Introduced for Private Browsing sessions in Safari 17.0, Advanced Fingerprinting Protection was also optionally available for regular non-private sessions. With iOS 26, it will be enabled by default. Here’s what that means.
Starting with iOS 26 (as well as iPad 26, and macOS 26), Apple is flipping the switch on Advanced Fingerprinting Protection for all browsing sessions, not just Private Browsing.
As stated above, this feature has been available for a while in Safari and has been on by default for Private Browsing sessions, however, more technically savvy users may already know that you can already enable it for all browsing sessions in current versions of Safari. I’ve had it on for all browsing sessions for a long time on my Macs, my iPhone and my iPad.
If you want to know how Advanced Fingerprinting Protection works in Safari, then head over to 9to5Mac and read through the original article.
As a long-time Mac user, I find the lack of consistency in Windows’ UI utterly baffling, even in system applications from Microsoft. The latest update to Windows 11 just introduced a new search feature in the Settings application which is actually a good thing, but their choice to use an entirely different type of search bar compared to other Microsoft applications confuses me.
It is located in the center of the title bar much like the Microsoft Store, but instead of having almost square edges like every other search bar (and text box for that matter) in Windows 11’s standard design language, it has fully rounded sides like Mac OS X used to have for all of its search bars for years. Why? Just, why?
Just compare them below. Left is the Settings application and right is the Microsoft Store and File Explorer.
It might seem trivial, but details like this matter. They add up and even if most users don’t consciously notice it, they will on a subconscious level. Consistent UI makes for a smoother, easier user experience which is one major reason why macOS has such a fine reputation for user-friendliness.
I just wish Microsoft would stick to its own UI guidelines, but they won’t. Windows has a reputation for inconsistent UI even among first-party applications and it will continue happily moseying down that path. And, as my grandpa used to say, it will keep looking like the south end of a northbound donkey as it does so.
Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans.
He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.
[…]
Experiences like Sellers’s are becoming more common as AI tools gain momentum in white-collar workplaces, offering time-saving shortcuts but also new workplace etiquette conundrums.
[…]
Major workplace tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet offer note-taking features that canrecord, transcribe and use AI to summarize meetings a person is invited to but doesn’t attend. A profusion of smaller companies, such as otter.ai, offers appsthat workers can use to send AImeeting agents to capture calls in a similar way. OpenAI’s ChatGPT recently added a record mode that can function as a meeting note taker. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Participants can’t send their note takers to present to a meeting on their behalf — yet. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has said the company wants to allow users to create “digital twins,” or AI assistants, that can eventually attend meetings for people and take action in their place.
Where can I get one of these?!? That’s my first reaction as meetings tend to be my least productive time. However, I will also admit that the regular contact with the rest of my team that meetings provide has become much more important while working remotely. In a way, the regular meetings and discussions have become the glue holding the team together.
Of course, there are also the privacy implications of AI note-takers:
Sending an AI bot to experience things in your absence could be the next logical step after social media and smartphones created the expectation that anything that can be recorded, will be.
“We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller, CEO of Open Machine, which helps companies and executives deploy AI, said in a phone interview last week. Always-on recording is changing human behavior, she said, from college parties to corporate boardrooms.
[…]
She advises people to remember that there’s no medium — on or offline —that means you’re safe from being recorded. And if someone skipped a meeting and sent an AI note taker instead, consider that the person may later read or hear anything you say in their absence.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote up some of my thoughts on AI replacing traditional search on the internet. My main fear of it is that it would devastate publishers who rely on traffic to earn money from their content and thereby causing the whole industry to essentially collapse.
Fortunately, I’m not the only one to see the problem and, even more fortunately, someone in a position to do something about it has also realized it and has committed to do something about it. It turns out Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, has introduced a new Cloudflare feature to help publishers:
Cloudflare is now experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites.
[…]
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said the feature would ensure that the Internet as we know it will survive “the age of AI.”
“Original content is what makes the Internet one of the greatest inventions in the last century, and it’s essential that creators continue making it,” Prince said. “AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate. This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone.”
Some participating publishers expressed optimism in the press release that Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl feature could potentially stop the endless scraping that publishers defending copyrights have alleged represents wide-scale theft.
I think this is a fantastic idea. Cloudflare is in the unique position to make an initiative like this a success and perhaps even the standard. Publishers do need to get paid in order to continue to produce content.
You might think that AI firms might be against such a thing, but some are even on board with it:
For Cloudflare’s plan to work, AI companies must sign up, too. However, while some AI companies may not see the incentive, Cloudflare has confirmed that it has partnered with AI companies on the initiative, which may benefit from having a simple interface to negotiate with content creators.
Cloudflare suggested its AI partners benefit from “long-term collaboration” with creators whose updated content will help AI products stay relevant. They also can stop wasting money scraping poor quality data sources, a Cloudflare blog said.
“Without ongoing contributions from content creators, AI systems risk becoming outdated, biased, or less reliable—ultimately diminishing user trust and the value of AI products,” the blog said. “Cloudflare is working with AI companies to give them more signals, and ultimately improve the quality and relevance of content they can access. A healthy, sustainable ecosystem of original content is critical for AI innovation and relevance.”
The emphasis is mine. It seems that at least some AI companies see the benefit of being able to negotiate access to publisher’s content through one channel rather than with each publisher separately. Aside from that, I can also imagine some AI companies are interested in preventing the onslaught of copyright violation lawsuits that have been working their way through the court systems of multiple countries.
Overall, I’m excited to see where this goes, if anywhere. It’s still very early with the process of trying to figure out where this is all going, so concepts like this will come and go and the ones that stick around will evolve.
There is plenty more to read about the topic on Ars Technica which I have quoted above. I can recommend it.
Dolphin is the default file manager on the KDE desktop, helping you navigate and browse your local and cloud files. Even though it’s usually discussed as a Linux application, you can actually install it on Windows as an alternative to Microsoft’s built-in File Explorer.
Many KDE applications are available and fully supported on Windows and Mac, such as the Kdenlive video editor and Krita digital art creator. Dolphin is also in that category of cross-platform KDE apps, though the Windows version is more of an experimental project. You have to download the latest daily version from KDE’s build server. After installation, Dolphin is available in the Start menu.
That said, Dolphin also offers a number of features that File Explorer doesn’t such as split screen views and the ability to start a terminal session from any folder. The latter may not be as relevant for Windows as it is for Linux, but it’s still convenient for power users.
Earlier this month, a report emerged that the Denmark Ministry of Digital Affairs would shift away from using Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of Linux and LibreOffice. Now, it appears the ministry will only shift away from Office but continue using Windows.
Politiken, which reported on the situation, has amended its original piece, as spotted by PC Gamer. The Denmark Ministry of Digital Affairs will migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice gradually over the coming months.
For anyone following tech news, this won’t be new. As a long-time Apple user, I do, however, have a few things to say about it.
My feelings are mixed. I’m the type of person that needs order. Call me slightly autistic or OCD, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the fact that Apple has mostly been consistent with its versioning when it comes to its software. I do wish they had stopped with the Mac OS X 10.x nonsense sooner and moved on to Mac OS 11, but at least it was still in sequence.
Contrast that to Microsoft’s chaotic and nonsensical versioning system for Windows. I realize that, internally, Windows NT is still versioned sequentially, but you don’t see that anywhere unless you know where to look.
As such, I am a bit dismayed that Apple made such a huge leap in version numbers.
That said though, I understand why. It makes absolute sense to unify the versions across their multiple platforms so that both consumers and developers know which feature set to expect. Since Apple already indicates Mac models by the year they were released, this makes sense to do on the software-side as well. Now, they just need to carry this over to their iPads, iPhones, Apple Watches, etc.
Ubuntu has been using a YEAR.MONTH versioning scheme for their OS releases from the beginning. This has never bothered me because it was logical and sequential.
It will take me a little bit of time to get used to Apple’s new versioning, but as long as they stay consisent and avoid Microsoft’s versioning follies, I think it’s for the better. In the end, it’s just a number that indicates a specfic release of a piece of software and version numbers don’t really matter. They are just labels to identfy a specific piece of software.
I don’t know how many times I’ve advocated for people to finally drop the “learnings” crap. I’ve hated it since day one, but have had to listen to it for years. I just wish I had had the idea to create a website like this. Someone else did it, though, and that makes me happy.
Publishers face an existential threat in the AI era and need to take action to make sure they are fairly compensated for their content, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Axios at an event in Cannes on Thursday.
Why it matters: Search traffic referrals have plummeted as people increasingly rely on AI summaries to answer their queries, forcing many publishers to reevaluate their business models
This is something I recently wrote about on my personal blog. If I had to rely on any of my blogs for income, I would be panicking about now. My biggest fear is that AI and the handful of companies that are working on it are going to irreversibly change the internet so that most people stay in their walled gardens. As someone who has been a web developer since the beginning of the internet, that worries me.
Earlier this week, Meta officially flipped the switch on in-app advertising for WhatsApp users worldwide, marking the first time ads have appeared inside the messaging platform. But if you’re in the European Union, there’s now an important update: the rollout won’t be happening for you… yet.
Europe’s privacy guardrails hold yet again
In comments to reporters today (via Politico), Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) said WhatsApp has informed them that the new ad model won’t go live in the EU until next year at the earliest. Previously, Meta had stated that they would be “rolling this out slowly over the next several months”, with no mention of the European rollout timeline.
[…]
To nobody’s surprise, that cross-platform data-sharing element in particular raised immediate concerns from European privacy advocates and regulators.
I generally try to avoid Meta’s products because of their abysmal attitude towards user privacy, so I won’t be terribly affected by it when it does come to the EU. I only use WhatsApp for the two or three people I know who don’t have anything else. Otherwise, it’s Apple Messages or Signal for me.
This year at Google I/O 2025, a new mode of search was announced: AI Mode. The idea behind it is simple: Google is going to add an AI-generated answer to search queries at the top of the results page so that users don’t have to click through websites to try to find the answer or information they are looking for.
I am very torn on this. There are both positives and negatives to this approach and I can see it from both perspectives.
Positives
We’ll start with the positive aspects. This is actually a great feature for users. It should, in theory, save them time so that they can immediately get what they are looking for without having to manually click on links, close cookie banners, close newsletter modals, close chatbots and finally comb through the ad-infested content of a website just to realize the information they want isn’t there and they have to repeat the process on the next website.
The amount of enshittification that has occurred on so many websites in the name of marketing or “helping the user” is astounding and leads to a terrible user experience. That’s not even mentioning all of the keyword-driven SEO content written purely so that a website ranks in the search results without providing much real information.
In theory, AI answers should enable the user to skip all of this. It will have done the job of combing through websites’ contents for you and provide you with a nice, neat summary of the information you’re looking for. It’s a win for the user — in theory, if it works properly.
Negatives
As great as all that sounds, there is a nefarious side to it as well. We’ll start with the fact that AI’s reliability is currently abysmal. It frequently hallucinates information that is flat out wrong and could potentially be harmful to the user.
Imagine if the user searches for the temperature considered to be a high fever for a baby. Instead of visiting an accredited website such as the UK’s NHS which says a high fever is 38 C, AI tells them a high fever is 40 C. That could have fatal consequences.
In essence, as AI is now, users have to double-check the answers it provides which defeats the entire purpose of it. They might as well just click through the websites and save themselves the extra step of reading the AI summary.
Part of the problem is that AI as it stands now with its large language models (LLMs) can only regurgitate what its models have been trained on. As we all know, not every website on the internet is reliable or accurate since anyone can write about anything whether they are an expert or not.
While not all AI hallucinations are a result of bad training data, there is so much inaccurate data on the internet that the models are bound to be full of it. This is unavoidable and makes the reliability of its summaries questionable at best.
That isn’t the only issue at play either. As a person who keeps multiple blogs, it is likely that I, like all other website owners, will see a significant drop in traffic. I write on my blogs for fun, not for profit, so the direct impact it has on me will be minimal. The problem is really for websites that rely on traffic to earn money. News organizations or commerical blogs will likely be the most highly impacted by AI summaries since they generally rely on ad revenue or subscriptions — both of which users have to visit the organization’s website for them to earn money.
This leads to a break in the current paradigm of how the internet works. To simplify it: a user searches for something and visits a website. Both the search engine and the website have now earned ad revenue. It’s a win-win. AI summaries have the potential to disrupt this as the user will stay on the search engine’s website and never visit the website with the content. The search engine therefore earns all the profit despite having used the other website’s content to train its models.
This is not only not fair to the producer of the content, it threatens the very production of content. If organizations can no longer earn a profit from producing content, they will go out of business and there won’t be any new content. This is a lose-lose situation for both the organizations and the search engines.
It seems awfully shallow-sighted on the part of the search engines to kill off the very content that they rely on to train their models. In the end, everyone loses.
That isn’t even to mention the psychological impact on people like me who keep websites for fun. Essentially, I write free content for AI bots to train on. It’s free labor that these companies are going to generate revenue from. I don’t get paid, but I put in the work and they reap the profit. As you can imagine, I resent that.
Conclusion
As you may be able to tell, the negatives still far outweigh the positives. While I am torn on it in that I think it would be wondeful to use AI summaries as a user, the unreliability and the cost of the potential impact it has on content creators are too great of an issue to simply ignore. I can’t, with a good conscious, use them exclusively.
That said, I’ve found AI can often get you pointed in the right direction. That is especially true if the information you’re looking for is obscure or you aren’t versed enough in the subject matter to formulate a decent query. I call that a hybrid approach as I use AI summaries to refine my query, then, once I am confident that I am heading in the right direction, I start looking through websites to verify the answer given by AI. Of course, that method is really only tenable for queries where you aren’t entirely sure of how to phrase what you’re looking for. It’s too complex and unnecessary for simple searches.
I’m neither a doomsayer nor an AI-enthusiast. It’s just another tool in the toolbox and you have to figure out how to use it best for your purposes. I can certainly see the potential AI has to benefit users, but we have to be wary about its reliability and impact and enjoy it with caution.
Alex is a developer, a drummer and an amateur historian. He enjoys being on the stage in front of a large crowd, but also sitting in a room alone, programming something or reading a scary story.
