Podcast

TMO Background Mode Interview with Journalist & TMO Contributor Charlotte Henry

John Martellaro · · 1 Comment

Charlotte is a London-based technical journalist. She writes about Apple — and is now The Mac Observer’s newest regular contributor. She has also written for City A.M. (London’s daily business tabloid,) Computer Business Review, The Independent on Sunday and CapX. Her first book, Not Buying It, will be published in June.

I asked Charlotte how she got started in technical journalism. The first factor derived from the fact, that, as a youth, there were always new technical gadgets showing up in her home. The second was via her early interest in music creation on a Mac during her college years. We chatted about her first news blog and then meeting Jeff Gamet on the British Tech Network. Finally Charlotte shared some of her personal interests when she’s not writing: music, soccer and mystery novels.

Add Four Displays To Your Mac with Targus USB-C Universal Quad HD Docking Station
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Add Four Displays To Your Mac with Targus USB-C Universal Quad HD Docking Station

Dave Hamilton ·

The beauty of our new USB-C docking station world (don’t say dongles!) is the flexibility and expandability it provides for our Macs. Targus highlights this perfectly with their new USB-C Universal Quad HD Docking Station that they were showing off Sunday at CES Unveiled. In addition to four USB 3.0 ports, an audio in/out port, and a USB-C port with 15W of power, this dock includes four (yes, 4!) HDMI ports, each connectable to a 1080p display. MacOS sees each of these connected displays individually, meaning you could just as easily have four separate screens for your day-trading delights as you could build a multi-screen video “wall” and spread your image across all four of them simultaneously. At US$275 this is a no-brainer if you need those kind of display options. A unit supporting four 4K screens will be out later this year, due to be priced at US$375.

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Browser Fingerprinting? DuckDuckGo says DuckDuckNo!

Andrew Orr ·

In a Whonix forum a person alleged that DuckDuckGo was using browser fingerprinting techniques to track people. The search engine denies the claim however.

“Fingerprinting-detection libraries unfortunately create false positives because they don’t anticipate good actors using some browser APIs for non-nefarious purposes for which they were designed. We know this not only because we’re falsely identified here (and have been elsewhere) but because we are building this type of detection into our mobile app and browser extension and don’t similarly want to make false claims.”

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said an API they use to determine the size of the browser might be triggering the fingerprinting flag.

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RCS, Successor to SMS, Could Come to Apple Devices

Andrew Orr ·

RCS is a technology touted as the replacement for SMS. It will bring rich, iMessage-like features to texting, and major carriers support it. And it sounds like Apple is interested.

According to the purported slide from the conference, Apple has “engaged in discussions with the GSMA and Operators about including RCS in iOS.” This is inherently vague and doesn’t offer too many details about the extent to which Apple is involved, but the pitch seems to center on three things.

I find it unfortunate that RCS seems to only support encryption during transport, and not end-to-end encryption. Governments around the world would probably not let end-to-end encryption become so widespread.