John Gruber shares thoughts on the new ways tabs feel and function on Safari for Mac: From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15's tabs is a regression. Everything. It's a tab design that can only please users who do not use tabs heavily; whereas the old tab design scaled gracefully from "I only open a few tabs at a time" all the way to "I have hundreds of tabs open across multiple windows." That's a disgrace. The Safari team literally invented the standard for how tabs work on MacOS. The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari's tabs. Now, Apple has thrown away Safari's tab design -- a tab design that was not just best-of-platform, but arguably best-in-the-whole-damn-world -- and replaced it with a design that is both inferior in the abstract, and utterly inconsistent with the standard tabs across the rest of MacOS. The skin-deep "looks cool, ship it" nature of Safari 15's tab design is like a fictional UI from a movie or TV show, like Westworld's foldable tablets or Tony Stark's systems from Iron Man, where looking cool is the entirety of the design spec. Something designed not by UI designers but by graphic designers, with no thought whatsoever to the affordances, consistencies, and visual hierarchies essential to actual usability. Just what looks cool. This new tab design shows a complete disregard for the familiarity users have with Safari's existing tab design. Apple never has been and should not be a company that avoids change at all cost. But proper change -- change that breaks users' habits and expectations -- is only justifiable when it's an improvement. Change for change's sake alone is masturbatory. That with Safari 15 it actually makes usability worse, solely for flamboyant cosmetic reasons, is downright perverse. "Google could and should run ads targeting Safari users, with a simple welcoming message: Switch to Chrome, the Mac browser where tabs look like tabs."

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Windows 11 is now officially available to download. While Microsoft is launching Windows 11-powered hardware worldwide on October 5th, the company has made the OS update available early for eligible devices in New Zealand and beyond. From a report: If you've purchased a Windows 10 machine recently, that means you should be able to upgrade to Windows 11 right now. For everyone else, the rollout of Windows 11 will be gradual. Microsoft says existing Windows 10 devices that are eligible for the Windows 11 upgrade will start to be able to upgrade today, but it will be mostly new hardware that will receive the upgrade immediately. Microsoft says, "We expect all eligible Windows 10 devices to be offered the upgrade to Windows 11 by mid-2022."

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The U.S. Supreme Court turned away a lingering appeal by Oracle stemming from its challenge to the now-scrapped $10 billion cloud-computing contract the Pentagon awarded to Microsoft in 2019. From a report: The rejection was a formality given the Defense Department's decision in July to drop the contract and divide the work among multiple bidders, potentially between Microsoft and Amazon. Oracle's appeal centered on alleged conflicts of interest involving Amazon, and on claims that the Pentagon violated its own rules when it set up the contract to be awarded to a single firm.

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A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide. From a report: The company, Syniverse, revealed in a filing dated September 27 with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission that an unknown "individual or organization gained unauthorized access to databases within its network on several occasions, and that login information allowing access to or from its Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) environment was compromised for approximately 235 of its customers." A former Syniverse employee who worked on the EDT systems told Motherboard that those systems have information on all types of call records. [...] The company wrote that it discovered the breach in May 2021, but that the hack began in May of 2016.

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Facebook -- and all the major services that Facebook owns -- are down today. ArsTechnica: We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook: "Google anycast DNS returns SERVFAIL for Facebook queries; querying http://a.ns.facebook.com directly times out." The problem goes deeper than Facebook's obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services -- which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook's own network -- were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services' load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not. A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. With no BGP routes into Facebook's network, Facebook's own DNS servers would be unreachable -- as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

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Ian MacDougall, reporting for ProPublica: Since 2008, McKinsey & Company has regularly advised the Food and Drug Administration's drug-regulation division, according to agency records. The consulting giant has had its hand in a range of important FDA projects, from revamping drug-approval processes to implementing new tools for monitoring the pharmaceutical industry. During that same decade-plus span, as emerged in 2019, McKinsey counted among its clients many of the country's biggest drug companies -- not least those responsible for making, distributing and selling the opioids that have ravaged communities across the United States, such as Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson. At times, McKinsey consultants helped those drugmaker clients fend off costly FDA oversight -- even as McKinsey colleagues assigned to the FDA were working to bolster the agency's regulation of the pharmaceutical market. In one instance, for example, McKinsey consultants helped Purdue and other opioid producers push the FDA to water down a proposed opioid-safety program. The opioid producer ultimately succeeded in weakening the program, even as overdose deaths mounted nationwide. Yet McKinsey, which is famously secretive about its clientele, never disclosed its pharmaceutical company clients to the FDA, according to the agency. This year ProPublica submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the FDA seeking records showing that McKensey had disclosed possible conflicts of interest to the agency's drug-regulation division as part of contracts spanning more than a decade and worth tens of millions of dollars. The agency responded recently that "after a diligent search of our files, we were unable to locate any records responsive to your request." Federal procurement rules require U.S. government agencies to determine whether a contractor has any conflicts of interest. If serious enough, a conflict can disqualify the contractor from working on a given project. McKinsey's contracts with the FDA, which ProPublica obtained after filing a FOIA lawsuit, contained a standard provision obligating the firm to disclose to agency officials any possible organizational conflicts. One passage reads: "the Contractor agrees it shall make an immediate and full disclosure, in writing, to the Contracting Officer of any potential or actual organizational conflict of interest or the existence of any facts that may cause a reasonably prudent person to question the contractor's impartiality because of the appearance or existence of bias."

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The island has rare elements needed for electric cars and wind turbines. But protesters are blocking one project, signaling that mining companies must tread carefully. From a report: This huge, remote and barely habited island is known for frozen landscapes, remote fjords and glaciers that heave giant sheets of ice into the sea. But increasingly Greenland is known for something else: rare minerals. It's all because of climate change and the world's mad dash to accelerate the development of green technology. As global warming melts the ice that covers 80 percent of the island, it has spurred demand for Greenland's potentially abundant reserves of hard-to-find minerals with names like neodymium and dysprosium. These so-called rare earths, used in wind turbines, electric motors and many other electronic devices, are essential raw materials as the world tries to break its addiction to fossil fuels. China has a near monopoly on these minerals. The realization that Greenland could be a rival supplier has set off a modern gold rush. Global superpowers are jostling for influence. Billionaire investors are making big bets. Mining companies have staked claims throughout the island in a quest that also includes nickel, cobalt, titanium and, yes, gold. But those expecting to exploit the island's riches will have to contend with Mariane Paviasen and the predominantly Indigenous residents of the village of Narsaq. Until she was elected to Greenland's Parliament in April, Ms. Paviasen was manager of a heliport that provided one of the few ways to get to Narsaq, a village at the mouth of a fjord on the island's southwest coast. The forces reshaping the planet -- extreme weather caused by rising temperatures, and rising demand for electric vehicles and other green technology that require bits of rare metals -- converge at Narsaq, where fishing is the main industry and most people live in brightly colored wooden houses with tar paper roofs.

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Clearview AI has stoked controversy by scraping the web for photos and applying facial recognition to give police and others an unprecedented ability to peer into our lives. Now the company's CEO wants to use artificial intelligence to make Clearview's surveillance tool even more powerful. From a report: It may make it more dangerous and error-prone as well. Clearview has collected billions of photos from across websites that include Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and uses AI to identify a particular person in images. Police and government agents have used the company's face database to help identify suspects in photos by tying them to online profiles. The company's cofounder and CEO, Hoan Ton-That, tells WIRED that Clearview has now collected more than 10 billion images from across the web -- more than three times as many as has been previously reported. Ton-That says the larger pool of photos means users, most often law enforcement, are more likely to find a match when searching for someone. He also claims the larger data set makes the company's tool more accurate. Clearview combined web-crawling techniques, advances in machine learning that have improved facial recognition, and a disregard for personal privacy to create a surprisingly powerful tool. Ton-That demonstrated the technology through a smartphone app by taking a photo of the reporter. The app produced dozens of images from numerous US and international websites, each showing the correct person in images captured over more than a decade. The allure of such a tool is obvious, but so is the potential for it to be misused. Clearview's actions sparked public outrage and a broader debate over expectations of privacy in an era of smartphones, social media, and AI. [...] The pushback has not deterred Ton-That. He says he believes most people accept or support the idea of using facial recognition to solve crimes. "The people who are worried about it, they are very vocal, and that's a good thing, because I think over time we can address more and more of their concerns," he says. Some of Clearview's new technologies may spark further debate. Ton-That says it is developing new ways for police to find a person, including "deblur" and "mask removal" tools. The first takes a blurred image and sharpens it using machine learning to envision what a clearer picture would look like; the second tries to envision the covered part of a person's face using machine learning models that fill in missing details of an image using a best guess based on statistical patterns found in other images. These capabilities could make Clearview's technology more attractive but also more problematic. It remains unclear how accurately the new techniques work, but experts say they could increase the risk that a person is wrongly identified and could exacerbate biases inherent to the system.

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Boris Johnson says the UK can get all its electricity supply to "complete clean energy production" by 2035.

China has revealed its first set of ethical guidelines governing artificial intelligence, placing emphasis on protecting user rights and preventing risks in ways that align with Beijing's goals of reining in Big Tech's influence and becoming the global AI leader by 2030. From a report: Humans should have full decision-making power, the guidelines state, and have the right to choose whether to accept AI services, exit an interaction with an AI system or discontinue its operation at any time. The document was published by China's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) last Sunday. The goal is to "make sure that artificial intelligence is always under the control of humans," the guidelines state. "This is the first specification we see from the [Chinese] government on AI ethics," said Rebecca Arcesati, an analyst at the German think tank Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics). "We had only seen high-level principles before."

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A shortage of technology talent has Indian companies offering sweeteners like more vacation time and gender-neutral parental leave as they compete for graduates and professionals. One Bangalore startup is trying a more dramatic solution: a three-day work week. From a report: Fintech company Slice is offering new hires a three-day week with salary at 80% of the going market rate. This is a win-win approach that frees the workers to pursue other passions or interests -- or other gigs -- while still locking in a steady pay and benefits from Slice, said Rajan Bajaj, the company's founder. "This is the future of work," Bajaj, 28, said in a phone interview. "People don't want to be tied down to a job." Global investors are pouring billions of dollars into India's tech startups, putting entrepreneurs under pressure to ramp up teams. A massive talent crunch has ensued as IT outsourcers, Silicon Valley giants, global retailers and Wall Street banks' technology centers vie for engineering and product talent alongside hundreds of fast-growing startups. Slice is betting that its approach will make it stand apart from the competition. The company has 450 employees and wants to recruit 1,000 engineers and product managers in the next three years.

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Original tweets

• The tech industry was and is so much about self-promotion, selfishness, that there's no way for people who know the history, how we got here, to explain in that context, what Facebook is, beyond all the things the press says about them, and the distilled evil they represent.
• 1/3 I remember my first glimpse of the Mac. I arrived at a building on Bandley Drive in Cupertino some time in August 1983, and was met by Mike Boich and Guy Kawasaki from the Mac team. As we walked to the conference room, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a beige plastic box
• the Sopranos movie was ok. The kid really does look like his dad.
• As someone who ran a social net long before Facebook booted up, I suspect what we're seeing on FB has less to do with the company and more to do with the scaling up of humanity on social nets.
• 1/3 Another radical idea for political pubs. Did you hear blogs are back? They call them newsletters now. They all have RSS feeds, of course. How about gathering a list of all the newsletters people on your staff read, publish the list,
• an idea for a political publication.for a few weeks, assign a reporter to read the twitter comments for all the stories, but don't announce anything. look for people who write intelligent comments with new ideas that people in your circle never come up with. recruit.

Links

• More here --
• Blue Origin is officially sending William Shatner to space.
• New York’s Cannabis Control Board to hold first public meeting about legalized marijuana on Tuesday.
• Getting Our Model 3 Approved for Tesla's FSD Beta Requires Passing the New Safety Score.
• Facebook is at least eight things.
• RT @blaireerskine:
• Why the Media Got the Story About this Week All Wrong.
• 2021 MLB playoffs schedule is set after the 162-game season concludes.
• Warriors’ Andrew Wiggins gets COVID-19 vaccine.
• . https://t.co/TdnU89Chp6
• Radical ideas for political pubs.
• Everything you need to know about tiebreakers, wild cards and the last day of the MLB season.
• I made this a blog post.

Replies

• Because we have the ability to share deep ideas here, not just screaming "look at me" -- maybe this is the time for tech to grow up, before the generation that built the foundation for FB is gone.
• They are a product of tech, and there was some good in the foundations we built for them to use. And that good *is* in their product, whether or not they know it, or anyone believes it. It's still there. And if you use it, you must know that.
• 3/3 All this from a fraction of a second look
• 2/3 that was small and upright. And personal. How it said that to me, in just a glimpse, I have no idea. Is that a computer? Another thought popped into my head: It said "I'm new." And that was something because back in those days everything was new. And it was personal, for me.
• I'd love to see us start looking at the news media and help us understand how they're undermining our civilization. They obviously won't do it themselves, as they criticize Facebook for not being transparent. Unbelievable hypocrisy, even more unbelievable that people fall for it.
• The people commenting are just parroting what they hear from news people, who are highly conflicted.
• We had thousands of users, not millions or billions. Conclusion: A certain percentage of humans really are deplorable. If you give them a means to organize they will use it to destroy civilization.
• Why do I think this? Even though we didn't have an algorithm, the network we started crumbled, over and over, under pressure from people's whose only apparent purpose was to cause chaos.
• @andrewkimmel Pirates of the Caribbean
• @andrewkimmel Godfather 3
• @Neoryder @cdixon Twitter/Facebook were easier to use because in the open space people wouldn’t cooperate, everyone was trying to dominate.
• @cancelself I'm saying it should be a product. Something they share with their readers. Kind of like Apple has an app store, with developer products.
• 3/3 Pay special attention to ones that criticize your specific publication. Always listen to your most passionate users, that's how you improve over time.
• 2/3 and run a river of all their letters, when they come out. A way of revealing your sources in a new dimension. Build relationships with the smartest of them. Become known as connoisseurs of political thought. How could that hurt your pub?
• be a contrarian. in journalism the assumption is that comments are disgusting. take an opposite view for a short period of time, and see objectively if there aren't some diamonds out there in the middle of all the crap.
• @axios makes sense. the real deadline is jan 1, 2023 -- when the next congress is seated. also of concern, a member of the senate could die. if a repub were to die, that would mean one of manchin or sinema would become irrelevant. if it was a democrat dying, end of game.
• @jonahb in other words they broke the web.

RTs

• RT @whengoodenough: @davewiner Agree. I ran Blurtt which had social network component to it. As a small startup couldn’t afford human moder…
• RT @davewiner: As someone who ran a social net long before Facebook booted up, I suspect what we're seeing on FB has less to do with the co…
• RT @mount_bees: Rep. Louie Gohmert warned OAN viewers about the "hundreds and thousands" of "Flamers," aka birds who survive windmills but…
• RT @SchmuckLauren: Hope this helps. https://t.co/6BZ48JosiV
• RT @tcarmody: for how much and with whom https://t.co/UkmqYe2RMK
• RT @artistrivera: Entry into the Mine, 1923 #diegorivera #muralism https://t.co/8lYk3NNmCB
• RT @artistmetzinger: Paysage aux deux Cyprés, 1905 #pointillism #jeanmetzinger https://t.co/3pNg0SxIZW
• RT @davewiner: If you like what I write here on Twitter, a more coherent and organized version goes out every night via email. You'd make…
• RT @davewiner: @axios makes sense. the real deadline is jan 1, 2023 -- when the next congress is seated. also of concern, a member of the s…

The tech industry was and is so much about self-promotion, selfishness, that there's no way for people who know the history, how we got here, to explain in that context, what Facebook is, beyond all the things the press says about them, and the distilled evil they represent. They are a product of tech, and there was some good in the foundations we built for them to use. And that good is in their product, whether or not they know it, or anyone believes it. It's still there. And if you use it, you must know that. We have the ability to share deep ideas here, not just screaming "look at me" -- maybe this is the time for tech to grow up, before the generation that built the foundation for FB is gone.

The spill has been described by one official as a potential ecological disaster.

William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk, is set to become the oldest person to fly to space.