Tech

Brad Silverberg, former senior VP of Windows, kept hold of the first copy of Windows 95 that came off the production line. Microsoft employees then held a Release to Manufacturing (RTM) party with bottles of Dom Pérignon for drinking and “cheap champagne for spraying.” Microsoft’s RTM parties were infamous throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, especially the iPhone funeral one for the Windows Phone 7 RTM.

As reported by The Financial Times:

In previously unreleased figures, X said its number of global daily active users in the second quarter of this year was 251mn, a rise of 1.6 per cent from the same period the year before.

The stalled growth and general turmoil at X, ever since Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, created an opening for Zuckerberg’s Threads to attract 175 million monthly users in its first year.

The Aqara U200 replaces your existing lock and comes with a wireless keypad, which you can tap with an iPhone or Apple Watch for easy unlocking.

It’s now available to buy on Amazon and works with European and UK locks, as well as US deadbolts. It uses Thread, is Matter-compatible, and has fingerprint and PIN code access.

I’ll have a review soon.

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In his latest book, Microsoft software developer turned literature professor Dennis Yi Tenen takes us all the way back to 17th-century apps for a deep dive into computer science and literature’s intertwined history — and, as Tenen says, why it’s important our understanding of AI “become more grounded in the history of the humanities.”

The sleepy town of Granbury, TX was in for a rude awakening when Marathon Digital Holdings opened a bitcoin mine — an operation that not only draws a lot of energy, but creates a tremendous amount of noise:

“We’re living in a nightmare,” Sarah Rosenkranz says... As rock music blares from the speakers and other patrons chatter away, Rosenkranz pulls out her phone and clocks 72 decibels on a sound meter app — the same level that she records in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. In early 2023, her daughter began waking up, yelling and holding her ears. Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away. She soon refused to sleep in her own room. She then developed so many ear infections that Rosenkranz pulled her from school in March and learned how to homeschool her for the rest of the semester.

This feature in Time by Andrew Chow is expertly reported. It’s difficult to prove a casual link between the mine’s constant racket and the town’s health, but it’s hard not to be alarmed by what Granbury residents are suffering from: migraines, vertigo, nausea, leaking ear fluids, and a number of other horrifying ailments.

The new Echo Spot looks like an intriguing option for a bedside smart display, thanks to Amazon’s decision to ditch the camera with this iteration.

The $80 smart speaker competes against the Google Nest Hub and the Echo Show 5. but the Nest takes up a lot of real estate, and the Show has a camera. Will the Spot be just right? I’ll have a review soon.

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Russia’s communications regulator ordered Apple to remove some of the VPN apps available in the country, according to a notice Apple sent to the developers of Red Shield VPN, Le VPN, and others:

We are writing to notify you that your application, your application, per demand from Roskomnadzor will be removed from the Russia App Store because it includes content that is illegal in Russia.

In March, Russia made it illegal to advertise VPNs that don’t comply with the country’s strict laws.

Ticketmaster does some pretty wild (and user-hostile) stuff in the name of stopping scalpers and bots from getting all the good tickets. And the scalpers and bots seem to always have another move. Case in point: those rotating barcodes on your ticket.

If you’ve bought a ticket, this token can be extracted from within the Ticketmaster app (or, in some cases, from Ticketmaster’s desktop website), exported to a third-party platform, and tickets can then be generated on that third-party platform.

By all reports, Apple and Warner Bros.’ F1 wasn’t cheap to produce, but you can definitely see director Joseph Kosinski putting that budget to work in the film’s new teaser trailer. The movie’s out internationally on June 25th, 2025, June 27th in the US, and will hit Apple TV Plus some time afterwards.

Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative is set to impact Chinese employees in September, with the software giant reportedly set to cut off Android devices from accessing its corporate network. Bloomberg News reports that the move is due to Android devices in China lacking Google’s Play store to distribute Authenticator and identity apps for Microsoft employees. Microsoft is ramping up its internal security efforts after a series of high-profile attacks in recent years.