Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg is expected to meaningfully cut resources for building the so-called metaverse, an effort that he once framed as the future of the company and the reason for changing its name from Facebook Inc.

Executives are considering potential budget cuts as high as 30% for the metaverse group next year, which includes the virtual worlds product Meta Horizon Worlds and its Quest virtual reality unit, according to people familiar with the talks, who asked not to be named while discussing private company plans. Cuts that high would most likely include layoffs as early as January, according to the people, though a final decision has not yet been made.

Wagner’s reporting was independently confirmed by Mike Isaac, of the New York Times, and Meghan Bobrowsky and Georgia Wells, of the Wall Street Journal, albeit in slightly different ways. While Wagner wrote it “would most likely include layoffs as early as January”, Isaac apparently confirmed the budget cuts are likely large-scale personnel cuts, which makes sense:

The cuts could come as soon as next month and amount to 10 to 30 percent of employees in the Metaverse unit, which works on virtual reality headsets and a V.R.-based social network, the people said. The numbers of potential layoffs are still in flux, they said. Other parts of the Reality Labs division develop smart glasses, wristbands and other wearable devices. The total number of employees in Reality Labs could not be learned.

Alan Dye is just about to join Reality Labs. I wonder if this news comes as a fun surprise for him.

At Meta Connect a few months ago, the company spent basically the entire time on augmented reality glasses, but it swore up and down it was all related to its metaverse initiatives:

We’re hard at work advancing the state of the art in augmented and virtual reality, too, and where those technologies meet AI — that’s where you’ll find the metaverse.

The metaverse is whatever Meta needs it to be in order to justify its 2021 rebrand.

Our vision for the future is a world where anyone anywhere can imagine a character, a scene, or an entire world and create it from scratch. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re making progress. In fact, we’re not far off from being able to create compelling 3D content as easily as you can ask Meta AI a question today. And that stands to transform not just the imagery and videos we see on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, but also the possibilities of VR and AR, too.

You know, whenever I am unwinding and chatting with friends after a long day at work, I always get this sudden urge to create compelling 3D content.

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Apple:

Apple today announced that Jennifer Newstead will become Apple’s general counsel on March 1, 2026, following a transition of duties from Kate Adams, who has served as Apple’s general counsel since 2017. She will join Apple as senior vice president in January, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and serving on Apple’s executive team.

In addition, Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, will retire in late January 2026. The Government Affairs organization will transition to Adams, who will oversee the team until her retirement late next year, after which it will be led by Newstead. Newstead’s title will become senior vice president, General Counsel and Government Affairs, reflecting the combining of the two organizations. The Environment and Social Initiatives teams will report to Apple chief operating officer Sabih Khan.

What will tomorrow bring, I wonder?

Newstead has spent the past year working closely with Joel Kaplan, and fighting the FTC’s case against Meta — successfully, I should add. Before that, she was a Trump appointee at the U.S. State Department. Well positioned, then, to fight Apple’s U.S. antitrust lawsuit against a second-term Trump government that has successfully solicited Apple’s money.

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Although Apple doesn’t say so in its press release, it’s pretty clear that a few things are playing out among its executive ranks. First, a large number of them are approaching retirement age, and Apple is transitioning and changing roles internally to account for those who are retiring. Second, the company is dealing with departures like Alan Dye’s and what appears to be the less-than-voluntary retirement of John Giannandrea. Finally, the company is reducing the number of Tim Cook’s direct reports, which is undoubtedly to simplify the transition to a new CEO in the relatively near future.

A careful reader will notice Apple’s newsroom page currently has press releases for these departures and, from earlier this week, John Giannandrea’s, but there is nothing about Alan Dye’s. In fact, even in the statement quoted by Bloomberg, Dye is not mentioned. In fairness, Adams, Giannandrea, and Jackson all have bios on Apple’s leadership page. Dye’s was removed between 2017 and 2018.

Starting to think Mark Gurman might be wrong about that FT report.

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Jonathan Slotkin, a surgeon and venture capital investor, wrote for the New York Times about data released by Waymo indicating impressive safety improvements over human drivers through June 2025:

If Waymo’s results are indicative of the broader future of autonomous vehicles, we may be on the path to eliminating traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the United States. While many see this as a tech story, I view it as a public health breakthrough.

[…]

There’s a public health imperative to quickly expand the adoption of autonomous vehicles. […]

We should be skeptical of all self-reported stats, but these figures look downright impressive.

Slotkin responsibly notes several caveats, though neglects to mention the specific cities in which Waymo operates: Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. These are warm cities with relatively low annual precipitation, almost none of which is ever snow. Slotkin’s enthusiasm for widespread adoption should be tempered somewhat by this narrow range of climate data. Still, its data is compelling. These cars seem to crash less often than those driven by people in the same cities and, in particular, avoid causing serious injuries at an impressive rate.

It is therefore baffling to me that Waymo appears to be treating this as a cushion for experimentation.

Katherine Bindley, in a Wall Street Journal article published the very same day as Slotkin’s Times piece:

The training wheels are off. Like the rule-following nice guy who’s tired of being taken advantage of, Waymos are putting their own needs first. They’re bending traffic laws, getting impatient with pedestrians and embracing the idea that when it comes to city driving, politeness doesn’t pay: It’s every car for itself.

[…]

Waymo has been trying to make its cars “confidently assertive,” says Chris Ludwick, a senior director of product management with Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet. “That was really necessary for us to actually scale this up in San Francisco, especially because of how busy it gets.”

A couple years ago, Tesla’s erroneously named “Full Self-Driving” feature began cruising through crosswalks if it judged it could pass a crossing pedestrian in time, and I wrote:

Advocates of autonomous vehicles often say increased safety is one of its biggest advantages over human drivers. Compliance with the law may not be the most accurate proxy for what constitutes safe driving, but not to a disqualifying extent. Right now, it is the best framework we have, and autonomous vehicles should follow the law. That should not be a controversial statement.

I stand by that. A likely reason for Waymo’s impressive data is that its cars behave with caution and deference. Substituting that with “confidently assertive” driving is a move in entirely the wrong direction. It should not roll through stop signs, even if its systems understand nobody is around. It should not mess up the order of an all-way stop intersection. I have problems with the way traffic laws are written, but it is not up to one company in California to develop a proprietary interpretation. Just follow the law.

Slotkin:

This is not a call to replace every vehicle tomorrow. For one thing, self-driving technology is still expensive. Each car’s equipment costs $100,000 beyond the base price, and Waymo doesn’t yet sell cars for personal use. Even once that changes, many Americans love driving; some will resist any change that seems to alter that freedom.

[…]

There is likely to be some initial public trepidation. We do not need everyone to use self-driving cars to realize profound safety gains, however. If 30 percent of cars were fully automated, it might prevent 40 percent of crashes, as autonomous vehicles both avoid causing crashes and respond better when human drivers err. Insurance markets will accelerate this transition, as premiums start to favor autonomous vehicles.

Slotkin is entirely correct in writing that “Americans love driving” — the U.S. National Household Travel Survey, last conducted in 2022, found 90.5% of commuters said they primarily used a car of some kind (table 7-2, page 50). 4.1% said they used public transit, 2.9% said they walked, and just 2.5% said they chose another mode of transportation in which taxicabs are grouped along with bikes and motorcycles. Those figures are about the same in 2017, though with an unfortunate decline in the number of transit commuters. Commuting is not the only reason for travelling, of course, but this suggests to me that even if every taxicab ride was in an autonomous Waymo, there would still be a massive gap to achieve that 30% adoption rate Slotkin wants. And, if insurance companies begin incentivizing autonomous vehicles, it really means rich people will reap the reward of being able to buy a new car.

Any argument about road safety has to be more comprehensive than what Slotkin is presenting in this article. Regardless of how impressive Waymo’s stats are, it is a vision of the future that is an individualized solution to a systemic problem. I have no specialized knowledge in this area, but I am fascinated by it. I read about this stuff obsessively. The things I want to see are things everyone can benefit from: improvements to street design that encourage drivers to travel at lower speeds, wider sidewalks making walking more comfortable, and generous wheeling infrastructure for bicycles, wheelchairs, and scooters. We can encourage the adoption of technological solutions, too; if this data holds up, it would seem welcome. But we can do so much better for everyone, and on a more predictable timeline.

This is, as Slotkin writes, a public health matter. Where I live, record numbers of people are dying, in part because more people than ever are driving bigger and heavier vehicles with taller fronts while they are distracted. Many of those vehicles will still be on the road in twenty years’ time, even if we accelerate the adoption pace of more autonomous vehicles. We do not need to wait for a headline-friendly technological upgrade. There are boring things cities can start doing tomorrow that would save lives.

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I have obtained exclusive footage of Alan Dye leaving Apple Park after overseeing visual interface design updates across Apple’s operating systems.

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Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc. has poached Apple Inc.’s most prominent design executive in a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices.

The company is hiring Alan Dye, who has served as the head of Apple’s user interface design team since 2015, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple is replacing Dye with longtime designer Stephen Lemay, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel changes haven’t been announced.

Big week for changes in Apple leadership.

I am sure more will trickle out about this, but one thing notable to me is that Lemay has been a software designer for over 25 years at Apple. Dye, on the other hand, came from marketing and print design. I do not want to put too much weight on that — someone can be a sufficiently talented multidisciplinary designer — but I am curious to see what Lemay might do in a more senior role.

Admittedly I also have some (perhaps morbid) curiosity about what Dye will do at Meta.

One more note from Gurman’s report:

Dye had taken on a more significant role at Apple after Ive left, helping define how the company’s latest operating systems, apps and devices look and feel. The executive informed Apple this week that he’d decided to leave, though top management had already been bracing for his departure, the people said. Dye will join Meta as chief design officer on Dec. 31.

Let me get this straight: Dye personally launches an overhaul of Apple’s entire visual interface language, then leaves. Is that a good sign for its reception, either internally or externally?

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Benj Edwards, Ars Technica:

Microsoft has lowered sales growth targets for its AI agent products after many salespeople missed their quotas in the fiscal year ending in June, according to a report Wednesday from The Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft, and it comes after the company missed a number of ambitious sales goals for its AI offerings.

Based on Edwards’ summary — I still have no interest in paying for the Information — it sounds like this mostly affects sales of A.I. “agents”, a riskier technology proposition for businesses. This sounds to me like more concrete evidence of a plateau in corporate interest than the surveys reported on by the Economist.

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Todd Vaziri:

As far as I can tell, Paul Haine was the first to notice something weird going on with HBO Max’ presentation. In one of season one’s most memorable moments, Roger Sterling barfs in front of clients after climbing many flights of stairs. As a surprise to Paul, you can clearly see the pretend puke hose (that is ultimately strapped to the back side of John Slattery’s face) in the background, along with two techs who are modulating the flow. Yeah, you’re not supposed to see that.

It appears as though this represents the original photography, unaltered before digital visual effects got involved. Somehow, this episode (along with many others) do not include all the digital visual effects that were in the original broadcasts and home video releases. It’s a bizarro mistake for Lionsgate and HBO Max to make and not discover until after the show was streaming to customers.

Eric Vilas-Boas, Vulture:

How did this happen? Apparently, this wasn’t actually HBO Max’s fault — the streamer received incorrect files from Lionsgate Television, a source familiar with the exchange tells Vulture. Lionsgate is now in the process of getting HBO Max the correct files, and the episodes will be updated as soon as possible.

It just feels clumsy and silly for Lionsgate to supply the wrong files in the first place, and for nobody at HBO to verify they are the correct work. An amateur mistake, frankly, for an ostensibly premium service costing U.S. $11–$23 per month. If I were king for a day, it would be illegal to sell or stream a remastered version of something — a show, an album, whatever — without the original being available alongside it.

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Apple:

Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026. Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.

When Apple hired Giannandrea from Google in 2018, the New York Times called it a “major coup”, given that Siri was “less effective than its counterparts at Google and Amazon”. The world changed a lot in the past six-and-a-half years, though: Siri is now also worse than a bunch of A.I. products. Of course, Giannandrea’s role at Apple was not limited to Siri. He spent time on the Project Titan autonomous car, which was cancelled early last year, before moving to generative A.I. projects. The first results of that effort were shown at WWDC last year; the most impressive features have yet to ship.

I feel embarrassed and dumb for hoping Giannandrea would help shake the company out of its bizarre Siri stupor. Alas, he is now on the Graceful Executive Exit Express, where he gets to spend a few more months at Apple in a kind of transitional capacity — you know the drill. Maybe Subramanya will help move the needle. Maybe this ex-Googler will make it so. Maybe I, Charlie Brown, will get to kick that football.

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Tyler Hall:

Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”.

A good, cheeky name. The results are not what I would call beautiful, but that is not the point, is it? It works well. I wish it did not feel understandable for there to be an app that draws a big border around the currently active window. That should be something made sufficiently obvious by the system.

Unfortunately, this is a problem plaguing the latest versions of MacOS and Windows alike, which is baffling to me. The bar for what constitutes acceptable user interface design seems to have fallen low enough that it is tripping everyone at the two major desktop operating system vendors.

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Hank Green was not getting a lot of traction on a promotional post on Threads about a sale on his store. He got just over thirty likes, which does not sound awful, until you learn that was over the span of seven hours and across Green’s following of 806,000 accounts on Threads.

So he tried replying to rage bait with basically the same post, and that was far more successful. But, also, it has some pretty crappy implications:

That’s the signal that Threads is taking from this: Threads is like oh, there’s a discussion going on.

It’s 2025! Meta knows that “lots of discussion” is not a surrogate for “good things happening”!

I assume the home feed ranking systems are similar for Threads and Instagram — though they might not be — and I cannot tell you how many times my feed is packed with posts from many days to a week prior. So many businesses I frequent use it as a promotional tool for time-bound things I learn about only afterward. The same thing is true of Stories, since they are sorted based on how frequently you interact with an account.

Everyone is allowed one conspiracy theory, right? Mine is that a primary reason Meta is hostile to reverse-chronological feeds is because it requires businesses to buy advertising. I have no proof to support this, but it seems entirely plausible.

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Winston Cho, the Hollywood Reporter:

To rewind, authors and publishers have gained access to Slack messages between OpenAI’s employees discussing the erasure of the datasets, named “books 1 and books 2.” But the court held off on whether plaintiffs should get other communications that the company argued were protected by attorney-client privilege.

In a controversial decision that was appealed by OpenAI on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Ona Wang found that OpenAI must hand over documents revealing the company’s motivations for deleting the datasets. OpenAI’s in-house legal team will be deposed.

Wang’s decision (PDF), to the extent I can read it as a layperson, examines OpenAI’s shifting story about why it erased the books 1 and books2 data sets — apparently, the only time possible training materials were deleted.

I am not sure it has yet been proven OpenAI trained its models on pirated books. Anthropic settled a similar suit in September, and Meta and Apple are facing similar accusations. For practical purposes, however, it is trivial to suggest it did use pirated data in general: if you have access to its Sora app, enter any prompt followed by the word “camrip”.

What is a camrip?, a strictly law-abiding person might ask. It is a label added to a movie pirated in the old-fashioned way: by pointing a video camera at the screen in a theatre. As a result, these videos have a distinctive look and sound which is reproduced perfectly by Sora. It is very difficult for me to see a way in which OpenAI could have trained this model to understand what a camrip is without feeding it a bunch of them, and I do not know of a legitimate source for such videos.

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The Internet Archive released a WordPress plugin not too long ago:

Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer is a WordPress plugin designed to combat link rot—the gradual decay of web links as pages are moved, changed, or taken down. It automatically scans your post content — on save and across existing posts — to detect outbound links. For each one, it checks the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for an archived version and creates a snapshot if one isn’t available.

Via Michael Tsai:

The part where it replaces broken links with archive links is implemented in JavaScript. I like that it doesn’t modify the post content in your database. It seems safe to install the plug-in without worrying about it messing anything up. However, I had kind of hoped that it would fix the links as part of the PHP rendering process. Doing it in JavaScript means that the fixed links are not available in the actual HTML tags on the page. And the data that the JavaScript uses is stored in an invisible <div> under the attribute data-iawmlf-post-links, which makes the page fail validation.

I love the idea of this plugin, but I do not love this implementation. I think I understand why it works this way: for the nondestructive property mentioned by Tsai, and also to account for its dependence on a third-party service of varying reliability. I would love to see a demo of this plugin in action.

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Nicholas Hune-Brown, the Local:

Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud—where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more “content” have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.

This is likely not the first story you have read about a freelancer managing to land bylines in prestigious publications thanks to dependency on A.I. tools, but it is one told very well.

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Good tip from Jeff Johnson:

My business website has a number of “Download on the App Store” links for my App Store apps. Here’s an example of what that looks like:

[…]

The problem is that Live Text, “Select text in images to copy or take action,” is enabled by default on iOS devices (Settings → General → Language & Region), which can interfere with the contextual menu in Safari. Pressing down on the above link may select the text inside the image instead of selecting the link URL.

I love the Live Text feature, but it often conflicts with graphics like these. There is a good, simple, two-line CSS trick for web developers that should cover most situations. Also, if you rock a user stylesheet — and I think you should — it seems to work fine as a universal solution. Any issues I have found have been minor and not worth noting. I say give it a shot.

Update: Adding Johnson’s CSS to a user stylesheet mucks up the layout of Techmeme a little bit. You can exclude it by adding div:not(.ii) > before a:has(> img) { display: inline-block; }.

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Quinn Nelson:

[…] at a moment when the Mac has roared back to the centre of Apple’s universe, the iPad feels closer than ever to fulfilling its original promise. Except it doesn’t, not really, because while the iPad has gained windowing and external display support, pro apps, all the trappings of a “real computer”, underneath it all, iPadOS is still a fundamentally mobile operating system with mobile constraints baked into its very DNA.

Meanwhile, the Mac is rumoured to be getting everything the iPad does best: touchscreens, OLED displays, thinner designs.

There are things I quibble with in Nelson’s video, including the above-quoted comparison to mere rumours about the Mac. The rest of the video is more compelling as it presents comparisons with the same or similar software on each platform in real-world head-to-head matches.

Via Federico Viticci, MacStories:

I’m so happy that Apple seems to be taking iPadOS more seriously than ever this year. But now I can’t help but wonder if the iPad’s problems run deeper than windowing when it comes to getting serious work done on it.

Apple’s post-iPhone platforms are only as good as Apple will allow them to be. I am not saying it needs to be possible to swap out Bluetooth drivers or monkey around with low-level code, but without more flexibility, platforms like the iPad and Vision Pro are destined to progress only at the rate Apple says is acceptable, and with the third-party apps it says are permissible. These are apparently the operating systems for the future of computers. They are not required to have similar limitations to the iPhone, but they do anyway. Those restrictions are holding back the potential of these platforms.

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Marina Dunbar, the Guardian:

Many of the most influential personalities in the “Make America great again” (Maga) movement on X are based outside of the US, including Russia, Nigeria and India, a new transparency feature on the social media site has revealed.

The new tool, called “about this account”, became available on Friday to users of the Elon Musk-owned platform. It allows anyone to see where an account is located, when it joined the platform, how often its username has been changed, and how the X app was downloaded.

This is a similar approach to adding labels or notes to tweets containing misinformation in that it is adding more speech and context. It is more automatic, but the function and intent is comparable, which means Musk’s hobbyist P.R. team must be all worked up. But I checked, and none seem particularly bothered. Maybe they actually care about trust and safety now, or maybe they are lying hacks.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

For years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have insisted that anyone working on these [trust and safety] problems was part of a “censorship industrial complex” designed to silence political speech. Politicians like Ted Cruz and Jim Jordan repeated these lies. They treated trust & safety work as a threat to democracy itself.

Then Musk rolled out one basic feature, and within hours proved exactly why trust & safety work existed in the first place.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media, has been covering the monetization of social media:

This has created an ecosystem of side hustlers trying to gain access to these programs and YouTube and Instagram creators teaching people how to gain access to them. It is possible to find these guide videos easily if you search for things like “monetized X account” on YouTube. Translating that phrase and searching in other languages (such as Hindi, Portuguese, Vietnamese, etc) will bring up guides in those languages. Within seconds, I was able to find a handful of YouTubers explaining in Hindi how to create monetized X accounts; other videos on the creators’ pages explain how to fill these accounts with AI-generated content. These guides also exist in English, and it is increasingly popular to sell guides to make “AI influencers,” and AI newsletters, Reels accounts, and TikTok accounts regardless of the country that you’re from.

[…]

Americans are being targeted because advertisers pay higher ad rates to reach American internet users, who are among the wealthiest in the world. In turn, social media companies pay more money if the people engaging with the content are American. This has created a system where it makes financial sense for people from the entire world to specifically target Americans with highly engaging, divisive content. It pays more.

The U.S. market is a larger audience, too. But those of us in rich countries outside the U.S. should not get too comfortable; I found plenty of guides similar to the ones shown by Koebler for targeting Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and more. Worrisome — especially if you, say, are somewhere with an electorate trying to drive the place you live off a cliff.

Update: Several X accounts purporting to be Albertans supporting separatism appear to be from outside Canada, including a “Concerned 🍁 Mum”, “Samantha”, “Canada the Illusion”, and this “Albertan” all from the United States, and a smaller account from Laos. I tried to check more, but X’s fragile servers are aggressively rate-limited.

I do not think people from outside a country are forbidden from offering an opinion on what is happening within it. I would be a pretty staggering hypocrite if I thought that. Nor do I think we should automatically assume people who are stoking hostile politics on social media are necessarily external or bots. It is more like a reflection of who we are now, and how easily that can be exploited.

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Jonathan Weil, Wall Street Journal:

It seems like a marvel of financial engineering: Meta Platforms is building a $27 billion data center in Louisiana, financed with debt, and neither the data center nor the debt will be on its own balance sheet.

That outcome looks too good to be true, and it probably is.

The phrase “marvel of financial engineering” does not seem like a compliment. In addition to the evidence from Weil’s article, Meta is taking advantage of a tax exemption created by Louisiana’s state legislature. But, in its argument, it is merely a user of this data centre.

Also, colour me skeptical this data centre will truly be “the size of Manhattan” before the bubble bursts, despite the disruption to life in the area.

Update: Paris Martineau points to Weil’s bio noting he was “the first reporter to challenge Enron’s accounting practices”.

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Fred Vogelstein, Crazy Stupid Tech — which, again, is a compliment:

We’re not only in a bubble but one that is arguably the biggest technology mania any of us have ever witnessed. We’re even back reinventing time. Back in 1999 we talked about internet time, where every year in the new economy was like a dog year – equivalent to seven years in the old.

Now VCs, investors and executives are talking about AI dog years – let’s just call them mouse years – which is internet time divided by five? Or is it by 11? Or 12? Sure, things move way faster than they did a generation ago. But by that math one year today now equals 35 years in 1995. Really?

A sobering piece that, unfortunately, is somewhat undercut since it lacks a single mention of layoffs, jobs, employment, or any other indication that this bubble will wreck the lives of people far outside its immediate orbit. In fairness, few of the related articles linked at the bottom mention that, either. Articles in Stratechery, the Brookings Institute, and the New York Times want you to think a bubble is just a sign of building something new and wonderful. A Bloomberg newsletter mentions layoffs only in the context of changing odds in predictions markets — I chuckled — while M.G. Siegler notes all the people who are being laid off while new A.I. hires get multimillion-dollar employment packages. Maybe all the pain and suffering that is likely to result from the implosion of this massive sector is too obvious to mention for the MBA and finance types. I think it is worth stating, though, not least because it acknowledges other people are worth caring about at least as much as innovation and growth and all that stuff.

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I am not sure it is worth writing at length about Grokipedia, the Elon Musk-funded effort to quite literally rewrite history from the perspective of a robot taught to avoid facts upsetting to the U.S. far right. Perhaps it will be an unfortunate success — the Fox News of encyclopedias, giving ideologues comfortable information as they further isolate themselves.

It is less a Wikipedia competitor than it is a machine-generated alternative to Conservapedia. Founded by Andy Schlafly, an attorney and son of Phyllis Schlafly, the Wikipedia alternative was an attempt to make an online encyclopedia from a decidedly U.S. conservative and American exceptionalism perspective. Seventeen years ago, Schlafly’s effort was briefly profiled by Canadian television and, somehow, the site is still running. Perhaps that is the fate of Grokipedia: a brief curiosity, followed by traffic coming only from a self-selecting mix of weirdos and YouTubers needing material.

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Marc Hogan, New York Times (gift link):

Enter Setlist.fm. The wikilike site, where users document what songs artists play each night on tour, has grown into a vast archive, updated in real time but also reaching back into the historical annals. From the era of Mozart (seriously!) to last night’s Chappell Roan show, Setlist.fm offers reams of statistics — which songs artists play most often, when they last broke out a particular tune. In recent years, the site has begun posting data about average concert start times and set lengths.

Good profile. I had no idea it was owned by Live Nation.

I try to avoid Setlist.fm ahead of a show, but I check it immediately when I get home and for the days following. I might be less familiar with an artist’s catalogue, and this is particularly true of an opener, so it lets me track down particular songs that were played. It is one of the internet’s great resources.

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Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan says AI will shorten our workweek

[…]

“Today, I need to manually focus on all those products to get work done. Eventually, AI will help,” Yuan said.

“By doing that, we do not need to work five days a week anymore, right? … Five years out, three days or four days [a week]. That’s a goal,” he said.

So far, technological advancements have not — in general — produced a shorter work week; that was a product of collective labour action. We have been promised a shorter week before. We do not need to carry water for people who peddle obvious lies. We will always end up being squeezed for greater output.

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Andrew Kenney, Denverite:

It was Sgt. Jamie Milliman [at the door], a police officer with the Columbine Valley Police Department who covers the town of Bow Mar, which begins just south of [Chrisanna] Elser’s home.

[…]

“You know we have cameras in that jurisdiction and you can’t get a breath of fresh air, in or out of that place, without us knowing, correct?” he said.

“OK?” Elser, a financial planner in her 40s, responded in a video captured by her smart doorbell and viewed by Denverite.

“Just as an example,” the sergeant told her, she had “driven through 20 times the last month.”

This story is a civil liberties rollercoaster. Milliman was relying on a nearby town’s use of Flock license plate cameras and Ring doorbells — which may also be connected to the Flock network — to accuse Elser of theft and issue a summons. Elser was able to get the summons dropped by compiling evidence from, in part, the cameras and GPS system on her truck. Milliman’s threats were recorded by a doorbell camera, too. The whole thing is creepy, and all over a $25 package stolen off a doorstep.

I have also had things stolen from me, and I wish the police officers I spoke to had a better answer for me than shrugging their shoulders and saying, in effect, this is not worth our time. But this situation is like a parallel universe ad for Amazon and its Ring subsidiary. Is this the path toward “very close to zero[ing] out crime”? It is not worth it.

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Carsten Frauenheim and Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit:

Apple’s official replacement process requires swapping the entire top case, keyboard and all, just to replace this single consumable component. And it has for a long time. That’s a massive and unreasonable job, requiring complete disassembly and reassembly of the entire device. We’re talking screws, shields, logic board, display, Touch ID, trackpad, everything. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t get transferred are the keyboard and speakers. The keyboard is more or less permanently affixed to this top aluminum, and the speakers are glued in — which, I guess, according to Apple means that the repair is out of the scope of DIY (we disagree).

At least one does not need to send in their laptop for a mere battery replacement. Still, I do not understand why this — the most predictable repair — is so difficult and expensive.

I hate to be that guy, but the battery for a mid-2007 15-inch MacBook Pro used to cost around $150 (about $220 inflation-adjusted) and could be swapped with two fingers. The official DIY solution for replacing the one in my M1 MacBook Pro is over $700, though there is a $124 credit for returning the replaced part. The old battery was, of course, a little bit worse: 60 watt-hours compared to 70 watt-hours in the one I am writing this with. I do not even mind the built-in-ness of this battery. But it should not cost an extra $500 and require swapping the rest of the top case parts.

[…] But for now, this tedious and insanely expensive process is the only offering they make for changing out a dead battery. Is it just a byproduct of this nearly half-a-decade-old chassis design, something that won’t change until the next rethink? We don’t know.

“Nearly half-a-decade-old” is a strange way of writing “four years”, almost like it is attempting to emphasize the age of this design. Four years old does not seem particularly ancient to me. I thought iFixit’s whole vibe was motivating people to avoid the consumerist churn encouraged by rapid redesigns.

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Matt O’Brien, Associated Press:

Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an “industrial-scale, unlawful” economy to “scrape” the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain.

[…]

Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a “former Russian botnet,” and Texas-based startup SerpApi, which lists Perplexity as a customer on its website.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

Most reporting on this is not actually explaining the nuances, which require a deeper understanding of the law, but fundamentally, Reddit is NOT arguing that these companies are illegally scraping Reddit, but rather that they are illegally scraping… Google (which is not a party to the lawsuit) and in doing so violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause, over content Reddit holds no copyright over. And, then, Perplexity is effectively being sued for linking to Reddit.

This is… bonkers on so many levels. And, incredibly, within their lawsuit, Reddit defends its arguments by claiming it’s filing this lawsuit to protect the open internet. It is not. It is doing the exact opposite.

I am glad Masnick wrote about this despite my disagreement with his views on how much control a website owner ought to have over scraping. This is a necessary dissection of the suit, though I would appreciate views on it from actual intellectual property lawyers. They might be able to explain how a positive outcome of this case for Reddit would have clear rules delineating this conduct from the ways in which artificial intelligence companies have so far benefitted from a generous reading of fair use and terms of service documents.

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Andrej Sokolow, Deutsche Presse Agentur:

Apple could switch off a function that prevents users’ apps from tracking their behaviour across various services and websites for advertising purposes in Germany and other European countries.

The iPhone manufacturer on Wednesday complained that it has experienced constant headwinds from the tracking industry.

“Intense lobbying efforts in Germany, Italy and other countries in Europe may force us to withdraw this feature to the detriment of European consumers,” Apple said in a statement.

It is a little rich for Apple to be claiming victimhood in the face of “intense lobbying efforts” by advertising companies when it is the seventh highest spender on lobbying in the European Union. Admittedly, it spends about one-third as much as Meta in Germany, but that is not because Apple cannot afford to spend more. Apple’s argument is weak.

In any case, this is another case where Apple believes it should have a quasi-regulatory role. As I wrote last month:

[…] Apple seems to believe it is its responsibility to implement technical controls to fulfill its definition of privacy and, if that impacts competition and compatibility, too bad. E.U. regulators seem to believe it has policy protections for user privacy, and that users should get to decide how their private data is shared.

I believe there are people within Apple who care deeply about privacy. However, when Apple also gets to define privacy and tracking, it is no coincidence it found an explanation allowing it to use platform activity and in-app purchases for ad targeting. This is hardly as sensitive as the tracking performed by Google and Meta, and Apple does not use third-party data for targeting.

But why would it? Apple owns the platform and, if it wanted, could exploit far more user information without it being considered “tracking” since it is all first-party data. That it does not is a positive reflection of self-policing and, ideally, something it will not change. But it could.

What E.U. authorities are concerned about is this self-serving definition of privacy and the self-policing that results, conflicting with the role of European regulators and privacy laws, and its effects on competition. I think those are reasonable grounds for questioning the validity of App Tracking Transparency. Furthermore, the consequences emanating from violations of privacy law are documented; Meta was penalized €1.2 billion as a result of GDPR violations. Potential violations of App Store policy, on the other hand, are handled differently. If Meta has, as a former employee alleges, circumvented App Tracking Transparency, would the penalties be handled by similar regulatory bodies, or would it — like Uber before — be dealt with privately and rather quietly?

The consequences of previous decisions have been frustrating. They result in poorer on-device privacy controls for users in part because Apple is a self-interested party. It would be able to make its case more convincingly if it walked away from the advertising business altogether.

Sokolow:

Apple argues that it has proposed various solutions to the competition authorities, but has not yet been able to dispel their concerns.

The company wants to continue to offer ATT to European users. However, it argued that the competition authorities have proposed complex solutions that would effectively undermine the function from Apple’s point of view.

Specificity would be nice. It would be better if these kinds of conversations could be had in public instead of in vague statements provided on background to select publications.

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Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, of the Verge, interviewed Ring founder Jamie Siminoff about a new book — which Tuohy has not read — written with Andrew Postman about the success of the company. During this conversation, Tuohy stumbled into Siminoff making a pretty outrageous claim:

While research suggests that today’s video doorbells do little to prevent crime, Siminoff believes that with enough cameras and with AI, Ring could eliminate most of it. Not all crime — “you’ll never stop crime a hundred percent … there’s crimes that are impossible to stop,” he concedes — but close.

“I think that in most normal, average neighborhoods, with the right amount of technology — not too crazy — and with AI, that we can get very close to zero out crime. Get much closer to the mission than I ever thought,” he says. “By the way, I don’t think it’s 10 years away. That’s in 12 to 24 months … maybe even within a year.”

If this sounds ridiculous to you, congratulations, you are thinking harder than whomever wrote the headline on this article:

Ring’s CEO says his cameras can almost ‘zero out crime’ within the next 12 months

The word “almost” and the phrase “very close” are working very hard to keep the core of Siminoff’s claim intact. What he says is that, by this time next year, “normal” communities with enough Ring cameras and a magic dusting of A.I. will have virtually no crime. The caveats are there to imply more nuance, but they are merely an escape hatch for when someone revisits this next year.

The near-complete elimination of crime in “normal” areas — whatever that means — will very obviously not happen. Tuohy cites a 2023 Scientific American story which, in turn, points to articles in MIT Technology Review and CNet. The first debunks a study Ring likes to promote claiming its devices drove a 55% decline in burglaries in Wilshire Park, Los Angeles in 2015, with cameras on about forty homes. Not only does the public data does not support this dramatic reduction, but:

Even if the doorbells had a positive effect, it seemed not to last. In 2017, Wilshire Park suffered more burglaries than in any of the previous seven years.

The CNet article collects a series of reports from other police departments indicating Ring cameras have questionable efficacy at deterring crime on a city-wide level.

This is also something we can know instinctually, since we already have plenty of surveillance cameras. A 2019 meta analysis (PDF) by Eric Piza, et al., found CCTV adoption decreased crime by about 13%. That is not nothing, but it is also a long way from nearly 100%. One could counter that these tests did not factor in Ring’s A.I. features, like summaries of what the camera saw — we have spent so much energy creating summary-making machines — and finding lost dogs.

The counterargument to all of this, however, is that Ring’s vision is a police state enforced by private enterprise. A 2022 paper (PDF) by Dan Calacci, et al., found race was, unsurprisingly, a motivating factor in reports of suspicious behaviour, and that reports within Ring’s Neighbors app was not correlated with the actual frequency of those crimes. Ring recently partnered with Flock, adding a further layer of creepiness.

I will allow that perhaps an article about Siminoff’s book is not the correct place to litigate these claims. By the very same logic, however, the Verge should be more cautious in publishing them, and should not have promoted them in a headline.

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Liam Mo and Brenda Goh, Reuters:

A group of 55 Chinese iPhone and iPad users filed a complaint with China’s market regulator on Monday, a lawyer representing the group said, alleging that Apple abuses its market dominance by restricting app distribution and payments to its own platforms while charging high commissions.

[…]

This marks the second complaint against Apple led by Wang. A similar case filed in 2021 was dismissed by a Shanghai court last year.

Imran Rahman-Jones, BBC News:

But the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has designated both Apple and Google as having “strategic market status” – effectively saying they have a lot of power over mobile platforms.

The ruling has drawn fury from the tech giants, with Apple saying it risked harming consumers through “weaker privacy” and “delayed access to new features”, while Google called the decision “disappointing, disproportionate and unwarranted”.

The CMA said the two companies “may be limiting innovation and competition”.

Pretty soon it may be easier to list the significant markets in which Apple is still able to exercise complete control over iOS app distribution.

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Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch:

OpenAI announced Tuesday the launch of its AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, a major step in the company’s quest to unseat Google as the main way people find information online.

The company says Atlas will first roll out on macOS, with support for Windows, iOS, and Android coming soon. OpenAI says the product will be available to all free users at launch.

Atlas, like Perplexity’s Comet, is a Chromium-based browser. You cannot use it without signing in to ChatGPT. As I was completing the first launch experience, shimmering colours radiated from the setup window and — no joke — it looked like my computer’s screen was failing.

OpenAI:

As you use Atlas, ChatGPT can get smarter and more helpful, too. Browser memories let ChatGPT remember context from the sites you visit and bring that context back when you need it. This means you can ask ChatGPT questions like: “Find all the job postings I was looking at last week and create a summary of industry trends so I can prepare for interviews.” Browser memories in Atlas are completely optional, and you’re always in control: you can view or archive them at any time in settings, and deleting browsing history deletes any associated browser memories.

I love the idea of this. So often, I need to track down something I remember reading, but have only the haziest recollection of what, exactly, it is. I want this in my life. Yet I have zero indication I can trust OpenAI with retaining and synthesizing useful information from my browsing history.

The company says it only retains pages until they have been summarized, and I am sure it thinks it is taking privacy as seriously as it can. But what about down the road? What could it do with all of this data it does retain — information that is tied to your ChatGPT account? OpenAI wants to be everywhere, and it wants to know everything about you to an even greater extent than Google or Meta have been able to accomplish. Why should I trust it? What makes the future of OpenAI look different than the trajectories of the information-hungry businesses before it?

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Even if you are not interested in the iPad or Apple product news generally, I recommend making time for Federico Viticci’s review, at MacStories, of the new iPad Pro. Apple claims 3.5× performance gains with A.I. models, so Viticci attempted to verify that number. Unfortunately, he ran into some problems.

Viticci (emphasis his):

This is the paradox of the M5. Theoretically speaking, the new Neural Accelerator architecture should lead to notable gains in token generation and prefill time that may be appreciated on macOS by developers and AI enthusiasts thanks to MLX (more on this below). However, all these improvements amount to very little on iPadOS today because there is no serious app ecosystem for local AI development and tinkering on iPad. That ecosystem absolutely exists on the Mac. On the iPad, we’re left with a handful of non-MLX apps from the App Store, no Terminal, and the untapped potential of the M5.

In case it’s not clear, I’m coming at this from a perspective of disappointment, not anger. […]

Viticci’s frustration with the state of A.I. models on the iPad Pro is palpable. Ideally and hopefully, it is a future-friendly system, but that is not usually the promise of Apple’s products. It usually likes to tell a complete story with the potential for sequels. To get even a glimpse of what that story looks like, Viticci had to go to great lengths, as documented in his review.

In the case of this iPad Pro, it is marketing leaps-and-bounds boosts in A.I. performance — though those claims appear to be optimistic — while still playing catch-up on last year’s Apple intelligence announcements, and offering little news for a user who wants to explore A.I. models directly on their iPad. It feels like a classic iPad story: incredible hardware, restricted by Apple’s software decisions.

Update: I missed a followup post from Viticci in which he points to a review from Max Weinbach of Creative Strategies. Weinbach found the M5 MacBook Pro does, indeed, post A.I. performance gains closer to Apple’s claims.

As an aside, I think it is curious for Apple to be supplying review units to Creative Strategies. It is nominally a research and analysis firm, not a media outlet. While there are concerns about the impartiality of reviewers granted access to prerelease devices, it feels to me like an entirely different thing for a broad-ranging research organization for reasons I cannot quite identify.

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Ken MacGillivray and Karen Bartko, Global News:

“All electors are legislatively required to complete a Statement of Eligibility form (Form 13) at the voting station. This form is a declaration by an elector that they meet the required legislated criteria to receive and cast ballots,” Elections Edmonton said.

[…]

Those casting ballots say confirming voters are on the register or completing the necessary paperwork takes three to five minutes per voter.

I was lucky to be in and out of my polling place in about fifteen minutes, but the longest part was waiting for the person to diligently copy my name, address, and date-of-birth from my driver’s license to a triplicate form, immediately after confirming the same information on the printed voter roll. It is a silly requirement coming down as part of a larger unwanted package from our provincial government for no clear reason. The same legislation also prohibits electronic tabulation, so all the ballots are slowly being counted by hand. These are the kinds of measures that only begin to make sense if you assume someone with influence in our provincial government watches too much Fox News.

I wonder if our Minister of Red Tape Reduction has heard about all the new rules and restrictions implemented by his colleagues.

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Jason Parham, Wired:

The uptick in artificial social networks, [Rudy] Fraser tells me, is being driven by the same tech egoists who have eroded public trust and inflamed social isolation through “divisive” algorithms. “[They] are now profiting on that isolation by creating spaces where folks can surround themselves with sycophantic bots.”

I saw this quote circulating on Bluesky over the weekend and it has been rattling around my head since. It cuts to the heart of one reason why A.I.-based “social” networks like Sora and Meta’s Vibes feel so uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, I found the very next paragraph from Parham uncompelling:

In the many conversations I had with experts, similar patterns of thought emerged. The current era of content production prioritizes aesthetics over substance. We are a culture hooked on optimization and exposure; we crave to be seen. We live on our phones and through our screens. We’re endlessly watching and being watched, submerged in a state of looking. With a sort of all-consuming greed, we are transforming into a visual-first society — an infinite form of entertainment for one another to consume, share, fight over, and find meaning through.

Of course our media reflects aesthetic trends and tastes; it always has. I do not know that there was a halcyon era of substance-over-style media, nor do I believe there was a time since celebrity was a feasible achievement in which at least some people did not desire it. In a 1948 British survey of children 10–15 years old, one-sixth to one-third of respondents aspired to “‘romantic’ [career] choices like film acting, sport, and the arts”. An article published in Scouting Magazine in 2000 noted children leaned toward high-profile careers — not necessarily celebrity, but jobs “every child is exposed to”. We love this stuff because we have always loved this stuff.

Among the bits I quibble with in the above, however, this stood out as a new and different thing: “[w]e’re endlessly watching and being watched”. That, I think, is the kind of big change Fraser is quoted as speaking about, and something I think is concerning. We already worried about echo chambers, and platforms like YouTube responded by adjusting recommendations to less frequently send users to dark places. Let us learn something, please.

Cal Newport:

A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. They also wouldn’t be entertaining the idea, ​as [Sam] Altman did last week​, that they might soon start offering an age-gated version of ChatGPT so that adults could enjoy AI-generated “erotica.”

To me, these are the acts of a company that poured tens of billions of investment dollars into creating what they hoped would be the most consequential invention in modern history, only to finally realize that what they wrought, although very cool and powerful, isn’t powerful enough on its own to deliver a new world all at once.

I do not think Sora smells of desperation, but I do think it is the product of a company that views unprecedented scale as its primary driver. I think OpenAI wants to be everywhere — and not in the same way that a consumer electronics company wants its smartphones to be the category’s most popular, or anything like that. I wonder if Ben Thompson’s view of OpenAI as “the Windows of A.I.” is sufficient. I think OpenAI is hoping to be a ubiquitous layer in our digital world; or, at least, it is behaving that way.

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John Gruber, responding to my exploration of the MacBook Pro A.C. adapter non-issue:

The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply re-using a good one they already own, normal users have no idea what makes a “good” power adapter. I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience.

Maybe. I think it is fair to be concerned about this being another thing people have to think about when buying a laptop. But, in my experience, less technically adept people still believe they need specific cables and chargers, even when they do not.

When I was in college, a friend forgot to bring the extension cable for their MacBook charger. There was an unused printer in the studio, though, so I was able to use the power cable from that because it is an interchangeable standard plug. I see this kind of thing all the time among friends, family members, and colleagues. It makes sense in a world frequently populated by proprietary adapters.

Maybe some people will end up with underpowered USB-C chargers. I bet a lot of people will just go to the Apple Store and buy the one recommended by staff, though.

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Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

You can find the new option [in 26.1 beta 4] on iPhone and iPad by going to the Settings app and navigating to the Display & Brightness menu. On the Mac, it’s available in the “Appearance” menu in System Settings. Here, you’ll see a new Liquid Glass menu with “Clear” and “Tinted” options.

“Choose your preferred look for Liquid Glass. Clear is more transparent, revealing the content beneath. Tinted increases opacity and adds more contrast,” Apple explains.

After Apple made the menu bar translucent in Mac OS X Leopard, it added a preference to make the bar solid after much pushback. When it refreshed the design of Mac OS X in Yosemite with more frosted glass effects, it added controls to Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast, which replaced the menu bar-specific setting.

Here we are with yet another theme built around translucency, and more complaints about legibility and contrast — Miller writes “Apple says it heard from users throughout the iOS 26 beta testing period that they’d like a setting to manage the opaqueness of the Liquid Glass design”. Now, as has become traditional, there is another way to moderate the excesses of Apple’s new visual language. I am sure there are some who will claim this undermines the entire premise of Liquid Glass, and I do not know that they are entirely wrong. Some might call it greater personalization and customization, too. I think it feels unfocused. Apple keeps revisiting translucency and finding it needs to add more controls to compensate.

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Carly Nairn, Courthouse News Service:

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton said in a 25-page ruling that there was evidence NSO Group’s flagship spyware could still infiltrate WhatApp users’ devices and granted Meta’s request for a permanent injunction.

However, Hamilton, a Bill Clinton appointee, also determined that any damages would need to follow a ratioed amount of compensation based on a legal framework designed to proportion damages. She ordered that the jury-based award of $167 million should be reduced to a little over $4 million.

Once again, I am mystified by Apple’s decision to drop its suit against NSO Group. What Meta won is protection from WhatsApp being used as an installation vector for NSO’s spyware; importantly, high-value WhatsApp users won a modicum of protection from NSO’s customers. And, as John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab points out, NSO has “an absolute TON of their business splashed all over the court records”. There are several depositions from which an enterprising journalist could develop a better understanding of this creepy spyware company.

Last week, NSO Group confirmed it had been acquired by U.S. investors. However, according to its spokesperson, its “headquarters and core operations remain in Israel [and] continues to be fully supervised and regulated by the relevant Israeli authorities”.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch:

NSO has long claimed that its spyware is designed to not target U.S. phone numbers, likely to avoid hurting its chances to enter the U.S. market. But the company was caught in 2021 targeting about a dozen U.S. government officials abroad.

Soon after, the U.S. Commerce Department banned American companies from trading with NSO by putting the spyware maker on the U.S. Entities List. Since then, NSO has tried to get off the U.S. government’s blocklist, as recently as May 2025, with the help of a lobbying firm tied to the Trump administration.

I have as many questions about what this change in ownership could mean for its U.S. relationship as I do about how it affects possible targets.

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Are you outraged? Have you not heard? Apple updated its entry-level MacBook Pro with a new M5 chip, and across Europe, it does not ship with an A.C. adapter in the box as standard any more. It still comes with a USB-C to MagSafe cable, and you can add an adapter at checkout, but those meddling E.U. regulators have forced Apple to do something stupid and customer-unfriendly again. Right?

William Gallagher, of AppleInsider, gets it wrong:

Don’t blame Apple this time — if you’re in the European Union or the UK, your new M5 14-inch MacBook Pro or iPad Pro may cost you $70 extra because Apple isn’t allowed to bundle a charger.

First of all, the dollar is not the currency in any of these countries. Second, the charger in European countries is €65, which is more like $76 right now. Third, Apple is allowed to bundle an A.C. adapter, it just needs to offer an option to not include it. Fourth, and most important, is that the new MacBook Pro is less expensive in nearly every region in which the A.C. adapter is now a configure-to-order option — even after adding the adapter.

In Ireland, the MacBook Pro used to start at €1,949; it now starts at €1,849; in France, it was €1,899, and it is now €1,799. As mentioned, the adapter is €65, making these new Macs €35 less with a comparable configuration. The same is true in each Euro-currency country I checked: Germany, Italy, and Spain all received a €100 price cut if you do not want an A.C. adapter, and a €35 price cut if you do.

It is not just countries that use the Euro receiving cuts. In Norway, the new MacBook Pro starts at 2,000 krone less than the one it replaces, and a charger is 849 krone. In Hungary, it is 50,000 forint less, with a charger costing about 30,000 forint. There are some exceptions, too. In Switzerland, the new models are 50 francs less, but a charger is 59 francs. And in the U.K., there is no price adjustment, even though the charger is a configure-to-order option there, too.

Countries with a charger in the box, on the other hand, see no such price adjustment, at least for the ones I have checked. The new M5 model starts at the same price as the M4 it replaces in Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. (For the sake of brevity and because not all of these pages have been recently crawled by the Internet Archive, I have not included links to each comparison. I welcome checking my work, however, and would appreciate an email if I missed an interesting price change.)

Maybe Apple was already planning a €100 price cut for these new models. The M4 was €100 less expensive than the M3 it replaced, for example, so it is plausible. That is something we simply cannot know. What we do know for certain is that these new MacBook Pros might not come with an A.C. adapter, but even if someone adds one at checkout, it still costs less in most places with this option.

Gallagher:

It doesn’t appear that Apple has cut prices of the MacBook Pro or iPad Pro to match, either. That can’t be proven, though, because at least with the UK, Apple generally does currency conversion just by swapping symbols.

It can be proven if you bother to put in thirty minutes’ work.

Joe Rossignol, of MacRumors, also gets it a little wrong:

According to the European Union law database, Apple could have let customers in Europe decide whether they wanted to have a charger included in the box or not, but the company has ultimately decided to not include one whatsoever: […]

A customer can, in fact, choose to add an A.C. adapter when they order their Mac.

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Tabby Kinder in New York and George Hammond, Financial Times:

OpenAI has signed about $1tn in deals this year for computing power to run its artificial intelligence models, commitments that dwarf its revenue and raise questions about how it can fund them.

Emily Forgash and Agnee Ghosh, Bloomberg:

For much of the AI boom, there have been whispers about Nvidia’s frenzied dealmaking. The chipmaker bolstered the market by pumping money into dozens of AI startups, many of which rely on Nvidia’s graphics processing units to develop and run their models. OpenAI, to a lesser degree, also invested in startups, some of which built services on top of its AI models. But as tech firms have entered a more costly phase of AI development, the scale of the deals involving these two companies has grown substantially, making it harder to ignore.

The day after Nvidia and OpenAI announced their $100 billion investment agreement, OpenAI confirmed it had struck a separate $300 billion deal with Oracle to build out data centers in the US. Oracle, in turn, is spending billions on Nvidia chips for those facilities, sending money back to Nvidia, a company that is emerging as one of OpenAI’s most prominent backers.

I possess none of the skills most useful to understand what all of this means. I am not an economist; I did not have a secret life as an investment banker. As a layperson, however, it is not comforting to read from some People With Specialized Knowledge that this is similar to historically good circular investments, just at an unprecedented scale, while other People With Specialized Knowledge say this has been the force preventing the U.S. from entering a recession. These articles might be like one of those prescient papers from before the Great Recession. Not a great feeling.

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Emmanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

Democratic U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren sent letters to the Department of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson, raising concerns about the $55 billion acquisition of the giant American video game company in part by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Specifically, the Senators worry that EA, which just released Battlefield 6 last week and also publishes The Sims, Madden, and EA Sports FC, “would cease exercising editorial and operational independence under the control of Saudi Arabia’s private majority ownership.”

“The proposed transaction poses a number of significant foreign influence and national security risks, beginning with the PIF’s reputation as a strategic arm of the Saudi government,” the Senators wrote in their letter. […]

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the assumption was that it would be democratic nations successfully using the web for global influence. But I think the 2016 U.S. presidential election, during which Russian operatives worked to sway voters’ intentions, was a reality check. Fears of foreign influence were then used by U.S. lawmakers to justify banning TikTok, and to strongarm TikTok into allowing Oracle to oversee its U.S. operations. Now, it is Saudi Arabian investment in Electronic Arts raising concerns. Like TikTok, it is not the next election that is, per se, at risk, but the general thoughts and opinions of people in the United States.

U.S. politicians even passed a law intended to address “foreign influence” concerns. However, Saudi Arabia is not one of the four “covered nations” restricted by PAFACA.

Aside from xenophobia, I worry “foreign influence” is becoming a new standard excuse for digital barriers. We usually associate restrictive internet policies with oppressive and authoritarian regimes that do not trust their citizens to be able to think for themselves. This is not to say foreign influence is not a reasonable concern, nor that Saudi Arabia has no red flags, nor still that these worries are a purely U.S. phenomenon. Canadian officials are similarly worried about adversarial government actors covertly manipulating our policies and public opinion. But I think we need to do better if we want to support a vibrant World Wide Web. U.S. adversaries are allowed to have big, successful digital products, too.

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Robert Graham, clarifying the bad reporting of the big SIM farm bust in New York:

The Secret Service is lying to the press. They know it’s just a normal criminal SIM farm and are hyping it into some sort of national security or espionage threat. We know this because they are using the correct technical terms that demonstrate their understanding of typical SIM farm crimes. The claim that they will likely find other such SIM farms in other cities likewise shows they understand this is a normal criminal activity and not any special national security threat.

One of the things we must always keep in mind is that press releases are written to persuade. That is as true for businesses as it is for various government agencies. In this case, the Secret Service wanted attention, so they exaggerated the threat. And one wonders why public trust in institutions is falling.

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Something I missed in posting about Apple’s critical appraisal of the Digital Markets Act is its timing. Why now? Well, it turns out the European Commission sought feedback beginning in July, and with a deadline of just before midnight on 24 September. That is why it published that statement, and why Google did the same.

Oliver Bethell, Google’s “senior director, competition”, a job title which implies a day spent chuckling to oneself:

Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.

Key parts of the European tourism industry have already seen free, direct booking traffic from Google Search plummet by up to 30%. A recent study on the economic impact of the DMA estimates that European businesses across sectors could face revenue losses of up to €114 billion.

The study in question, though published by Copenhagen Business School, was funded by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a tech industry lobbying firm funded in part by Google. I do not have the background to assess if the paper’s conclusions are well-founded, but it should be noted the low-end of the paper’s estimates was a loss of €8.5 billion, or just 0.05% of total industry revenue (page 45). The same lobbyists also funded a survey (PDF) conducted online by Nextrade Group.

Like Apple, Google clearly wants this law to go away. It might say it “remain[s] committed to complying with the DMA” and that it “appreciate[s] the Commission’s consistent openness to regulatory dialogue”, but nobody is fooled. To its credit, Google posted the full response (PDF) it sent the Commission which, though clearly defensive, has less of a public relations sheen than either of the company’s press releases.

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In 2023 Lina Khan, then-chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, sued Amazon over using (PDF) “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions” and “knowingly complicat[ing] the cancellation process”. Some people thought this case was a long-shot, or attempted to use Khan’s scholarship against her.

Earlier this week, the trial began to adjudicate the government’s claims which, in addition to accusing Amazon itself, also involved charges against company executives. It was looking promising for the FTC.

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

The FTC notched an early win in the case last week when U.S. District Court Judge John Chun ruled Amazon and two senior executives violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by gathering Prime members’ billing information before disclosing the terms of the service.

Chun also said that the two senior Amazon executives would be individually liable if a jury sides with the FTC due to the level of oversight they maintained over the Prime enrollment and cancellation process.

Then, just two days into the trial, the FTC announced it had reached a settlement:

The Federal Trade Commission has secured a historic order with Amazon.com, Inc., as well as Senior Vice President Neil Lindsay and Vice President Jamil Ghani, settling allegations that Amazon enrolled millions of consumers in Prime subscriptions without their consent, and knowingly made it difficult for consumers to cancel. Amazon will be required to pay a $1 billion civil penalty, provide $1.5 billion in refunds back to consumers harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices, and cease unlawful enrollment and cancellation practices for Prime.

As usual for settlements like these, Amazon will admit no wrongdoing. The executives will not face liability, something Adam Kovacevich, head of the Chamber of Progress, a tech industry lobbying group, said today was a “wild … theory” driven by “Khan’s ego”. Nonsense. The judge in the case, after saying Amazon broke the law, gave credence to the concept these executives were personally liable for the harm they were alleged to have caused.

Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya on X:

Based on my initial read, do the executives need to do anything separate from that? Do they pay any fines? Are they being demoted? Are they subject to extra monitoring? Do they need to admit any guilt whatsoever? The answers, as far as I can tell are no, no, no, no, and no. What’s worse, the order applies to the executives for only three years — seven years less than the company.

Two-and-a-half billion is a lot of dollars in the abstract. CIRP estimates there are 197 million U.S. subscribers to Amazon Prime, which costs anywhere from $7 to $15 per month. For the sake of argument, assume everyone is — on average — on the annual plan of $11.58 per month. It will take barely more than one billing cycle for Amazon to recoup that FTC settlement. The executives previously charged will bear little responsibility for this outcome.

Those million-dollar inauguration “investments”, as CBS News put it, sure are paying off.

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Catharine Tunney, CBC News:

The immensely popular social media app TikTok has been collecting sensitive information from hundreds of thousands of Canadians under 13 years old, a joint investigation by privacy authorities found.

[…]

The privacy commissioners said TikTok agreed to enhance its age verification and provide up-front notices about its wide-ranging collection of data.

Off the top, the Privacy Commissioner’s report was limited in scope and did not examine “perceived risks to national security” since they were not related to “privacy in the context of commercial activity” and have been adjudicated elsewhere. The results of national security reviews by other agencies have not been published. However, the Commissioner’s review of the company’s privacy practices is still comprehensive for what was in scope.

TikTok detects and removes about 500,000 accounts of Canadian children under 13 annually. Yet even though the company has dedicated significant engineering efforts to estimating users’ ages for advertising and to produce recommendations, it has not developed similar capabilities for restricting minors’ access.

Despite my skepticism of the Commissioner’s efficacy in cases like these, this investigation produced a number of results. TikTok made several changes as the investigation progressed, including restricting ad targeting to minors:

As an additional measure, in its response to the Offices’ Preliminary Report of Investigation, TikTok committed to limit ad targeting for users under 18 in Canada. TikTok informed the Offices that it implemented this change on April 1st, 2025. As a result, advertisers can no longer deliver targeted ads to users under 18, other than according to generic data (such as language and approximate location).

This is a restriction TikTok has in place for some regions, but not everywhere. It is not unique to TikTok, either; Meta and Google targeted minors, and Meta reportedly guessed teens’ emotional state for ad targeting purposes. This industry cannot police itself. All of these companies say they have rules against ad targeting to children and have done so for years, yet all of them have been found to ignore those rules when they are inconvenient.

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Apple issued a press release criticizing the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act in a curious mix of countries. It published it on its European sites — of course — and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, all English-speaking. It also issued the same press release in Brazil, China, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, and Thailand — and a handful of other places — but not in Argentina, India, Japan, Mexico, or Singapore. Why this mix? Why did Apple bother to translate it into Thai but not Japanese? It is a fine mystery. Read into it what you will.

Anyway, you will be amazed to know how Apple now views the DMA:

It’s been more than a year since the Digital Markets Act was implemented. Over that time, it’s become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU. It’s exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together. And as new technologies come out, our European users’ Apple products will only fall further behind.

[…]

That’s why we’re urging regulators to take a closer look at how the law is affecting the EU citizens who use Apple products every day. We believe our users in Europe deserve the best experience on our technology, at the same standard we provide in the rest of the world — and that’s what we’ll keep fighting to deliver.

It thinks the DMA should disappear.

Its reasoning is not great; Michael Tsai read the company’s feature delays more closely and is not convinced. One of the delayed features is Live Translation, about which I wrote:

This is kind of a funny limitation because fully half the languages Live Translation works with — French, German, and Spanish — are the versions spoken in their respective E.U. countries and not, for example, Canadian French or Chilean Spanish. […]

Because of its launch languages, I think Apple expects this holdup will not last for long.

I did not account for a cynical option: Apple is launching with these languages as leverage.

The way I read Apple’s press release is as a fundamental disagreement between the role each party believes it should play, particularly when it comes to user privacy. Apple seems to believe it is its responsibility to implement technical controls to fulfill its definition of privacy and, if that impacts competition and compatibility, too bad. E.U. regulators seem to believe it has policy protections for user privacy, and that users should get to decide how their private data is shared.

Adam Engst, TidBits:

Apple’s claim of “the same standard we provide in the rest of the world” rings somewhat hollow, given that it often adjusts its technology and services to comply with local laws. The company has made significant concessions to operate in China, doesn’t offer FaceTime in the United Arab Emirates, and removes apps from the still-functional Russian App Store at the Russian government’s request. Apple likely pushed back in less public ways in those countries, but in the EU, this public statement appears aimed at rallying its users and influencing the regulatory conversation.

I know what Engst is saying here, and I agree with the sentiment, but this is a bad group of countries to be lumped in together with. That does not mean the DMA is equal to the kinds of policies that restrict services in these other countries. It remains noteworthy how strict Apple is in restricting DMA-mandated features only to countries where they are required, but you can just change your region to work around the UAE FaceTime block.

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Oscar Godsell, Sky News:

The opposition’s shadow finance minister James Paterson has since urged the Australian Labor government to follow suit.

Mr Paterson told Sky News if the US was able to create a “safer version” of TikTok, then Australia should liaise with the Trump administration to become part of that solution.

“It would be an unfortunate thing if there was a safe version of TikTok in the United States, but a version of TikTok in Australia which was still controlled by a foreign authoritarian government,” he said.

I am not sure people in Australia are asking for yet more of the country’s media to be under the thumb of Rupert Murdoch. Then again, I also do not think the world needs more social media platforms controlled by the United States, though that is very clearly the wedge the U.S. government is creating: countries can accept the existing version of TikTok, adopt the new U.S.-approved one, or ban them both. The U.S. spinoff does not resolve user privacy problems and it raises new concerns about the goals of its government-friendly ownership and management.

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Do you manage a Patreon page as a “creator”? I do; it is where you can give me five dollars per month to add to my guilt over not finishing my thoughts about Liquid Glass.¹ You do not have to give me five dollars. I feel guilty enough as it is.

Anyway, you might have missed an email Patreon sent today advising you that Autopilot will be switched on beginning October 1 unless you manually turn it off. According to Patreon’s email:

Autopilot is a growth engine that automatically sends your members and potential members strategic, timely offers which encourage them to join, upgrade, or retain your membership — without you having to lift a finger.

As an extremely casual user, I do not love this; I think it is basically spam. I am sympathetic toward those who make their living with Patreon. I turned this off. If you have a Patreon creator page and missed this email, now you know.

And if you are a subscriber to anyone on Patreon and begin receiving begging emails next week, please be gracious. They might not be aware this feature was switched on.

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Tonight, I set up a new Apple TV — well, as “new” as a refurbished 2022-though-still-current-generation model can be — and it was not a good time. I know Apple might be releasing a new model later this year, but any upgrades are probably irrelevant for how I have used my existing ten-year-old model. I do not even have a 4K television.

My older model has some drawbacks. It is pretty slow, and the storage space is pitiful — I think it is the 32 GB model — so it keeps offloading apps. What I wanted to do was get a new one and bump the old Apple TV to my kitchen, where I have a receiver and a set of speakers I have used with Bluetooth, and then I would be able to AirPlay music in all my entertaining spaces. Real simple stuff.

Jason Snell, in a sadly still-relevant Six Colors article:

The setup starts promisingly: You can bring your iPhone near the Apple TV, and it will automatically log your Apple ID in. If you’ve got the One Home Screen feature turned on, all your apps will load and appear in all the right places. It will feel like you’ve done a data transfer.

But it’s all a mirage.

One Home Screen is a nice feature, but it’s not an iCloud backup of your Apple TV, nor is it the Apple TV equivalent of Migration Assistant. It is exactly what its name suggests — a home-screen-syncing feature and nothing more.

I went into this upgrade realizing my wife and I would need to set up all our streaming apps again. (She was cool with it.) That is not great, but at least I had that expectation.

But even the “promising” parts of the setup experience did not work for me. When I brought my iPhone near the new Apple TV, it spun before throwing a mysterious error. After setting it up manually, it thought it was not connected to Wi-Fi — even though it was — and then it tried syncing the home screen. Some of the apps are right, but it has not synced all of them, and none of them are in the correct position.

Then I opened Music on my phone to try and AirPlay to both Apple TVs, only to find it was not listed. It turns out that is a separate step. I had to add it to my Home, which again involved me bringing my iPhone into close proximity and tapping a button. This failed the three times I tried it. So I restarted my Apple TV and my phone, and then Settings told me I needed to complete my Home setup. I guess it worked but somehow did not move to the next step. At last, AirPlay worked — and, frankly, it is pretty great.

I know bugs happen about as often as blog posts complaining about bugs. This thing is basically an appliance, though. I am glad Apple ultimately did not make a car.

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The U.S. Secret Service:

The U.S. Secret Service dismantled a network of electronic devices located throughout the New York tristate area that were used to conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials, which represented an imminent threat to the agency’s protective operations.

This protective intelligence investigation led to the discovery of more than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites.

That sure is a lot of SIM cards, and a scary-sounding mix of words in the press release:

• “[…] telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials […]”

• “[…] these devices could be used to conduct a wide range of telecommunications attacks […]”

• “These devices were concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the United Nations General Assembly […]”

Reporters pounced. The New York Times, NBC News, CBS News, and even security publications like the Record seized on dramatic statements like those, and another said by the special agent in a video the Service released: “this network had the potential to […] essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City”. Scary stuff.

When I read the early reports, it sure looked to me like some reporters were getting a little over their skis.

For a start, emphasizing the apparent proximity to the U.N. in New York seems to me like a stretch. A thirty-five mile area around the U.N. looks like this — and that is diameter, not radius. If you cannot see that or this third-party website goes away at some point, that is a circle encompassing just about the entire island of Manhattan, going deep into Brooklyn and Queens, stretching all the way up to Chappaqua, and out into Connecticut and New Jersey. That is a massive area. One could just as easily say it was within thirty-five miles of any number of New York-based landmarks and be just as accurate.

Second, the ability to “facilitat[e] anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises” is common to basically any internet-connected device. The scale of this one is notable, but you do not need a hundred-thousand SIM cards to make criminal plans. And the apparent possibility of “shut[ting] down the cellular network in New York” is similarly common to any large-scale installation. This is undeniably peculiar, huge, and it seems to be nefarious, but a lot of this seems to be a red herring.

Andy Greenberg, Lily Hay Newman, and Matt Burgess, Wired:

Despite speculation in some reporting about SIM farm operation that suggests it was created by a foreign state such as Russia or China and used for espionage, it’s far more likely that the operation’s central focus was scams and other profit-motivated forms of cybercrime, says Ben Coon, who leads intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Unit 221b and has carried out multiple investigations into SIM farms. “The disruption of cell services is possible, flooding the network to the degree that it couldn’t take any more traffic,” Coon says. “My gut is telling me there was some type of fraud involved here.”

These reporters point to a CNN article by John Miller and Celina Tebor elaborating on the threat to “senior U.S. government officials”: they were swatting calls targeting various lawmakers. Not nothing and certainly dangerous, but this is not looking anything like how many reporters have described it, nor what the U.S. Secret Service is suggesting through its word choices.

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This story of how Full Fact geolocated a viral video claiming to be shot in London is intriguing because it disproves its own headline’s claim that “A.I. helped”.

Charlotte Green, Full Fact:

But in this case, directly reverse image searching through Google took me to a TikTok video with a location marker for ‘Pondok Pesantren Al Fatah Temboro’, in Indonesia.

This is enough information to give the Full Fact team a great start: translated, it is a school in Temboro.

Green:

We found a slightly different compilation of similar videos on Facebook, seemingly from the same area, also with women in Islamic dress, but with more geographical features visible, such as a sign and clearer views of buildings.

Using stills from this video as references, we asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT if it could provide coordinates to the location, using the possible location of the Al Fatah school in Indonesia.

Up to the point where ChatGPT was invoked, there is no indication any A.I. tools were used. After that — and I do not intend to be mean — it is unclear to me why anyone would ask ChatGPT for coordinates to a known, named location when you can just search Google Maps. It is the third one down in my searches; the first two would quickly be eliminated when comparing to either video.

Green:

But this did not match the location of the original video we were trying to fact check—or anywhere in the near vicinity. While we were very confident the video had been filmed in Temboro, we needed to investigate further to prove this.

After this, no A.I. tools were used. ChatGPT was only able to do as much as a basic Google Maps search. After that, Full Fact had to do some old-fashioned comparative geolocation, and were ultimately successful.

I found this via Charles Arthur, who writes:

And thus we see the positive uses of geolocation by chatbots.

On the contrary, this proved little about the advantages of A.I. geolocation. These tools can certainly be beneficial; Green links to an experiment in Bellingcat in comparison to Google’s reverse image search tools.

I think Full Fact did great work in geolocating this video and deflating its hateful context in that tweet. But a closer reading of the actual steps taken shows any credit to ChatGPT or A.I. is overblown.

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Allison Smith, Modern Retail (via Michael Tsai):

Amazon revealed at its annual Accelerate seller conference in Seattle that it is shutting down its long-running “commingling” program — a move that drew louder applause from sellers than any other update of the morning.

The decision marks the end of a controversial practice in which Amazon pooled identical items from different sellers under one barcode. The system, intended to speed deliveries and save warehouse space, had also allowed counterfeit or expired goods to be mixed in with authentic ones, according to The Wall Street Journal. For years, brands complained that commingling made it difficult to trace problems back to specific sellers and left their reputations vulnerable when customers received knockoffs. In 2013, Johnson & Johnson temporarily pulled many of its consumer products from Amazon, arguing the retailer wasn’t doing enough to curb third-party sales of damaged or expired goods.

I had no idea Amazon did this until I complained on Mastodon about how terrible its shopping experience is, and Ben replied referencing this practice, nor did I know it has been doing so for at least twelve years. I am certain I have received counterfeit products more than once from Amazon, and I think this is how it happened.

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John Walker, Kotaku

Rather than because of wifi, the reason this happened is because these so-called AIs are just regurgitating information that has been parsed from scanning the internet. It will have been trained on recipes written by professional chefs, home cooks and cookery sites, then combined this information to create something that sounds a lot like a recipe for a Korean sauce. But it, not being an intelligence, doesn’t know what Korean sauce is, nor what recipes are, because it doesn’t know anything. So it can only make noises that sound like the way real humans have described things. Hence it having no way of knowing that ingredients haven’t already been mixed — just the ability to mimic recipe-like noises. The recipes it will have been trained on will say “after you’ve combined the ingredients…” so it does too.

I would love to know how this demo was supposed to go. In an ideal world, is it supposed to walk you through the preparation ingredient-by-ingredient? If Jack Mancuso had picked up the soy sauce, would it have guided the recipe-suggested amount? That would be impressive, if it had worked. The New York Times’ tech reporters got to try the glasses for about thirty minutes and, while they shared no details, said it was “as spotty as Mr. Zuckerberg’s demonstration”.

I think Walker is too hard on the faux off-the-cuff remarks, though they are mock-worthy in the context of the failed demo. But I think the diagnosis of this is entirely correct: what we think of as “A.I.” is kind of overkill for this situation. I can see some utility. For example, I could not find a written recipe that exactly matched the ingredients on Mancuso’s bench, but perhaps Meta’s A.I. software can identify the ingredients, and assume the lemons are substituting for rice vinegar. Sure. After that, what would actually be useful is a straightforward recitation of a specific recipe: measure out a quarter-cup of soy sauce and pour it into a bowl; next, stir in one tablespoon of honey — that kind of thing. This is pretty basic text-to-speech stuff, though it would be cool if it can respond to questions like how much ginger?, and did I already add the honey?, too.

Also, I would want to know which recipe it was following. A.I. has a terrible problem with not crediting its sources of information in general, and it is no different here.

Also — and this probably goes without saying — even if these glasses worked as well as Meta suggests they should, there is no way I would buy a pair. You are to tell me that I should strap a legacy of twenty years of privacy violations and user hostility to my face? Oh, please.

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In 2018, the Toronto Star and CBC News jointly published an investigation into Ticketmaster’s sales practices:

Data journalists monitored Ticketmaster’s website for seven months leading up to this weekend’s show at Scotiabank Arena, closely tracking seats and prices to find out exactly how the box-office system works.

Here are the key findings:

• Ticketmaster doesn’t list every seat when a sale begins.

• Hikes prices mid-sale.

• Collects fees twice on tickets scalped on its site.

Dave Seglins, Rachel Houlihan, Laura Clementson, CBC News:

Posing as scalpers and equipped with hidden cameras, the journalists were pitched on Ticketmaster’s professional reseller program.

[…]

TradeDesk allows scalpers to upload large quantities of tickets purchased from Ticketmaster’s site and quickly list them again for resale. With the click of a button, scalpers can hike or drop prices on reams of tickets on Ticketmaster’s site based on their assessment of fan demand.

Ticketmaster, of course, disputed these journalists’ findings. But the very existence of TradeDesk — owned by Ticketmaster — seems to be in direct opposition to Ticketmaster’s obligations to purchasers. One part of the company is ostensibly in the business of making sure legitimate buyers acquire no more than their fair share of tickets to a popular show, while another part facilitates easy reselling at massive scale. The TradeDesk platform is not something accessible by just anyone; you cannot create an account on demand. Someone from Ticketmaster has to set up your TradeDesk account for you.

These stories have now become a key piece of evidence in a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster:

The FTC alleges that in public, Ticketmaster maintains that its business model is at odds with brokers that routinely exceed ticket limits. But in private, Ticketmaster acknowledged that its business model and bottom line benefit from brokers preventing ordinary Americans from purchasing tickets to the shows they want to see at the prices artists set.

The complaint’s description (PDF) of the relationship between Ticketmaster and TradeDesk, beginning at paragraph 84 and continuing through paragraph 101, is damning. If true, Ticketmaster must be aware of the scalper economy it is effectively facilitating through TradeDesk.

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Rani Molla, Sherwood News:

While the prerecorded videos of the products in use were slick and highly produced, some of the live demos simply failed.

“Glasses are the ideal form factor for personal superintelligence because they let you stay present in the moment while getting access to all of these AI capabilities to make you smarter, help you communicate better, improve your memory, improve your senses,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated at the start of the event, but the ensuing bloopers certainly didn’t make it feel that way.

I like that Meta took a chance with live demos but, in addition to the bloopers, Connect felt like another showcase of an inspiration-bereft business. The opening was a more grounded — figuratively and literally — version of the Google Glass skydive from 2012. Then, beginning at about 52 minutes, Zuckerberg introduced the wrist-based control system, saying “every new computing platform has a new way to interact with it”, summarizing a piece of the Macworld 2007 iPhone introduction. It is not that I am offended by Meta cribbing others’ marketing. What I find amusing, more than anything, is Zuckerberg’s clear desire to be thought of as an inventor and futurist, despite having seemingly few original ideas.

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If you want reviews of the iPhone 17 — mostly the Pro — from the perspective of photography, two of the best come from Chris Niccolls and Jordan Drake of PetaPixel and Tyler Stalman. Coincidentally, both from right here in Calgary. I am not in the market for an upgrade, but I think these are two of the most comprehensive and interesting reviews I have seen specifically about the photo and video features. Alas, both are video-based reviews, so if that is not your bag, sorry.

Niccolls and Drake walk you through the typical PetaPixel review, just as you want it. The Portrait Mode upgrades they show are obvious to me. Stalman’s test of Action Mode plus the 8× zoom feature is wild. He also took a bunch of spectacular photos at the Olds Rodeo last week. Each of these reviews focuses on something different, with notably divergent opinions on some video features.

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Raffaele Huang, Lingling Wei, and Alex Leary, Wall Street Journal:

The arrangement, discussed by U.S. and Chinese negotiators in Madrid this week, would create a new U.S. entity to operate the app, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the people said.

It must be at least an 80% stake. That is the letter of the law this administration has been failing to enforce.

This new company would also have an American-dominated board with one member designated by the U.S. government.

A golden share, perhaps?

Existing users in the U.S. would be asked to shift to a new app, which TikTok has built and is testing, people familiar with the matter said. […]

“Asked”?

[…] TikTok engineers will re-create a set of content-recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology licensed from TikTok’s parent ByteDance, the people said. U.S. software giant Oracle, a longtime TikTok partner, would handle user data at its facilities in Texas, they said. […]

And I am sure this will satisfy everyone who has found TikTok’s success alarming. Oracle already has access to TikTok’s source code and — at best — will allow TikTok employees to rewrite it to get a “Made in the USA” stamp. It is possible the recommendations system will be unchanged.

Of course, Chinese investors will still have a stake in the U.S. company and, unless the U.S. company is entirely siloed from TikTok everywhere else, users will still be recommended videos the U.S. government framed as a national security threat. But now the U.S. app will seem suspicious to anyone who has been skeptical of the country’s increasing state involvement in the tech industry.

Some TikTok users are going to be furious about this. Some people who viewed its Chinese ownership as inherently problematic are not going to be satisfied by this. It is going to make everyone a little bit upset. It is unclear if it will solve any of the pressing concerns, either. From a distance and in summary, what it looks like is the U.S. government panicked over the only massively successful social media app not based in the U.S., then wrested control of the app and gave it to people friendlier to this government. That is too simplified but, also, not inaccurate.

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Craig Grannell, Wired:

Apple revealed Liquid Glass as part of its WWDC announcement this June, with all the pomp usually reserved for shiny new gear. The press release promised a “delightful and elegant new software design” that “reflects and refracts its surroundings while dynamically transforming to bring greater focus to content.” Today it launches globally onto compatible Apple devices.

If you haven’t encountered it yet, brace yourself. Inspired by visionOS — the software powering the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset — Liquid Glass infuses every Apple platform with a layered glass aesthetic. This is paired with gloopy animations and a fixation on hiding interface components when possible—and showing content through them when it isn’t.

Grannell interviewed several developers for this piece, which is ultimately quite critical of Liquid Glass.

I, too, have thoughts, but life got in the way of completing anything by today’s release. Luckily, there is no shortage of people with opinions about this new material and the broader redesign across Apple’s family of operating systems. I trust you will find their commentary adequate, and I hope you will still be interested in mine whenever I can finish.

In the meantime, I think a chunk of Dan Moren’s iOS 26 review, for Six Colors, is quite good:

Apple has designed extensive rules to try and minimize some of the most distracting impacts of Liquid Glass. For example, if you’re viewing black-on-white content and suddenly scroll past a darker image, the UI widgets will only flip from light to dark mode based on the speed of your scrolling: scroll past it quickly and they won’t flip; it’s only if you slow down or stop with the widgets over the image that they’ll shift into dark mode.

While clever, this also feels remarkably over-engineered to work around the fundamental nature of these devices. It’s a little reminiscent of the old apocryphal story about how the American space industry spent years and millions of dollars designing a pen that could write in space while the Soviets used a pencil. Perhaps they should have used a design that doesn’t require adjusting its look on the fly.

Also, Federico Viticci has published his extraordinary annual review. In addition to the section on design, I am also looking forward to his thoughts in particular on iPadOS 26. Lots to read and lots to discover.

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Nicole Nguyen, Wall Street Journal:

My husband, who grew up in Switzerland, helped me test: He spoke French, which turned into English audio in my ears. I responded in English, and he read the French translation on-screen.

There was a delay between his speech and my in-ear translation, which made the conversation stilted. This is par for the course for real-time translators, including the Google Meet and Google Pixel versions I’ve tried. But the AirPods delay was long and it didn’t always transcribe speech correctly, leading to nonsensical translations. (“Down” became “done,” “smoothie” became “movie,” etc.)

Live Translation is still in beta, so I’ll try it again down the line.

Kate Kozuch, Tom’s Guide:

The AirPods Pro 3 are the first AirPods to include a dedicated heart rate sensor.

You can start about 50 different workouts from the iOS 26 fitness app on your iPhone, and your AirPods Pro 3 become the heart rate source, no Apple Watch required. They even sync with Workout Buddy for Apple Intelligence-based workout guidance and Apple Music to launch a workout playlist automatically.

I do not use an Apple Watch, so this feature is compelling for tracking my cycling trips more comprehensively. A similar sensor is in the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2; I wonder if the workout tracking features will work with those, too.

Apple’s AirPods remain, for me, the most difficult product not to buy. I enjoyed my AirPods 2 while they lasted, and using a set of wired headphones afterwards does not feel quite right. But these new models still do not have replaceable batteries. It is hard to write this without sounding preachy, so just assume this is my problem, not yours. I continue to be perplexed by treating perfectly good speaker drivers, microphones, and chips as disposable simply because they are packaged with a known consumable part. The engineering for swappable batteries would be, I assume, diabolical, but I still cannot get to a point where I am okay with spending over three hundred Canadian dollars every few years because of this predictable limitation.

It is difficult to resist, though.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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