Weekly Web Harvest for 2021-09-26

Nice exploration of all kinds of things that frequently happen between science, intent, and result. Be nice to break down things like this for patterns of misunderstandings.

In April 2021, Apple released the App Tracking Transparency (“ATT”) feature with iOS 14.5. ATT claims to give users choice and transparency for third-party tracking in their apps, and it was lauded by many as a step forward in protecting user privacy. Does it really work? Five months after its release, we tested ten of the top apps in the App Store to see if ATT succeeds in stopping tracking.

Wirelessly mirror your screen or stream media files to a variety of receivers. AirParrot quickly finds available media receivers on your network and uses quick connect to connect directly to any device running Reflector 4. Easily mirror your screen, extend your desktop or stream files to share videos, audio, presentations and much more!

–wonder if this is substantially more information than the credit card charges tied to you tied to order gave previously? Certainly more than the cash payments and certainly lets you try to manipulate behavior on the site.

“What’s happening is we’re replacing a very sort of innocuous object, a restaurant menu, with a website that comes with all the sort of tracking technologies that you see in modern e-commerce today.” 

That video got 4.1 million views in the month after it was posted and sent tens of thousands of new users flooding to the Prolific platform. Prolific, a tool for scientists conducting behavioral research, had no screening tools in place to make sure that it delivered representative population samples to each study. Suddenly, scientists used to getting a wide mix of subjects for their Prolific studies saw their surveys flooded with responses from young women around Frank’s age.

The developer of StopTheMadness is Jeff Johnson, famous for solving the Mac OCSP appocalypse. Jeff’s other software includes Link Unshortener, a Mac app that expands shortened web links, Tweaks for Twitter, a web browser extension for Mac and iOS that makes Twitter better, and Underpass, a peer-to-peer encrypted file transfer and chat app for Mac and iOS. Jeff was a longtime engineer at Rogue Amoeba Software and also worked on the open source RSS reader Vienna.

A hamster in Germany is redefining “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” author Burton Malkiel’s belief that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a stock ticker list in the newspaper could do just as good as a human investment professional.