Windows 10 is great but I’ve always been confused by the sharing icon, which has been quite different from other commonly accepted versions. Turns out I wasn’t the only one.

Microsoft is changing their icon, and Paula Chuchro has written a piece explaining why:

Recently, our own share icon got us thinking. Does the current visual representation convey sharing in the best way? From data in our usability labs, we’ve consistently seen people misunderstanding or looking past the icon in the user interface, especially when a label didn’t accompany it. When it stood alone, many people saw its circular shape and mistakenly interpreted it against other ring-shaped icons like sync or refresh or loading […]

In the end, we designed an icon that benefits from ubiquity and familiarity. We looked at the icons users were seeing out in the wild and tested similar variations to see which icons best represented what it meant to share. We A/B tested them against the old share icon in the Photos app, with and without labels. You may have seen us testing a few different kinds of icons in the past few months if you used the Photos app.

I’m always impressed when a massive company like Microsoft can rethink and reevaluate fundamental aspects of its UI.

Sebastian Anthony at Ars Technica has written about Google Brain’s new software that has the ability to create detailed images out of extremely pixelated ones. The results in the article are spectacular, but there’s one thing to keep in mind:

It’s important to note that the computed super-resolution image is not real. The added details—known as “hallucinations” in image processing jargon—are a best guess and nothing more. This raises some intriguing issues, especially in the realms of surveillance and forensics. This technique could take a blurry image of a suspect and add more detail—zoom! enhance!—but it wouldn’t actually be a real photo of the suspect. It might very well help the police find the suspect, though.

In a viral post last year, Anil Dash laid out suggestions on how to save Twitter. Near the top of the list? Stopping abuse:

This is one of the rare areas where you shouldn’t just show, you should tell: Explain loudly and clearly that you don’t want organized mobs of attackers on your site. Make sure features like quoting tweets aren’t being abused by people who set others up as targets. Fighting these large-scale attacks matters even more than banning individual bad actors. Harassment mobs like the alt-right already think you’re censoring them, so you might as well make their dreams come true.

Not too long ago, one of Twitter’s top engineers promised more anti-harassment features were coming, and soon:

We heard you, we didn’t move fast enough last year; now we’re thinking about progress in days and hours not weeks and months.

— Ed Ho (@mrdonut) January 31, 2017

Today, we have the first glimpse of what these might be. In a new blog post, Twitter identifies three features they’re rolling out:

• Stopping the creation of new abusive accounts – Shutting down a troll’s account used to be a largely meaningless act; they could just create a new one. Now Twitter is saying they’re finding a way to prevent users from doing that.
• Introducing safer search results – It sounds like results will exclude content from profiles that have been blocked and muted. But will it algorithmically exclude similar content?
• Collapsing potentially abusive or low-quality tweets – You now have the ability to collapse these in-feed and not see them.

Twitter says they’ll be unrolling new features in the days/months to come and this is definitely a good sign. But there are still some extremely basic things you should be able to do (or not do) that I think would go a long way towards preventing harassment, such as:

• Preventing users from following you if their account is less than X days/months old.
• Preventing users from following you if they have less than X followers
• Preventing users from tagging you or quoting a tweet even after they’ve been blocked. Often a troll who’s been blocked will try to incite their own friends/followers to attack you.

Those are just things I would like to have happen. Last year Randi Lee Harper put together a pretty comprehensive list of suggestions as well. I hope Twitter keeps shipping this stuff, and quickly.

Not too long ago I linked to a corporate profile of Odyssey, a content engine that relied on free and low-paid individuals to generate viral material. Turns out they haven’t nailed down the business model quite yet:

Digital media startup Odyssey has laid off 55 people, slashing over a third of its full-time, paid staff less than a year after raising $25 million, CEO Evan Burns confirmed to Business Insider.

This is a dramatic change for a company that board member Michael Lazerow described in April as being the most exciting company to him since he invested in BuzzFeed.

At Wired, Andy Greenberg has the bizarre story of how one man’s Grindr account got spoofed, turning his life upside-down:

This is the months-long nightmare Herrick describes in a lawsuit he filed against Grindr last week in the Supreme Court of New York. He accuses Grindr of negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false advertising, and deceptive business practices for allowing him to be impersonated and turned into an unwitting beacon for stalkers and harassers. Herrick’s civil complaint against the company states that despite contacting Grindr more than 50 times, Grindr hasn’t offered a single response beyond auto-replies saying that it’s looking into the profiles he’s reported. Even after a judge signed an injunctive relief order Friday to force Grindr to stop the impersonating profiles, they persist: Herrick says that at least 24 men have come to his home and work since then. In total, he counts over 700 sex-soliciting men thrown into his daily life by the spoofed accounts since the ordeal began.

Tim Cross over at The Guardian has an interesting piece on how Moore’s Law is bumping against the realities of physics and business:

Shrinking a chip’s components gets harder each time you do it, and with modern transistors having features measured in mere dozens of atoms, engineers are simply running out of room. There have been roughly 22 ticks of Moore’s law since the launch of the 4004 in 1971 through to mid-2016. For the law to hold until 2050 means there will have to be 17 more, in which case those engineers would have to figure out how to build computers from components smaller than an atom of hydrogen, the smallest element there is. That, as far as anyone knows, is impossible.

Yet business will kill Moore’s law before physics does, for the benefits of shrinking transistors are not what they used to be. Moore’s law was given teeth by a related phenomenon called “Dennard scaling” (named for Robert Dennard, an IBM engineer who first formalised the idea in 1974), which states that shrinking a chip’s components makes that chip faster, less power-hungry and cheaper to produce. Chips with smaller components, in other words, are better chips, which is why the computing industry has been able to persuade consumers to shell out for the latest models every few years. But the old magic is fading.