Rob Pegoraro

@robpegoraro.com

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D.C.-based freelance technology journalist covering, and often vexed by, computers, gadgets, and other things that beep. May or may not be notable. He/him. Read: PCMag, Fast Company, etc. Write: [email protected]

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Rob Pegoraro

I've verified that a set of leaked documents which show what phones Cellebrite can (and can't) unlock are authentic. Shows company could not unlock a sizeable chunk of modern iPhones just recently. Also shows some issues with Google Pixels 6-8 www.404media.co/leaked-docs-...

Leaked Docs Show What Phones Cellebrite Can (and Can’t) Unlockwww.404media.co The leaked April 2024 documents, obtained and verified by 404 Media, show Cellebrite could not unlock a large chunk of modern iPhones.

If you wanted to know more about how Bluesky handles moderation, this thread provides a helpful level of detail about that--and about how machine-learning models can assist human moderators.

It didn't. They've always had a hybrid model where they use Hive Moderation (hivemoderation.com ) to scan images for CSAM, CSEM, murder images, beheadings, animal crush images, etc etc, and to label and classify content that's NSFW, violent, etc , and humans handle actual reports.

Hive Moderationhivemoderation.com Automated content moderation solutions with human-level accuracy

Reply to

rahaeli

Thank you for the details!

Reply to

Ian K. Rogers ikr?╭ರ_ಠ

It's scaled, but it hasn't scaled enough to pry away as many journalists from Xitter as I'd hoped.

Reply to

Jillian C. York 🍉

Perhaps but a secret but is news to me, because the transparency report Bluesky published in January emphasized how the company hired its own moderators instead of outsourcing the work. When did that change?

Bluesky 2023 Moderation Report - Blueskybsky.social We have hired and trained a full-time team of moderators, launched and iterated on several community and individual moderation features, developed and refined policies both public and internal, design...

🎶 Drowning here in Summer's Cauldron 🎵

Bob Menendez, convicted felon.

Sen. Menendez convicted of bribery, other charges in corruption trialwww.washingtonpost.com The Democrat from New Jersey faced 16 counts, including bribery, extortion, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt.

The headline I want to see when New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy makes the obvious appointment to take Bob Menendez's seat in the Senate for the last few months of his term: "Finally. The World Is Ready For Sen. Bruce Springsteen."

PR people: Do Not Do This.

Just encountered a new, extremely cursed PR strategy. A PR person emailed "Hi Rose, Just sending over a reminder for today's interview at 4:30 EST. See you then!" I panicked thinking that I had double booked myself or something. Turns out we never scheduled an interview, she just WANTS TO DO ONE.

Local-news plot twist: As the Post's D.C. coverage ebbs, DCist exiles aim to start a worker-owned newsroom--like NYC's @hellgateny.bsky.social--called The 51st, starting with a crowdfunding campaign. (Yes, I see the race and age variances between this staff photo and the District's population.)

Former DCist staff launch the 51st, new local news site for Washingtonwapo.st The 51st is a worker-run newsroom that will attempt to fill a niche its founders say opened when WAMU closed DCist.

One of our neighborhood's newest "modern farmhouse" McMansions having both a front and a back lawn that are mostly astroturf--with two giant SUVs in the driveway--is just too on the nose.

Reply to

Theo in Arlington

Yeah, I spend too much time at events with dodgy or outright defective WiFi.

Reply to

Leah

For a while, I was sure that OneNote would be my Evernote replacement--but Microsoft still hasn't matched Evernote business-card scanning, and then Microsoft further sank its cause by taking down its Evernote-to-OneNote importer.

Reply to

Theo in Arlington

How well does it work offline? That's the issue I usually see cited with Notion.

Evernote's voice transcription is a smart addition to the feature lineup, but the developers need to work on recognizing pauses in a conversation and spacing them accordingly--versus extruding long, unbroken blocks of text that look like the denser chapters in Ulysses.

Further proof of how easily people can skip past bylines: a longtime PR pal texted yesterday to say he was happy to spot my byline at Wirecutter... where I've been contributing since 2014.

Judge Aileen Cannon (R)

Judge Cannon went and did it. She has dismissed the stolen documents case against Trump on Clarence Thomas’s (nonsense) appointments clause rationale.

Reply to

Philip Bump

I'm so old that reading "People who know Trump well say he's a gracious host, inquisitive, loves music and social media" reminds of me reading stories approvingly citing how Yuri Andropov appreciated jazz.

Seeing a Cybertruck only two blocks from your house might rate as "uncomfortably close."

My cat remains oblivious to The Discourse.

The person at the Trump rally whom I keep thinking about is not Trump, not the shooter, but the attendee who arrived thinking he had a front-row seat to history, maybe also thinking he was at the safest place around, and wound up one of the 40,000-plus Americans dead from gun violence every year.

Here is that man's story.

Man killed at Trump rally was former fire chief in Butler County who was protecting familywww.post-gazette.com Gov. Josh Shapiro said Sunday that he has ordered the state’s flags to fly at half mast in honor of the former fire chief killed trying to protect...

Reminder: Journalists usually don't write the headlines that run over their stories or even get any say in them. So if a headline looks utterly daft, please spend a whole three or four minutes to read the story below it before you post your hot take.

Could you try bringing some replacement-level humanity to the discussion?

Reply to

Anil Dash

Indeed.

Any kids who set up lemonade stands next to a bike trail on a day like today (case in point, the siblings on the Cap Crescent at Little Falls, with their mom as a cash/Venmo cashier) are going to be printing money.

I kind of blinked twice at this sentence: "In May, DSA’s 'Red Star' caucus, which describes itself as a 'revolutionary Marxist caucus within the DSA,' published a post titled, 'Endorsing AOC is a Bridge to Nowhere.'"

As we all discuss the online left eating itself and shooting itself in the foot while engaging in revolutionary cosplay I thought I might share this incredibly detailed account of the national DSA "Red Star" beef with AOC. www.cityandstateny.com/politics/202...

The real story behind DSA’s decision to unendorse AOCwww.cityandstateny.com A deep dive into the leftist fringe of the leftist fringe.

Reply to

John Schwartz

He'd fit in well with the tobacco-lobby staffers in Christopher Buckley's Thank You For Smoking: "People who had never been inside a military base, much less on the business end of a gun, were walking around using phrases like *lock and load* and *incoming*."

Reply to

Brian Fung

Damnit! I'm sorry, man. Their loss.

If you've been following the news of this gruesome AT&T data breach and thinking "why can't any of these companies practice any goddamn data minimization?," I've had the same question on my mind for a long time. Here's what I found out last fall (tl;dr: no excuse for not encrypting data at rest).

What part of 'get rid of my data' don’t companies get?www.fastcompany.com Data minimization remains a subject of talk, not practice, at too many firms that have already suffered data breaches.