Clark Reid Tech Report

The folks that used to make Twitterrific, the Icon Factory, have just launched a new app that pulls social media and web feeds together in one place. 9to5mac.com reports that with Tapestry, you can now see your feeds from Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS, YouTube, and more in a single timeline. It’s all in chronological order, with no algorithm deciding what you should see or not see. Tapestry is free for download at the App Store, but you can also pay to remove ads, unlock custom timelines, mute content, and customize themes. The fees for the upgraded service run $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or you can get them for a one-time purchase at $79.99.

Apple has rolled out a new app called ‘Invites,’ which is supposed to let user plan events like birthday parties, graduations, vacations, baby showers, and more. In other words, Apple has invented Evite! Snark aside, according to macrumors.com, the Apple app lets you grab images from your Photos library, set an emoji background, and will automatically add info from the Maps and Weather apps, so that is useful. You can use their AI Image Playground to create original images using text-based descriptors. The app has a built in method that lets the sender track who has responded. To use the app, you will need to be an iCloud Plus subscriber and be running iOS 18 or later on your iPhone. 

Meta, in a new policy document, says it may not release some for its AI systems that fall under what it terms ‘high risk’ or ‘critical risk’. Techcrunch.com says the document is called Frontier AI Framework by Meta. Under their definition of ‘high-risk’ and ‘critical-risk’, they mean systems which are capable of aiding in cybersecurity, chemical, and biological attacks, the difference being that “critical-risk” systems could result in a “catastrophic outcome [that] cannot be mitigated in [a] proposed deployment context.” High-risk systems, by contrast, might make an attack easier to carry out but not as reliably or dependably as a critical risk system. If Meta determines a system is high-risk, the company says it will limit access to the system internally and won’t release it until it implements mitigations to “reduce risk to moderate levels.” If, on the other hand, a system is deemed critical-risk, Meta says it will implement unspecified security protections to prevent the system from being exfiltrated and stop development until the system can be made less dangerous. That’s thoughtful of them, isn’t it. Let’s hope the critical systems don’t get hacked by some bad foreign actor!

If this doesn’t make your hair catch fire, I don’t know what will. A 25 year old whiz-kid engineer put in place by Elon Musk…who is not any kind of government official…despite the White House calling him ‘a special government employee’ today apparently has administrative access to the computer code that directs Social Security payments, tax returns, and other payments owed to Americans. Rawstory.com notes that folks inside the Treasury Department and now Democrats and some Republicans in Congress are freaking out. The engineer, Marko Elez, formerly worked for a couple of Musk companies. The Treasury Secretary nominee assured Congressional Republicans that he only has ‘read only’ privileges. Some insiders at Treasury say the kid has already made some rather substantial changes to the code. It should be noted that the old Treasury computers run on COBOL, which is what I would describe as more squirrelly and brittle than more modern codes, so this kid could inadvertently do irreparable damage the payment system of the United States, that handles some $6 trillion in funds! Are you nervous yet?

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.