Chance Miller:
Following its acquisition of the popular Day One journaling app last month, Automattic has announced that it is also acquiring the popular podcast application Pocket Casts. For those unfamiliar, Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com and Tumblr.
Eli Budelli (Hacker News, Slashdot):
As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new). We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts.
[…]
Co-founders Russell Ivanovic and Philip Simpson will continue to lead Pocket Casts as part of Automattic.
Ashley Carman:
Pocket Casts launched in 2010 and sold to NPR and a group of other public media groups eight years later. […] It started monetizing through a program called Pocket Casts Plus, which charges users a monthly subscription fee for features like desktop app access and a standalone Apple Watch app, in 2019.
Pocket Casts initially went up for sale in January after its board of public media members voted to do so. The app, which is free to download, was losing money, and NPR reportedly lost $800,000 on it last year.
Previously:
Acquisition Android Android App Business iOS iOS 14 iOS App Pocket Casts Podcasts
Base11 Studios:
Unclack is the small but mighty Mac utility that mutes your microphone while you type. No more getting called out for clacking your way through a Zoom meeting on your clicky keyboard!
Via Nick Heer:
This is, for me, a perfect addition to my work-from-home software toolkit, and it is free.
Audio Discord FaceTime Keyboard Mac Mac App macOS 11.0 Big Sur Skype Zoom
Ognjen Regoje (via Hacker News):
I’ve stopped using Reddit mostly because I no longer wanted to support a site that has aggressively started to employ disrespectful design patterns. Not only that, but they kept trying to present them in a way that made it seem like they’re doing it for the sake of their users.
Here are examples of dark (perhaps dark is too strong but they’re certainly at least grey) patterns that I noticed[…]
wting:
I was the EM for Reddit’s Growth team around this time. I am responsible for / contributed to a few features like the current signup flow, AMP pages, push notifications, email digests, app download interstitials, etc.
There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned in or let go; I immediately transferred to a different org.
Dark Patterns Design Reddit Web
Dan Goodin (Hacker News):
The Russian state hackers who orchestrated the SolarWinds supply chain attack last year exploited an iOS zero-day as part of a separate malicious email campaign aimed at stealing Web authentication credentials from Western European governments, according to Google and Microsoft.
[…]
Attacks targeting CVE-2021-1879, as the zero-day is tracked, redirected users to domains that installed malicious payloads on fully updated iPhones.
[…]
In one wave, a Nobelium-controlled web server profiled devices that visited it to determine what OS and hardware the devices ran on. If the targeted device was an iPhone or iPad, a server used an exploit for CVE-2021-1879, which allowed hackers to deliver a universal cross-site scripting attack. Apple patched the zero-day in late March.
Previously:
Bug Exploit iOS iOS 14 LinkedIn Security WebKit
