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Google Topics Will Categorize Your Browsing for Advertising

Andrew Orr ·

Google Topics will track your browsing and divvy it up into 300 categories for advertising. It replaces Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

When you hit upon a site that supports the Topics API for ad purposes, the browser will share three topics you are interested in — one for each of the three last weeks — selected randomly from your top five topics of each week. The site can then share this with its advertising partners to decide which ads to show you. Ideally, this would make for a more private method of deciding which ad to show you — and Google notes that it also provides users with far greater control and transparency than what’s currently the standard. Users will be able to review and remove topics from their lists — and turn off the entire Topics API, too.

 

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Cooking Over FaceTime? New Recipe App 'Pestle' Can Help

Andrew Orr ·

Sarah Perez writes about a new app called Pestle that helps with cooking over FaceTime. It makes use of SharePlay released with iOS 15.1.

The result is a well-built recipe app that provides a better experience for the end user, and one which tries to respect the creator content it organizes by offering source links, tools to discover more recipes from the same creator as they’re published, and a feature that encourages repeat visits to recipe sites. But some of Pestle’s other features make it almost too easy to bypass creators’ websites, which could cause concerns.

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Coinbase Creates Center to Help With Crypto Taxes

Andrew Orr ·

Worried about crypto taxes? Coinbase has created a tax center on its platform to help.

Customers will see all of their taxable activity in one place to determine if they owe taxes, and how much. If they’ve taken more advanced steps like sending or receiving crypto from Coinbase Pro or external wallets, they can receive free tax reports for up to 3,000 transactions from our crypto tax partner CoinTracker. The most complicated time of the year just became more clear.

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Do You Use Coinbase or Venmo? Join the Plaid Lawsuit

Andrew Orr ·

Join the Plaid lawsuit if you’ve ever used Coinbase, Venmo, Robinhood, or dozens of other apps.

Plaid, a middleman connecting bank accounts to other fintech services, says it’s been used by tens of millions in North America. According to the settlement website, Plaid allegedly obtained “more financial data than was needed” and set up log-in pages that deceptively mimicked those of the user’s own bank account, but fed the credentials directly to itself. For its part, Plaid has denied any wrongdoing and argued it was transparent about its practices.

I filed a claim and look forward to getting my US$5.00.

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Someone Reverse Engineered 'Wordle', Here are the Secrets

Andrew Orr ·

Robert Reichel has reverse engineered Worldle and posted a write-up on his blog. It includes a list of words the game uses.

At this point, we’ve done enough digging to know how Wordle is choosing the word of the day. We know that Wordle uses a client-side date-based algorithm to determine which word to use from a static wordlist. Each day is predictable so long as we have all of the code pieced together.

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YouTuber Ruben Sim Must Pay Roblox Over 'Cybermob'

Andrew Orr ·

The Roblox Corporation sued YouTuber Ruben Sim over leading a “cybermob” on its platform and terrorizing players, many of whom are kids.

The original ban, according to Roblox’s lawyers, was issued after the YouTube creator harassed other players using racist and homophobic slurs, allegedly sexually harassed users, and uploaded photos of Adolph Hitler to Roblox. Sim disputed this characterization in a YouTube video uploaded last week.