Trump threatens social media companies with law changes because they marked his tweets as lies
Microsoft’s Windows 10 May 2020 update is now out for mainstream users
Arizona sues Google for tracking Android users if even they disabled app-specific tracking
Microsoft’s new WinGet is a clone of the AppGet and the developer is a bit salty about it
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Trump's more than a little cranky over Twitter's decision to slap a warning label on one of his misleading tweets yesterday. Kellyanne Conway, a "Counselor to the President", got on Fox News and set Trump's troll army on Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of site integrity, who then dug up old tweets and taking them out of context trying to get him fired from Twitter. According to the Washington Post, Trump's gonna change Section 230 via an executive order and make internet companies liable for what their users say online. Meanwhile, the US Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit against Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Apple from YouTube nutjob Laura Loomer saying that "their attempts to connect their complaints to violations of the First Amendment, antitrust law, and human rights law fell exceedingly short" - i.e: social media companies aren't trying to silence you, you're just a dickhead.
The Windows 10 May 2020 update is out. Some nice features include improved Bluetooth pairing, lower memory consumption for Edge, the ability to keep Calculator always on top (so minor but so useful), Notepad showing an asterisk in the title bar so you know if there's unsaved changes (again so minor but damn useful), making phone calls from your ARM-based Windows device, new kaomoji (little text based emojis like this ლ(╹◡╹ლ) haha) and a keyboard shortcut to invoke them, support for Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, lots of new icons as part of Microsoft's "Fluent Design" language, the ability to log in with a PIN, Hello Face scan or fingerprint for Microsoft Account based profiles, improved file searching and indexing and probably heaps more. It would be nice if Microsoft had an official list of changes somewhere public (there's likely one on MSDN).
The US state of Arizona has sued Google for "deceptive and unfair practices used to obtain users' location data, which Google then exploits for its lucrative advertising business". The state argues "Google kept location tracking running in the background for certain features, like weather and for web searches using its search engine and Chrome browser, even after the user disabled app-specific location tracking". Arizona's attorney-general wants Google to "pay back profits it may have earned from monetizing this data through ads served to Arizona residents" and could be fined $10,000 for each violation. Google responded saying "lawyers filing this lawsuit appear to have mischaracterized our services. We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data", which is true, but if the settings are buried 3 menus deep in the settings, is that fair?
WinGet was one of the exciting bits of Microsoft's Build conference for me. An official package manager from Microsoft so installing common apps is quick and easy - perfect for deployments. Unfortunately, WinGet's development has a bit of a sour story. Keivan Beigi developed AppGet two years ago in his spare time, as he was frustrated with the state of package management on Windows. AppGet was open source, people used it, liked it and Microsoft noticed this so they reached out to Keivan mid-2019. A few meetings took place that turned into Microsoft exploring acquiring/hiring Keivan to work on a package management solution in early December 2019. He heard nothing from Microsoft until last week, when they gave him a heads up about WinGet, a clone of his project Microsoft showed off at Build. Microsoft didn't do anything wrong legally and maybe Keivan was naive, but it kinda feels dirty that Microsoft didn't even credit Keivan?
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