Knowing the kinds of readers we have here, I strongly suspect that if you drew a Venn diagram of "TDWTF Readers" and "TikTok Users" those circles wouldn't overlap at all. But TikTok is in the news, and because my partner uses TikTok, I'm getting second hand smoke of all of this, I think there's some interesting things to talk about here.
If you've been avoiding this news, good for you. For a long recap, Ars can bring up up to date.. But as a quick recap: TikTok is owned by Bytedance, which is based in China, and subject to Chinese laws. TikTok, like every other social media company, is basically spyware, tracking your behavior to sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Over the past few years, all three branches of the US government have decided that the "Chinese ownership" is the problem here (not so much the spying), and passed a law to ban it unless a US company buys it. The whole thing has turned into an idiotic political football, with Biden saying that his waning days of the Presidency wouldn't enforce the ban anyway, and then the whole thing turns into a Trumpist political football as the incoming President is playing Calvinball and making decrees that he did not (at the time) have any authority to make in the first place.

The one accessibility area I don’t like and avoid working on is PDF files. I frankly find the process people have to go through to make a PDF accessible is far too complex and far too antiquated. …

Chain of paper cut out figures with one missing in the middle Over the past few years, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have become more...

England, the US and Canada are among the countries with national autism strategies — and now Australia has one too.

Doctors in the U.S. have reported feeling unprepared to care for people with disabilities and have revealed significant negative bias about this population, according to previous research. A new Northwestern Medicine study has found much of this could be rooted in their medical school training.

Nearly nine million students rely on DOE-backed disability accommodations.

New research suggests that the risk for developing dementia is significantly higher than previously estimated, and the burden on the United States population will grow substantially over the next few decades.

tl;dr: Microsoft and other email security scanners will visit the links in email you transmit, and run the JavaScript in those links, including calls that lead to POSTs going out. This used to be unacceptable, since POSTs have side effects. Yet here we are. This breaks even somewhat sophisticated single-use sign-on / email confirmation messages. Read on for how to deal with this, and some thoughts on how we should treat gatekeepers like Microsoft that can randomly break things & get away with it.

Schools are now notifying families their data has been stolen.

New Worlds gets a music column, JG Ballard revisits an old fetish, Ian Watson takes us to Japan and Jack Storey finally finishes his novel.

On November 20, 2024, Shubham Shah and I discovered a security vulnerability in Subaru’s STARLINK admin panel that gave us unrestricted access to all vehicles and customer accounts in the United States, Canada, and Japan.

Image generated by DALL*E We’re shipping a new API in Firefox Nightly that will let you use our Firefox AI runtime to run offline machine learning tasks

Sketchy follower sales sites are (unsurprisingly) expanding to Bluesky

119 LTE and 5G vulnerabilities disclosed, including 79 in MME and 36 in AMF, risking city-wide disruptions

Apple yesterday announced a new API to expand in-app purchase capabilities on the App Store, providing developers with new ways to support large...

Frankly, “Use ChatGPT” is the best answer Siri has offered.

New research “Computer-Use Agent” AI model can perform multi-step tasks through a web browser.

In order to capitalize on network effects as people shift from old platforms to new ones, we need to think about what's holding people back.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Tuesday signed a long-awaited bill to stop Illinois organizations from paying less than the minimum wage to workers with disabilities.

With the new Samsung announcement, it is now confirmed that the Galaxy S25 will be the first Samsung device to receive Gemini image descriptions in its

High impact? Problematic? Are we starting conversations or stopping them. (348 words / January 24, 2025)

This student project is even better than some entry-level laptops.

“An AI completing multiple tasks at the same time” — DALL-E

We are very excited to announce our third annual Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card and invite you to participate in the survey that will determine the ratings. Plus, participants who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing to receive a $200 gift card, thanks to Be My Eyes.

MOVED TO https://codeberg.org/spritely/ocappub

The remastered versions of DOOM and DOOM II have arrived, bringing with them a host of new enhancements and features, including improved accessibility options. These updates aim to make the first-person shooter games more inclusive for players with disability. Visual accessibility options include High Contrast Text and Menu Typeface, making…

Denise's company formed a new team. They had a lot of low-quality legacy code, and it had gotten where it was, in terms of quality, because the company had no real policy or procedures which encouraged good code. "If it works, it ships," was basically the motto. They wanted to change that, and the first step was creating a new software team to kick of green-field projects with an eye towards software craftsmanship.
Enter Jack. Jack was the technical lead, and Jack had a vision of good software. This started with banning ORM-generated database models. But it also didn't involve writing raw SQL either- Jack hand-forged their tables with the Visual Table Designer feature of SQL Server Management Studio.

Lawsuit over accessibility widget This article originally appeared on TechStart-ups on 23/12/2024. Userway is facing a class action lawsuit filed by

Our bodies have evolved to need exercise but not want to do it. Why is that, and what can we do about it?

We run the LLMs through a gauntlet of tests, from creative writing to complex instruction.

Learn how to kickstart inclusive accessibility research with practical advice from Fable’s experts. Get tips on building rapport with assistive tech users, navigating barriers, and bringing accessibility into your product development with confidence.

How do we make impactful accessibility change that better integrates into what we’re already doing? The answer is to create systems around accessibility work, instead of treating it like a barrier or a checkmark.

Read EcomBack's 2024 ADA Website Lawsuits Report. Discover which states have the most lawsuits, key plaintiffs and law firms, industries most affected, and insights on overlay widget myths. Get a clear view of the ADA website compliance scene in 2024.

First model release of 2025 for French AI lab Mistral, who describe Mistral Small 3 as "a latency-optimized 24B-parameter model released under the Apache 2.0 license." More notably, they claim …

Move over, DeepSeek. Seattle-based nonprofit AI lab Ai2 has released a benchmark-topping model called Tulu3-405B.

Today's anonymous submitter spent a few weeks feeling pretty good about themselves. You see, they'd inherited a gigantic and complex pile of code, an application spread out across 15 backend servers, theoretically organized into "modules" and "microservices" but in reality was a big ball of mud. And after a long and arduous process, they'd dug through that ball of mud and managed to delete 190 files, totaling 30,000 lines of code. That was fully 2/3rds of the total codebase, gone- and yet the tests continued to pass, the application continued to run, and everyone was just much happier with it.
Two weeks later, a new ticket comes in: users are getting a 403 error when trying to access the "User Update" screen. Our submitter has seen a lot of these tickets, and it almost always means that the user's permissions are misconfigured. It's an easy fix, and not a code problem.

I wanted to share a project a good friend is creating because it’s an important project. Last week, my friend Derek Riemer announced his adaptive sports project and I wanted to share it with…

Specialized garbage-filled captions are invisible to humans, confounding to AI.

Imagining how we'd cover overseas what's happening to the U.S. right now

Shouldn’t there be a way to keep your apps or project data private and improve performance by reducing server latency? This is what on-device AI is designed to solve. It handles AI processing locally, right on your device, without connecting to the internet and sending data to the cloud. In this article, Joas Pambou explains what on-device AI is, why it’s important, the tools to build this type of technology, and how it can change the way we use technology every day.

We need to talk about recent executive orders and memorandums regarding accessibility.

Who, Me?: Hey! Teacher! Leave our network alone!

News, Reviews & Betas which includes large community peer support

We don’t live in a purely deterministic world of technology anymore.

The Nuance Audio hearing aid smart glasses have received FDA clearance and a CE marking in the EU, clearing the way for a Q1 launch.

The optional features include letting drivers know in advance you travel with one. Drivers who try to cancel will be reminded that doing so is against Uber policy — and the law.

thoughts, projects and research

The NRSC’s AM Improvement Working Group published a study examining the effects of RF noise on AM radio reception in cars.

The Audio Issue

The first week of the new republican administration was frightening and disorienting for all of us who believe in civil and human rights, justice, equality, fairness and more. This guest article is written by Eve Hill, a disability rights and digital accessibility lawyer, about actions taken on day

Ars staffers take aim at some of the web’s worst predatory practices.

Techie complains as biz ignores contractual working hours

Malicious microcode vulnerability discovered, fixes rolling out for Epycs at least

A beloved community radio station featuring only music by Fediverse artists has closed its doors. This is its legacy.

Dissecting various compression algorithms.

How are financial institutions faring in this often-overlooked component of the digital banking experience?

The refreshed museum of the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, Kentucky, is slated to open in 2026 with a novel invitation to visitors: please touch.