Helpful
Just a reminder…. maybe hold off before installing the latest updates on your iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Mac. Give it a few days.
Thank You and happy update day for those that celebrate. Apple iOS 18
Breaking News… There Are Shady Companies on the Internet!
Shameless. This is an example people who are concerned with AI will point to has why we need to slow down.
So, I read a fair number off technology websites and blogs, some big like Macworld and others smaller like TechRadar. I am a regular reader of John Gruber’s long running blog DaringFireball and Jason Kottke’s Kottke Like a lot of things on the Internet, some sites get published, are read a good bit, but for whatever reason fade away. One such site I read regularly was The Unofficial Apple Weblog but a few years ago, it went away from my regular bookmarks. Originally owned by AOL, they let the site go to Yahoo, recently the domain (and all of its many years of articles and reviews) was sold by Yahoo to a company based out of Hong Kong called Web Orange Limited. I am not going to link to them because I find them despicable.
Instead of maybe restoring TUAW to a legitimate news source with curated reporters, they took a different route. They are basically using AI to scrape articles from other sites such as MacRumours and engadget and then publish them on TUAW. Now many sites will do similar things but the reputable ones will attribute the source of the original articles. TUAW is not doing this, worse, they are giving the author of such articles to people on their staff…. except most of these people don’t exist.
The following tech writer, Christina Warren, discovered this because she was one off the original TUAW contributing writers, they even were still using her picture, name, and bio on their about page! You can find her X post about it here. When confronted, all TUAW did was change the name on the about page but as of now kept her picture. Horrible.
Adam Engst at TidBits has a very nice summary article with screen shots showing the thefts and explaining it further.
I know there are a lot of more important news happening in the world but things like this really irritate me because it wont get a lot of main stream reporting. Just trying to do my part, however small, to share and call out the offender.
Special Place in Hell
Public Service Announcement.
I have a pretty decent spam filtering process, but no process is 100% and I will still get the occasional BAD email, as follows.
The first screen shot shows the message as it appears in my inbox and is pretty legit looking…. although the use of French in the fine print is a clue. The second screen shot shows the senders full email…. “noreply@pphoki.me” is probably not an actual Disney email server. The last screen shot is what the website looks like and shows the full address in the address bar, yes I used a private browser to access the site. There is a special place in hell for these kinds of criminals.
A very special place.
