacts with our kids like this robot thing does. We can talk about how it’s insane that no refunds will be given, or how a company can just remotely kill a product like this without any repercussions, but most of all I’m just sad for the kids who use one and are truly attached to it, who now have to deal with their little friend going away. That’s just heartbreaking, and surely a sign of things to come as more and more companies start stuffing “AI” into their toys. The only thing I can say is that we as parents should think long and hard about what kind of toys we give our children, and that we should maybe try to avoid anything tied to a cloud service that can go away at any time.
The standard trope when talking about timezones is to rattle off falsehoods programmers believe about them. These lists are only somewhat enlightening – it’s really hard to figure out what truth is just from the contours of falsehood. So here’s an alternative approach. I’m gonna show you some weird timezones. In fact, the weirdest timezones. They’re each about as weird as timezones are allowed to get in some way. ↫ Ulysse Carion The reason why timezones are often weird is not only things like the shape of countries dictating where the actual timezones begin and end, but also because of politics. A lot of politics. The entirety of China runs on Beijing time, even though it covers five geographical timezones. Several islands in the Pacific were forced by their colonisers to run on insanely offset timezones because it made exploiting them easier. Time in Europe is political, too – countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain should really be in the same time zone as the UK, but adopted UTC+1 because it aligns better with the rest of mainland Europe. Although anything is better than whatever the hell Dutch Time was. Then there is, of course, daylight savings, which is a whole pointless nightmare in and of itself that should be abolished. Daylight savings rules and exceptions alone cover a ton of the oddities and difficulties with timezones, which is reason enough to get rid of it, aside from all the other possible issues, but a proposal to abolish it in the EU has sadly stalled.
One-third of payments to contractors training AI systems used by companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have not been paid on time after the Australian company Appen moved to a new worker management platform. Appen employs 1 million contractors who speak more than 500 languages and are based in 200 countries. They work to label photographs, text, audio and other data to improve AI systems used by the large tech companies and have been referred to as “ghost workers” – the unseen human labour involved in training systems people use every day. ↫ Josh Taylor at The Guardian It’s crazy that if you peel back the layers on top of a lot of tools and features sold to us as “artificial intelligence”, you’ll quite often find underpaid workers doing the labour technology companies are telling us are done by computers running machine learning algorithms. The fact that so many of them are either deeply underpaid or, as in this case, not even paid at all, while companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI are raking in ungodly amounts of profits, is deeply disturbing. It’s deeply immoral on so many levels, and just adds to the uncomfortable feeling people have with “AI”. Again I’d like to reiterate I’m not intrinsically opposed to the current crop of artificial intelligence tools – I just want these mega corporations to respect the rights of artists, and not use their works without permission to earn immense amounts of money. On top of that, I don’t think it should be legal for them to lie about how their tools really work under the hood, and the workers who really do the work claimed to be done by “AI” to be properly paid. Is any of that really too much to ask? Fix these issues, and I’ll stop putting quotation marks around “AI”.
Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM. ↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority There already are a variety of ways to do this today, but having it as a supported feature implemented by Google is very welcome. This is also going to greatly increase the number of spammy articles and lazy YouTube videos telling you how to “run Ubuntu on your phone”, which I’m not particularly looking forward to.
A cart and payment process is a critical yet often overlooked part of the user journey that can make or break an ecommerce app. From the outset, cart design, user experience and flexible payment options should be at the top of the agenda for digital brands wanting to drive conversions. Understanding User Intent When users add items to their carts, they have shown a clear intent to purchase. To complete that transaction, the following checkout process needs to be as easy and seamless for them as possible. Higher abandonment rates occur due to unnecessary friction caused by a confusing interface, complicated payment flows, and the absence of preferred payment methods, among other things. Studies show that 76% of online shopping carts are eventually abandoned, and clunky checkout design is a big part of this. The cart and payment section is the last step in persuading users to buy. An optimized experience directly correlates with higher conversion rates and more revenue. Key Aspects to Optimize There are 3 key aspects of the cart and checkout process that need to be optimized for conversion-focused brands: 1. Cart Design and User Experience The cart should provide a simple, visual summary of items added for purchase along with quantity selected and total order value. Allowing users to easily edit item properties, apply discounts, and estimate shipping simplifies what can be an anxiety inducing process, especially on mobile. Advanced features like saved carts for returning users further facilitate purchases. Offering guest checkout alongside account creation streamlines the process for first-time customers. 2. Flexible Payment Options Research shows that cart abandonment is reduced on sites that offer preferred payment methods. The more payment modes you enable, the higher the chances that users will find an option they trust and feel comfortable with. Major credit cards, mobile wallets, Buy Now Pay Later schemes, bank transfers, and other must have options; location based popular payment methods like Sofort, iDeal if you are selling across geographies. PCI-compliant integration with payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal unlocks multiple payment methods while additionally ensuring transaction and sensitive user data security. Discover how to add payment gateway in app to enhance the payment capabilities of your mobile app. 3. Testing and Optimization No cart experience is perfect out of the box. Running A/B tests by tweaking design elements, flows, payment options, etc., provides data-backed insights on what users respond best to. Tools like Hotjar record user sessions directly in your live cart which surfaces pain points that can then be fixed. Analytics dashboards reveal drop off rates at each step, average order values and other trends that indicate scope for improvement if benchmarked periodically. Examples of Brands with Great Cart Experiences Some standout examples of brands that ace the cart and payment process: 1. Made.com Made.com offers a clean, distraction free cart with focus on only relevant details like items added, shipping estimates, order total, discounts and gift cards applied. Purchasing without account creation can be done through their guest checkout and the option to save details for faster repeat orders. At checkout, there are multiple payment methods clearly presented, along with clear messaging around security and returns policy – both essential to gain user trust for a furniture brand. 2. Bolt.com Bolt presents users with a single-page visual cart that provides details of services (food, rides, etc.) along with associated quantities, pricing and taxes. Pre-added tips can be edited before seamlessly checking out via integrated payment partner Stripe. Discounts and promo codes can also be applied directly on this page. The cart is optimized for speed, which is in line with Bolt’s brand promise of efficient deliveries and payments. 3. Amazon Amazon offers the gold standard for guided cart experiences, with persistent visibility into items added for purchase, alerts on discounts and delivery estimates. Their patented one-click buying option removes friction, allowing power users to skip checkout. However, multiple payment methods, including COD and EMI schemes, make it accessible for first-time buyers, too. The entire purchase process is geared towards user convenience, distilled through decades of testing and user data. Designing a Cart Experience from Scratch Creating an effective cart experience requires understanding user psychology, buyer journeys, and an iterative design approach. Here is a step-by-step process to follow: 1. Define Goals and Outcomes First, define what a successful cart and checkout flow needs to achieve from a business point of view. Typical goals include: So that design choices align with business impact and tie these to overall revenue and growth goals. 2. Map the Existing User Journey Analyze data around existing user behavior across the checkout process, e.g.: The above can be gleaned from tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar. 3. Competitor Benchmarking Look at how competitor brands within your industry offer study cart experiences. Find out what flows, or features appeal most to users. For example, they can provide guest checkout or Apple/Google Pay for mobility apps or BNPL options for D2C brands. The right cart design combines learnings from data and real-world behavior. 4. Create and Test Hypotheses Using what has been researched so far, imagine what cart element and flow changes could positively impact your goals, e.g. Once you’ve tested these hypotheses with real users through interviews or prototypes, roll them out globally. Tools like UserTesting.com can be used to do quick user studies to find feedback. Choosing the Right Payment Partner To allow flexible payment options, though, one must interface with a payment service provider. Here are key aspects to evaluate when choosing a payment partner: The partner should advocate consistent checkout integration among several platforms, including web, mobile apps, POS systems, etc. For businesses selling cross-border, the partner must offer payment acceptance using local methods in 100+ markets, multi-currency processing and DCC. Using 3D security, risk-based analysis, artificial intelligence, etc., payment partners guard transactions. You should choose a mate with advanced competence in this field. The partner should support integration with credit cards, the most popular mobile wallets, UPI, BNPL schemes and
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