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The Fundamental-Feature Edition Friday, August 12, 2016

“A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment, by Charlie Warzel, BuzzFeed

According to 10 high-level former employees, the social network’s long history with abuse has been fraught with inaction and organizational disarray. Taken together, these interviews tell the story of a company that’s been ill-equipped to handle harassment since its beginnings. Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority. On Twitter, abuse is not just a bug, but — to use the Silicon Valley term of art — a fundamental feature.

Twitter Statement On BuzzFeed Safety Story, by Twitter

We feel there are inaccuracies in the details and unfair portrayals but rather than go back and forth with BuzzFeed, we are going to continue our work on making Twitter a safer place.

Coming Soon

New Accessibility Features Coming To Apple’s Ecosystem, by Steven Aquino, TidBITS

At WWDC, Apple introduced a slew of enhancements to its four software platforms: iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Although there was no mention during the keynote, Apple also has added new accessibility features aimed at addressing a wide range of needs.

Here is a rundown of the new accessibility features across Apple’s operating systems.

How Apple's New Privacy Settings In iOS 10 Will Impact Mobile Advertising, by David Kirkpatrick, Marketing Dive

The iOS 10 update significantly changes what IDFA flags send back to advertisers and developers. The new version sends back a completely anonymized set of zeroed-out values, giving users a much higher level of privacy.

Stuff

Simplenote, The Planet’s Most Useful Piece Of Software, Is Now Open Source On iOS, macOS And Android, by Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch

If you haven’t tried Simplenote, you really should. It’s just cloud-synced text documents, and it’s so much simpler and more lightweight than something like Evernote (which daily grows larger and more cumbersome) that I use it for just about everything, from shopping lists to the Great American Novel.

Make Dull Photos Dazzle, by Ray Saitz, Peterborough Examiner

Your smartphone or tablet can take excellent photos and your computer or laptop is a perfect place to store and organize your library of snapshots. However, it's what a mobile device or computer can do to enhance a picture that is really exciting.

Notes

VR Will Break Museums, by Adrian Hon, Medium

The first sign came with the Oculus Rift DK2 last year, when I discovered that consumer virtual reality could finally replicate a sense of physical presence in a digital world.

The second came last month, when I visited the British Museum’s Sicily exhibition.

The exhibition was perfectly fine, a well-curated narrative of the Greek and Norman periods of Sicilian history — the greatest hits, if you will. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t see shit.

Bottom of the Page

I don't like how Apple has implemented full-screen apps in Mac OS X -- so, I've been experimenting with hiding both the menu bar as well as the Dock while 'maximizing' all my windows.

So far, I like it.

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Thanks for reading.