It’s like when safe area insets appeared in iOS 11: it wasn’t clear why you needed them until the iPhone X came along with a notch and a home indicator. And then it changed everything.
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All of this makes me think that Apple is close to introducing devices where the screen disappears seamlessly into the physical edge. Something where flexible OLED blurs the distinction between pixels and bezel. A new “wraparound” screen with safe area insets on the vertical edges of the device, just like we saw with the horizontal edges on iPhone X.
“Safety, specifically, has been on the roadmap, I'd say probably for three or four years, once we started implementing the DULT,” says Pebblebee’s founder and CEO Daniel Daoura. “So ever since then, we’ve wanted to do it but we just didn't have the bandwidth and ability. We wanted to make sure we've established ourselves as a trustworthy and dependable company.”
The DULT specification, which is also supported by Apple, Google and the likes of Chipolo and is waiting on IETF ratification, is, says Daoura, “very close to being perfect.” Safeguards including the tracker devices buzzing or chiming so as not to go undetected, and notifications to the user being tracked without the need for a dedicated app are ideas the IETF is considering.
Instead of simply dimming your Lock Screen wallpaper, the system now blurs it by default. The tweak makes the clock and widgets stand out more, but it also defeats the purpose of displaying a photo if that’s what you like about the feature. Luckily, there’s also a toggle to bring back the original behavior.
At the root of these concerns is the fact just three US giants - Google, Microsoft and Amazon - provide 70% of Europe's cloud-computing infrastructure, the scaffolding on which many online services depend.
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Even the region's main mobile operating systems - Apple and Android - and payment networks - Mastercard and Visa - are American.
Roblox can’t keep up. After years of criticism that its platform isn’t safe for the young gamers it caters to, the multibillion-dollar company announced in July that it was rolling out new measures to protect users, including an AI-powered age-verification system and other privacy tools. But researchers, experts, and lawyers have concerns the changes won’t stop Roblox’s bigger problem: staying ahead of individuals using the platform to exploit players.
IMHO, governments and regulators should not focus all their energy in curtailing what dominant players can and cannot do. Rather, spend more effort to make it easier for competitors to emerge and flourish.
Why spend all that effort and capital just to help dating apps and clipboard apps and games and game emulators on the existing platforms? Instead, start figuring how to bring about additional viable mobile platforms. Invest in new companies and people, invest in open standards.
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Thanks for reading.