Month: January 2023

Enlarge / Many third-party Twitter clients, apps the social network has been seeking to diminish since 2012, are suddenly not working, with no update or outreach from Twitter. (credit: Nathan Coppen/Getty Images)

Tweetbot, Twiterrific, Echofon, and other third-party Twitter clients have failed to work for many people since late Thursday night, and the social network has seemingly not notified the apps' developers as to why.

Paul Haddad, a co-creator of Tweetbot, posted on Mastodon at 11:10 pm ET Thursday in reply to a post from tech journalist Casey Newton that multiple third-party clients were failing, with "no communication as to if [it's] a bug or ..." Tweets from the official accounts of the Tweetbot and Twitteriffic clients on Thursday night confirmed their communication issues. The account for Echofon posted shortly after 8:30 am Friday that it was working to resolve its issues and that "Twitter has not yet replied."

Haddad told TechCrunch that the connection issues started at 10:30 pm on Thursday and noted that all API requests from his app were failing. A post on Twitter's developers forum shows numerous Twitter-based app developers noting that their apps have been listed as "suspended" or showing invalid authentication credentials.

Enlarge / A child getting a vaccination on February 19, 2021, in Bonn, Germany. (credit: Getty | Ute Grabowsky)

Routine childhood vaccination coverage continues to slip among US kindergarteners, falling from 95 percent—the target coverage—prior to the pandemic to 94 percent in the 2020–2021 school year and to the new low of 93 percent in the 2021–2022 school year, according to a fresh analysis published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While a two-percent drop "might not sound significant, it means nearly 250,000 kindergarteners are potentially not protected against measles alone," Georgina Peacock, director of the CDC's Immunization Services Division, told reporters in a media briefing Thursday. And, she added, national coverage of MMR vaccination—which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella—is now the lowest it has been in over a decade.

Peacock and other health experts in the briefing attributed the continued decline to a variety of factors. Prime among them are pandemic-related disruptions, such as missed well-child doctor's appointments where routine vaccines are given. There's also data suggesting barriers to access for children living below the poverty line or in rural areas. And vaccine misinformation and disinformation continue to play a role, as it has for many years prior to the pandemic.

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Apple is targeting a more than 40 percent cut to Tim Cook’s pay package in 2023, it said, at the request of the chief executive following shareholder criticism.

Apple’s compensation committee decided to award Cook total “target compensation” of $49 million, down from a target of $84 million a year before, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday.

Cook’s base salary was unchanged at $3 million, as well as a bonus of up to $6 million. But the targeted value of his equity award will fall from $75 million in 2022 to $40 million this year, according to Apple.

Enlarge / On the left, the AE86 BEV Concept; on the right, the AE86 H2 Concept. (credit: Toyota)

I don't know about you, but I adore a good restomod. Restomodding is the practice of taking a classic car and restoring it—while modernizing it at the same time. In the past, that might have meant putting modern AMG powertrains in classic Mercedes-Benz Gullwing bodies, but these days, my attention is more drawn to electric conversions.

Sadly, the cost involved is still prohibitive for most of us, but that's less true if you're a car company like Ford, General Motors, or Jaguar. Or in today's case, Toyota, which surprised and delighted this year's Tokyo Auto Salon with a pair of restomodded AE86 coupes, a car best known for its starring role in Initial D.

The idea behind the project was to boost carbon-neutrality prospects "for protecting beloved cars," according to Toyota. The company says it worked with aftermarket suppliers to rejuvenate old stock and use recycled materials wherever possible.

Enlarge (credit: MOF)

Currently, the major oil companies appear to have settled on an awkward compromise with the reality of climate change: They generally acknowledge that their product is helping drive it but plan to continue to produce as much of that product as they can. But that reflects a major change for these companies, which up until recently were funding think tanks that minimized the risks of climate change and, in many cases, directly denying the validity of the science.

In the case of ExxonMobil, that includes denying its own science. Thanks to documents obtained by the press, we now know that Exxon sponsored its own climate researchers who did internal research, collaborated with academic scientists, and came to roughly the same conclusions about carbon dioxide that the rest of the scientific community had—and executives were made aware of it.

But how rough were the conclusions that Exxon's scientists gave its executives? It's a question that goes to the heart of how misleading the executives were being when they downplayed the risks. A new study answers that question pretty definitively: Exxon's scientists were as good (and sometimes better) than the scientific community as a whole at projecting the climate changes created by fossil fuel use.