Free Sectigo S/MIME Certificates Limited to One Month

Free Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA) S/MIME certificates, which is a standard used to encrypt emails, are now limited to one month instead of twelve.

On renewing this month, have found that the new issued Certificate only has a 1 month duration instead of 12 months, and if you want 12 months, you now need to pay. (US$48 per year, multi-year discounts available). Note: Sectigo’s Sales Team all ensure me that they still offer 12 months free, despite evidence otherwise.

If you use one of these certificates for email encryption on macOS and iOS, be warned you may have to look for another solution, like OpenPGP.

PDF Expert 2: $54.99

We have a deal on PDF Expert for Mac from Readdle. You can create and edit PDFs, work with large PDFs smoothly, and it allows you to annotate PDFs, merge them, and much more. This PDF editor also has a nice list of distinctions, including being The 2015 App of the Year in the Mac App Store and Top Paid App in the Mac App Store. It’s $54.99 through our deal, 31% off retail.

For Years, Google Sabotaged Firefox

In the latest news of anticompetitive corporate behavior, a former Mozilla executive said Google sabotaged Firefox for years.

“When Chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you might expect. They had a competing product now, but they didn’t cut ties, break our search deal – nothing like that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, ‘We’re on the same side. We want the same things’,” the former Mozilla exec said.

I encourage everyone to read the Twitter thread.

Apple Should Be Buying Roku

Apple TV+ is on its way, but should the company actually be buying Roku? Tim Beyers on Motley Fool thinks it should. He said it should remake its streaming service as the Roku Channel. It’s certainly an idea…

Now imagine Apple acquiring Roku and making Apple TV+ with its original content a featured channel and selling access as part of the hardware bundle. (“Buy an Apple Roku player and get both Apple TV+ and the Roku Channel, free,” they might say.) Netflix, which has long been available through Roku, could remain on the platform without streaming its data through Apple servers. Everyone wins. Even better, Apple would be putting its service out in the wild — i.e., unbundling the service from the device — just as Roku is getting traction for being the most widely used TV operating system.

AI's Serious Diversity Problem

Diversity, or lack thereof, is a big issue in the tech industry. The problem has particularly serious ramifications in AI. The Verge looked at a new report on the topic, and what the industry can do about it.

Diversity, while a hurdle across the tech industry, presents specific dangers in AI, where potentially biased technology, like facial recognition, can disproportionately affect historically marginalized groups. Tools like a program that scans faces to determine sexuality, introduced in 2017, echo injustices of the past, the researchers write. Rigorous testing is needed. But more than that, the makers of AI tools have to be willing to not build the riskiest projects. “We need to know that these systems are safe as well as fair,” AI Now Institute co-director Kate Crawford says.

Tim Cook is a Better CEO of Apple Than Steve Jobs

Leander Kahney’s biography of Tim Cook hit stores Tuesday. In a piece for Wired, the author explained why he believes Mr. Cook is a better CEO of Apple than Steve Jobs. The proof, he said, is in the numbers.

Apple is the world’s first trillion-dollar company, a milestone reached under Cook’s watch. Apple reached this landmark valuation on August 2, 2018, when Apple’s stock hit $207.05. By comparison, when Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011, Apple’s stock was $50.53 (split adjusted), which valued the company at about two-thirds less: $300 billion. During his tenure, Cook has almost tripled Apple’s revenue. In 2018 Apple earned $265.6 billion, the highest annual revenue in the company’s history.