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Amanda Silberling, writing at TechCrunch, on Twitter’s supposed plans to charge users $20/month to be verified:

Musk and his buddies view this plan as a way to get people to actually give Twitter money. But by monetizing a symbol that currently has value, they will ultimately remove all of that existing value.

Blue checks exist on social platforms as a means of combating misinformation. Currently, if someone makes a fake account pretending to be a world leader, journalist or celebrity, it’s easy to tell it’s a fake if the account doesn’t have a blue check. But under this newly proposed system, there’s not much incentive to pay the $20 per month to stay verified, especially since the once-coveted symbol would be available to anyone willing to pay. It’s quite possible that bad actors trying to pose as journalists to spread fake news would be more incentivized to pay the $20 than actual journalists.

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This week on Mac Power Users:

Apple has shipped significant updates to its operating systems, so David and Stephen explore the features each brings to the table, getting deep into macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16.1.

In other news, we have the MPU Merch Store has re-opened for the holidays! We’ve got the Classy Tee back for pre-order, as well as a sweatshirt and hoodie:

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Everyone knows that they should be backing up their computer, and Backblaze is an easy and secure way to back up docs, music, photos, videos, drawings, projects — all of your data. Files can be accessed via Backblaze’s excellent website or on the go with the Backblaze app on iOS and Android. If you experience a drive failure, Backblaze lets you download your files, or you can restore via mail, with a hard drive full of your data that gets shipped to your door. By default, Backblaze saves deleted and old versions of files for 30 days, but for an extra $2/month, you can increase that retention history to 1 year!

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That famous clip of a floppy disk floating through the air after being ejected from a Macintosh Portable really makes my brain vibrate in a special way. In this video, Scott Manley explains why the Portable was there in the first place:

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Nilay Patel, in a fantastic piece about the challenges that You Know Who faces with his purchase of Twitter:

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

[…]

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.

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Like many pervious versions of macOS, you can create a USB install disk with in just a few steps. I like having these on hand for troubleshooting or quicker installations.

As before, creating a USB Installer requires downloading a full copy of macOS Ventura from Apple. This can be done via the Mac App Store if you are already running Ventura. If not, your Mac may only download the delta update. As of the initial version of macOS Ventura, the full installer is about 12 GB.

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You’ve probably seen all the USB-C iPhone headlines that came out of this interview, but the whole thing is worth a watch, or a listen if you’re like me and ripped the audio then uploaded it to your Overcast account to listen to later when you go for a walk.

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This week on Connected:

Stephen has some dongles, Myke worries about the neighbors and Federico doesn’t enjoy piles.

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Jessica Merzdorf, NASA:

Lucy is the first mission to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, an ancient population of asteroid “fossils” that orbit around the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. To reach these distant asteroids, the Lucy spacecraft’s trajectory includes three Earth gravity assists to boost it on its journey to these enigmatic asteroids.

On October 13, 2022, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured this image of the Earth and the Moon from a distance of 890,000 miles (1.4 million km). The image was taken as part of an instrument calibration sequence as the spacecraft approached Earth for its first of three Earth gravity assists. These Earth flybys provide Lucy with the speed required to reach the Trojan asteroids — small bodies that orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. On its 12 year journey, Lucy will fly by a record breaking number of asteroids and survey their diversity, looking for clues to better understand the formation of the solar system.

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Apple:

Use the powerful camera system of your iPhone to do things never before possible with a webcam, including Center Stage, Portrait mode, Studio Light, and Desk View.

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Howard Oakley:

At first sight, it might appear that boot volume groups and overall disk layout in Ventura are exactly the same as those in Big Sur and Monterey. This article shows their similarity, and how they differ significantly.

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Apple Support:

macOS Ventura makes the things you do most on Mac even better, with big updates to the apps you use everyday, including Mail, Messages, and Safari. You can use your iPhone as a webcam for your Mac with Continuity Camera. There’s also an entirely new way to automatically organize your windows with Stage Manager. And when you upgrade, you get the latest security and privacy protections for your Mac.

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