Web Excursions 2021-06-09
Discover built-in sound classification in SoundAnalysis
Mentioned in WWDC 2021: More cowbell by Jason Snell
Presenter Jon Huang of Apple’s audio team demonstrates a built-in audio recognition model
that allows his Mac to dynamically recognize different sounds as they occur around it:
talking, music, elements of the music like vocals and guitars
Kevin Durand [then] uses Shortcuts on a Mac running macOS Monterey to process a folder full of movies,
looking for any that contain the sound of a cowbell—and then clipping out that movie and saving it to a new location.
Shortcuts doesn’t have audio classification built into it (yet?),
but Durand has built a simple app using Apple’s new SoundAnalysis APIs
that identifies whether a particular sound is found inside a particular file.
a good example of what Shortcuts enables on the Mac
Ten years of breaches in one image
This is a map of the internet’s biggest sources of breached data, from June 2011 to today.
The data is drawn from Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned project (with minor adjustments), so you can click through to the site to see if you’re included. Each bubble represents a single breach, and as you scroll down, you’ll see them getting bigger and coming faster, until the sheer volume is overwhelming.
Creative Commons’ 2021-2025 strategy statement
Today, changed technological, social, cultural, political, legal and economic environments raise new challenges for the open movement.
In order to protect what we have achieved so far and to create the world we want to see,
we must expand our focus beyond copyright licensing,
because content sharing cannot be decoupled from economic and ethical concerns.
Indeed, the benefits of open sharing can be undermined
by exploitative practices that threaten the financial sustainability of open endeavors, leading to economic hardship.
Further, open sharing practices can also be marred by ethical concerns, such as
the problematic use of open content to trail potentially harmful artificial intelligence (AI) technologies or
the use of open content in violation of non-copyright norms.
These challenges often disproportionately affect marginalized and under-resourced creators or communities who stand to lose the most.
To ensure everyone can enjoy the benefits of the full open sharing cycle, we must embrace a multifrontal, coordinated, broad-based approach that transcends copyright.
Will Apple end the newsletter boom?
Email-based publishing has been of the few bright spots for journalism in recent years;
some observers look at Mail Privacy Protection and see a threat.
in this case, it mostly strikes me as a false alarm
For May 2021, 93.5% of all email opens on phones come in Apple Mail on iPhones or iPad; On desktop, Apple Mail on Mac is responsible for 58.4% of all email opens.
Impacts
For ad-based newsletters, then, Mail Privacy Protection is likely to spur publishers to find other ways to understand their audiences.
Apple’s move may affect reader-supported newsletters even less
Writers can triangulate reader engagement by [statistics such as] pageview, mailing list, or revenue
Looking at Apple’s privacy moves this week, I’m mostly willing to take them at face value
But it also seems clear that the value to Apple goes far beyond customer satisfaction