Life

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Why You May Want to Leave Your Phone at Home When Accessing Reproductive Care

Our phones track us all the time. That’s an unfortunate reality of the world we live in, and an investigation published on 404 Media shows just how intrusive and detailed location tracking can get. They were able to show that a service offered to government contractors can trace the route of an individual phone from a person’s house, to an abortion clinic, and back home. 

This particular tool, Locate X, is run by a company called Babel Street, which sells access to law enforcement and government contractors. (An investigator was able to access a free trial of the software, and shared what they found with journalists at several media companies, including 404.) 

How governments can track your location via your smartphone

Locate X uses data that your phone sends to advertisers and app developers. Every smartphone has a MAID, or mobile advertising ID, that uniquely identifies your phone but is not linked to who you personally are—in theory, anyway.

Advertisers have all kinds of creative uses for these IDs. They can use them to send you ads based on your location, and different platforms can pool their information to figure out that they could serve you an ad on one app based on terms you’ve searched in another. 

As our own Stephen Johnson has explained, a lot of the things that make it seem like your phone must be listening to your real-life conversations are actually because of the far creepier things that advertisers do with the data that’s available through more conventional methods. They can serve you ads that match what your friends and family members are into, whether they’ve talked about those things with you or not. 

Your MAID is, of course, not really anonymous. Advertisers and data brokers know that a certain phone spends a lot of time at a certain address, and can be pretty sure that that’s your home. It’s not hard for them to figure out where you work, where you frequently shop, and so on. If you drive to a friend’s house, and then cross a state line and end up at a clinic that does abortions, that’s something that you probably don’t want the government of your home state to know, especially if it’s a state that has recently outlawed abortion and maybe even criminalized behavior that relates to helping someone get an abortion out of state. 

But if local governments or law enforcement subscribe to a service that provides this information, they could use it to figure out who you are and what you’ve done. As 404 points out, data like this has already been used by agencies like ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement), CBP (Customs and Border Protection), and more. 

What you can do to make it harder for governments to track you

Obviously, the safest option is to leave your phone at home when you access reproductive care, or go anywhere else you wouldn’t like to be tracked. But that may not be an option, considering how many things we rely on our phones to do these days. 

You can turn off location permissions for specific apps; here are the instructions for Android and for iPhones.

You can deny permission for apps to share your activity with advertisers or data brokers. Here are the instructions for Android and for iPhones.

You can turn your phone off. This may not stop every type of location tracking, but the type of data collected by Locate X relies on specific apps and ad networks, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains here in their guide to understanding different location tracking technologies. 

Your Google Calendar App Is About to Get a Little Makeover

Google Calendar is getting a refresh: new Material 3 updates are rolling out to Google users in the next few months, bringing the app’s design in line with others like Gmail and Drive. Material 3 is the latest iteration of Google’s open-source design language, which has also adaptive components that adjust your icons, settings, and other UI elements to match a selected color scheme.

In addition to rounded corners and grey top and sidebars, Material 3 changes to Google Calendar include the following:

  • Modernized, accessible buttons, dialogs, and sidebars

  • Typography with Google’s custom design

  • Fresh—”legible and crisp”—iconography

Calendar is also getting a dark mode so users can choose between light, dark, or the device default. According to Google, these updates will be consistent across Calendar on the web, including the task list view.

The redesign will be available to Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and those with personal Google accounts. If you don’t see the changes just yet, don’t worry—Google says they will be pushed to Rapid Release domains in the next two weeks and to other users in an extended rollout beginning on Dec. 2.

If you want to switch your calendar to dark mode once you receive the update, go to Settings > Appearance and select Light, Dark, or Device default.

Which New Kindle Is Best For You

After about three years, Amazon finally has a new lineup of Kindles. This time, we have four models in total, starting from the $110 basic Kindle, to the $400 Kindle Scribe. And in the middle, we finally have a model with a color e-ink screen. Some of these devices are shipping now, but you’ll have to wait a bit for Scribe.

The question is, though, which model is right for you? From $100 to $400, there’s a Kindle for everyone, and it can be perplexing to keep track of models, especially now that Amazon has premium Signature Editions too. Here’s your guide to all the Amazon Kindle models launched in 2024, and how to choose the best one for you.

The base Kindle edges closer to the Paperwhite

New Amazon Kindle in Matcha Green.

Credit: Amazon

The latest Kindle launches with a new Matcha Green color, and comes with a $10 price bump, now starting at $110. The Kindle keeps the 300 PPI 6-inch E Ink display from the previous generation. With an updated processor, Amazon is promising faster page turns and a front light that is 25% brighter at max settings, making it as bright as the Kindle Paperwhite. This Kindle offers the same 6 week long battery life as the previous generation.

The Paperwhite is for the bookworms


Credit: Amazon

The Paperwhite gets a more substantial upgrade with an updated body design, making the bezels slightly smaller. The screen also now sits completely flush with the bezels, giving it a tablet-like look.

The screen is now 7-inches across instead of the 6.8-inches from the previous model. It’s also 25% faster, and according to Amazon, it’s the fastest Kindle yet.

The Kindle Paperwhite now uses an oxide thin-film transistor display that gives it the highest contrast ratio of any Kindle yet. This should make the black text really pop on the screen. The front-light system now has 10 white LEDs and 9 Amber LEDs. The Signature Edition comes with an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts the brightness based on your environment (kind of like your smartphone).

Speaking of the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, it comes with 32GB storage instead of the 16GB for the standard model, and has an option for a wireless charging dock. Plus, it comes in three exclusive colors: Metallic Raspberry, Metallic Jade, and Metallic Black. The regular Kindle Paperwhite instead comes in Raspberry, Jade, and Black colors.

Like with the base Kindle, there’s a $10 bump in the price tag. The Paperwhite starts at $159.99, while the Signature edition is now $199.99.

Kindle Colorsoft finally brings color to Kindle


Credit: Amazon

Amazon finally has a brand new type of Kindle. It’s called the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, and it is built on the foundation of the new Paperwhite. The big difference, though, is the new color E Ink display.

The color screen is designed to view book covers, graphic novels, and certain manga. The book reading experience is still very much black and white, but you can highlight with multiple colors (like you can in the Kindle app for smartphones and tablets).

The E-ink display is built on E Ink’s Kaleido technology, but it uses a whole new display stack designed for Kindles. There’s a newly designed oxide backplate with a custom designed waveform that leads to fast performance and high contrast for both black-and-white and color content. The display also features custom designed nitride LEDs that enhance color and increase the brightness, supposedly without washing out the details. The black-and-white content is still displayed at the 300 PPI resolution like the Paperwhite, but switching to color drops it to 150 PPI.

The Kindle Colorsoft comes with wireless charging, eight weeks of battery life (compared to three months on the regular Paperwhite), and is waterproof. The Kindle Colorsoft starts at $289.99.

Kindle Scribe goes AI


Credit: Amazon

The 2nd Generation Kindle Scribe is a small upgrade over the previous Kindle Scribe. The big 10.2-inch and 300 PPI E Ink black and white display is still the same. But now, the device has white borders. The screen also now has a paper-like coating, and the screen sits flush with the bezels.

The big feature here is AI. You can’t mark up on books or PDFs yet, but the Scribe has a new feature where you can highlight or annotate on a page, and attach handwritten notes that are then saved to the margin. Kindle’s AI can also help you summarize a couple of pages of handwritten notes. And lastly, a new feature can help you clean up your handwritten notes, making them more legible.

The new Kindle Scribe will cost $399, $20 more than the previous model, and it won’t ship until December 2024. Amazon will be adding these AI features to the older Scribe as well.

Which Kindle is right for you?

For the vast majority of users, the Kindle Paperwhite is still the best option. It now has the fastest screen on any Kindle, features high contrast rate, and adjustable warm lighting.

The $199 Kindle Paperwhite Signature edition might not be worth the extra $40, though it has the extra bells and whistles like better LEDs, ambient lighting, and metallic colors.

The Kindle Colorsoft is a great pick for fans of graphic novels and manga. The fast screen should make reading illustrated stories an ease. The competition, though, is cheaper. You can get a Kobo Libra Color for $220 on Amazon.

The Kindle Scribe works best for people who really want to annotate and take notes on their ebooks.

The base Kindle is a viable option if you’re on a budget. The $110 Kindle comes quite close to the Paperwhite, but misses out on key features like a flush-front design, adjustable warm light, waterproofing, and the new performance upgrade.

How the ‘Fediverse’ Works (and Why It Might Be the Future of Social Media)

Idealist nerds have a long history of giving terribly confusing names to potentially revolutionary technology. So it goes with Fediverse, a portmanteau of “Federation” and “Universe,” and the potential future of the social internet. But what does that mean?

Put simply, the Fediverse is the collective name for a bunch of different social networks and platforms that are connected to one another. Users on any of these services can follow users on any other one and respond to, like, and share posts.

There are a lot of articles and websites that explain this concept in detail, but most of them get bogged down in technical language pretty quickly. I’d like to avoid that, so here’s my good faith attempt to explain what the Fediverse is in plain English.

First, though, let’s talk about email.

Email is decentralized (and why that matters for the Fediverse)

Anyone with an email address can email anyone else. Gmail users, for example, aren’t limited to talking with other Gmail users—they can send messages to Outlook users, Yahoo Mail users, and even people who are running their own email servers in their basement. Basically, anyone with an email address can write anyone else with an email address. To put it another way, email is decentralized.

There is no one company or institution that is in charge of email—there are many different email providers, all of which are compatible with each other. This is because email is an open protocol, one that anyone who wants to can build a service for.

The largest social media networks do not work this way right now. You can’t follow an X user via Facebook, for example, or subscribe to a Reddit community from Tumblr. That’s why all of those websites are full of screenshots from the other ones—people want to share posts from other sites but there’s no good way to do so. That’s a problem the Fediverse seeks to remedy.

Follow anyone anywhere

The Fediverse is an attempt to make social networks more like email—that is, to allow users on different services to follow and interact with each other anywhere they want, without signing up for a million different accounts.

Right now, one of the biggest services on the Fediverse is Mastodon, which started in 2016 as a Twitter alternative. Other open source networks on the platform include Pixelfed, a photo sharing service similar to 2010’s Instagram, and Peertube. There’s also Threads, as I mentioned, a Meta-owned network that allows users to opt into sharing their posts with the Fediverse.

How this works in practice: I’m pretty active on Mastodon but have a few friends who only post on Threads. Because Threads is connected to the Fediverse, I can follow Threads users, see their posts, and even write back comments while using Mastadon. It’s as simple as searching for the Threads user from inside Mastodon, following them, and interacting the way I would with any other user.

This is the promise of the Fediverse: You use whatever social network you want to use and connect with people on whatever social network they want to use. And there are a few other perks. When I quit using Twitter a couple years ago (before it became X), I left all of my followers behind. That’s not how it works with the Fediverse: You can switch from one service to another and take your followers with you. That’s the kind of freedom you can’t get from a centralized system.

A potential future for social media

A number of companies and enthusiasts are working on other ways to connect with the Fediverse. WordPress offers a plugin that allows bloggers to share their posts, for example—replies show up as comments. Flipboard, the news reading app, recently added the option to follow Fediverse users from within the app, and email newsletter platform Ghost is also working on similar functionality. And there are hacks to connect other, non-Fediverse networks—you can connect Bluesky to the Fediverse with a bit of work, for example.

There’s a certain idealism behind all of these efforts—a lot of the biggest Fediverse services are run by nonprofits and volunteers. But smaller publishing companies like Ghost and Flipboard getting involved suggests that the Fediverse could also be a place for writers and publications to connect directly with readers in the future. A decentralized social media system could also allow smaller social media upstarts to compete with the big platforms. It’s a potentially exciting time for social media, and the larger internet.

All of this is possible because the Fediverse is based on an open protocol that anyone can build on. The hope is that, over time, more services will offer integrations and social networking will become as open as email. Is that what will happen for sure? I don’t know. And the Fediverse, like anything that exists on the internet, has its share of problems. Moderation, for example, is a huge challenge, and bigger platforms moving into the space could make it harder.

I’m only scratching the service with this explanation—there’s so much more I could dig into. For the most part, though, when you hear “the Fediverse” you’ll now know what it means: a series of social networks and platforms that are connected to each other. You’ll hopefully hear a lot more about it in the years to come.

Agriculture Secretary Vilsack Visits North Carolina to Highlight Federal Resources Available to Help Farmers, Families and Communities Recover from Hurricane Helene

ASHEVILLE, NC, October 25, 2024 – U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today visited Asheville, North Carolina, to hear firsthand from local, state and Tribal officials, emergency managers, food bank staff and volunteers, and impacted producers on the region’s relief and recovery efforts and highlighted resources from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to help producers, families, and communities in the Tarheel State recover from the devastating impact of Hurricane Helene.

Biden-Harris Administration Invests in Clean, More Affordable Energy for Seven Rural Electric Cooperatives from South Carolina to Colorado as Part of Investing in America Agenda

Westminster, Colo., Oct. 25, 2024 – Today Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced more than $3 billion through the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Empowering Rural America (New ERA) Program to lower electricity costs as part of President Biden and Vice President Harris’ Investing in America Agenda.

What’s New on Max in November 2024

Max’s November slate brings viewers to the Dune universe with the six-episode HBO drama Dune: Prophecy (Nov. 17). The series, inspired by Brian Herbert’s book Sisterhood of Dune and in the same continuity as the recent films, follows two Harkonnen sisters—played by Emily Watson and Olivia Williams—as they establish the Bene Gesserit sect that will, centuries hence, birth Paul Atreides.

On the documentary side is Surveilled (Nov. 20), an HBO original that follows The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow in his investigation into (and the implications of) commercial spyware and espionage cybertech.

Also worth catching is season three of Max original comedy series The Sex Lives of College Girls (Nov. 21), co-written and produced by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, which follows the troubled love lives of a group of students at New England’s Essex College. In the same vein, Sweethearts (Nov. 28) is a Max original rom-com from Dollface creator Jordan Weiss—it stars Kiernan Shipka and Nico Hiraga as college freshman who pledge to break up with their high school sweethearts over “Drunksgiving.”

Here’s everything else coming to Max in November, including A24 film Janet Planet (Nov. 1); classic Christmas movies like A Christmas Story, Elf, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (all Nov. 1); and holiday baking content from the Food Network ranging from Holiday Wars (Nov. 4) to Christmas Cookie Challenge (Nov. 8).

What’s coming to Max in November 2024

Available November 1

  • A Christmas Carol (1938)

  • A Christmas Story (1983)

  • Another Earth (2011)

  • Big Miracle (2012)

  • Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009)

  • Dirty Harry (1971)

  • Elf (2003)

  • Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

  • Goodfellas (1990)

  • He’s Just Not That Into You (2009)

  • Janet Planet (2023) (A24)

  • Jurassic Park (1993)

  • Jurassic Park III (2001)

  • National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

  • The Addams Family 2 (2021)

  • The Extra Man (2010)

  • The Full Monty (1997)

  • The Hangover (2009)

  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

  • The Other Side of the Door (2016)

  • The Polar Express (2004)

  • Unforgiven (1992)

  • Unstoppable (2010)

Available November 2

  • Cleats & Convos, Episode 104

Available November 3

  • Before They Kill Again, Season 1 (ID)

  • Invincible Fight Girl, Season 1 (Adult Swim)

  • Like Water For Chocolate (Como Agua Para Chocolate), Season 1 (HBO Original)

Available November 4

  • Holiday Wars, Season 6 (Food Network) (following linear debut)

Available November 5

  • Game Changers, Season 1 (Discovery)

  • Holiday Baking Championship, Season 11 (Food Network) (following linear debut)

Available November 6

  • Fareed Zakaria Documentaries, Episode 201 – 204

  • Feuds Turned Fatal, Season 1 (ID)

Available November 7

  • Luva de Pedreiro: Viral Moves (Luva de Pedreiro – O Rei Da Jogada) (Max Original)

Available November 8

  • Christmas Cookie Challenge, Season 8 (Food Network) (following linear debut)

Available November 9

  • Cleats & Convos, Episode 106

  • Gold Rush, Season 15 (Discovery)

Available November 10

  • Build for Off-Road, Season 1

Available November 11

  • Bellator: Fight Week Paris, Season 7

Available November 12

  • Christina in the Country, Season 2 (HGTV)

  • Moonshiners, Season 15 (Discovery)

  • Operation Undercover, Season 1 (ID)

  • TV on the Edge: Moments That Shaped Our Culture, Season 1 (CNN Original Series)

Available November 13

  • Beat Bobby Flay: Holiday Throwdown (Food Network) (following linear debut)

  • Call Me Ted

  • Don’t Hate Your House with the Property Brothers, Season 1 (HGTV)

Available November 14

  • A Very Merry Rickmas Yule Log

  • Calcifer Yule Log

  • Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid (CNN Films)

  • Harry Potter: Fireplace (Yule Log)

  • Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking, Season 1 (Food Network)

  • Lost Monster Files, Season 1 (Discovery)

  • The Dog House: UK, Season 5 Christmas Special (Max Original)

Available November 15

  • Casi el Paraíso (2024)

  • The Last Woodsmen, Season 1 (Discovery)

Available November 16

  • Cleats & Convos, Episode 107

Available November 17

  • Dune: Prophecy, Season 1 (HBO Original)

  • Dynasties II, Season 1 (discovery+)

  • First-Time Buyer’s Club, Season 2 (OWN)

Available November 18

  • Watchmen: Chapter I (2024)

Available November 19

  • Night Is Not Eternal (HBO Original)

Available November 20

  • Fareed Zakaria Documentaries, Episode 205

  • Surveilled (HBO Original)

Available November 21

  • Human vs. Hamster (Max Original series by Magnolia Network)

  • Mystery At Blind Frog Ranch, Season 4 (Discovery)

  • Mysteries of the Abandoned, Season 11 (Discovery)

  • The Sex Lives of College Girls, Season 3 (Max Original)

Available November 25

  • Get Millie Black (HBO Original)

Available November 26

  • 90 Day Pillow Talk: The Other Way, Season 6 (TLC)

  • Chopped: Volume 3, Season 59 (Food Network)

Available November 27

  • Barnwood Builders, Season 19 (Magnolia Network)

  • Good Bones, Season 9 (HGTV)

Available November 28

  • Mysteries of the Abandoned, Season 11 (Discovery)

  • Second Chance Stage (Max Original series by Magnolia Network)

  • Sweethearts (2024) (Max Original)

Available November 29

  • Music Box: Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (HBO Original)

Available November 30

  • Cleats & Convos, Episode 108

You Can Get Microsoft Visual Studio Pro on Sale for $30 Right Now

You can get Microsoft Visual Studio Pro on sale for $29.97 right now (reg. $499)—its lowest price ever. Microsoft Visual Studio Pro 2022 is a 64-bit Integrated Development Environment (IDE) useful for programmers working on large projects. It comes with a suite of tools and built-in integrations that allows users to create responsive web UIs in C# with Blazor, cross-platform mobile and desktop apps with .NET MAUI, and the building, debugging, and testing of .NET and C++ apps in Linux. It also features hot reload capabilities across .NET and C++ apps, and developers can use IntelliCode for efficient coding. Windows 10 is the minimum supported OS, and hardware requirements include at least 4GB RAM with a recommendation of 16GB, along with up to 210GB disk space and a Quad-core or better processor. This license can be used on one desktop or mobile device. 

You can get Microsoft Visual Studio Pro 2022 for Windows on sale for $29.97 right now (reg. $499) until October 27 at 11:59 p.m. PT, though prices can change at any time.