To Walgreens, digital refrigerator doors which display images of contents sounded cool – until the makers blanked them in a dispute. CC-licensed photo by Phillip Pessar on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
No, you can’t use your $6,299.00 Canon camera as a webcam. That will cost $5/month • Roman Zipp
Roman Zipp takes some impressive photos. But:
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Last year, I bought a Canon G5 X II camera, which I wanted to use mainly for taking pictures at concerts. For me, it was the best match of focal range (zoom) and sensor size (more light) of any compact camera I’ve compared.
Because I’m only using this camera for a small range of events, it’s just collecting dust in the meantime. So why not use it as a webcam with my Macbook? Admittedly, it did not cost me the $6,300 from the article’s title; much closer to $900. Nonetheless, everything I’m describing translates to every other Canon camera model!
I tried this at first in 2024 with macOS 14, which did not work. I had a similar experience with FUJIFILM’s X Webcam software where either the camera was not recognized by the software, or the camera feed will freeze or simply be not available within other apps.
As of January 2025 with macOS 15 Sequoia, these issues have been resolved for me.
Well, actually, only if you are able to download the software at all. Seems like their Microsoft IIS server is having some issues. The following error page will be presented to you, after they asked you for your full legal name and mail address – without which you can not download the software.
So I was really excited when I finally found a downloadable file on the Canon webpage which was not blocked by a faulty newsletter grift and saw the live feed of my camera!
Except the excitement didn’t last long. Nearly every single setting is disabled if you’re using the software without a paying Canon account.
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Yes, Canon’s software isn’t a one-off free downloadable. It’s not even a single-price product: Canon wants you to pay $5/month or $50/year to connect your pricey, pricey camera and use it as a webcam. Zipp accepts that software doesn’t write itself. But that’s the sort of price you’d expect for something with incredible utility – not that does much the same job as free software (which does exist to do this).
Everything’s going subscription, and it’s not good.
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Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200m debacle • Fortune via Yahoo
Sydney Lake:
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You may have started seeing digitized refrigerator doors at some of your favourite grocery stores and other retailers [in the US]. But Walgreens has had years-long drama with a provider of the ad-bearing fridge doors—and they’re trying to get out of their contract.
Doing so, however, could cost the company millions.
Cooler Screens sued the pharmacy chain for $200m in June 2023 for breach of contract, according to a case filing in Cook County, Ill. While it’s not news that Cooler Screens sued Walgreens, and Walgreens subsequently countersued Cooler Screens for monetary damages, Bloomberg reported Thursday Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian found his own means of retaliation.
Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to digitized refrigerator doors at more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area, Bloomberg reported. These “smart doors” would typically display images and prices for the actual products behind the glass, as well as advertisements. As part of their contract, Cooler Screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of U.S. Walgreens locations, according to Bloomberg, and had plans to install 35,000 more doors.
But in December, the doors at the select Chicago locations “glazed over with white pixels,” or “blacked out altogether,” according to Bloomberg, preventing customers from finding the products they were searching for.
“We were disappointed in Cooler Screens’ attempts to interfere with our customers’ experience in certain stores and are pleased all their cooler doors have now been removed,” a Walgreens spokesperson told Fortune. “We look forward to showing all the ways in which Cooler Screens breached its contract and being vindicated in court.”
Counsel for Walgreens even suggested the outage hurt the pharmacy chain’s business in the last [Christmas] quarter.
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There’s being cut-throat, and then there’s cutting your own throat, and Cooler Screens seems to be doing both. Why would anyone go with them knowing this is how they might behave?
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Cameras are now fining drivers for illegally passing school buses in Florida county • The Autopian
Lewin Day:
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Down in Florida, Miami-Dade County is famous for three things—sun, sand, and school bus traffic cameras. The city has implemented an automatic camera system on its school bus fleet known as BusPatrol. The cameras film cars that blow past school buses when they’re loading and unloading passengers—and automatically issue fines to offending drivers.
This might sound like a high-tech solution to a nothing problem, but that’s sadly not the case. As covered by NBC Miami, over 11,500 violations were recorded in the first few weeks of the 2024/2025 school year—or roughly 1,600 violations per school day. The sheer volume of incidents prompted Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office to release a video of some of the worst offenders blowing past school buses with lights flashing and stop signs out.
The city isn’t messing around with penalties, either. Pass a school bus that has its lights on and stop signs out, and you could get a fine for $225.
The cameras are supplied by a company called BusPatrol. They’re installed on the side of the bus and rely on wide-angle lenses to gain good vision of the adjacent roadway. The cameras are set up to capture footage whenever the bus has its stop sign deployed. Footage is uploaded via the cellular network, and AI models are used to process the video to determine when a vehicle has performed an illegal pass. Human reviewers then check the footage before it is provided to the city as evidence so citations can be issued.
It’s not just Miami Dade getting on board, either. The same technology has been deployed in New York, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, amongst other jurisdictions. It’s an attractive proposition to many cities, offering safety for students, peace of mind for parents, and a new income stream from offending drivers.
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Smart, simple, socially beneficial. This is how we like technology to be.
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Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries • The Guardian
Sandra Laville:
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The global economy could face 50% loss in gross domestic product (GDP) between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonise and restore nature, according to a new report.
The stark warning from risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic wellbeing from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses maths and statistics to analyse financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.
Their report was published after data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5ºC target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.
Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonisation, remove carbon from the atmosphere and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50% in the two decades before 2090, the IFoA report said.
At 3ºC or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.
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They call today “blue Monday”. Just trying to help.
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Apple iPhone launch: Nokia internal presentation • Aalto repository
Via John Gruber, this is an internal presentation at Nokia the day after the iPhone launched. It points out how the iPhone is “a serious high-end contender” and suggests that RIM and Palm are going to be hurt by it. (It’s part of an archive released by Nokia.)
Pretty much everything is dead on – except maybe the realisation of how quickly Google would be able to copy the interface with Android, and how *that* would eat Nokia’s lunch. (Perhaps there’s something about that elsewhere in the archive.)
One of the authors of the deck is Peter Richardson, who from 2005 to 2012 was Nokia’s global head of market & competitive intelligence. He now runs Counterpoint Research, which does excellent analysis of multiple technology markets.
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TikTok starts working again after Trump says he will stall a ban • The New York Times
David McCabe:
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TikTok flickered back to life in the United States on Sunday after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that he would issue an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app.
The abrupt shift came after just hours after major app stores removed the popular social media site and it stopped operating for U.S. users as a federal law took effect on Sunday. The company said in a post on X that in “agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service.”
Mr. Trump said in a Sunday morning post on Truth Social that he would “issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”
The ban stems from a 2024 law that requires app stores and cloud computing providers to stop distributing or hosting TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Lawmakers passed the law over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app, which claims roughly 170 million United States users, to gather information about Americans or spread propaganda.
App stores and cloud computing providers that do not comply with the law face potentially significant financial penalties. Mr. Trump said in his post on Sunday that his order would “confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”
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But the law is in effect now, and Trump is not yet president – that doesn’t happen until 12 noon EST or so on Monday. Start as you mean to go on, I guess, telling people the law doesn’t apply to them.
Apparently Trump also wants TikTok to be 50% owned by the US government. But for that, Bytedance has to sell. It hasn’t shown any inclination to sell.
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‘All hands on deck’: Bird flu in US poultry puts state cooperation to the test • The Guardian
Melody Schreiber:
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Maryland has detected bird flu among three different commercial poultry flocks in the past week, marking the state’s first outbreak in more than a year. The discoveries come shortly after the establishment of a joint command with Delaware following the latter state’s detection of H5N1 in two other poultry operations.
Although the deadly bird flu has circulated in North America since 2022, the past few months have been especially brutal for the poultry industry. More than 20 million egg-laying hens died in the fall, the worst rates since the outbreak began, and egg prices have risen as a result.
About 134 million birds in the commercial poultry industry have been affected by the US outbreak so far, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The USDA is creating a new stockpile of H5N1 vaccines for poultry, though there is no plan to use them yet, Eric Deeble, deputy under-secretary for marketing and regulatory programs for the USDA, told reporters on Thursday.
The outbreaks signal the need for increased vigilance of animals – and the people who come into contact with them, officials said.
Hospitals should test all flu-positive patients, especially those in intensive care units, within 24 hours to speed up contact tracing and public health investigations, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in a health alert on Thursday.
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OK so now it’s Trump’s watching brief. And meanwhile the state of Georgia has shut down poultry sales. It’s all kicking off.
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Inside Elon Musk’s plan for DOGE to slash government costs • The New York Times
Theodore Schleifer and Madeleine Ngo:
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An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting.
As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government.
After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Mr. Musk did at X, his social media platform.
This article is based on interviews with roughly a dozen people who have insight into DOGE’s operations. They spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
On the eve of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks is paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
Mr. Trump has said the effort would drive “drastic change,” and that the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut wasteful spending. DOGE itself will have no power to cut spending — that authority rests with Congress. Instead, it is expected to provide recommendations for programs and other areas to cut.
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We are entering such a peculiar period. Though it is entirely possible that these people will discover sclerotic procedures everywhere, and be able to make some difference. The question is, what does truly efficient government look like? Is there anywhere else in the world that does have it, which can be the role model?
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GM banned from selling your driving data for five years • The Verge
Andrew Hawkins:
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General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar are banned from selling customer geolocation and driving behavior data for five years, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday.
The settlement comes after a New York Times investigation found that GM had been collecting micro-details about its customers’ driving habits, including acceleration, braking, and trip length — and then selling it to insurance companies and third-party data brokers like LexisNexis and Verisk. Clueless vehicle owners were then left wondering why their insurance premiums were going up.
For example, one consumer told a GM customer service representative that “[w]hen I signed up for this, it was so OnStar could track me. They said nothing about reporting it to a third party. Nothing. […] You guys are affecting our bottom line. I pay you, now you’re making me pay more to my insurance company.”
FTC accused GM of using a “misleading enrollment process” to get vehicle owners to sign up for its OnStar connected vehicle service and Smart Driver feature. The automaker failed to disclose to customers that it was collecting their data, nor did GM seek out their consent to sell it to third parties. After the Times exposed the practice, GM said it was discontinuing its OnStar Smart Driver program.
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You’ll never go wrong if you expect every American company to do the worst thing possible with any data it gets hold of.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 