Rajpreet Sahota

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has released new data showing a sharp rise in electronic device searches at border crossings.

From April to June alone, CBP conducted 14,899 electronic device searches, up more than 21 per cent from the previous quarter (23 per cent over the same period last year). Most of those were basic searches, but 1,075 were “advanced,” allowing officers to copy and analyze device contents.

U.S. border agents have conducted tens of thousands of searches every year for many years, along a generally increasing trajectory, so this is not necessarily specific to this administration. Unfortunately, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us, people have few rights at ports of entry, regardless of whether they are a U.S. citizen.

There are no great ways to avoid a civil rights violation, either. As a security expert told the CBC, people with burner devices would be subject to scrutiny because it is obviously not their main device. It stands to reason that someone travelling without any electronic devices at all would also be seen as more suspicious. Encryption is your best bet, but then you may need to have a whole conversation about why all of your devices are encrypted.

The EFF has a pocket guide with your best options.

⌥ Permalink

If you, thankfully, missed Google’s Pixel 10 unveiling — and even if you did not — you will surely appreciate PetaPixel’s review of the Pro version of the phone from the perspective of photographers and videographers. This line of phones has long boasted computational photography bonafides over the competition, and I thought this was a good exploration of what is new and not-so-new in this year’s models.

Come for Chris and Jordan; stay for Chris’ “pet” deer.

⌥ Permalink

Typepad:

After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad – including account management, blogs, and all associated content – will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated.   

I have not thought about Typepad in years, and I am certain I am not alone. That is not a condemnation; Typepad occupies a particular time and place on the web. As with anything hosted, however, users are unfortunately dependent on someone else’s interest in maintaining it.

If you have anything hosted at Typepad, now is a good time to back it up.

⌥ Permalink

Kelefa Sanneh, the New Yorker:

[…] In 2018, the social-science blog “Data Colada” looked at Metacritic, a review aggregator, and found that more than four out of five albums released that year had received an average rating of at least seventy points out of a hundred — on the site, albums that score sixty-one or above are colored green, for “good.” Even today, music reviews on Metacritic are almost always green, unlike reviews of films, which are more likely to be yellow, for “mixed/average,” or red, for “bad.” The music site Pitchfork, which was once known for its scabrous reviews, hasn’t handed down a perfectly contemptuous score — 0.0 out of 10 — since 2007 (for “This Is Next,” an inoffensive indie-rock compilation). And, in 2022, decades too late for poor Andrew Ridgeley, Rolling Stone abolished its famous five-star system and installed a milder replacement: a pair of merit badges, “Instant Classic” and “Hear This.”

I have quibbles with this article, which I will get to, but I will front-load this with the twist instead of making you wait — this article is, in effect, Sanneh’s response to himself twenty-one years after popularizing the very concept of poptimism in the New York Times. Sanneh in 2004:

In the end, the problem with rockism isn’t that it’s wrong: all critics are wrong sometimes, and some critics (now doesn’t seem like the right time to name names) are wrong almost all the time. The problem with rockism is that it seems increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.

Are you really pondering the phony distinction between “great art” and a “guilty pleasure” when you’re humming along to the radio? In an era when listeners routinely — and fearlessly — pick music by putting a 40-gig iPod on shuffle, surely we have more interesting things to worry about than that someone might be lip-synching on “Saturday Night Live” or that some rappers gild their phooey. Good critics are good listeners, and the problem with rockism is that it gets in the way of listening. If you’re waiting for some song that conjures up soul or honesty or grit or rebellion, you might miss out on Ciara’s ecstatic electro-pop, or Alan Jackson’s sly country ballads, or Lloyd Banks’s felonious purr.

Here we are in 2025 and a bunch of the best-reviewed records in recent memory are also some of the most popular. They are well-regarded because critics began to review pop records on the genre’s own terms.

Here is one more bonus twist: the New Yorker article is also preoccupied with criticism of Pitchfork, a fellow Condé Nast publication. This is gestured toward twice in the article. Neither one serves to deflate the discomfort, especially since the second mention is in the context of reduced investment in the site by Condé.

Speaking of Pitchfork, though, the numerical scores of its reviews have led to considerable analysis by the statistics obsessed. For example, a 2020 analysis of reviews published between 1999 and early 2017 found the median score was 7.03. This is not bad at all, and it suggests the site is most interested in what it considers decent-to-good music, and cannot be bothered to review bad stuff. The researchers also found a decreasing frequency of very negative reviews beginning in about 2010, which fits Sanneh’s thesis. However, it also found fewer extremely high scores. The difference is more subtle — and you should ignore the dot in the “10.0” column because the source data set appears to also contain Pitchfork’s modern reviews of classic records — but notice how many dots are rated above 8.75 from 2004–2009 compared to later years. A similar analysis of reviews from 1999–2021 found a similar convergence toward mediocre.

As for Metacritic, I had to go and look up the Data Colada article referenced, since the New Yorker does not bother with links. I do not think this piece reinforces Sanneh’s argument very well. What Joe Simmons, its author, attempts to illustrate is that Metacritic skews positive for bands with few aggregated reviews because most music publications are not going to waste time dunking on a nascent band’s early work. I also think Simmons is particularly cruel to a Modern Studies record.

Anecdotally, I do not know that music critics have truly lost their edge. I read and watch a fair amount of music criticism, and I still see a generous number of withering takes. I think music critics, as they become established and busier, recognize they have little time for bad music. Maroon 5 have been a best-selling act for a couple of decades, but Metacritic has aggregated just four reviews of its latest album, because you can just assume it sucks. Your time might be better spent with the great new Water From Your Eyes record.

Even though I am unsure I agree with Sanneh’s conclusion, I think critics should make time and column space for albums they think are bad. Negative reviews are not cruel — or, at least, they should not be — but it is the presence of bad that helps us understand what is good.

⌥ Permalink

Tripp Mickle and Don Clark, New York Times:

Echoing IBM, Microsoft in 1985 built its Windows software to run on Intel processors. The combination created the “Wintel era,” when the majority of the world’s computers featured Windows software and Intel hardware. Microsoft’s and Intel’s profits soared, turning them into two of the world’s most valuable companies by the mid-1990s. Most of the world’s computers soon featured “Intel Inside” stickers, making the chipmaker a household name.

In 2009, the Obama administration was so troubled by Intel’s dominance in computer chips that it filed a broad antitrust case against the Silicon Valley giant. It was settled the next year with concessions that hardly dented the company’s profits.

This is a gift link because I think this one is particularly worth reading. The headline calls it a “long, painful downfall”, but the remarkable thing about it is that it is short, if anything. Revenue is not always the best proxy for this, but the cracks began to show in the early 2010s when its quarterly growth contracted; a few years of modest growth followed before being clobbered since mid-2020. Every similar company in tech seems to have made a fortune off the combined forces of the covid-19 pandemic and artificial intelligence except Intel.

Tobias Mann, the Register:

For better or worse, the US is now a shareholder in the chipmaker’s success, which makes sense given Intel’s strategic importance to national security. Remember, Intel is the only American manufacturer of leading edge silicon. TSMC and Samsung may be setting up shop in the US, but hell will freeze over before the US military lets either of them fab its most sensitive chips. Uncle Sam awarded Intel $3.2 billion to build that secure enclave for a reason.

Put mildly, The US government needs Intel Foundry and Lip Bu Tan needs Uncle Sam’s cash to make the whole thing work. It just so happens that right now Intel isn’t in a great position to negotiate.

Mann’s skeptical analysis is also worth your time. There is good sense in the U.S. government holding an interest in the success of Intel. Under this president, however, it raises entirely unique questions and concerns.

⌥ Permalink

Mary Cunningham, CBS News:

Tesla was found partly liable in a wrongful death case involving the electric vehicle company’s Autopilot system, with a jury awarding the plaintiffs $200 million in punitive damages plus additional money in compensatory damages.

[…]

“What we ultimately learned from that augmented video is that the vehicle 100% knew that it was about to run off the roadway, through a stop sign, through a blinking red light, through a parked car and through a pedestrian, yet did nothing other than shut itself off when the crash was unavoidable,” said Adam Boumel, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

I continue to believe holding manufacturers legally responsible is the correct outcome for failures of autonomous driving technology. Corporations, unlike people, cannot go to jail; the closest thing we have to accountability is punitive damages.

⌥ Permalink

Andy Baio:

This minute-long clip of a Will Smith concert is blowing up online for all the wrong reasons, with people accusing him of using AI to generate fake crowds filled with fake fans carrying fake signs. The story’s blown up a bit, with coverage in Rolling Stone, NME, The Independent, and Consequence of Sound.

[…]

But here’s where things get complicated.

The crowds are real. Every person you see in the video above started out as real footage of real fans, pulled from video of multiple Will Smith concerts during his recent European tour.

The lines, in this case, are definitely blurry. This is unlike any previous is it A.I.? controversy over crowds I can remember because — and I hope this is more teaser than spoiler — note Baio’s careful word choice in that last quoted paragraph.

⌥ Permalink

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

A man holds an orange and white device in his hand, about the size of his palm, with an antenna sticking out. He enters some commands with the built-in buttons, then walks over to a nearby car. At first, its doors are locked, and the man tugs on one of them unsuccessfully. He then pushes a button on the gadget in his hand, and the door now unlocks.

The tech used here is the popular Flipper Zero, an ethical hacker’s swiss army knife, capable of all sorts of things such as WiFi attacks or emulating NFC tags. Now, 404 Media has found an underground trade where much shadier hackers sell extra software and patches for the Flipper Zero to unlock all manner of cars, including models popular in the U.S. The hackers say the tool can be used against Ford, Audi, Volkswagen, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, and several other brands, including sometimes dozens of specific vehicle models, with no easy fix from car manufacturers.

The Canadian government made headlines last year when it banned the Flipper Zero, only to roll it back in favour of a narrowed approach a month later. That was probably the right call. However, too many — including Hackaday and Flipper itself — were too confident in saying the device was not able to, or could not, be used to steal cars. This is demonstrably untrue.

⌥ Permalink

Michelle Bellefontaine, CBC News:

“Any publicly funded immunization in B.C. can be provided at no cost to any Canadian travelling within the province,” a statement from the ministry said.

“This includes providing publicly funded COVID-19 vaccine to people of Alberta.”

[…]

Alberta is the only Canadian province that will not provide free universal access to COVID-19 vaccines this fall.

The dummies running our province opened what they called a “vaccine booking system” earlier this month allowing Albertans to “pre-order” vaccines. However, despite these terms having defined meanings, the system did not allow anyone to book a specific day, time, or location to receive the vaccine, nor did it take payments or even show prices. The government’s rationale for this strategy is that it is “intended [to] help reduce waste”.

Now that pricing has been revealed, it sure seems like these dopes want us to have a nice weekend just over the B.C. border. A hotel room for a couple or a family will probably be about the same as the combined vaccination cost. Sure, a couple of meals would cost extra, but it is also a nice weekend away. Sure, it means people who are poor or otherwise unable will likely need to pay the $100 “administrative fee” to get their booster, and it means a whole bunch of pre-ordered vaccines will go to waste thereby undermining the whole point of this exercise. But at least it plays to the anti-vaccine crowd. That is what counts for these jokers.

⌥ Permalink

Jane Mundy, writing at the imaginatively named Lawyers and Settlements in December:

A former Apple executive has filed a California labor complaint against Apple and Jay Blahnik, the company’s vice president of fitness technologies. Mandana Mofidi accuses Apple of retaliation after she reported sexual harassment and raised concerns about receiving less pay than her male colleagues.

The Superior Court of California for the County of Los Angeles wants nearly seventeen of the finest United States dollars for a copy of the complaint alone.

Tripp Mickle, New York Times:

But along the way, [Jay] Blahnik created a toxic work environment, said nine current and former employees who worked with or for Mr. Blahnik and spoke about personnel issues on the condition of anonymity. They said Mr. Blahnik, 57, who leads a roughly 100-person division as vice president for fitness technologies, could be verbally abusive, manipulative and inappropriate. His behavior contributed to decisions by more than 10 workers to seek extended mental health or medical leaves of absence since 2022, about 10 percent of the team, these people said.

The behaviours described in this article are deeply unprofessional, at best. It is difficult to square the testimony of a sizeable portion of Blahnik’s team with an internal investigation finding no wrongdoing, but that is what Apple’s spokesperson expects us to believe.

⌥ Permalink

Emily Price, Fast Company:

Meta’s Threads is on a roll.

The social networking app is now home to more than 400 million monthly active users, Meta shared with Fast Company on Tuesday. That’s 50 million more than just a few months ago, and a long way from the 175 million it had around its first birthday last summer.

What is even more amazing about this statistic is how non-essential Threads seems to be. I might be in a bubble, but I cannot recall the last time someone sent me a link to a Threads post or mentioned they saw something worthwhile there. I see plenty of screenshots of posts from Bluesky, X, and even Mastodon circulating in various other social networks, but I cannot remember a single one from Threads.

As if to illustrate Threads’ invisibility, Andy Stone, Meta’s communications guy, rebutted a Wall Street Journal story with a couple of posts on X. He has a Threads account, of course, but he posts there only a few times per month.

⌥ Permalink

Adam Engst, TidBits:

I’m certainly aware that many readers venture outside the Apple ecosystem for certain devices, but I’ve always assumed that most people would opt for Apple’s device in any given category. TidBITS does focus on Apple, after all, and Apple works hard to provide an integrated experience for those who go all-in on Apple. That integration disappears if you use a Mac along with a Samsung Galaxy phone and an Amazon Echo smart speaker.

Let’s put my assumption to the test! Or rather, to the poll. […]

It is a good question; you should take this quick poll if you have a couple of minutes.

This will not be bias-free, but I also have a hard time assuming what kind of bias will be found in a sample of an audience reading TidBits. My gut instinct is many people will be wholly immersed in Apple hardware. However, a TidBits reader probably skews a little more technical and particular — or so I read in the comments — so perhaps not? Engst’s poll only asks about primary hardware and not, say, users’ choice in keyboards or music streaming services, so perhaps it will be different than my gut tells me.

Update: On August 25, Engst revealed the results.

⌥ Permalink

Apple:

Apple today announced the expansion of its Self Service Repair and Genuine Parts Distributor programs to Canada, providing individuals and independent repair professionals across the country broader access to the parts, tools, and manuals needed to repair Apple devices.

As with other regions where Self-Service Repair is available, manuals are available on Apple’s website, but none of the listed parts and tools are linked to the still-sketchy-looking Self-Service Repair site.

There does not seem to be a pricing advantage, either. My wife’s iPhone 12 Pro needs a new battery. Apple says that costs $119 with a Genius Bar appointment, or I can pay $119 from the Self-Service store for a battery kit plus $67 for a week-long rental of all the required tools. This does not include a $1,500 hold on the credit card for the toolkit. After returning the spent battery, I would get a $57.12 credit, so it costs about $10 more to repair it myself than to bring it in. Perhaps that is just how much these parts cost; or, perhaps Apple is able to effectively rig the cost of repairs by competing only with itself. It is difficult to know.

One possible advantage of the Self-Service Repair option and the Genuine Parts Program is in making service more accessible to people in remote areas of Canada. I tried a remote address in Baker Lake, Nunavut, and the Self-Service Store still said it would ship free in 5–7 business days. Whether it would is a different story. Someone in a Canadian territory should please test this.

⌥ Permalink

U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, in a tweet that happens to be the only communication of this news so far:

Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.

As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a “back door” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.

Zoe Kleinman, BBC News:

The BBC understands Apple has not yet received any formal communication from either the US or UK governments.

[…]

In December, the UK issued Apple with a formal notice demanding the right to access encrypted data from its users worldwide.

It is unclear to me whether Gabbard is saying the U.K.’s backdoor requirement is entirely gone, or if it means the U.K. is only retreating from requiring worldwide access (or perhaps even only access to U.S. citizens’ data). The BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are all interpreting this as a worldwide retreat, but Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Guardian say it is only U.S. data. None of them appear to have confirmation beyond Gabbard’s post, thereby illustrating the folly of an administration continuing to make policy decisions and announcements in tweet form. The news section of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is instead obsessed with relitigating Russian interference in the dumbest possible way.

Because of the secrecy required of Apple and the U.K. government, this confusion cannot be clarified by the parties concerned, so one is entrusting the Trump administration to communicate this accurately. Perhaps the U.K. availability of Advanced Data Protection can be a canary — if it comes back, we can hope Apple is not complicit with weakening end-to-end encryption.

Also, it seems that Google has not faced similar demands.

⌥ Permalink

Nice scoop from Eric Schwarz:

Over the past week, I’ve been working to track down the new owner of MacSurfer’s Headline News, a beloved site that shut down in 2020 and has recently had somewhat mysterious revival. Fortunately, after some digging that didn’t really lead anywhere, I received an email from its new owner, Ken Turner, and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions about the new project.

Turner sounds like a great steward to carry on the MacSurfer legacy. Even in an era of well-known aggregators like Techmeme and massive forums like Hacker News and Reddit, I think there is still a role for a smaller and more focused media tracking site.

I am uncertain what the role of BackBeat Media is in all this. I have not heard from Dave Hamilton or anyone there to confirm if they even have a role.

⌥ Permalink

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

Members of a law enforcement group chat including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies inadvertently added a random person to the group called “Mass Text” where they exposed highly sensitive information about an active search for a convicted attempted murderer seemingly marked for deportation, 404 Media has learned.

[…]

The person accidentally added to the group chat, which appears to contain six people, said they had no idea why they had received these messages, and shared screenshots of the chat with 404 Media. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation.

This is going to keep happening if law enforcement and government agencies keep communicating through ad hoc means instead of official channels. In fact — and I have no evidence to support this — I bet it has happened, but the errant recipients did not contact a journalist.

⌥ Permalink

Five years ago, Apple and tech news aggregator MacSurfer announced it was shutting down. The site was still accessible albeit in a stopped-time state, and it seemed that is how it would sit until the server died.

In June, though, MacSurfer was relaunched. The design has been updated and it is no longer as technically simple as it once was, but — charmingly — the logo appears to be the exact same static GIF as always. I cannot find any official announcement of its return.

Eric Schwarz:

It looks like Macsurfer is coming back, but I can’t find any details or who’s behind it? I really hope it’s not AI slop or someone trying to make a buck off nostalgia like iLounge or TUAW.

I had the same question, so I started digging. MxToolbox reveals a txt record on the domain for validating with Google apps, registered to BackBeat Media. BackBeat’s other properties include the Mac Observer, AppleInsider, and PowerPage. A review of historical MacSurfer txt records using SecurityTrails indicates the site has been with Backbeat Media since at least 2011, even though BackBeat’s site has not listed MacSurfer even when it was actively updated.

I cannot confirm the ownership is the same yet but I have asked Dave Hamilton, of BackBeat, and will update this if I hear back.

⌥ Permalink

Vjosa Isai, New York Times:

Some of the most popular bike lanes were making Toronto’s notorious traffic worse, according to the provincial government. So Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, passed a law to rip out 14 miles of the lanes from three major streets that serve the core of the city.

Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, arrived for her first day in office two years ago riding a bike. She was not pleased with the law, arguing that the city had sole discretion to decide street rules.

Jeremy Klaszus, the Sprawl:

Is Calgary city hall out of control in building new bike lanes or negligent in building too few?

Opinions abound. But with Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen talking about pausing new bike lanes in Calgary and Edmonton (he’s meeting with Mayor Jyoti Gondek about this July 30), it’s worth looking at what city hall has and hasn’t done on the cycling file.

I commute and do a fair slice of my regular errands by bike, and it is clear to me that seemingly few people debating this issue actually ride these lanes. Bike lanes on city streets have always struck me as a compromised version of dedicated cycling infrastructure, albeit made necessary by an insufficient desire to radically alter the structure of our roadway network. Everything — the scale of the lanes, the banking of the road surface, the timing of the lights — is designed for cars, not bikes.

But it is what we have, and it is not as though the provincial governments in Alberta and Ontario are seriously considering investment in better infrastructure. They simply do not treat cycling seriously as a mode of transportation. Even at a municipal level, one councillor — who represents an area nowhere near the city’s centre — is advocating for the removal of a track on a quiet street, half of which is pedestrianized. This is not the behaviour of people who are just trying to balance different modes of transportation.

Klaszus:

Meanwhile independent mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas, who was critical of expanding the downtown cycle track network when he was a councillor, has proposed tying capital transportation dollars to mode usage.

“Up until now we’ve had the sort of cars versus bikes debate and I think the way to break that logjam is to just acknowledge that every single form of transportation is legitimate,” Farkas said. “When we tie funding to usage, we take the guesswork and the gamesmanship out of it.”

This is a terrible idea. Without disproportionately high investment, cycle tracks will not be adequately built out and maintained and, consequently, people will not use them. This proposal would be a death spiral. Cycling can be a safe, practical, and commonplace means of commuting, if only we want it to be. We can decide to do that as a city, if not for the meddling of our provincial government.

⌥ Permalink

Liv McMahon and Andrew Rogers, BBC News:

Around 6,000 sites allowing porn in the UK will start checking if users are over 18 on Friday, according to the media regulator Ofcom.

Dame Melanie Dawes, its chief executive, told the BBC “we are starting to see not just words but action from the technology industry” to improve child safety online.

She told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme that “no other country had pulled off” such measures, nor gained commitments from so many platforms, including Elon Musk’s X, around age verification.

It is remarkable that one of the first large-scale laws of this type happened on the web before it hit smartphone apps. Perhaps that is because both the App Store and Play Store have rules prohibiting pornography. The web has so far only had voluntary guidelines and minimal verification. In the U.K., that has now changed.

This article is headlined “Around 6,000 Porn Sites Start Checking Ages in U.K.”, yet in this — the first paragraph — the reporters acknowledge these are “sites allowing porn” not “porn sites”. This might sound like I am splitting hairs, but this figure seems to include some extremely large non-porn websites too:

Ofcom said on Thursday that more platforms, including Discord, X (formerly Twitter), social media app Bluesky and dating app Grindr, had agreed to bring in age checks.

The regulator had already received commitments from sites such as Pornhub – the UK’s most visited porn website – and social media platform Reddit.

When we are talking about large platforms like Discord and Reddit, there is a meaningful difference between describing them as “porn sites” and “sites allowing porn”.

Apps for Bluesky, Discord, Grindr, Reddit, and X are all available on the App Store, where they all have “16+” ratings, and the Play Store, where they have a “Mature 17+” rating with the exception of Discord’s “Teen” rating. These platforms are in a position to provide privacy-protecting age gating and, I think, they ought to do so with APIs also available to third-party stores.

The age verification mandated by this British law, however, is worrisome, especially if it becomes a model for similar laws elsewhere. The process may be done by a third-party service and can require sensitive information. These services may be specialized, meaning they may have better security and privacy protections, but it still means handing over identification to some service a user probably does not recognize. What is a “Yoti” anyway? And, because website operators are liable if they do not adequately protect youth, they may choose to take broader measures — just in case. For example, the law requires age verification for “material that promotes or encourages suicide, self-harm and eating disorders”. Sounds reasonable, but it also means online support groups could be age-restricted as a precautionary measure by their administrators. Perhaps that is reasonable; perhaps young people should only participate in professional support groups. But it is a notable compromise.

Nevertheless, I think the justification behind this policy is fair and deserved. There are apps and parts of the web where children should not be able to participate. I do not even mind the presence of a third-party in the verification chain — many Canadian government services include the option of logging in with a bank or credit union account, and it works quite well. But there are enough problems with this law that I hope it is not seen by other governments — including my own — as a good foundation, because it is not.

⌥ Permalink

Tim Bradshaw and Ivan Levingston, Financial Times:

Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s investment company is leading a €600mn funding round in Helsing, valuing the German defence tech group at €12bn and making it one of Europe’s most valuable start-ups.

The deal comes as the Munich-based start-up is expanding from its origins in artificial intelligence software to produce its own drones, aircraft and submarines.

Laura Molloy, NME:

Xiu Xiu have announced that they are in the process of removing their music from Spotify, over CEO Daniel Ek’s “investment in AI war drones”.

[…]

It comes after Deerhoof also recently pulled their catalogue from the platform for the same reason, stating: “We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech,” Deerhoof said in a statement.

Financial relationships between the music industry and arms suppliers has been documented before, but it was more of a hop-skip-and-jump away. Ek’s investment is pretty direct. A Spotify subscription boosts his net worth, which he puts into his fund, which gives that money to an drone company he helps oversee.

Update: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has also removed its music from Spotify.

⌥ Permalink

Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb, Pew Research Center:

Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one. Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).

Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits to pages with such a summary.

I looked through this article and the methodology to see how this survey came together, since it seems to me the real question is if A.I. summaries are more or less damaging to search traffic than older features like snippets.

As far as I can figure out, the way Pew did this survey is that it looked for mentions of A.I. among users who consented to having their web browsing data tracked, and then categorized that traffic depending on whether it was a news article about A.I. or an A.I. feature being used. Any Google data without an A.I. summary was, as far as I can see, categorized as not containing an A.I. summary. But this latter category amounted to 82% of all Google searches, and there does not appear to be any differentiation in what features were shown for those. Some may have snippets; others may have some other “zero-click” feature. Some may have no such features at all. Lumping all those together makes it impossible to tell what impact A.I. summaries are having on search compared to Google’s previous attempts to keep users in its bubble.

This survey does a good job of showing how irrelevant the source links are in Google A.I. summaries to search traffic. Much like the citations at the end of a book, they serve as an indicator of something being referenced, but there is no expectation anyone will actually read it to confirm whether the information is accurate. There was such a citation to a Microsoft article ostensibly containing an Excel feature Google made up. Unlike citations in a book, Google’s A.I. summaries are entirely the product of a machine built by people who have only some idea of the output.

⌥ Permalink

Adam Aaronson:

As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them.

The journey has taken me to some interesting places, and now that it’s done, I have a little story to tell for each cocktail. I’m not gonna tell you all 102 stories, but I do want to debrief the experience. Drinking all 102 cocktails turned out to be unexpectedly tricky, and for reasons you’ll soon understand, I might be one of the first people in the world to do it.

Far from the first, as Aaronson notes later. If you are into cocktails, this looks like quite the experience. If the cocktail is truly a U.S. invention, it is among the finest things contributed by the country, along with Reese’s cups. Which are, I guess, a chocolate cocktail of sorts.

Aaronson put together a table “based on name recognition and ingredient availability”. It is pretty close to my own reactions as I read the piece — never heard of an Illegal but it sounds great — though I was surprised to see the White Lady in the “Obscure” row. It is a personal favourite, though I rarely order it as I typically have the ingredients on hand. For an excellent twist, try it with an Earl Grey gin.

⌥ Permalink

Ryan Jones in a thread on X (mirrored):

How to Clear Local iMessage Cache

- Settings > Name > iCloud > Messages > turn off Messages in the Cloud. Follow scary prompts.

- Messages > Settings > Apple Account > Sign Out. Follow scary prompts.

- Go to /Library/Messages and delete everything

- Empty trash

- Now you have nothing iMessage local

- Just reactive iMessage in the Cloud, and sync

Friendly reminder Optimize Storage was introduced in… iOS 8.1😑

Obviously, at your own risk.

Via Michael Tsai:

I think both Photos and Messages should have settings to specify the number of GB to cache locally.

I would like something similar, but I also do not understand why Messages — in particular — behaves like it does. As far as I can tell, my Messages cache on my iMac is a full copy of Messages in my iCloud account. It is not as though Apple is treating the cloud portion as merely a syncing solution, as it used to do with something like My Photo Stream, so it is not necessarily saving space in either my iCloud account or on my devices. I would like the option to store a full copy of my Messages history on my Mac, yes, but I also think it should more aggressively purge on-device copies. Is that not a key advantage of the cloud — that I do not need to keep everything on-disk?

⌥ Permalink

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

As promised, Apple has just released the first public beta versions for the next-generation versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and most of its other operating systems. The headlining feature of all the updates this year is Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface, which is rolling out to all of these operating systems simultaneously. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive update to Apple’s software design aesthetic since iOS 7 was released in 2013.

I have been using the iOS 26 beta since WWDC, and the MacOS Tahoe beta for a couple of weeks. Though I have been getting better battery life than I had expected, I am finding enough bugs and problems that I would recommend against participating in the public beta builds, at least for one or two more versions.

However, if you have a spare Mac or are comfortable setting up a dual-booting situation — and you like doing Apple’s quality assurance without pay — please try MacOS Tahoe and report as much feedback as you can.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

The result of this feels more like a work in progress than a finished design, and since this is a beta, that’s fair enough. But I get the sense that this really is a design that’s been thoroughly considered for iPhones, is similar enough on the iPad to be in the ballpark, but that has not really been thought through on the Mac. At least, through the first few developer beta releases, there are signs that Apple is making progress adapting this design to the Mac. I hope it continues, because it’s still in a state of disrepair.

My experience has mirrored this almost exactly. There is a lot to like in the technical and feature updates in Tahoe, but the U.I. changes are disappointing. Even with Reduce Transparency switched on, I find myself distracted by elements with poor contrast and clunky-looking toolbars. Tabs look bizarre.

I am not an outright hater; there are many places where I find Liquid Glass joyful or, at least, interesting in iOS. I see what Apple is going for even in places where I think other choices would have made sense. But the changes in MacOS Tahoe are worrisome knowing this is pretty close to what I will be living with for the next year or longer.

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Apple has launched its first ever public beta for AirPods firmware, bringing forthcoming iOS 26 features to AirPods users ahead of their fall launch. Here’s everything new.

No Liquid Glass here.

⌥ Permalink

David Moscrop, Jacobin, on the phenomenal curtailing of civil liberties promised by Bill C-2:

As a thought experiment, we might ask whether Carney would be tabling his bill absent Trump’s trade threats — and it’s reasonable to think that he wouldn’t. Nor, likely, would he be spending billions more on the armed forces. Carney’s goal, above all, is to grow the Canadian economy, using state power to “catalyze” private sector investment and growth. A heavily securitized border and expanded surveillance capacity may serve that purpose — or may simply reflect a managerial logic in which institutional capacity is an end in itself, pursued without much democratic deliberation. He may believe in these tools as necessary to modern governance. But in either case, had Trump not upended the framework of free trade between Canada and the United States, there’s a good chance there would no border bill at all — or at least a far weaker one.

And this is an optimistic paragraph.

⌥ Permalink

Kate Wagner, the Nation:

What makes this architecture so appealing to Western eyes, aside from its beauty, is its uniqueness. Architectural culture, especially in the United States, remains (with some exceptions) bound to either bloated, athletic forms and spectacle or the same dull residential minimalism it’s been shilling since the early 2000s. Practice in the field is fragmented, and there is no longer a cohesive creative or ideological movement to shape it in progressive or public-facing ways. Capital, meanwhile, pushes architectural labor to the brink and incentivizes cheapness and repetition, resulting in eyesore offices, identikit apartment buildings, and disposable single-family homes. This is merely one example of the disintegration of artistic culture writ large across all fields, as each of them enter their own crises of funding and structural decline.

It is endlessly disappointing to see new buildings in prime real estate with scant thought given to how they fit with their environment, their relationship to pedestrian traffic, or — seemingly — their aesthetics. New buildings are going in on two busy intersections not far from me and both look absolutely dreadful. In many cities, including mine, there are simply no standards or expectations that we should live in an environment built with much care. When I look at the work Wagner describes in this article — say, the Saadat Abad residential building — I see care.

⌥ Permalink

I have added a small update to my link last month regarding rounded corners and design fidelity. Here is the addition in full:

After using MacOS Tahoe, here is one area not mentioned by Oakley where I firmly disagree with the extreme corner radii in the system — multipage PDF documents in Preview. Each page, bafflingly, gets significant rounded corners, and there is no way to turn this off. At no zoom level does each page get its original squared corners. An awful and selfish design choice.

This is, admittedly, using the current developer beta build, so it may not reflect the final version. But, still, who steps back from updating a PDF document viewer in which each page is cut off at the corners and thinks yes, this is an improvement? I repeat: a selfish design choice prioritizing Apple’s goals over that of its users.

⌥ Permalink

Joseph Bernstein, New York Times:

Indeed, according to an April survey by Cumulus Media and the media research firm Signal Hill Insights, nearly three-quarters of podcast consumers play podcast videos, even if they minimize them, compared with about a quarter who listen only to the audio. Paul Riismandel, the president of Signal Hill, said that this split holds across age groups — it’s not simply driven by Gen Z and that younger generation’s supposed great appetite for video.

[…]

Still, this leaves everyone else — more than half of YouTube podcast consumers, who say they are actively watching videos. Here, it gets even trickier. YouTube, the most popular platform for podcasts, defines “views” in a variety of ways, among them a user who clicks “play” on a video and watches for at least 30 seconds: far from five hours. And the April survey data did not distinguish between people who were watching, say, four hours of Lex Fridman interviewing Marc Andreessen from people who were viewing the much shorter clips of these podcasts that are ubiquitous on TikTok, Instagram Reels, X and YouTube itself.

Thirty seconds is an awful short time to be counted as a single view on these very long videos. At the very least, I think it should be calculated as a fraction of the length of any specific video.

This report (PDF) has a few things of note, anyhow, like this from the fifth page:

YouTube is not a walled garden of podcasts: 72% of weekly podcast consumers who have consumed podcasts on YouTube say they would switch platforms from YouTube if a podcast were to become available only on another platform. 51% of YouTube podcast consumers say they already have listened to the same podcasts they consume on YouTube in another place.

There is not another YouTube, so this indicates to me the video component is not actually important to many people, and that YouTube is not a great podcast client. It is, however, a great place for discovery — a centralized platform in the largely decentralized world of podcasting.

Bernstein:

Now, the size of the market for video podcasts is too large to ignore, and many ad deals require podcasters to have a video component. The platforms where these video podcasts live, predominantly YouTube and Spotify, are creating new kinds of podcast consumers, who expect video.

The advertising model of podcasts has long been a tough nut to crack. It is harder to participate in the same surveillance model as the rest of the web, even with the development of dynamically ad insertion. There is simply less tracking and less data available to advertisers and data brokers. This is a good thing. YouTube, being a Google platform, offers advertisers more of what they are used to.

⌥ Permalink

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

Upon installing the new update, users of Apple Intelligence-compatible devices will be asked to enable or disable three broad categories of notifications: those for “News & Entertainment” apps, for “Communication & Social” apps, and for all other apps. The operating systems will list sample apps based on what you currently have installed on your device.

All Apple Intelligence notification summaries continue to be listed as “beta,” but Apple’s main change here is a big red disclaimer when you enable News & Entertainment notification summaries, pointing out that “summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines.” The notifications also get a special “summarized by Apple Intelligence” caption to further distinguish them from regular, unadulterated notifications.

Apparently there are architectural changes to help with reliability, but the only way to know for certain if a generated summary is accurate is to read the original. Then again, there are plenty of cases where human-written headlines are contradicted by the story contained within.

Generated summaries are different — or at least they feel different to me — though it is difficult to articulate why. The best way I can describe it is that it is an interference layer between the source of data and its recipient. This is true for all machine-generated summaries which promise a glimpse of a much larger set of information, but without any accountability for their veracity. While summaries of message threads in Mail are often usable, I have rarely found them useful.

⌥ Permalink

The Financial Times today published an article by Anna Gross, Tim Bradshaw, and Lauren Fedor, in which the three paint a picture of a complex stalemate between investment interests and the U.K. government’s snooping desires:

Sir Keir Starmer’s government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK’s demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data, two senior British officials have told the Financial Times.

The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including vice-president JD Vance.

The writers go on to describe the tension between U.K. and U.S. authorities, with sources telling them the U.K. definitely wants this capability, but feels the weight of the U.S. administration. Here are two things I think are true:

1. The U.K. should not be demanding access to iCloud data end-to-end encrypted by Advanced Data Protection — and certainly not worldwide, as it wants. It is terrible on the merits, it will be misused, and it is ridiculous nobody can talk about it directly because of secrecy requirements.

2. The U.S. continues to abuse its power in worrisome ways. There is no evidence this administration is objecting to the U.K. law on the merits of free speech, given how bad they are on speech in general. There is lots of reason to believe they are simply hostile to any attempts at regulating the massive technology companies that happen to come from the U.S. and reinforce its global power. It is not just the U.K.; the Canadian government pulled a fairly reasonable Digital Services Tax to placate this administration for similar reasons.

Bad faith rationale aside, the U.K. seems to be thinking about retreating from its backdoor efforts, though it has not yet made any moves to do so. Yet Ars Technica, which syndicates the occasional Times story, republished this article under the headline “UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US”. That is not true — not yet, anyway.

And there is reason to be skeptical of the Times’ sourcing on these matters, too. In 2023, its reporters — including Gross, who also worked on this Advanced Data Protection story — were told the U.K. government would no longer demand the breaking of end-to-end encryption in messaging apps. This was only true in the sense the government no longer demanded impossible backdoors, only possible ones. This was not so much rescinding a demand as it was clarifying it.

Until the U.K. formally withdraws the technical capability notice served to Apple — and maybe Google, too — we should assume they are still pushing for a backdoor. And, because of the secrecy rules, if they do rescind it, it seems we will only find out in a leak to the Times or the BBC, without any official acknowledgement any of this took place.

⌥ Permalink

Last time I checked in on how the second Trump administration was going to approach the globally-relevant business of antitrust enforcement, I was cautiously optimistic. Some key trust-busting suits were filed under the first Trump administration and, while sloppy, there seemed to be seeds planted for a continuation of a more active FTC. I knew this administration would be catastrophic, and even my tiny speck of optimism was misplaced.

Josh Sisco, of Bloomberg, in a profile of FTC chair Andrew Ferguson:

His concerns, too, may also be resolved with more novel compromises. In May Ferguson launched an investigation into ad agencies, alleging that they colluded in politically motivated ad boycotts, a bugbear of conservative media and X.com owner Elon Musk in particular.

Shortly after, the FTC signed off on Omnicom Group’s $13.5 billion buyout of rival Interpublic, a tie-up that would create the world’s biggest ad agency. To secure the regulator’s approval, the two groups promised they wouldn’t engage in any such boycotts in the future, but made no economic concessions.

That deal may prove to be a template for the FTC under Ferguson. By focusing attention on the alleged ad boycotts and leaving the underlying businesses untouched, the terms appealed to the MAGA faithful and corporate interests.

Sisco can call this a “novel compromise” all he wants, but this is nothing more than a perverted gift. Under Khan, Ferguson also objected to the FTC’s involvement in regulating non-compete agreements, saying it was an overreach for the commission, but has used his power under the Trump administration to go after transgender care because of course he has.

Karl Bode, of Techdirt, has been keeping tabs on how they have been faring on matters of competition:

That was, unsurprisingly, all bullshit. Six months into Trump’s second term and it has been a nonstop nightmare for consumer protection, corporate oversight, labor law, regulatory independence, and already underwater activist battles against media consolidation and monopoly power.

[…]

The only remaining remnants of Lina Khan’s antitrust legacy has been the fact that the Trump administration hasn’t killed several of her prominent antitrust cases against tech giants like Meta and Google. But again, this isn’t because Trump wants to genuinely rein in corporate power, it’s because he wants to maintain leverage over companies that control the flow of online information.

As I wrote over the weekend, this administration has kneecapped the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, one of the few checks on overreaches by the country’s federal government. All of these things have international implications. That board, for example, is responsible for the court that handles privacy complaints from Europeans. The merger of those two ad agencies means less competition worldwide. But Ferguson has affirmed the key conservative pillars of being supposed victims of the world around them and doing harm to trans people. That is his job, apparently. Being a trustbuster? Not so much.

⌥ Permalink

Anne-Laure Dufeal, Brussels Signal:

The [French] Senate report cited Microsoft France’s legal director, Anton Carniaux, as admitting the company could not guarantee that French data it hosted would not be handed over to foreign authorities.

“Carniaux … was asked by the [French Senate] commission to guarantee that French citizens’ data hosted by Microsoft would never be transmitted to foreign authorities without the agreement of the French authorities. He replied: ‘No, I can’t guarantee that,’” the report stated.

Luis Rijo, PPC Land:

The testimony contradicts years of Microsoft’s security assurances regarding European data hosting. Despite implementing encryption and technical safeguards, the company acknowledged that US legislation ultimately supersedes protective measures when federal agencies issue valid data requests.

[…]

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and other hyperscale providers operate under identical legal frameworks, potentially exposing European data to extraterritorial access. The testimony suggests widespread vulnerability in European digital infrastructure built on American technological foundations.

Ben Werdmuller:

Reliance on US services has become a point of vulnerability for everyone. This should be a concern regardless of American leadership; under the current administration, it’s become a frequent topic of conversation for security leaders both inside and outside of the country.

The U.S. set up a new court to handle European complaints, but it is under the umbrella of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board which currently has a single board member, who happens to be a Republican. That is because the other three members of the board — all Democrats — were told to leave after Donald Trump retook the presidency, thus making it non-functional. Is the court hearing cases? That is a good question; the whole thing is one big secret.

⌥ Permalink

Parker Molloy:

Think about where Stephen Colbert started. At Comedy Central, he played a character who parodied right-wing media manipulation. His whole schtick was pretending to be a Fox News-style propagandist who twisted facts, attacked critics, and defended power at all costs.

Twenty years later, he’s been silenced by actual media manipulation. Real billionaires wielding real power to protect their real financial interests.

The writers who created The Colbert Report couldn’t have scripted it better. Except this isn’t satire. It’s just what happens now when media companies need government approval for their deals.

Regardless of how much you like Colbert’s take on the Late Show — I do not care for it — the circumstances around its cancellation are suspicious and the implications are alarming. Were Colbert’s jokes truly cutting to the core of the Trump administration? I hardly think so. But it is nevertheless difficult not to see it as an olive branch for merger approval — an implied condition.

(Update: Anonymous sources swore up and down to the New York Times that this was purely a financial decision.)

Via Rusty Foster, who ties together a bunch of threads on this into the title thesis, “billionaires destroyed American news media on purpose”:

When I told my new friend that the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires, he asked an extremely reasonable question, which was: “but why?” And what makes this feel like a conspiracy is that there is no single answer to “why?” Sometimes it’s arrogance, sometimes it’s ideology, sometimes it’s purely money. Often it’s a messy combination of all three.

But if you really want to step back a bit, the reason why is that we have a socioeconomic system that concentrates nation-state level wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals, with virtually no checks on what they can choose to do with it. So if Larry Ellison wants to turn CBS News into Bari Weiss’s Free Press TV, or Jeff Bezos wants to make The Washington Post into an ideological subsidiary of the Cato Institute… what institutions of power will be left to disagree?

In related news, U.S. lawmakers voted to end federal funding for NPR and PBS. Conservatives in Canada are waging a similar campaign to stop funding the CBC, and I hope it fails.

⌥ Permalink

Jon Prosser’s many videos showing mockups of this year’s redesign on iOS were accurate. Very accurate, in fact — it was easy to surmise he had seen screenshots and videos of what it looked like in the real world. That part was not really in question. What would be, from Apple’s perspective, is if those demonstrations were obtained legitimately, and the company is now arguing they were not.

Eric Slivka, MacRumors:

Apple’s complaint outlines what it claims is the series of events that led to the leaks, which centered around a development iPhone in the possession of Ramacciotti’s friend and Apple employee Ethan Lipnik. According to Apple, Prosser and Ramacciotti plotted to access Lipnik’s phone, acquiring his passcode and then using location-tracking to determine when he “would be gone for an extended period.” Prosser reportedly offered financial compensation to Ramacciotti in return for assisting with accessing the development iPhone.

Apple says Ramacciotti accessed Lipnik’s development iPhone and made a FaceTime call to Prosser, showing off iOS 26 running on the development iPhone, and that Prosser recorded the call with screen capture tools. Prosser then shared those videos with others and used them to make re-created renders of iOS 26 for his videos.

Prosser, for his part, says he “certainly did not ‘plot’ to access anyone’s phone and was unaware of the situation playing out”. He also tweeted what seems to be a Signal screenshot as — I guess — proof, but it is a brief segment of a conversation with only implied context. I am not sure it is a great idea for Prosser to keep talking about this in public or post screenshots of what appears to be a discussion with a source.

The complaint filed by Apple contains a little more information, including a screenshot of a partly-redacted April email tipping the company off. It appears it was sent to several people at Apple, judging by the amount of redactions in the “to” field, and it implicates three others in this leak, though their names are redacted. It also suggests Prosser was sloppy with protecting his source. Finally, the tipster claims someone “has leaked iOS information” before to a party with a redaction almost the same length as the third “involved” party. (Also, at least one of these redactions is trivial to guess if you line up the characters.)

Three days after this email was sent, Prosser published even more comprehensive renders of iOS 26, which were representative of the version shown at WWDC.

There are shades and echoes here of Apple’s 2004–05 lawsuits against several rumour sites — most notably Think Secret, and also Apple Insider and O’Grady’s PowerPage — and their unnamed sources. Despite working my PACER account from every angle, I cannot seem to find Apple’s original complaints.

However, they were summarized by Joseph M. Tartakoff, writing for the Harvard Crimson in 2005:

Apple’s lawsuit alleges that Think Secret is illegally soliciting Apple employees to violate confidentiality agreements and disclosing that information online without Apple’s permission.

Offering tipsters “complete anonymity,” the website contact page urges visitors to submit “news tips” and “insider information.”

Nearly three years later, the lawsuit was settled and Think Secret was shut down.

The details of Apple’s suit against Prosser and Ramacciotti allege the latter took advantage of a friendship. At what stage Prosser was made aware of this and to what extent, if any, he played in pushing Ramacciotti further seems to be a key question. Also, one has to wonder about the difference between what Prosser revealed and Mark Gurman’s obviously well-sourced repeated scoops.

I am also looking forward to Apple trying to explain how it has suffered “damage and loss in an amount to be proven at trial but, in any event, exceeding $5,000 aggregated over a one-year period”. This multitrillion-dollar company was financially injured by a few YouTube videos showing the redesign of its operating system? Sure, okay.

⌥ Permalink

Ingrid Burrington:

So even though there isn’t really a smoking gun here, I think it’s worth playing out what Google Geo being break-even or not-especially profitable means for both Google and for geospatial technology as a sector. Google Maps really warped public perception of the business of geospatial by making what had previously been consumer products totally free to consumers. Why do that — why undercut a revenue source — in order to maintain other revenue sources that aren’t necessarily profitable or certainly not hundreds of billions of dollars profitable?

Burrington’s attempts to answer this question reinforce how much of Google is unsustainable if it were fractured into standalone businesss. Maps, Docs, YouTube, Gemini — it seems unlikely any of these work on their own without the backing of Google’s monopolistic digital advertising business. That is, not just any digital ads, but specifically the vast control Google has over online advertising is, seemingly, what props up products that would otherwise struggle to remain afloat as they grew.

⌥ Permalink

Federico Viticci, MacStories:

For the past two weeks, I’ve been able to use Sky, the new app from the people behind Shortcuts who left Apple two years ago. As soon as I saw a demo, I felt the same way I did about Editorial, Workflow, and Shortcuts: I knew Sky was going to fundamentally change how I think about my macOS workflow and the role of automation in my everyday tasks.

Only this time, because of AI and LLMs, Sky is more intuitive than all those apps and requires a different approach, as I will explain in this exclusive preview story ahead of a full review of the app later this year.

Matthew Cassinelli has also been using an early version of Sky:

Sky bridges the gap between old-school scripting, modern automation, and new-age LLM technology, built with a deep love for working on the Mac as a platform.

This feels like the so-far-unfulfilled promise of Apple Intelligence — but more. The ways I want to automate iOS are limited. But the kinds of things I want help with on my Mac are boundless. Viticci shares the example of automatically sorting a disorganized folder in Finder, and that is absolutely something I want to do easier than I currently can. Yes, I could cobble together something with AppleScript or an Automator workflow, but it would be so much nicer if I could just tell my computer to do something in the most natural language I understand. This is fascinating.

⌥ Permalink

Designed by Apple in Cupertino. Assembled by the Johnson family in Decatur. It has a certain ring to it.

⌥ Permalink

Mike Scarcella, Reuters:

Alphabet’s Google has persuaded a federal judge in California to reject a lawsuit from video platform Rumble accusing the technology giant of illegally monopolizing the online video-sharing market.

In a ruling on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr said Rumble’s 2021 lawsuit seeking more than $2 billion in damages was untimely filed outside the four-year statute of limitations for antitrust claims.

Rumble is dishonest and irritating, but I thought its case in which it argued Google engages in self-preferencing could be interesting. It seems to rank YouTube videos more highly than those from other sources. This can be explained by YouTube’s overwhelming popularity — it consistently ranks in the top ten web services according to Cloudflare — yet I can see anyone’s discomfort in taking Google’s word for it, since it has misrepresented its ranking criteria.

This is an unsatisfying outcome, but it seems Rumble has another suit it is still litigating.

⌥ Permalink

John Herrman, New York magazine:

But I also don’t want to assume Google knows exactly how this stuff will play out for Google, much less what it will actually mean for millions of websites, and their visitors, if Google stops sending as many people beyond its results pages. Google’s push into productizing generative AI is substantially fear-driven, faith-based, and informed by the actions of competitors that are far less invested in and dependent on the vast collection of behaviors — websites full of content authentic and inauthentic, volunteer and commercial, social and antisocial, archival and up-to-date — that make up what’s left of the web and have far less to lose. […]

Very nearly since it launched, Google has attempted to answer users’ questions as immediately as possible. It had the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button since it was still a stanford.edu subdomain, and it has since steadily changed the results page to more directly respond to queries. But this seems entirely different — a way to benefit from Google’s decades-long ingestion of the web and giving almost nothing back. Or, perhaps, giving back something ultimately worse: invented answers users cannot trust, and will struggle to check because sources are intermingled and buried.

⌥ Permalink

Ciro Santilli:

This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the late 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of the targeted countries circa 2010-2013.

This is a pretty clever scheme in theory, but seems to have been pretty sloppy in practice. That is, many of the sites seem to share enough elements allowing an enterprising person to link the seemingly unrelated sites — even, as it turns out, years later and after they have been pulled offline. That apparently resulted in the deaths of, according to Foreign Policy, dozens of people.

⌥ Permalink

Apple issued a news release today touting the safety of the App Store, dutifully covered without context by outlets like 9to5Mac, AppleInsider, and MacRumors. This has become an annual tradition in trying to convince people — specifically, developers and regulators — of the wisdom of allowing native software to be distributed for iOS only through the App Store. Apple published similar stats in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, reflecting the company’s efforts in each preceding year. Each contains similar figures; for example:

• In its new report, Apple says it “terminated more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns” in 2024, an increase from 118,000 in 2023, which itself was a decrease from 428,000 in 2022. Apple said the decrease between 2022 and 2023 was “thanks to continued improvements to prevent the creation of potentially fraudulent accounts in the first place”. Does the increase in 2024 reflect poorer initial anti-fraud controls, or an increase in fraud attempts? Is it possible to know either way?

• Apple says it deactivated “nearly 129 million customer accounts” in 2024, a significant decrease from deactivating 374 million the year prior. However, it blocked 711 million account creations in 2024, which is several times greater than the 153 million blocked in the year before. Compare to 2022, when it disabled 282 million accounts and prevented the creation of 198 million potentially fraudulent accounts. In 2021, the same numbers were 170 million and 118 million; in 2020, 244 million and 424 million. These numbers are all over the place.

• A new statistic Apple is publishing this year is “illicit app distribution”. It says that, in the past month, it “stopped nearly 4.6 million attempts to install or launch apps distributed illicitly outside the App Store or approved third-party marketplaces”. These are not necessarily fraudulent, pirated, or otherwise untoward apps. This statistic is basically a reflection of the control maintained by Apple over iOS regardless of user intentions.

There are plenty of numbers just like these in Apple’s press release. They all look impressive in large part because just about any statistic would be at Apple’s scale. Apple is also undeniably using the App Store to act as a fraud reduction filter, with mixed results. I do not expect a 100% success rate, but I still do not know how much can be gleaned from context-free numbers.

⌥ Permalink

Nicholas Chrastil, the Guardian:

State officials have praised Butler Snow for its experience in defending prison cases – and specifically William Lunsford, head of the constitutional and civil rights litigation practice group at the firm. But now the firm is facing sanctions by the federal judge overseeing Johnson’s case after an attorney at the firm, working with Lunsford, cited cases generated by artificial intelligence – which turned out not to exist.

It is one of a growing number of instances in which attorneys around the country have faced consequences for including false, AI-generated information in official legal filings. A database attempting to track the prevalence of the cases has identified 106 instances around the globe in which courts have found “AI hallucinations” in court documents.

The database is now up to 120 cases, including some fairly high-profile ones like that against Timothy Burke.

Here is a little behind-the-scenes from this weekend’s piece about “nimble fingers” and Apple’s supply chain. The claim, as framed by Tripp Mickle, in the New York Times, is that “[y]oung Chinese women have small fingers, and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts”. This sounded suspicious to me because I thought about it for five seconds. There are other countries where small objects are carefully assembled by hand, for example, and attributing a characteristic like “small fingers” to hundreds of millions of “young Chinese women” seems reductive, to put it mildly. But this assumption had to come from somewhere, especially since Patrick McGee also mentioned it.

So I used both DuckDuckGo and Google to search for relevant keywords within a date range of the last fifteen years and excluding the past month or so. I could not quickly find anything of relevance; both thought I was looking for smartphones for use with small hands. So I thought this might be a good time to try ChatGPT. It immediately returned a quote from a 2014 report from an international labour organization, but did not tell me the title of the report or give me a link. I asked it for the title. ChatGPT responded it was actually a 2012 report that mentioned “nimble fingers” of young women being valuable, and gave me the title. But when I found copies of the report, there was no such quote or anything remotely relevant. I did, however, get the phrase “nimble fingers”, which sent me down the correct search path to finding articles documenting this longstanding prejudice.

Whether because of time crunch or laziness, it baffles me how law firms charging as much as they do have repeatedly failed to verify the claims generated by artificial intelligence tools.

⌥ Permalink

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was on the Verge’s “Decoder” podcast with Nilay Patel, and was asked about Route Share:

I read this press release announcing Route Share, and I had this very mid-2010s reaction, which was what if Uber just invented a bus. Did you just invent a bus?

I think to some extent it’s inspired by the bus. If you step back a little bit, a part of us looking to expand and grow is about making Uber more affordable to more people. I think one of the things that makes tech companies different from most companies out there is that our goal is to lower prices. If we lower the price, then we can extend the audience.

There is more to Khosrowshahi’s answer, but I am going to interject with three objections. First, the idea that Route Share is “inspired” “to some extent” by a bus is patently ridiculous — it is a vehicle with multiple passengers who embark and disembark at fixed points along a fixed route. It is a bus. A bad one, but a bus.

Second, tech companies are not the only kinds of companies that want to lower prices. Basically every consumer business is routinely marketed on lowering prices and saving customers money. This is the whole entire concept of big box stores like Costco and Walmart. Whether they are actually saving people money is a whole different point.

Which brings me to my third objection, which is that Uber has been raising prices, not reducing them. In the past year, according to a Gridwise report, Uber’s fares increased by 7.2% in the United States, even though driver pay fell 3.4%. Uber has been steadily increasing its average fare since 2018, probably to set the groundwork for its 2019 initial public offering.

Patel does not raise any similar objections.

Anyway, back to Khosrowshahi:

There are two ways of lowering price as it relates to Route Share. One is you get more than one person to share a car because cars cost money, drivers’ time costs money, etc., or you reduce the size or price of the vehicle. And we’re doing that actively. For example, with two-wheelers and three-wheelers in a lot of countries. We’ve been going after this shared concept, which is a bus, for many, many years. We started with UberX Share, for example, which is on-demand sharing.

But this concept takes it to the next level. If you schedule and create consistency among routes, then I think we can up the matching quotient, so to speak, and then essentially pass the savings on to the consumer. So, call it a next-gen bus, but the goal is just to reduce prices to the consumer and then help with congestion and the environment. That’s all good as well.

Given the premise of “you get more than one person to share a car because cars cost money”, you might think Khosrowshahi would discuss the advantageous economics of increasing vehicle capacity. Instead, he cleverly pivots to smaller vehicles, despite Khosrowshahi and Patel discussing earlier how often their Uber ride occurs in a Toyota Highlander — a “mid-size” but still large SUV. This is an obviously inefficient way of moving one driver and one passenger around a city.

We just need better public transit. We should have an adequate supply of taxis, yes, but it is vastly better for everyone if we improve our existing infrastructure of trains and buses. Part of the magic of living in a city is the viability of shared public services like these.

⌥ Permalink

Greg Storey begins this piece with a well-known quote from Plato’s “Phaedrus”, in which the invention of writing is decried as “an elixir not of memory, but of reminding”. Storey compares this to a criticism of large language models, and writes:

Even though Plato thought writing might kill memory, he still wrote it down.

But this was not Plato’s thought — it was the opinion of Socrates expressed through Thamus. Socrates was too dismissive of the written word for a reason he believed worthwhile — that memory alone is a sufficient marker of intelligence and wisdom.

If anything, I think Storey’s error in attribution actually reinforces the lesson we can draw from it. If we relied on the pessimism of Socrates, we might not know what he said today; after all, human memory is faulty. Because Plato bothered to write it down, we can learn from it. But the ability to interpret it remains ours.

What struck me most about this article, though, is this part:

The real threat to creativity isn’t a language model. It’s a workplace that rewards speed over depth, scale over care, automation over meaning. If we’re going to talk about what robs people of agency, let’s start there. […]

Thanks to new technologies — from writing to large language models, from bicycles to jets — we are able to dramatically increase the volume of work done in our waking hours and that, in turn, increases the pressure to produce even more. The economic term for this is “productivity”, which I have always disliked. It distills everything down to the ratio of input effort compared to output value. In its most raw terms, it rewards the simplistic view of what a workplace ought to be, as Storey expresses well.

⌥ Permalink

Ryan Francis Bradley, New York Times Magazine:

Only — what if we did know exactly how he did the thing, and why? Before the previous installment of the franchise, “Dead Reckoning,” Paramount released a nine-minute featurette titled “The Biggest Stunt in Cinema History.” It was a behind-the-scenes look at that midair-motorbike moment, tracking how Cruise and his crew pulled it off. We saw a huge ramp running off the edge of a Norwegian fjord. We heard about Cruise doing endless motocross jumps as preparation (13,000 of them, the featurette claims) and skydiving repeatedly (more than 500 dives). We saw him touching down from a jump, his parachute still airborne above him, and giving the director Christopher McQuarrie a dap and a casual “Hey, McQ.” We heard a chorus of stunt trainers telling us how fantastic Cruise is (“an amazing individual,” his base-jumping coach says). And we hear from Cruise himself, asking his driving question: “How can we involve the audience?”

The featurette was an excellent bit of Tom Cruise propaganda and a compelling look at his dedication to (or obsession with) his own mythology (or pathology). But for the movie itself, the advance release of this featurette was completely undermining. When the jump scene finally arrived, it was impossible to ignore what you already knew about it. […]

Not only was the stunt compromised by the featurette, the way it was shot and edited did not help matters. Something about it does not look quite right — maybe it is the perpetual late afternoon light — and the whole sequence feels unbelievable. That is, I know Cruise is the one performing the stunt, but if I found out each shot contained a computer-generated replacement for Cruise, it would not surprise me.

I am as excited for this instalment as anyone. I hope it looks as good as a $300 million blockbuster should. But the way this franchise has been shot since “Fallout” has been a sore spot for me and, with the same director, cinematographer, and editor as “Dead Reckoning”, I cannot imagine why it would be much different.

⌥ Permalink

Rolfe Winkler, Amrith Ramkumar, and Meghan Bobrowsky, Wall Street Journal:

Apple stepped up efforts in recent weeks to fight Texas legislation that would require the iPhone-maker to verify ages of device users, even drafting Chief Executive Tim Cook into the fight.

The CEO called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week to ask for changes to the legislation or, failing that, for a veto, according to people familiar with the call. These people said that the conversation was cordial and that it made clear the extent of Apple’s interest in stopping the bill.

Abbott has yet to say whether he will sign it, though it passed the Texas legislature with veto-proof majorities.

This comes just a few months after Apple announced it would be introducing age range APIs in iOS later this year. Earlier this month, U.S. lawmakers announced federal bills with the same intent. This is clearly the direction things are going. Is there something specific in Texas’ bill that makes it particularly objectionable? Or is it simply the case Apple and Google would prefer a single federal law instead of individual state laws?

⌥ Permalink

Remember how, in 2023, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a report acknowledging mass stockpiling of third-party data it had purchased? It turns out there is so much private information about people it is creating a big headache for the intelligence agencies — not because of any laws or ethical qualms, but simply because of the sheer volume.

Sam Biddle, the Intercept:

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information, or CAI, like location data derived from mobile ads, by American spy agencies, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.” The documents state spy agencies will use the web portal not just to search through reams of private data, but also run them through artificial intelligence tools for further analysis.

Apparently, the plan is to feed all this data purchased from brokers and digital advertising companies into artificial intelligence systems. The DNI says it has rules about purchasing and using this data, so there is nothing to worry about.

By the way, the DNI’s Freedom of Information Act page was recently updated to remove links to released records and FOIA logs. They were live on May 5 but, as of May 16, those pages have been removed, and direct links no longer resolve either. Strange.

Update: The ODNI told me its “website is currently under construction”.

⌥ Permalink

Berber Jin, Wall Street Journal:

Altman and Ive offered a few hints at the secret project they have been working on [at a staff meeting]. The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

Ambitious, albeit marginally less hubristic than considering it a replacement for either of those two device categories.

Stephen Hackett:

If OpenAI’s future product is meant to work with the iPhone and Android phones, then the company is opening a whole other set of worms, from the integration itself to the fact that most people will still prefer to simply pull their phone out of their pockets for basically any task.

I am reminded of an April 2024 article by Jason Snell at Six Colors:

The problem is that I’m dismissing the Ai Pin and looking forward to the Apple Watch specifically because of the control Apple has over its platforms. Yes, the company’s entire business model is based on tightly integrating its hardware and software, and it allows devices like the Apple Watch to exist. But that focus on tight integration comes at a cost (to everyone but Apple, anyway): Nobody else can have the access Apple has.

A problem OpenAI could have with this device is the same as was faced by Humane, which is that Apple treats third-party hardware and software as second-class citizens in its post-P.C. ecosystem. OpenAI is laying the groundwork for better individual context. But this is a significant limitation, and it is one I am curious to see how it is overcome.

Whatever this thing is, it is undeniably interesting to me. OpenAI has become a household name on a foundation of an academic-sounding product that has changed the world. Jony Ive has been the name attached to entire eras of design. There is plenty to criticize about both. Yet the combination of these things is surely intriguing, inviting the kind of speculation that used to be commonplace in tech before it all became rote. I have little faith our world will become meaningfully better with another gadget in it. Yet I hope the result is captivating, at least, because we could use some of that.

⌥ Permalink

Jessica Conditt, Engadget:

A group of GeoGuessr map creators have pulled their contributions from the game to protest its participation in the Esports World Cup 2025, calling the tournament “a sportswashing tool used by the government of Saudi Arabia to distract from and conceal its horrific human rights record.” The protestors say the blackout will hold until the game’s publisher, GeoGuessr AB, cancels its planned Last Chance Wildcard tournament at the EWC in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from July 21 to 27.

Those participating in this blackout created some of the most popular and notable maps in the game. Good for them.

Update: GeoGuessr says it is withdrawing from the EWC.

⌥ Permalink

Thinking about the energy “footprint” of artificial intelligence products makes it a good time to re-link to Mark Kaufman’s excellent 2020 Mashable article in which he explores the idea of a carbon footprint:

The genius of the “carbon footprint” is that it gives us something to ostensibly do about the climate problem. No ordinary person can slash 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. But we can toss a plastic bottle into a recycling bin, carpool to work, or eat fewer cheeseburgers. “Psychologically we’re not built for big global transformations,” said John Cook, a cognitive scientist at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. “It’s hard to wrap our head around it.”

Ogilvy & Mather, the marketers hired by British Petroleum, wove the overwhelming challenges inherent in transforming the dominant global energy system with manipulative tactics that made something intangible (carbon dioxide and methane — both potent greenhouse gases — are invisible), tangible. A footprint. Your footprint.

The framing of most of the A.I. articles I have seen thankfully shies away from ascribing individual blame; instead, they point to systemic flaws. This is preferable, but it still does little at the scale of electricity generation worldwide.

⌥ Permalink

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review:

Today, new analysis by MIT Technology Review provides an unprecedented and comprehensive look at how much energy the AI industry uses — down to a single query — to trace where its carbon footprint stands now, and where it’s headed, as AI barrels towards billions of daily users.

We spoke to two dozen experts measuring AI’s energy demands, evaluated different AI models and prompts, pored over hundreds of pages of projections and reports, and questioned top AI model makers about their plans. Ultimately, we found that the common understanding of AI’s energy consumption is full of holes.

This robust story comes on the heels of a series of other discussions about how much energy is used by A.I. products and services. Last month, for example, Andy Masley published a comparison of using ChatGPT against other common activities. The Economist ran another, and similar articles have been published before. As far as I can tell, they all come down to the same general conclusion: training A.I. models is energy-intensive, using A.I. products is not, lots of things we do online and offline have a greater impact on the environment, and the current energy use of A.I. is the lowest it will be from now on.

There are lots of good reasons to critique artificial intelligence. I am not sure its environmental impact is a particularly strong one; I think the true energy footprint of tech companies, of which A.I. is one part, is more relevant. Even more pressing, however, is our need to electrify our world as much as we can, and that will require a better and cleaner grid.

⌥ Permalink

Last month, the Information reported OpenAI was considering buying io Products — unfortunate capitalization theirs — for around $500 million. The company, founded by Jony Ive and employing several ex-Apple designers and engineers, was already known to be working with OpenAI, but it was still an external entity. Now, it is not, to the tune of over $6 billion in equity.

OpenAI today published a press release and video — set in LoveFrom’s distinctive proprietary serif face — featuring Ive and Sam Altman in conversation. There is barely a hint of what they are working on but, whether because of honesty or just clever packaging, it comes across as an earnest attempt to think about the new technologies OpenAI has successfully brought to the world as part of our broader cultural fabric. Of course, it will be expressed in something that can be assembled in a factory and sold for money, so let us not get too teary-eyed. We have heard a similar tune before.

The video promises revealing something “next year”.

⌥ Permalink

Albert Burneko, Defector:

Over this past weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer’s weekend editions included identical huge “Best of Summer” inserts; in the Inquirer’s digital edition the insert runs 54 pages, while the entire rest of the paper occupies 36. Before long, readers began noticing something strange about the “Summer reading list for 2025” section of the insert. Namely, that while the list includes some very well-known authors, most of the books listed in it do not exist.

This is the kind of fluffy insert long purchased by publishers to pad newspapers. In this case, it appears to be produced by Hearst Communications, which feels about right for something with Hearst’s name on it. I cannot imagine most publishers read these things very carefully; adding more work or responsibility is not the point of buying a guide like this.

What I found very funny today was watching the real-time reporting of this story in parallel with Google’s I/O presentation, at which it announced one artificial intelligence feature after another. On the one hand, A.I. features can help you buy event tickets or generate emails offering travel advice based on photos from trips you have taken. On the other, it is inventing books, experts, and diet advice.

⌥ Permalink

Kurt Wagner and Katie Roof, Bloomberg:

Elon Musk said his xAI artificial intelligence startup has acquired the X platform, which he also controls, at a valuation of $33 billion, marking a surprise twist for the social network formerly known as Twitter.

This feels like it has to be part of some kind of financial crime, right? Like, I am sure it is not; I am sure this is just a normal thing businesses do that only feels criminal, like how they move money around the world to avoid taxes.

Wagner and Roof:

The deal gives the new combined entity, called XAI Holdings, a value of more than $100 billion, not including the debt, according to a person familiar with the arrangement, who asked not to be identified because the terms weren’t public. Morgan Stanley was the sole banker on the deal, representing both sides, other people said.

For perspective, that is around about the current value of Lockheed Martin, Rio Tinto — one of the world’s largest mining businesses — and Starbucks. All of those companies make real products with real demand — unfortunately so, in the case of the first. xAI has exactly one external customer today. And it is not like unpleasant social media seems to be a booming business.

Kate Conger and Lauren Hirsch, New York Times:

This month, X continued to struggle to hit its revenue targets, according to an internal email seen by The New York Times. As of March 3, X had served $91 million of ads this year, the message said, well below its first-quarter target of $153 million.

This is including the spending of several large advertisers. For comparison, in the same quarter in the pre-Musk era, Twitter generated over a billion dollars in advertising revenue.

I am begging for Matt Levine to explain this to me.

⌥ Permalink

Allison Morrow, CNN:

Tech columnists such as the New York Times’ Kevin Roose have suggested recently that Apple has failed AI, rather than the other way around.

“Apple is not meeting the moment in AI,” Roose said on his podcast, Hard Fork, earlier this month. “I just think that when you’re building products with generative AI built into it, you do just need to be more comfortable with error, with mistakes, with things that are a little rough around the edges.”

To which I would counter, respectfully: Absolutely not.

Via Dan Moren, of Six Colors:

The thesis of the piece is not about excusing Apple’s AI missteps, but zooming out to take a look at the bigger picture of why AI is everywhere, and make the argument that maybe Apple is well-served by not necessarily being on the cutting edge of these developments.

If that is what this piece is arguing, I do not think Apple makes a good case for it. When it launched Apple Intelligence, it could have said it was being more methodical, framing a modest but reliable feature set as a picture of responsibility. This would be a thin layer of marketing speak covering the truth, of course, but that would at least set expectations. Instead, what we got was a modest and often unreliable feature set with mediocre implementation, and the promise of a significantly more ambitious future that has been kicked down the road.

These things do not carry the Apple promise, as articulated by Morrow, of “design[ing] things that are accessible out of the box”, products for which “[y]ou will almost never need a user manual filled with tiny print”. It all feels flaky and not particularly nice to use. Even the toggle to turn it off is broken.

⌥ Permalink

Meta:

Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests.

You know, I think this concept of showing people things they say they want to see might just work.

Meta says this is just one of “several ‘O.G.’ Facebook experiences [coming] throughout the year” — a truly embarrassing sentence. But Mark Zuckerberg said in an autumn earnings call that Facebook would “add a whole new category of content which is A.I. generated or A.I. summarized content, or existing content pulled together by A.I. in some way”. This plan is going just great. I think the way these things can be reconciled is exactly how Facebook is doing it: your friends go in a “Friends” tab, but you will see all the other stuff it wants to push on you by default. Just look how Meta has done effectively the same thing in Instagram and Threads.

⌥ Permalink

Jeff Johnson in November 2023:

When people wistfully proclaim that they wish for the next major macOS version to be a “Snow Leopard update”, they’re wishing for the wrong thing. No major update will solve Apple’s quality issues. Major updates are the cause of quality issues. The solution would be a long string of minor bug fix updates. What people should be wishing for are the two years of stability and bug fixes that occurred after the release of Snow Leopard. But I fear we’ll never see that again with Tim Cook in charge.

I read an article today from yet another person pining for a mythical Snow Leopard-style MacOS release. While I sympathize with the intent of their argument, it is largely fictional and, as Johnson writes, it took until about two years into Snow Leopard’s release cycle for it to be the release we want to remember:

It’s an iron law of software development that major updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was no exception, of course. The next major update, Mac OS X 10.7.0, was no exception either, and it was much buggier than 10.6.8 v1.1, even though both versions were released in the same week.

What I desperately miss is that period of stability after a few rounds of bug fixes. As I have previously complained about, my iMac cannot run any version of MacOS newer than Ventura, released in 2022. It is still getting bug and security fixes. In theory, this should mean I am running a solid operating system despite missing some features.

It is not. Apple’s engineering efforts quickly moved toward shipping MacOS Sonoma in 2023, and then Sequoia last year. It seems as though any bug fixes were folded into these new major versions and, even worse, new bugs were introduced late in the Ventura release cycle that have no hope of being fixed. My iMac seizes up when I try to view HDR media; because this Extended Dynamic Range is an undocumented enhancement, there is no preference to turn it off. Recent Safari releases have contained several bugs related to page rendering and scrolling. Weather sometimes does not display for my current location.

Ventura was by no means bug-free when it shipped, and I am disappointed even its final form remains a mess. My MacBook Pro is running the latest public release of MacOS Sequoia and it, too, has new problems late in its development cycle; I reported a Safari page crashing bug earlier this week. These are on top of existing problems, like how there is no way to change the size of search results’ thumbnails in Photos.

Alas, I am not expecting many bugs to be fixed. It is, after all, nearly April, which means there are just two months until WWDC and the first semi-public builds of another new MacOS version. I am hesitant every year to upgrade. But it does not appear much effort is being put into the maintenance of any previous version. We all get the choice of many familiar bugs, or a blend of hopefully fewer old bugs plus some new ones.

⌥ Permalink

Remember when Substack’s co-founders went to great lengths to explain what they had built was little more than infrastructure? It was something they repeated earlier this year:

You need to have your own corner of the internet, a place where you can build a home, on your own land, with assets you control.

Our system gives creators ownership. With Substack, you have your own property to build on: content you own, a URL of your choosing, a website for your work, and a mailing list of your subscribers that you can export and take with you at any time.

This is a message the company reinforces because it justifies a wildly permissive environment for posters that requires little oversight. But it is barely more true that Substack is “your own land, with assets you control” than, say, a YouTube channel. The main thing Substack has going for it is that you can export a list of subscribers’ email accounts. Otherwise, the availability of your material remains subject to Substack’s priorities and policies.

What Substack in fact offers, and what differentiates it from a true self-owned “land”, is a comprehensive set of media formats and opportunities for promotion.

Charlotte Klein, New York magazine:

Substack today has all of the functionalities of a social platform, allowing proprietors to engage with both subscribers (via the Chat feature) or the broader Substack universe in the Twitter-esque Notes feed. Writers I spoke to mentioned that for all of their reluctance to engage with the Notes feature, they see growth when they do. More than 50 percent of all subscriptions and 30 percent of paid subscriptions on the platform come directly from the Substack network. There’s been a broader shift toward multimedia content: Over half of the 250 highest-revenue creators were using audio and video in April 2024, a number that had surged to 82 percent by February 2025.

Substack is now a blogging platform with email capabilities, a text-based social platform, a podcasting platform, and a video host — all of which can be placed behind a paywall. This is a logical evolution for the company. But please do not confuse this with infrastructure. YouTube can moderate its platform as it chooses and so can Substack. The latter has decided to create a special category filled to the brim with vaccine denialism publications that have “tens of thousands of paid subscribers”, from which Substack takes ten percent of earnings.

⌥ Permalink

The high-test idiocy of a senior U.S. politician inviting a journalist to an off-the-record chat planning an attack on Yemen, killing over thirty people and continuing a decade of war, seems to have popularized a genre of journalism dedicated to the administration’s poor digital security hygiene. Some of these articles feel less substantial; others suggest greater crimes. One story feels like deja vu.

Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman, Wired:

The Venmo account under [Mike] Waltz’s name includes a 328-person friend list. Among them are accounts sharing the names of people closely associated with Waltz, such as [Walker] Barrett, formerly Waltz’s deputy chief of staff when Waltz was a member of the House of Representatives, and Micah Thomas Ketchel, former chief of staff to Waltz and currently a senior adviser to Waltz and President Donald Trump.

[…]

One of the most notable appears to belong to [Susie] Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted political advisers. That account’s 182-person friend list includes accounts sharing the names of influential figures like Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, and Hope Hicks, Trump’s former White House communications director.

In 2021, reporters for Buzzfeed News found Joe Biden’s Venmo account and his contacts. Last summer, the same Wired reporters plus Andrew Couts found J.D. Vance’s and, in February, reporters for the American Prospect found Pete Hegseth’s. It remains a mystery to me why one of the most popular U.S. payment apps is this public.

⌥ Permalink

Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal — which has recently been in the news — in an op-ed for the Financial Times:

The UK is part and parcel of a dangerous trend that threatens the cyber security of our global infrastructures. Legislators in Sweden recently proposed a law that would force communication providers to build back door vulnerabilities. France is poised to make the same mistake when it votes on the inclusion of “ghost participants” in secure conversations via back doors. “Chat control” legislation haunts Brussels.

There is some good news: French legislators ultimately rejected this provision.

⌥ Permalink

Like those since 2020, WWDC 2025 appears to be an entirely online event with a one-day in-person event. While it is possible there will be live demos — I certainly hope that is the case — I bet it is a two-hour infomercial again.

If you are planning on travelling there and live outside the United States, there are some things you should know and precautions you should take, particularly if you are someone who is transgender or nonbinary. It is a good thing travel is not required, and hopefully Apple will once again run labs worldwide.

⌥ Permalink

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.

[…]

“Brute force” is not just what I have noticed while reporting on the spammers who flood Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Google with AI-generated spam. It is the stated strategy of the people getting rich off of AI slop.

Regardless of whether you have been following Koebler’s A.I. slop beat, you owe it to yourself to read this article at least. The goal, Koelber surmises, is for Meta to target slop and ads at users in more-or-less the same way and, because this slop is cheap and fast to produce, it is a bottomless cup of engagement metrics.

Koebler, in a follow-up article:

As I wrote last week, the strategy with these types of posts is to make a human linger on them long enough to say to themselves “what the fuck,” or to be so horrified as to comment “what the fuck,” or send it to a friend saying “what the fuck,” all of which are signals to the algorithm that it should boost this type of content but are decidedly not signals that the average person actually wants to see this type of thing. The type of content that I am seeing right now makes “Elsagate,” the YouTube scandal in which disturbing videos were targeted to kids and resulted in various YouTube reforms, look quaint.

Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel:

Meta is testing an Instagram feature that suggests AI-generated comments for users to post beneath other users’ photos and videos.

Meta is going to make so much money before it completely disintegrates on account of nobody wanting to spend this much time around a thin veneer over robots.

⌥ Permalink

Grace Dean, BBC News:

Ms O’Carroll’s lawsuit argued that Facebook’s targeted advertising system was covered by the UK’s definition of direct marketing, giving individuals the right to object.

Meta said that adverts on its platform could only be targeted to groups of a minimum size of 100 people, rather than individuals, so did not count as direct marketing. But the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) disagreed.

“Organisations must respect people’s choices about how their data is used,” a spokesperson for the ICO said. “This means giving users a clear way to opt out of their data being used in this way.”

Meta, in response, says “no business can be mandated to give away its services for free”, a completely dishonest way to interpret the ICO’s decision. There is an obvious difference between advertising and personalized advertising. To pretend otherwise is nonsense. Sure, personalized advertising makes Meta more money than non-personalized advertising, but that is an entirely different problem. Meta can figure it out. Or it can be a big soggy whiner about it.

⌥ Permalink

John Voorhees, MacStories:

The update [next month] will enable 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio, which Apple says is supported by over 100 million songs on Apple Music. Using the headphones’ USB-C cable, musicians will enjoy ultra-low latency and lossless audio in their Logic Pro workflows. The USB-C cable will allow them to produce Personalized Spatial Audio, too.

Allow me to recap the absurd timeline of lossless support for AirPods models.

In December 2020, Apple launched the first AirPods Max models promising “high-fidelity sound” and “the ultimate personal listening experience”. These headphones are mostly designed for wireless listening, but a 3.5mm-to-Lightning cable allows you to connect them to analog sources. Five months later, Apple announces lossless audio in Apple Music. These tracks are not delivered in full fidelity to any AirPods model, including the AirPods Max, because of Bluetooth bandwidth limits, nor when AirPods Max are used in wired mode.

In September 2023, Apple updates the AirPods Pro 2 with a USB-C charging case and adds lossless audio playback over “a groundbreaking wireless audio protocol”, but only when using the Vision Pro — a capability also added to the AirPods 4 line. These headphones all have the H2 chip; the pre-USB-C AirPods Pro 2 also had the H2, but do not support lossless audio.

In September 2024, Apple announces a seemingly minor AirPods Max update with new colours and a USB-C port where a Lightning one used to be. Crucially, it still contains the same H1 chip as the Lightning version.

In March 2025, Apple says lossless audio will now be supported by the AirPods Max, but only in a wired configuration, and only for the USB-C model. I feel like there must be technical reasons for this mess, but it is a mess nonetheless.

⌥ Permalink

Simon Sharwood, the Register:

Over the weekend, users noticed their Timelines went missing.

Google seems to have noticed, too, as The Register has seen multiple social media posts in which Timelines users share an email from the search and ads giant in which it admits “We briefly experienced a technical issue that caused the deletion of Timeline data for some people.”

The email goes on to explain that most users that availed themselves of a feature that enables encrypted backups will be able to restore their Maps Timelines data.

Once again, Google provides no explanation for why it is incapable of reliably storing user data, and no customer support. Users are on their own.

⌥ Permalink

Lucy Mangan, the Guardian:

There have been a few contenders for the crown [of “televisual perfection”] over the years, but none has come as close as Jack Thorne’s and Stephen Graham’s astonishing four-part series Adolescence, whose technical accomplishments – each episode is done in a single take – are matched by an array of award-worthy performances and a script that manages to be intensely naturalistic and hugely evocative at the same time. Adolescence is a deeply moving, deeply harrowing experience.

I did not intend on watching the whole four-part series today, maybe just the first and second episodes. But I could not turn away. The effectively unanimous praise for this is absolutely earned.

The oner format sounds like it could be a gimmick, the kind of thing that screams a bit too loud and overshadows what should be a tender and difficult narrative. Nothing could be further from the truth. The technical decisions force specific storytelling decisions, in the same way that a more maximalist production in the style of, say, David Fincher does. Fincher would shoot fifty versions of everything and then assemble the best performances into a tight machine — and I love that stuff. But I love this, too, little errors and all. It is better for these choices. The dialogue cannot get just a little bit tighter in the edit, or whatever. It is all just there.

I know nothing about reviewing television or movies but, so far as I can tell, everyone involved has pulled this off spectacularly. You can quibble with things like the rainbow party-like explanation of different emoji — something for which I cannot find any evidence — that has now become its own moral panic. I get that. Even so, this is one of the greatest storytelling achievements I have seen in years.

Update: Watch it on Netflix. See? The ability to edit means I can get away with not fully thinking this post through.

⌥ Permalink

Reid Tatoris, Harsh Saxena, and Luis Miglietti, of Cloudflare:

Today, we’re excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives. When you opt in, Cloudflare will automatically deploy an AI-generated set of linked pages when we detect inappropriate bot activity, without the need for customers to create any custom rules.

Two thoughts:

1. This is amusing. Nothing funnier than using someone’s own words or, in this case, technology against them.

2. This is surely going to lead to the same arms race as exists now between privacy protections and hostile adtech firms. Right?

⌥ Permalink

Damian Carrington, the Guardian:

Their exploration of future fossils has led [Prof. Sarah] Gabbott and [Prof. Jan] Zalasiewicz to draw some conclusions. One is that understanding how human detritus could become fossils points towards how best to stop waste piling up in the environment.

“In the making of fossils, it’s the first few years, decades, centuries and millennia which are really crucial,” says Zalasiewicz. “This overlaps with the time in which we have the capacity to do something about it.”

Gabbott says: “The big message here is that the amount of stuff that we are now making is eye-watering – it’s off the scale.” All of the stuff made by humans by 1950 was a small fraction of the mass of all the living matter on Earth. But today it outweighs all plants, animals and microbes and is set to triple by 2040.

It is disconcerting to understand our evidence of civilization accumulated over the span of many tens of thousands of years, yet we have equalized that within just a few decades. We are converting so much of the matter on this planet into things we care about for only a few minutes to a few years, but their mark will last forever.

Gabbott and Zalasiewicz’s book “Discarded” is out now. I hope my local library stocks it soon.

⌥ Permalink

Benedict Evans:

That takes us to xR, and to AI. These are fields where the tech is fundamental, and where there are real, important Apple kinds of questions, where Apple really should be able to do something different. And yet, with the Vision Pro Apple stumbled, and then with AI it’s fallen flat on its face. This is a concern.

The Vision Pro shipped as promised and works as advertised. But it’s also both too heavy and bulky and far too expensive to be a viable mass-market consumer product. Hugo Barra called it an over-engineered developer kit — you could also call it an experiment, or a preview or a concept. […]

The main problem, I think, with the reception of the Vision Pro is that it was passed through the same marketing lens as Apple uses to frame all its products. I have no idea if Apple considers the sales of this experiment acceptable, the tepid developer adoption predictable, or the skeptical press understandable. However, if you believe the math on display production and estimated sales figures, they more-or-less match.

Of course, as Evans points out, Apple does not ship experiments:

The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. […]

However, it clearly is a problem that the Apple execution machine broke badly enough for Apple to spend an hour at WWDC and a bunch of TV commercials talking about vapourware that it didn’t appear to understand was vapourware. The decision to launch the Vision Pro looks like a related failure. It’s a big problem that this is late, but it’s an equally big problem that Apple thought it was almost ready.

Unlike the Siri feature delay, I do not think the Vision Pro’s launch affects the company’s credibility at all. It can keep pushing that thing and trying to turn it into something more mass-market. This Siri stuff is going to make me look at WWDC in a whole different light this year.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.

[…]

Rockwell is known as the brains behind the Vision Pro, which is considered a technical marvel but not a commercial hit. Getting the headset to market required a number of technical breakthroughs, some of which leveraged forms of artificial intelligence. He is now moving away from the Vision Pro at a time when that unit is struggling to plot a future for the product.

If you had no context for this decision, it looks like Rockwell is being moved off Apple’s hot new product and onto a piece of software that perennially disappoints. It looks like a demotion. That is how badly Siri needs a shakeup.

Giannandrea will remain at the company, even with Rockwell taking over Siri. An abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous — something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Giannandrea’s other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company also has a team reporting to Giannandrea investigating robotics.

I figured as much. Gurman does not clarify in this article how much of Apple Intelligence falls under Giannandrea’s rubric, and how much is part of the “Siri” stuff that is being transferred to Rockwell. It does not sound as though Giannandrea will have no further Apple Intelligence responsibilities — yet — but the high-profile public-facing stuff is now overseen by Rockwell and, ultimately, Craig Federighi.

⌥ Permalink

There is a free market argument that can be made about how Apple gets to design its own ecosystem and, if it is so restrictive, people will be more hesitant to buy an iPhone since they can get more choices with an Android phone. I get that. But I think it is unfortunate so much of our life coalesces around devices which are so restrictive compared to those which came before.

Recall Apple’s “digital hub” strategy. The Mac would not only connect to hardware like digital cameras and music players; the software Apple made for it would empower people to do something great with those photos and videos and their music.

The iPhone repositioned that in two ways. First, the introduction of iCloud was a way to “demote” the Mac to a device at an equivalent level to everything else. Second, and just as importantly, is how it converged all that third-party hardware into a single device: it is the digital camera, the camcorder, and the music player. As a result, its hub-iness comes mostly in the form of software. If a developer can assume the existence of particular hardware components, they have extraordinary latitude to build on top of that. However, because Apple exercises control over this software ecosystem, it limits its breadth.

Like the Mac of 2001, it is also a hub for accessories — these days, things like headphones and smartwatches. Apple happens to make examples of both. You can still connect third-party devices — but they are limited.

Eric Migicovsky, of Pebble:

I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared – there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

Even if you believe Apple is doing this not out of anticompetitive verve, but instead for reasons of privacy, security, API support, and any number of other qualities, it still sucks. What it means is that Apple is mostly competing against itself, particularly in smartwatches. (Third-party Bluetooth headphones, like the ones I have, mostly work fine.)

The European Commission announced guidance today for improving third-party connectivity with iOS. Apple is, of course, miserable about this. I am curious to see the real-world results, particularly as the more dire predictions of permitting third-party app distribution have — shockingly — not materialized.

Imagine how much more interesting this ecosystem could be if there were substantial support across “host” platforms.

⌥ Permalink

The RSS feed for this website runs through Feedpress and, at some point in November, I must have done something to cause it to behave unreliably. It took me a while to track down in part because I have the JSON feed in NetNewsWire, but not the RSS feed. A silly oversight, I admit.

I think it is fixed, but please let me know if I have still made a mess of things. I recommend subscribing to the JSON feed anyhow if that is an option for you.

⌥ Permalink

Liv McMahon and Lily Jamali, BBC News:

TikTok’s bid to overturn a law which would see it banned or sold in the US from early 2025 has been rejected.

[…]

TikTok says it will now take its fight to the US Supreme Court, the country’s highest legal authority.

The court’s opinion (PDF) is not particularly long. As this is framed as a question of national security, the court gives substantial deference to the government’s assessment of TikTok’s threat. It also views the legislation passed earlier this year to limit data brokers as a complementary component of this TikTok divest-or-ban law.

I still do not find this argument particularly compelling. There is still too much dependence on classified information and too little public evidence. A generous interpretation of this is the court knows something I do not, and perhaps this is completely justified. But who knows? The paranoia over this app is leaking but the proof is not.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US Presidential Election may also present a lifeline for the app.

Despite unsuccessfully attempting to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, he said in the run-up to the November elections he would not allow the ban on TikTok to take effect.

I would be shocked if the incoming administration remains committed to overturning this ban, and not just because of its historically flaky reputation. This very decision references the actions of the first Trump presidency, though it owes more to the more tailored policies of the Biden administration.

If the U.S. Supreme Court does not stay this order and TikTok’s U.S. operations are not jettisoned from its global business, the ban will go into effect the day before Trump’s inauguration.

⌥ Permalink

Last month, Brazilian competition authorities ruled against Apple, finding in an increasingly familiar pattern that its anti-steering App Store rules are illegal. It imposed a twenty-day deadline for compliance.

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

According to a new Valor Econômico report, a Brazilian Federal Court judge has ruled that the decision by Cade, the Brazilian regulator, is “disproportionate and unnecessary.” The judge understood that the measures imposed by the regulator “change, in a sensitive and structural way” Apple’s business operation.

Cade ruled on November 26 that Apple would have 20 days to comply with antitrust legislation, otherwise it would be fined R$250,000 (US$42,000) per day. Apple had previously appealed on the grounds that the changes requested were too complex and would take too long to be made, so the company wouldn’t be able to meet the 20-day deadline.

Twenty days does seem like a tight turnaround. I have obviously no idea what it would take to copy-and-paste the same policies it uses in Japan, Korea, and the United States, but perhaps it would be easier to rip off the bandage and do so worldwide.

⌥ Permalink

Howard Oakley:

Over those 11 years, governments have come and gone, my grandchildren have grown up and one is now at university, we survived Covid, lost QuickTime and 32-bit code, and now use Apple silicon Macs. But one thing has remained unchanged through all of that, the Finder column width bug.

Maybe this is the year this bug will bubble up to the top of an intern’s to-fix list. As a dedicated user of the column view, I would not miss it.

⌥ Permalink

Go figure — just one day after writing about how Apple’s ambiguous descriptions of supposedly clever features has the potential to rob trust, my phone has become haunted.

I saw a suggestion from Siri that I turn on Do Not Disturb until the end of an event in my calendar — a reservation at a restaurant from 8:30 until 10:00 this morning. No such matching event was in Fantastical. It was, however, shown in the Calendar app as a Siri Suggestion.

What I think happened is that I was looking at that restaurant on OpenTable at perhaps 8:00 this morning. I was doing so in my web browser on my Mac, and I was not logged into OpenTable. My Mac and iPhone are both running operating system beta builds with Apple Intelligence enabled. Siri must have interpreted this mere browsing as me making a reservation, and then added it to my calendar without my asking, and then made a suggestion based on that fictional event.

This was not helpful. It was, in fact, perplexing and creepy. I do not know how all of these things were able to work together to produce this result, but I do not like it at all. It is obvious how this would make anyone question whether they can trust Apple Intelligence, A.I. systems generally, Siri, and their personal privacy. Truly bizarre.

⌥ Permalink

Cade Metz, New York Times:

Mr. [Sam] Altman said he was “tremendously sad” about the rising tensions between the two one-time collaborators.

“I grew up with Elon as like a mega hero,” he said.

But he rejected suggestions that Mr. Musk could use his increasingly close relationship with President-elect Trump to harm OpenAI.

“I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon would hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses,” he said.

Alex Heath, the Verge:

Jeff Bezos and President-elect Donald Trump famously didn’t get along the last time Trump was in the White House. This time, Bezos says he’s “very optimistic” and even wants to help out.

“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m going to help him.”

Emily Swanson, the Guardian:

“Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of and a participant in this change that we’re seeing all around America,” Stephen Miller, a top Trump deputy, told Fox.

Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, agreed with Miller. Clegg said in a recent press call that Zuckerberg wanted to play an “active role” in the administration’s tech policy decisions and wanted to participate in “the debate that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere,” particularly on artificial intelligence. Meta declined to provide further comment.

There are two possibilities. The first is that these CEOs are all dummies with memory no more capacious than that of an earthworm. The second is that these people all recognize the transactional and mercurial nature of the incoming administration, and they have begun their ritualistic grovelling. Even though I do not think money and success is evidence of genius, I do not think these CEOs are so dumb they actually believe in the moral fortitude of these goons.

⌥ Permalink

Ben Cohen, Wall Street Journal:

Only four years ago, when it was less popular for podcasts than both Spotify and Apple, YouTube becoming a podcasting colossus sounded about as realistic as Martin Scorsese releasing his next movie on TikTok.

But this year, YouTube passed the competition and became the most popular service for podcasts in the U.S., with 31% of weekly podcast listeners saying it’s now the platform they use the most, according to Edison Research.

This is notable, but Cohen omits key context for why YouTube is suddenly a key podcast platform: Google Podcasts was shut down this year with users and podcasters alike instructed to move to YouTube. According to Buzzsprout’s 2023 analytics, Google Podcasts was used by only 2.5% of global listeners. YouTube is not listed in their report, perhaps because it exists in its own bubble instead of being part of the broader RSS-feed-reading podcast client ecosystem.

But where Google was previously bifurcating its market share, it aligned its users behind a single client. And, it would seem, that audience responded favourably.

John Herrman, New York magazine:

Then, just as the 2010s podcasting bubble was about to peak, TikTok arrived. Here was a video-first platform that was basically only a recommendation engine, minus the pretense and/or burden of sociality — a machine for automating and allocating virality. Its rapid growth drove older, less vibrant social-media platforms wild with envy and/or panic. They all immediately copied it, refashioning themselves as algorithmic short-video apps almost overnight. Suddenly, on every social-media platform — including YouTube, which plugged vertical video “Shorts” into its interface and rewarded creators who published them with followers, attention, and money — there was a major new opportunity for rapid, viral growth. TikTok’s success (and imitation by existing megaplatforms) triggered a formal explosion in video content as millions of users figured out what sorts of short videos worked in this new context: Vine-like comedy sketches; dances; product recommendations; rapid-fire confessionals. The list expanded quickly and widely, but one surprising category broke through: podcast clips.

Of the top twenty podcasts according to Edison Research, fifteen have what I would deem meaningful and regular video components. I excluded those with either a still piece of artwork or illustrated talking heads, and those which only occasionally have video.

Dave Winer:

[…] We’re losing the word “podcast” very quickly. It’s coming to mean video interviews on YouTube mostly. Our only hope is upgrading the open platform in a way that stimulates the imagination of creators, and there’s no time to waste. If you make a podcast client, it’s time to start collaborating with competitors and people who create RSS-based podcasts to take advantage of the open platforms, otherwise having a podcast will mean getting approved by Google, Apple, Spotify, Amazon etc. […]

I hope this is not the case. Luckily, YouTube seems to be an additional place for podcasters so far. I found every show in the top twenty available for download through Overcast in an audio-only format. Also, YouTube channels have RSS feeds, though that is not very useful in an audio-only client like Overcast. Also, Google’s commitment to RSS is about as good as the company’s commitment to anything.

⌥ Permalink

Out of the U.S. today comes a slew of new proposed restrictions against data brokers and their creepy practices.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

[…] The proposed rule would limit the sale of personal identifiers like Social Security Numbers and phone numbers collected by certain companies and make sure that people’s financial data such as income is only shared for legitimate purposes, like facilitating a mortgage approval, and not sold to scammers targeting those in financial distress. The proposal would make clear that when data brokers sell certain sensitive consumer information they are “consumer reporting agencies” under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), requiring them to comply with accuracy requirements, provide consumers access to their information, and maintain safeguards against misuse.

The Federal Trade Commission:

The Federal Trade Commission will prohibit data broker Mobilewalla, Inc. from selling sensitive location data, including data that reveals the identity of an individual’s private home, to settle allegations the data broker sold such information without taking reasonable steps to verify consumers’ consent.

And also the Federal Trade Commission:

The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against Gravy Analytics Inc. and its subsidiary Venntel Inc. for unlawfully tracking and selling sensitive location data from users, including selling data about consumers’ visits to health-related locations and places of worship.

Both of the proposed FTC orders require these businesses to “maintain a sensitive location data program designed to develop a list of sensitive locations and prevent the use, sale, license, transfer, sharing, or disclosure of consumers’ visits to those locations”. These include, for example and in addition to those in the above quotes, shelters, labour union offices, correctional facilities, and military installations. This order was previewed last month in Wired.

As usual, I am conflicted about these policies. While they are yet another example of Lina Khan’s FTC and other government bureaucrats cracking down on individually threatening data brokers, it would be far better for everyone if this were not handled on a case-by-case basis. These brokers have already caused a wealth of damage around the world, and only they are being required to stop. Other players in the rest of the data broker industry will either self-govern or hope they do not fall into the FTC’s crosshairs, and if you believe the former is more likely, you have far greater faith in already-shady businesses than I do.

There is another wrench in these proposals: we are less than two months away from a second Trump presidency, and the forecast for the CFPB looks unfriendly. It was kneecapped during the first administration and it is on the chopping block for those overseeing a advisory committee masquerading as a government agency. The future of the FTC is more murky, with some indicators it will continue its current path — albeit from a Republican-skewed perspective — while others suggest a reversal.

The centring of the U.S. in the digital activity of a vast majority of us gives it unique power on privacy — power it has, so far, used in only very small doses. The future of regulatory agencies like these has relevance to all of us.

⌥ Permalink

Enron is not really back. Someone managed to grab the Enron.com URL and put up an inspirational faux corporate video and a Shopify merch store. It is all very funny.

What is more amusing to me is stumbling across a preserved-in-amber Enron website. There is an earnings press release from July 2001, mere months before the whole thing went to hell in public. There are descriptions of the company’s vast products.

But this, too, is unofficial. It was created by Facundo Pignanelli to preserve this noteworthy chapter in corporate fraud. There is even an Instagram account. This is all very strange.

⌥ Permalink

Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable:

Google launched a new feature in the Google App for iOS named Page Annotation. When you are browsing a web page in the Google App native browser, Google can “extract interesting entities from the webpage and highlight them in line.” When you click on them, Google takes you to more search results.

This was announced nearly two weeks ago in a subtle forum post. If there was a press release, I cannot find it. It was only picked up by the press thanks to Schwartz’s November 21 article, but those stories were not published until just before the U.S. Thanksgiving long weekend, so this news was basically buried.

Google is now injecting “Page Annotations”, which are kind of like Skimlinks but with search results. The results from a tapped Page Annotation are loaded in a floating temporary sheet, so it is not like users are fully whisked away — but that is almost worse. In the illustration from Google, a person is apparently viewing a list of Japanese castles, into which Google has inserted a link on “Osaka Castle”. Tapping on an injected link will show Google’s standard search results, which are front-loaded with details about how to contact the castle, buy tickets, and see a map. All of those things would be done better in a view that cannot be accidentally swiped away.

Maybe, you are thinking, it would be helpful to easily trigger a search from some selected text, and that is fair. But the Google app already displays a toolbar with a search button when you highlight any text in this app.

Owners of web properties are only able to opt out by completing a Google Form, but you must be signed into the same Google account you use for Search Console. Also, if a property is accessible at multiple URLs — for example, http and https, or www and non-prefixed — you must include each variation separately.

For Google to believe it has the right to inject itself into third-party websites is pure arrogance, yet it is nothing new for the company. It has long approached the web as its own platform over which it has control and ownership. It overlays dialogs without permission; it invented a proprietary fork of HTML and it pushed its adoption for years. It can only do these things because it has control over how people use the web.

⌥ Permalink

From the official Bluesky account:

With this release, you can now display replies by “hotness,” which weights liked replies that are more recent more heavily.

I believe this replaced the past reply sorting of oldest to newest. People seem worried this can be gamed, but there is good news: you can just change it. There are options for oldest replies, newest replies, most-liked, and one that is completely randomized. Also, you can still set it to prioritize people you follow.

Imagine that: options for viewing social media that give control back to users. Threads is experimenting, but Meta still fundamentally distrusts users to make decisions like these.

⌥ Permalink

Adam Satarino, New York Times:

But as Ms. [Margrethe] Vestager closes out her era in Brussels, regulating the tech industry has become more mainstream around the world. Thanks to her, Europe is now widely seen as the pioneer of the toughest laws against tech. U.S. regulators have in recent years followed Europe by bringing antitrust lawsuits against Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon. Regulators in South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Canada and elsewhere are also taking on the tech giants.

Vestager’s term has been defined by patience. Owing to both the rapid growth in size and complexity of technology firms, and tedious legal processes, these cases have taken considerable time. Some of the earliest cases Vestager brought have just been settled. It is still too early to tell whether the many changes resulting from these cases will have a radical effect on the technology landscape.

However, as Satarino writes, her approach has been influential worldwide. The technology in seemingly every country outside authoritarian states like China and Russia has been under the thumb of big companies most often based in the United States. Sometimes, those products and services clash with local expectations and values, or consume business viability. Not all of these corporations got where they are by illegitimate means, or are unanimously behaving in illegally anticompetitive ways. But it is sensible to investigate and become a correcting force.

For too long, regulators were too hesitant to question tech companies. These businesses were perpetually too new and too complicated. Vestager broke the dam.

⌥ Permalink

Competition Bureau Canada:

The Competition Bureau is taking legal action against Google for anti-competitive conduct in online advertising technology services in Canada. Following a thorough investigation, the Bureau has filed an application with the Competition Tribunal that seeks to remedy the conduct for the benefit of Canadians.

This has become a familiar announcement: a consumer protection agency, somewhere in the world, is questioning whether a giant technology conglomerate has abused its power. A dam has burst.

⌥ Permalink

Leah Nylen, Josh Sisco, and Dina Bass, Bloomberg:

The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an antitrust investigation of Microsoft Corp., drilling into everything from the company’s cloud computing and software licensing businesses to cybersecurity offerings and artificial intelligence products.

Seems like a lot of people who thought Microsoft would escape antitrust investigations in the U.S. might have been a little too eager.

This kind of scrutiny is a good thing, and long overdue. Yet one of the unavoidable problems of reducing the influence of these giant corporations now is the pain it is going to cause — almost by definition. If a corporation is abusing its power and scale to such a degree the FTC initiates an investigation, unwinding that will have — to put it mildly — an effect. We are seeing this in the Google case. This is true for any situation where a business or a group of people with too much influence needs correcting. That does not mean it should not happen.

It is true that Microsoft’s products and services are the backbone of businesses and governments the world over. These are delivered through tight integrations, all of which encourages further fealty to this singular solution. For example, it used its dominant position with Office 365 to distribute Teams for free, thereby making it even harder for other businesses to compete. It then leveraged Outlook and Teams to boost its web browser, after doing the same with Windows. If it charged for Teams out of the gate, this would be having a different discussion.

Obviously, the FTC’s concerns with Microsoft’s business practices stretch well beyond bundling Teams. According to this Bloomberg report, the Commission is interested in cloud and identity tying, too. On the one hand, it is enormously useful to businesses to have a suite of products with a single point of management and shared credentials. On the other hand, it is a monolithic system that is a non-starter for potential competitors.

The government is understandably worried about the security and stability risks of global dependence on Microsoft, too, but this is odd:

The CrowdStrike crash that affected millions of devices operating on Microsoft Windows systems earlier this year was itself a testament to the widespread use of the company’s products and how it directly affects the global economy.

This might just be Bloomberg’s contextualizing more than it is relevant to the government’s position. But, still, it seems wrong to me to isolate Windows as the problem instead of Crowdstrike itself, especially with better examples to be found in the SolarWinds breach and its track record with first-party security.

⌥ Permalink

Ronan Farrow, the New Yorker:

Decisions by the White House and by Republican lawmakers about spyware will have implications across a variety of policy areas that Trump and his associates are upending and that reach far beyond Washington. In recent years, an array of states, including Texas, Florida, and California have reportedly purchased spyware and other surveillance technologies; legislators and regulators will dictate whether that trend continues. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, at least two states have already used private personal data to prosecute people for getting abortions. That practice could expand with more widespread and affordable access to this technology.

This article appears to have been timed to coincide with the release of a new documentary on HBO, showing Farrow reporting out stories on NSO Group and other commercial spyware makers. It is not the most substantive piece and I think that plus the headline — “The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone” — is more distracting than it is illuminating. U.S. administrations have, since George W. Bush, used terrorism as a means of hand-waving away civil liberties protections, including domestic spying. Barack Obama’s administration famously killed U.S. citizens without trial, an action which remains shocking to me to this day regardless of who carried it out. In his first administration, Donald Trump compromised the legitimacy of all manner of domestic and foreign politics.

So, to the question of whether the U.S. would begin using fancy spyware on citizens’ phones under any administration, the answer seems more like a question of when and not if. It is just one more tool of a long series of violations. The next Trump administration seems unlikely to be more restrained than the first but, when this happens, I bet it becomes part of the churn-and-burn media cycle. It will barely register except to those who already find this sort of stuff disturbing.

By the way, the documentary itself is fine. It is only about an hour long and is mostly a behind-the-scenes look at the reporting. I am not sure that there is anything new-for-2024 within. Farrow’s New Yorker articles about the subject are far more illuminating.

⌥ Permalink

Michael Kan, PC Magazine:

Mozilla points to a key but less eye-catching proposal from the DOJ to regulate Google’s search business, which a judge ruled as a monopoly in August. In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices. 

“The proposed remedies are designed to end Google’s unlawful practices and open up the market for rivals and new entrants to emerge,” the DOJ told the court. The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals — nearly 86% in 2022 — making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.

This is probably another reason why U.S. prosecutors want to jettison Chrome from Google: they want to reduce any benefit it may accrue from trying to fix its illegal search monopoly. But it seems Google’s position in the industry is so entrenched that correcting it will hurt lots of other businesses, too. That does not mean it should not be broken up or that the DOJ’s proposed remedies are wrong, however.

⌥ Permalink

X on Wednesday announced a new set of terms, something which is normally a boring and staid affair. But these are a doozy:

Here’s a high-level recap of the primary changes that go into effect on November 15, 2024. You may see an in-app notice about these updates as well.

• Governing law and forum changes: For users residing outside of the European Union, EFTA States, and the United Kingdom, we’ve updated the governing law and forum for lawsuits to Texas as specified in our terms. […]

Specifically, X says “disputes […] will be brought exclusively in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas, United States”. X’s legal address is on a plot of land shared with SpaceX and the Boring Company near Bastrop, which is in the Western District. This particular venue is notable as the federal judge handling current X litigation in the Northern District owns Tesla stock and has not recused himself in X’s suit against Media Matters, despite stepping aside on a similar case because of a much smaller investment in Unilever. The judge, Reed O’Connor, is a real piece of work from the Federalist Society who issues reliably conservative decisions and does not want that power undermined.

An investment in Tesla does not necessarily mean a conflict of interest with X, an ostensibly unrelated company — except it kind of does, right? This is the kind of thing the European Commission is trying to figure out: are all of these different businesses actually related because they share the same uniquely outspoken and influential figurehead? Musk occupies such a particularly central role in all these businesses and it is hard to disentangle him from their place in our society. O’Connor is not the only judge in the district, but it is notable the company is directing legal action to that venue.

But X is only too happy to sue you in any court of its choosing.

Another of the X terms updates:

• AI and machine learning clarifications: We’ve added language to our Privacy Policy to clarify how we may use the information you share to train artificial intelligence models, generative or otherwise.

This is rude. It is a “clarifi[cation]” described in vague terms, and what it means is that users will no longer be able to opt out of their data being used to train Grok or any other artificial intelligence product. This appears to also include images and video, posts in private accounts and, if I am reading this right, direct messages.

Notably, Grok is developed by xAI, which is a completely separate company from X. See above for how Musk’s companies all seem to bleed together.

• Updates to reflect how our products and services work: We’ve incorporated updates to better reflect how our existing and upcoming products, features, and services work.

I do not know what this means. There are few product-specific changes between the old and new agreements. There are lots — lots — of new ways X wants to say it is not responsible for anything at all. There is a whole chunk which effectively replicates the protections of Section 230 of the CDA, you now need written permission from X to transfer your account to someone else, and X now spells out its estimated damages from automated traffic: $15,000 USD per million posts every 24 hours.

Oh, yeah, and X is making block work worse:

If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.).

The block button is one of the most effective ways to improve one’s social media experience. From removing from your orbit people who you never want to hear from for even mundane reasons, to reducing the ability for someone to stalk or harass, its expected action is vital. This sucks. I bet the main reason this change was made is because Musk is blocked by a lot of people.

All of these changes seem designed to get rid of any remaining user who is not a true believer. Which brings us to today.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Social networking startup Bluesky, which just reported a gain of half a million users over the past day, has now soared into the top five apps on the U.S. App Store and has become the No. 2 app in the Social Networking category, up from No. 181 a week ago, according to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. The growth is entirely organic, we understand, as Appfigures confirmed the company is not running any App Store Search Ads.

As of writing, Bluesky is the fifth most popular free app in the Canadian iOS App Store, and the second most popular free app in the Social Networking category. Threads is the second most popular free app, and the most popular in the Social Networking category.

X is number 74 on the top free apps list. It remains classified as “News” in the App Store because it, like Twitter, has always compared poorly against other social media apps.

⌥ Permalink

Gian Volpicelli and Samuel Stolton, Bloomberg:

Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules. Regulators are considering whether sales from SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI and the Boring Company, in addition to revenue generated from the social network, should be included to determine potential fines against X, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public.

These are all businesses privately owned by Elon Musk; Tesla, as a publicly traded company, is reportedly not being factored into the calculation. According to a Bloomberg source, the Commission is trying to decide if they should be penalizing the owner of the business and not the business itself.

Matt Levine, in Bloomberg’s Money Stuff newsletter:

See, you’re not really supposed to do that: X is its own company, with its own corporate structure and owners; 6% of X’s revenue is 6% of X’s revenue, not 6% of the revenue of Musk’s other companies. But if everyone thinks of the Musk Mars Conglomerate as a single company, then there’s a risk that it will be treated that way.

I can see how the penalty formula should not be stymied by carefully structured corporations. There should be a way to fine businesses breaking the law, even if their ownership is obfuscated.

But that is not what is happening here. As reported, this seems like an overreach to me. Even though Musk himself disregards barriers between his companies, as Levine also documents, a penalty for the allegedly illegal behaviour of X should probably be levied only against X.

⌥ Permalink

Dominic Wellington responded thoughtfully to speculation, including my own that a device management key for suppressing screen recording alerts in MacOS Sequoia was added in part because of employee monitoring software:

[…] I know perfectly well that these sorts of tools exist and are deployed by companies, but I suspect they are more prevalent in the sorts of lower-paid jobs that don’t rate fancy expensive Macs. This is why I don’t think employee surveillance (or test proctoring, which is Nick Heer’s other example) can be sufficient explanation for Apple walking back the frequency of this notification. Meanwhile, Zoom et al are near-universal on corporate Macs, and are going to be correspondingly closer to top of mind for administrators of Mac fleets.

This is a fair and considered response, and I think Wellington is right. Even though screen recording capabilities are widespread in employee surveillance products, I do not know that they are very popular. I oversold the likelihood of this being a reflection of that software.

⌥ Permalink

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple sells two external displays, including the Pro Display XDR and the Studio Display, but neither has received hardware upgrades in years. In fact, the Pro Display XDR is nearly five years old, having been released all the way back in December 2019.

Via Michael Tsai:

This is not surprising, since Apple has historically taken a long time to update its displays. I don’t think the panels necessarily need to be updated. But it’s disappointing because the Studio Display has well documented camera problems and power issues. I had high hopes that, coming from Apple, it would be reliable as a USB hub, but I end up directly connecting as many storage devices as possible to the meager ports on my MacBook Pro.

Displays are a product category conducive to infrequent updates. The plentiful problems I have been reading with the Studio Display, in particular, worry me. Most sound like software problems, but that is not consolation. Apple’s software quality has been insufficiently great for years and, so, it does not surprise me that a display running iOS is not as reliable as a display that does not use an entire mobile operating system.

⌥ Permalink

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic:

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

On one of the bonus episodes of “If Books Could Kill”, the hosts discuss Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” which, after they re-read it, disappointed them. They thought the idea was interesting but were frustrated by the lack of examples and, in trying to find examples of their own, found it difficult to find those which were only bullshit and not lies.

I feel as though they missed the most obvious family of examples: all conspiracy theories necessarily become bullshit, if they did not already begin that way. Consider how the theories cited by Warzel begin with a nugget of truth, from which a theory is extrapolated to serve a narrative role — against (typically) Democratic Party politicians, against Jewish people, against scientific understanding, in favour of a grand unifying order that purportedly explains everything. The absence of evidence for a conspiracy theory is, itself, evidence to believers. All of this is steeped in bullshit. Believers in these things do not care to find understanding in known facts; rather, they perceive the world through this lens and bullshit until it all fits.

This story by Warzel documents that trajectory with perfect pitch. It is now politically incorrect in many circles to have beliefs that align with those of experts in their fields. Regardless of what is being discussed, the only safe speech is aggrieved bullshit. In a disaster, however, such speech can be dangerous if people believe it.

⌥ Permalink

Apple in the release notes for MacOS 15.1 beta:

Applications using our deprecated content capture technologies now have enhanced user awareness policies. Users will see fewer dialogs if they regularly use apps in which they have already acknowledged and accepted the risks.

John Gruber:

Why in the world didn’t Apple take regular use of a screen-recording app into account all along?

Benjamin Brooks:

I think this is the question you ask when you have not used a Corporate Mac in the last 4-5 years. For those who are, you know that companies install applications which take screenshots and screen recordings of certain or all activities being done on the Mac. You know, for security.

When users began noticing the screen recording permissions prompt over the summer, I remember lots of people speculating Apple added it because of possible spyware or domestic violence behaviour. That is a plausible explanation.

But Brooks’ keen observation is something I, in hindsight, should have also considered, and I am kicking myself for forgetting about the possibility. I now remember linking to things like employee surveillance software and online test proctoring — applications which monitor users’ screens effectively by force, something one will agree to unless they want to change jobs or not complete an exam. I believe this is supported by — and casts a new light upon — a device management key available to system administrators for suppressing those permissions prompts.

⌥ Permalink

I am not much of a true crime podcast listener, but the first three episodes of “Kill List” — Overcast link — have transfixed me.

Jamie Bartlett:

Besa Mafia was a dark net site offering hitmen for hire. It worked something like this: a user could connect to the site using the Tor browser and request a hit. They’d send over some bitcoin (prices started from $5,000 USD for ‘death by shotgun’). Then they’d upload the name, address, photographs, of who they wanted killed. Plus any extra requests: make it look like a bungled robbery; need it done next week, etc. The website owner, a mysterious Romanian called ‘Yura’ would then connect them with a specialist hitman to carry out the commission.

[…]

In the end, Carl investigated one hundred and seventy five kill requests. Each one a wannabe murderer. Each one a potential victim — who Carl often phones and break the crazy news. “The hardest calls I’ve ever made” Carl tells me. “How do you explain that someone wants you dead?!” (Carl would be indirect, gentle. He tried to make sure the victim felt in control. But often they hung up. “They didn’t believe me. They thought I was a scammer”).

I am not sure I agree with Bartlett’s conclusion — “more and more complex crimes will be solved by podcast journalists” is only true to the extent any crime is “solved” by any journalist — but it does appear this particular podcast has had quite the impact already. What a fascinating and dark story this is.

⌥ Permalink

A bit of background, for those not steeped in the world of WordPress development: there exists a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) which allows developers to create near-endless customization options for end clients in the standard page and post editor. It is hard to explain in a single paragraph — the WordPress.com guide is a good overview — but its utility is so singular as to be an essential component for many WordPress developers.

ACF was created by Elliot Condon who, in 2021, sold it to Delicious Brains. At this point, it was used on millions of websites, a few of which I built. I consider it near-irreplaceable for some specific and tricky development tasks. A year later, the entire Delicious Brains plugin catalogue was sold to WPEngine.

Matt Mullenweg:

On behalf of the WordPress security team, I am announcing that we are invoking point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines and are forking Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new plugin, Secure Custom Fields. SCF has been updated to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem.

[…]

Similar situations have happened before, but not at this scale. This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.

This is an awfully casual way of announcing WordPress is hijacking one of the most popular third-party plugins in the directory. Mullenweg cites policy for doing so — WordPress can “make changes to a plugin, without developer consent, in the interest of public safety” — but the latter paragraph I quoted above makes clear the actual motive here. The “security problem” triggering this extraordinary action is a real but modest change to expand a patch from a previous update. But WordPress has removed the ability for WPEngine to make money off its own plugin — and if users have automatic plugin updates turned on, their ACF installation will be overwritten with WordPress’ unauthorized copy.

Iain Poulson, of ACF:

The change to our published distribution, and under our ‘slug’ which uniquely identifies the ACF plugin and code that our users trust in the WordPress.org plugin repository, is inconsistent with open source values and principles. The change made by Mullenweg is maliciously being used to update millions of existing installations of ACF with code that is unapproved and untrusted by the Advanced Custom Fields team.

It is nearly impossible to get me to feel sympathetic for anything touched by private equity, but Mullenweg has done just that. He really is burning all goodwill for reasons I cannot quite understand. I do understand the message he is sending, though: Mullenweg is prepared to use the web’s most popular CMS and any third-party contributions as his personal weapon. Your carefully developed plugin is not safe in the WordPress ecosystem if you dare cross him or Automattic.

⌥ Permalink

CBC News:

All Calgary Public Library locations closed early on Friday after a cybersecurity breach compromised some systems, according to a spokesperson.

All locations were shut down as of 5 p.m.

Between this and the Internet Archive, criminals are picking terrible targets this week. I am not saying there are acceptable attacks, but these ones are particularly cruel.

⌥ Permalink

I have been trying to stay informed of the hostile relationship between WordPress, Automattic, and Matt Mullenweg, and third-party hosting company WPEngine. Aram Zucker-Scharff put together a helpful and massive set of links to news coverage. Michael Tsai has a good collection of links, too, and Emma Roth and Samantha Cole have published notable articles.

From a distance, it looks like an expensive pissing match between a bunch of increasingly unlikable parties, and I would very much appreciate if it never affects my self-hosted version of WordPress. Maybe it is a little confusing that WPEngine is not affiliated with WordPress, but I only learned this week that WordPress.org is personally owned by Mullenweg and is not actually affiliated with Automattic or WordPress.com. From Mullenweg’s perspective, this confusion is beneficial, but the confusion with WPEngine is not. From my perspective, I would not like to be confused.

Also, if Mullenweg is mad about WPEngine — and Silver Lake, its private equity owner — benefitting from the open source nature of WordPress without what he feels is adequate compensation, I am not sure he has a leg to stand on. It does not sound like WPEngine is doing anything illegal. It is perhaps rude or immoral to build a private business named after and on the back of an open source project without significantly contributing, but surely that is the risk of developing software with that license. I am probably missing something here.

⌥ Permalink

Well, add XOXO to the list of conferences I was never able to attend. The final edition occurred this year and it looked pretty special.

Happily, if you — as I — were unable to attend in person, Andy Baio has begun uploading videos of this year’s talks. I have watched those from Cabel Sasser, Dan Olson, Molly White, and Sarah Jeong. These are all worth your time — and so are, I am sure, the ones I have not yet seen.

Update: Be sure to watch Sasser’s talk before exploring an amazing archive he is assembling. Seriously — watch first, then click.

⌥ Permalink

Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica:

Last night, after a wait of roughly an hour after the official start time, Elon Musk spoke to a crowd of Tesla fans and some journalists on a film studio backlot in California to give us an update on the company’s much-talked-about pivot to robotics. […]

[…]

After promising that “unsupervised FSD” is coming to all of Tesla’s five models — “now’s not the time for nuance,” Musk told a fan — he showed off a driverless minibus and then a horde of humanoid robots, which apparently leverage the same technology that Tesla says will be ready for autonomous driving with no supervision. These robots — “your own personal R2-D2,” he said — will apparently cost less than “$30,000” “long-term,” Musk claimed, adding that these would be the biggest product of all time, as all 8 billion people on earth would want one, then two, he predicted.

These announcements are almost certainly bullshit, and correctly contextualized by Gitlin. Mix the axiom “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” with the boy who cried “wolf!”, and the result is this media event — and that is without factoring in the usual Tesla sloppiness. These are three brand new products, all of which are purportedly future-defining, rambled about in the span of about thirty minutes on a random Thursday in October. Nothing is finished. Musk called two of the products “Cybercab” and “Optimus Robots”, but the company’s website refers to them as “Robotaxi” and “Tesla Bot”. Everything is hypothetical until proven otherwise.

The robot is particularly galling. The automotive industry has a long history of building humanoid robots: Honda’s ASIMO, Toyota’s Partner series, and General Motors’ work on NASA’s Robonaut 2. Some of these perform more specialized tasks. All of them have been around for a while. None of them are in widespread use. Tesla’s should be treated as an elaborate fiction until anyone outside the company can confirm even the most fundamental qualities it is claimed to possess.

Oh, and speaking of claims on the website, I want to address this:

To create a sustainable future, we must democratize transportation. We do this by making driving more efficient, affordable and safe. Autonomy makes this future possible, today.

Musk — for the featherweight of his words — said the Robotaxi would cost “less than $30,000” and be available “before 2027” — that is, to be clear, not “today”. If this thing ever ships, it will still require car-like infrastructure and ample space, even though it carries only two people.

Public transit, which is available today, is the very definition of democratized transportation, especially if it has been carefully considered for the needs of people with disabilities. It is inexpensive for end users, requires less space per person than any car, and has a beneficial feedback loop of safety and usage. I am not arguing the two cannot coexist; perhaps some of this stuff makes sense in low-density sprawl. But I have little confidence the future will look like Musk’s vision, or that Tesla will be delivering it. Why would anyone still believe this too-rich carnival barker who lies all the time?

⌥ Permalink

Speaking of the Internet Archive, Matt Sephton, in August, posted about the surprise loss of his account there:

Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman since 2015.

I had meant to post this nearer to when it happened but, like others, my requests for comment went unanswered, even when sent directly to an organization representative instead of a generic media inbox. Parts of Sephton’s account were thankfully restored, but only after this post was sent to Hacker News.

I find the Internet Archive’s utility unparalleled. I find some of its recent behaviour frustrating.

⌥ Permalink

Brendan Jones:

The rise of Mastodon has made me so much more aware of government services requiring us to use private companies’ systems to communicate with them and access services.

Sitting on a Dutch train just now I was shown on a screen “feeling unsafe in the train? Contact us via WhatsApp”.

Jones says the railway operator’s website also contains SMS reporting instructions, but that was not shown on the train itself.

One of the side effects of the decline of née Twitter is in the splintering of its de facto customer support and alert capabilities. Plenty of organizations still use it that way. But it should only be one option. Apps like WhatsApp should not be the preferred contact method, either. Private companies’ contact methods should be available, sure — meet people where they are — but a standard method should always be as easily available.

⌥ Permalink