I could understand limiting new registrations, but permanently and irreparably breaking people's website domains and email addresses feels pretty hostile considering how little resources this must take up.
The historic information in here was really interesting, and a great example of an article rapidly expanding in scope and detail. How they combatted corporate IT “security” software by pretending to be a VPN is quite unexpected.
If you want to get location accuracy lower than 500m without significantly impacting battery life, you can use region monitoring. There's two paths:
1. Set up a region around the user's current location. If they exit it, note the location and set up another one around that location. This will give you around 100m accuracy, which is the minimum diameter of the monitored region.
2. Set up regions in various cardinal directions that nearly-or-just-barely overlap. If they enter one of those regions, note the location and set up another set around the current location. This can give you something closer to 50m accuracy.
For (2), this is how I did it in the Home Assistant iOS app, largely for zones that people wish to monitor which are smaller than 100m. You can find some of the annoying math here[1] (and there's tests all over for it), the logic for setting up regions here[2], and computing them here[3].
These are the changes that Apple was forced to make, specifically referencing 3.1.3 (Other Purchase Methods) and 3.1.3(a) (“Reader” Apps):
> 3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.
> 3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action.
The bit about the (formerly required in the US) entitlement is:
> Reader app developers may apply for the External Link Account Entitlement to provide an informational link in their app to a web site the developer owns or maintains responsibility for in order to create or manage an account.
They required you use a trackingless, generic URL that was unvarying per user, so you probably didn't run into it super often. Offhand, the Kobo app did use it.
Except for 'reader apps' (those that sell digital content, basically) which Amazon is. Plus, Apple's rules are applied unevenly; Amazon is a giant WebView on Apple TV but it's disallowed for everybody else.
Facebook never federated so their implementation was just an API they couldn't control to them:
> Facebook Messages are evolving to allow people to share rich content beyond text: photos, videos, audio and even stickers. We want to ensure the best possible send and receive experience where all these rich forms of content are reliably and consistently available on every platform. XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.
I think this is a pretty great step in the direction of not being wholly dependent on one platform; makes you start thinking about your website as the source and the social media networks as just a representation.
Fish is such a great shell. More often than not it reads my mind about what to do (e.g. with its fantastic history autocomplete), but I’m really excited for this minor breaking change note:
> alt-left and alt-right will now move by one argument (which may contain quoted spaces), not just one word like ctrl-left and ctrl-right do.
Paze (https://www.paze.com/) feels to me like the collective banks’ attempt to wrestle back control here. You could imagine a world where it’s a separate side channel for payment for the same credit card accounts but without the rent-seeking intermediaries.
Probably the first step would be a good, non-regular-expression (IIRC, URLs are not regular) based link parser that's ported to every possible language on the planet.
zacwest@^^domain^^