Posted in Commentary on December 31, 2023 by itnerd
At this time of year I like to look back over the past 365 days and pick out the stories that really got my attention. This year the planet returned to normal…. More or less. Having said that, here’s what happened in tech this year:
Twitter Goes Into A Death Spiral Because Of Elon Musk: The number one story this year had to be Elon Musk taking Twitter on a suicide mission that it will not recover from. Whether it’s because Elon drove away all those who would be willing to pay to advertise on the platform due to his decisions or his actions, throwing away years of brand equity by renaming Twitter to “X”, letting Twitter turn into a hellscape of racism among other evils, or it’s because of the fact that the EU along with FTC are looking to give him a legal beat down, 2024 is likely to be one where Elon gets what’s coming to him. Not to mention that Twitter will go from dying to dead.
Rogers Merges With Shaw: The unpopular merger between Rogers and Shaw happened this year. As part of this Freedom Mobile who was owned by Shaw had to be sold to Videotron. Now that might have made the Canadian government happy, lots of consumers were not happy as the assumption was that Rogers would find new and creative ways to screw their customers over. It’s a cynical view, but 2024 will illustrate if that view is correct or not.
Bell Decides To Hold Canadians Hostage To Get A Better Deal From The CRTC: In the latter half of the summer, I started to hear rumblings that Bell was slowing down their fibre rollout for whatever reason. Something that as I have said previously was giving them a competitive advantage against Rogers. Now I wrote a story about this where Bell told me that they had “nothing to announce” at that time. But that changed a couple of months later when Bell announced that they were cutting spending and blamed the CRTC for it due to a decision from the CRTC that Bell didn’t like. Effectively Bell was holding Canadians hostage to get the CRTC to fold up like a cheap suit. And that is pretty low. Bell really needs to check themselves because this is the sort of thing that might bite them in 2024 as consumers don’t like to be held hostage.
Rogers Has Email Issues That Are Still Ongoing: What started as a general outage with Rogers Internet offering that happened back in March has evolved into a situation where users of Rogers email service (in other words they have a @Rogers.com address) can’t get their email on any device or application that they choose. And that has dragged on for months without resolution, and frustrated their customers to no end. This is happening in part due to the fact that Rogers requires users to create App Specific Passwords via Rogers Member Center on each program or device that an email address is used on. The creation of new app specific passwords doesn’t work and existing app specific passwords appear to have been deleted in many cases. That pretty much breaks your applications that rely on them. Rogers has blamed everyone from Microsoft, Apple, to the tooth fairy for these issues. And they’ve also suggested that the workaround for this which is using their webmail portal is an acceptable workaround. Which it isn’t if you’re used to using a real email client like Microsoft Outlook. Let’s see if Rogers cares enough about their customers to fix this in 2024. In the meantime, your best bet is to take this advice and not use the email provided by your ISP.
Casetify Becomes Copy And Pastetify: Phone case maker Casetify gets caught in hysterical fashion copying the work of competitor Dbrand. The TL:DR on this is that Casetify literally copy and pasted the designs from Dbrand’s teardown skins onto their own cases. And when I say literally, I really mean it. Here’s the story that I wrote about this here. What made it worse is the fact that Casetify responded to this by saying that they are a “bastion of originality” which is laughable. And everybody on the planet called them on it. And then they were caught also stealing stuff from iFixit. The net result is that Casetify is getting sued, and sued big by Dbrand. Honestly, Casetify needs to get taken to the cleaners here legally. So, while I order a new Dbrand skin for my MacBook Pro, I will be watching Casetify getting pwned in court 2024. Because they deserve to get pwned.
Apple Gets Gets Caught Violating A Pair Of Patents: Late in the year, the ITO has nailed Apple for violating a pair of patents held by a company by Masimo that are related to the blood oxygen sensor in the Apple Watch. That caused sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 briefly. The whole thing is due to go back to court in the new year. But it will be interesting to see if Apple simply fights this for as long as they can, or if they simply pay off Masimo to make this go away.
AI Is A Thing: Whether it’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, or Grok, AI became mainstream in a big hurry this year. Both for good and bad reasons. That means that 2024 is going to see more use of AI. Both for good and bad reasons. And that’s scary.
Threat Actors Pwn All The Things: 2023 beat 2022 in terms of the scale and effects of hacks. And that is frightening because it leaves us all unsafe. So much so that it is difficult to not be directly affected by a threat actor pwning something or some company. In 2024 this needs to change or there is truly no hope for us.
Indian Scammers Run Wild: I have spent way more time than I ever have coming to the rescue of people who have been scammed or almost scammed by scammers based in India. And the problem is getting worse in my opinion. At the same time, I’ve been spending time working with community groups here in Toronto to educate people in terms of not getting scammed. Because I believe education is part of the solution to this problem. The real solution is for India to do more to make the country less hospitable to scammers. Or put another way, they need to put these people in jail for a very long time. While I would like to see that happen in 2024, I am not holding my breath and I am preparing to deal with a lot of more riding to the rescue.
And now for some stats. The top ten countries that visited my blog in 2023 are:
In all almost just over 1.41 million page views were served up this year. And that’s despite the fact that I have largely stopped cross posting on Twitter in 2023 except when I want to get a brand’s attention. Instead, I’ve moved to cross posting on Mastodon. Thus proving that Twitter is less relevant than ever before. Sorry (not sorry) Elon Musk.
And in terms of the top ten stories that were viewed this year:
I find it interesting that seven of the top ten stories are related to Bell and their Internet service. Clearly there is a lot of interest from users and want to be users of Bell’s Internet service. Perhaps Bell should take note of that. Particularly of #10 where a Bell tech took out my service and I had to fight to get it back online on the same day. Which only seemed fair to me as I was taken offline due to Bell. Which is another way of saying that Bell needs to work on their customer service. Of the rest of the stories, I find it interesting that a Roku story related to Apple Fitness+ made the list. It’s interesting because this was a story from 2 years ago. That implies that people are still finding out about this feature. Two stories about fraud made the list along with a story about a broken ASUS Zen WiFi XT8 update made the list. Thus it shows the diversity of what readers are interested in.
Now if you have something that you think that should be on this list, leave a comment with your thoughts as I am interested in hearing what you think.
2023: Year In Review
Posted in Commentary on December 31, 2023 by itnerdAt this time of year I like to look back over the past 365 days and pick out the stories that really got my attention. This year the planet returned to normal…. More or less. Having said that, here’s what happened in tech this year:
Twitter Goes Into A Death Spiral Because Of Elon Musk: The number one story this year had to be Elon Musk taking Twitter on a suicide mission that it will not recover from. Whether it’s because Elon drove away all those who would be willing to pay to advertise on the platform due to his decisions or his actions, throwing away years of brand equity by renaming Twitter to “X”, letting Twitter turn into a hellscape of racism among other evils, or it’s because of the fact that the EU along with FTC are looking to give him a legal beat down, 2024 is likely to be one where Elon gets what’s coming to him. Not to mention that Twitter will go from dying to dead.
Rogers Merges With Shaw: The unpopular merger between Rogers and Shaw happened this year. As part of this Freedom Mobile who was owned by Shaw had to be sold to Videotron. Now that might have made the Canadian government happy, lots of consumers were not happy as the assumption was that Rogers would find new and creative ways to screw their customers over. It’s a cynical view, but 2024 will illustrate if that view is correct or not.
Bell Decides To Hold Canadians Hostage To Get A Better Deal From The CRTC: In the latter half of the summer, I started to hear rumblings that Bell was slowing down their fibre rollout for whatever reason. Something that as I have said previously was giving them a competitive advantage against Rogers. Now I wrote a story about this where Bell told me that they had “nothing to announce” at that time. But that changed a couple of months later when Bell announced that they were cutting spending and blamed the CRTC for it due to a decision from the CRTC that Bell didn’t like. Effectively Bell was holding Canadians hostage to get the CRTC to fold up like a cheap suit. And that is pretty low. Bell really needs to check themselves because this is the sort of thing that might bite them in 2024 as consumers don’t like to be held hostage.
Rogers Has Email Issues That Are Still Ongoing: What started as a general outage with Rogers Internet offering that happened back in March has evolved into a situation where users of Rogers email service (in other words they have a @Rogers.com address) can’t get their email on any device or application that they choose. And that has dragged on for months without resolution, and frustrated their customers to no end. This is happening in part due to the fact that Rogers requires users to create App Specific Passwords via Rogers Member Center on each program or device that an email address is used on. The creation of new app specific passwords doesn’t work and existing app specific passwords appear to have been deleted in many cases. That pretty much breaks your applications that rely on them. Rogers has blamed everyone from Microsoft, Apple, to the tooth fairy for these issues. And they’ve also suggested that the workaround for this which is using their webmail portal is an acceptable workaround. Which it isn’t if you’re used to using a real email client like Microsoft Outlook. Let’s see if Rogers cares enough about their customers to fix this in 2024. In the meantime, your best bet is to take this advice and not use the email provided by your ISP.
Casetify Becomes Copy And Pastetify: Phone case maker Casetify gets caught in hysterical fashion copying the work of competitor Dbrand. The TL:DR on this is that Casetify literally copy and pasted the designs from Dbrand’s teardown skins onto their own cases. And when I say literally, I really mean it. Here’s the story that I wrote about this here. What made it worse is the fact that Casetify responded to this by saying that they are a “bastion of originality” which is laughable. And everybody on the planet called them on it. And then they were caught also stealing stuff from iFixit. The net result is that Casetify is getting sued, and sued big by Dbrand. Honestly, Casetify needs to get taken to the cleaners here legally. So, while I order a new Dbrand skin for my MacBook Pro, I will be watching Casetify getting pwned in court 2024. Because they deserve to get pwned.
Apple Gets Gets Caught Violating A Pair Of Patents: Late in the year, the ITO has nailed Apple for violating a pair of patents held by a company by Masimo that are related to the blood oxygen sensor in the Apple Watch. That caused sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 briefly. The whole thing is due to go back to court in the new year. But it will be interesting to see if Apple simply fights this for as long as they can, or if they simply pay off Masimo to make this go away.
AI Is A Thing: Whether it’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, or Grok, AI became mainstream in a big hurry this year. Both for good and bad reasons. That means that 2024 is going to see more use of AI. Both for good and bad reasons. And that’s scary.
Threat Actors Pwn All The Things: 2023 beat 2022 in terms of the scale and effects of hacks. And that is frightening because it leaves us all unsafe. So much so that it is difficult to not be directly affected by a threat actor pwning something or some company. In 2024 this needs to change or there is truly no hope for us.
Indian Scammers Run Wild: I have spent way more time than I ever have coming to the rescue of people who have been scammed or almost scammed by scammers based in India. And the problem is getting worse in my opinion. At the same time, I’ve been spending time working with community groups here in Toronto to educate people in terms of not getting scammed. Because I believe education is part of the solution to this problem. The real solution is for India to do more to make the country less hospitable to scammers. Or put another way, they need to put these people in jail for a very long time. While I would like to see that happen in 2024, I am not holding my breath and I am preparing to deal with a lot of more riding to the rescue.
And now for some stats. The top ten countries that visited my blog in 2023 are:
In all almost just over 1.41 million page views were served up this year. And that’s despite the fact that I have largely stopped cross posting on Twitter in 2023 except when I want to get a brand’s attention. Instead, I’ve moved to cross posting on Mastodon. Thus proving that Twitter is less relevant than ever before. Sorry (not sorry) Elon Musk.
And in terms of the top ten stories that were viewed this year:
I find it interesting that seven of the top ten stories are related to Bell and their Internet service. Clearly there is a lot of interest from users and want to be users of Bell’s Internet service. Perhaps Bell should take note of that. Particularly of #10 where a Bell tech took out my service and I had to fight to get it back online on the same day. Which only seemed fair to me as I was taken offline due to Bell. Which is another way of saying that Bell needs to work on their customer service. Of the rest of the stories, I find it interesting that a Roku story related to Apple Fitness+ made the list. It’s interesting because this was a story from 2 years ago. That implies that people are still finding out about this feature. Two stories about fraud made the list along with a story about a broken ASUS Zen WiFi XT8 update made the list. Thus it shows the diversity of what readers are interested in.
Now if you have something that you think that should be on this list, leave a comment with your thoughts as I am interested in hearing what you think.
Happy new year!
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