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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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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Liv McMahon and Lily Jamali, BBC News:

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Apple in the release notes for MacOS 15.1 beta:

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

John Gruber:

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

Benjamin Brooks:

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

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

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

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I have to say, it is quite an odd thing to be listening to a podcast and hear one’s own name. This recently happened to me on the latest episode of “Upgrade”. It feels like I am about to be called to the principal’s office or something. But I was not.

Myke Hurley and Jason Snell discussed an article I wrote about the more granular control available to users in iOS 18 when apps request access to their contacts. (My piece is a response to a New York Times story; Snell also linked to both with some commentary.) Their chat centres Apple’s scale and influence. Even little decisions the company makes are capable of transforming entire industries.

Hurley raises an apt comparison to App Tracking Transparency, which is exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote my piece. I am similarly unsympathetic to corporate empires built on illicitly obtained data. If you cannot make money when users are given a choice to consent, your business model probably sucks. But I do think it is concerning how powerful both of the major players were in the aftermath of that announcement: Meta, for hoarding behavioural data on billions of people; and Apple, for its ability to give users options.

I see parallels to Google’s power over the web. The near-uniform layout and structure of webpages is thanks to Google’s specific suggestions for improving the likelihood of ranking higher. The main difference is Google’s suggestions are sort of optional; if a website’s owner does not care much about search traffic, they can do whatever they want. The prompts on iOS, on the other hand, are baked into the system.

As Snell says, these apps “have to make the case” for granting permission. I do not think that is such a bad thing, and I am amenable to their suggestion of Apple’s built-in apps being placed on a level playing field. I think a lot of this would be more predictable if privacy laws were stronger. A basic level of privacy protections should not be a competitive advantage, nor should users be required to navigate either unceasing permissions dialogs or terms of service agreements to understand the myriad ways their personal information is being exploited — because their personal information should not be exploited.

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Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch:

One big change Apple announced Thursday is that developers who include link-outs in their apps will no longer need to accept the newer version of its business terms — which requires they commit to paying the Core Technology Fee (CTF) the EU is investigating.

In another notable revision of approach, Apple is giving developers more flexibility around how they can communicate external offers and the types of offers they can promote through their iOS apps. Apple said developers will be able to inform users about offers available anywhere, not only on their own websites — such as through other apps and app marketplaces.

These are good changes. Users will also be able to turn off the scary alerts when using external purchasing mechanisms. But there is a catch.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

There are two fees that are associated with directing customers to purchase options outside of the App Store. A 5 percent initial acquisition fee is paid for all sales of digital goods and services that the customer makes on any platform that occur within a 12-month period after an initial install. The fee does not apply to transactions made by customers that had an initial install before the new link changes, but is applicable for new downloads.

Apple says that the initial acquisition fee reflects the value that the App Store provides when connecting developers with customers in the European Union.

The other new fee is a Store Services Fee of 7% or 20% assessed annually. Apple says it “reflects the ongoing services and capabilities that Apple provides developers”:

[…] including app distribution and management; App Review; App Store trust and safety; re-discovery, re-engagement and promotional tools and services; anti-fraud checks; recommendations; ratings and reviews; customer support; and more.

Contrary to its name, this fee does not apply solely to apps acquired through the App Store; rather, it is assessed against any digital purchase made on any platform. If an app is first downloaded on an iPhone and then, within a year, the user ultimately purchases a subscription in the Windows version of the same app, Apple believes it deserves 7–20% of the cost of that subscription in perpetuity, plus 5% for the first year’s instance. This seems to be the case no matter whether the iPhone version of that app is ever touched again.

I am not sure what business standards apply here and whether it is completely outlandish, but it sure feels that way. The App Store certainly helps with app discovery to some degree, and Apple does provide a lot of services whether developers want them or not. Yet this basically ties part of a developer’s entire revenue stream to Apple; the part is unknown but will be determined based on whichever customers used the iPhone version of an app first.

I think I have all this right based on news reports from those briefed by Apple and the new contract (PDF), but I might have messed something up. Please let me know if I got some detail wrong. This is all very confusing and, though I do not think that is deliberate, I think it struggles to translate its priorities into straightforward policy. None of these changes applies to external purchases in the U.S., for example. But what I wrote at the time applies here just the same: it is championing this bureaucracy because it believes it is entitled to a significant finder’s fee, regardless of its actual contribution to a customer’s purchase.

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Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Apple’s recent feature changes suggest a value system that’s wildly out of balance, preferring to warn (and control) users no matter how damaging it is to the overall user experience. Maybe the people in charge should be forced to sit down and watch that Apple ad that mocks Windows Vista. Vista’s security prompts existed for good reasons — but they were a user disaster. The Apple of that era knew it. I’d guess a lot of people inside today’s Apple know it, too — but they clearly are unable to win the arguments when it matters.

The first evidence of this relentless slog of permissions prompts occurred on iOS. Want to allow this app to use the camera? Tap allow. See your location? Tap allow. Access your contacts? Tap allow. Send you notifications? Tap allow. On and on it goes, sweeping up the Mac in this relentless offloading of responsibility onto users.

On some level, I get it. Our devices are all synced with one another, passing our identities and secret information between them constantly. We install new applications without thinking too much about what they could be doing in the background. We switch on automatic updates with similar indifference. (If you are somebody who does not do these things, please do not write. I know you are there; I respect you; you are one of few.)

But relentless user confirmation is not a good answer for privacy, security, or competition. It merely kicks the can down the road, and suggests users cannot be trusted, yet must bear all the responsibility for their choices.

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Alfonso Maruccia, TechSpot:

Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.

Jason Del Rey, Fortune:

Mozilla is putting on a brave face for now, and not directly addressing the existential threat that the ruling appears to pose.

“Mozilla has always championed competition and choice online, particularly in search,” a spokesperson said in a statement to Fortune on Monday. “We’re closely reviewing the court’s decision, considering its potential impact on Mozilla and how we can positively influence the next steps… Firefox continues to offer a range of search options, and we remain committed to serving our users’ preferences while fostering a competitive market.”

It is possible Mozilla will not be impacted by remedies to Google’s illegal monopoly, the details of which will begin to take shape next month. It seems possible Mozilla could be losing virtually all its revenue, thereby destabilizing the organization behind one of the few non-Chromium browsers and the best documentation of web technologies available anywhere.

Trying to untangle an illegal monopolist is necessarily difficult. This will be a long and painful process for everyone. The short-term resolutions might be ineffectual and irritating, and they may not change Google’s market position. But it is important to get on the record that Google has engaged in illegal conduct to protect its dominance, and so it will be subjected to new oversight and scrutiny. This exercise is worth it because there ought to be limits to market power and anticompetitive behaviour.

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Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman, of Wired, were able to confirm Robb Knight’s finding that Perplexity ignores the very instructions it gives website owners to opt out of scraping. And there is more:

The WIRED analysis also demonstrates that despite claims that Perplexity’s tools provide “instant, reliable answers to any question with complete sources and citations included,” doing away with the need to “click on different links,” its chatbot, which is capable of accurately summarizing journalistic work with appropriate credit, is also prone to bullshitting, in the technical sense of the word.

I had not played around with Perplexity very much, but I tried asking it “what is the bullshit web?”. Its summaries in response to prompts with and without a question mark are slightly different but there is one constant: it does not cite my original article, only a bunch of (nice) websites which linked to or reblogged it.

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Kevin Beaumont:

At a surface level, it [Recall] is great if you are a manager at a company with too much to do and too little time as you can instantly search what you were doing about a subject a month ago.

In practice, that audience’s needs are a very small (tiny, in fact) portion of Windows userbase — and frankly talking about screenshotting the things people in the real world, not executive world, is basically like punching customers in the face. The echo chamber effect inside Microsoft is real here, and oh boy… just oh boy. It’s a rare misfire, I think.

Via Eric Schwarz:

This fact that this feature is basically on by default and requires numerous steps to disable is going to create a lot of problems for people, especially those who click through every privacy/permission screen and fundamentally don’t know how their computer actually operates — I’ve counted way too many instances where I’ve had to help people find something and they have no idea where anything lives in their file system (mostly work off the Desktop or Downloads folders). How are they going to even grapple with this?

The problems with Recall remind me of the minor 2017 controversy around “brassiere” search results in Apple’s Photos app. Like Recall, it is entirely an on-device process with some security and privacy protections. In practice, automatically cataloguing all your photos which show a bra is kind of creepy, even if it is being done only with your own images on your own phone.

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Liz Reid, head of Google Search, on the predictably bizarre results of rolling out its “A.I. Overviews” feature:

One area we identified was our ability to interpret nonsensical queries and satirical content. Let’s take a look at an example: “How many rocks should I eat?” Prior to these screenshots going viral, practically no one asked Google that question. You can see that yourself on Google Trends.

There isn’t much web content that seriously contemplates that question, either. This is what is often called a “data void” or “information gap,” where there’s a limited amount of high quality content about a topic. However, in this case, there is satirical content on this topic … that also happened to be republished on a geological software provider’s website. So when someone put that question into Search, an AI Overview appeared that faithfully linked to one of the only websites that tackled the question.

This reasoning sounds almost circular in the context of what A.I. answers are supposed to do. Google loves demonstrating how users can enter a query like “suggest a 7 day meal plan for a college student living in a dorm focusing on budget friendly and microwavable meals” and see a grouped set of responses synthesized from a variety of sources. That is surely a relatively uncommon query. I was going to prove that in the same was as Reid did, but when I enter it in Google Trends, I get a 400 error. Even a shortened version is searched so rarely it has no data.

The organic, non-A.I. search results for the long query are plentiful but do not exactly fulfill its specific criteria. Most of the links I saw are not microwave-only, or are simple lists not grouped into particular meal types. Nothing I could find specifically answers the question posed. In order to fulfill the query in the demo video, Google’s search engine has to look through everything it knows and find meals which cook in a microwave, and organize them into a daily plan of different meal types.

But Google is also blaming the novelty of the rocks query and the satirical information directly answering it for the failure of its A.I. features. In other words, it wants to say cool thing about its A.I. stuff is that it can handle unpopular or new queries by sifting through the web and merging together a bunch of stuff it finds. The bad thing about A.I. stuff, it turns out, is basically the same.

Benj Edwards, Ars Technica:

Here we see the fundamental flaw of the system: “AI Overviews are built to only show information that is backed up by top web results.” The design is based on the false assumption that Google’s page-ranking algorithm favors accurate results and not SEO-gamed garbage. Google Search has been broken for some time, and now the company is relying on those gamed and spam-filled results to feed its new AI model.

Reid says Google has made a bunch of changes to address the issues raised, but none of them fix a fundamental shift in A.I. results. Google used to be a directory — admittedly one ranked by mysterious criteria — allowing users to decide which results best fit their needs. It has slowly repositioned itself to being able to answer their queries with authority. Its A.I. answers are a more fulsome realization of features like Featured Snippets and the Answer Box. That is: instead of seeing options which may match their query, Google is now giving searchers singular answers. It has transformed from a referrer into an omniscient responder.

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Drew Harwell, Washington Post:

But the extent to which the United States evaluated or disregarded TikTok’s proposal, known as Project Texas, is likely to be a core point of dispute in court, where TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, are challenging the sale-or-ban law as an “unconstitutional assertion of power.”

The episode raises questions over whether the government, when presented with a way to address its concerns, chose instead to back an effort that would see the company sold to an American buyer, even though some of the issues officials have warned about — the opaque influence of its recommendation algorithm, the privacy of user data — probably would still be unresolved under new ownership.

You may recognize the deal Harwell is writing about if you read my exploration of the divestment law. While TikTok claimed in its lawsuit (PDF) that the Biden administration was the party responsible for cancelling this deal with CFIUS, I did not see that confirmed anywhere else. Harwell’s reporting appears to support TikTok’s side of events. Still, there is frustratingly little explanation for why the U.S. was unsatisfied with this settlement.

Krystal Hu and Sheila Dang, Reuters:

TikTok is working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm for its 170 million U.S. users that may result in a version that operates independently of its Chinese parent and be more palatable to American lawmakers who want to ban it, according to sources with direct knowledge of the efforts.

The work on splitting the source code ordered by TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance late last year predated a bill to force a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations that began gaining steam in Congress this year. The bill was signed into law in April.

TikTok says this story is “misleading and factually inaccurate” and reiterates that divestiture is, according to them, impossible. But TikTok already began preparing for this eventuality in 2020, so it is hard to believe the company would not want to figure out ways to make this possible should its current lawsuit fail and the law be allowed to stand.

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Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica:

But the judge apparently did not find Amazon’s denials completely persuasive. Viewing the FTC’s complaint “in the light most favorable to the FTC,” Judge John Chun concluded that “the allegations sufficiently indicate that Amazon had actual or constructive knowledge that its Prime sign-up and cancellation flows were misleading consumers.”

[…]

One such trick that Chun called out saw Amazon offering two-day free shipping with the click of a button at checkout that also signed customers up for Prime even if they didn’t complete the purchase.

“With the offer of Amazon Prime for the purpose of free shipping, reasonable consumers could assume that they would not proceed with signing up for Prime unless they also placed their order,” Chun said, ultimately rejecting Amazon’s claims that all of its “disclosures would be clear and conspicuous to any reasonable consumer.”

This is far from the only instance of scumbag design cited by Chun, and it is bizarre to me that anybody would defend choices like these.

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Apple finished naming what it — well, its “team of experts alongside a select group of artists […] songwriters, producers, and industry professionals” — believes are the hundred best albums of all time. Like pretty much every list of the type, it is overwhelmingly Anglocentric, there are obvious picks, surprise appearances good and bad, and snubs.

I am surprised the publication of this list has generated as much attention as it has. There is a whole Wall Street Journal article with more information about how it was put together, a Slate thinkpiece arguing this ranking “proves [Apple has] lost its way”, and a Variety article claiming it is more-or-less “rage bait”.

Frankly, none of this feels sincere. Not Apple’s list, and not the coverage treating it as meaningful art criticism. I am sure there are people who worked hard on it — Apple told the Journal “about 250” — and truly believe their rating carries weight. But it is fluff.

Make no mistake: this is a promotional exercise for Apple Music more than it is criticism. Sure, most lists of this type are also marketing for publications like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork and NME. Yet, for how tepid the opinions of each outlet often are, they have each given out bad reviews. We can therefore infer they have specific tastes and ideas about what separates great art from terrible art.

Apple has never said a record is bad. It has never made you question whether the artist is trying their best. It has never presented criticism so thorough it makes you wince on behalf of the people who created the album.

Perhaps the latter is a poor metric. After Steve Jobs’ death came a river of articles questioning the internal culture he fostered, with several calling him an “asshole”. But that is mixing up a mean streak and a critical eye — Jobs, apparently, had both. A fair critic can use their words to dismantle an entire project and explain why it works or, just as important, why it does not. The latter can hurt; ask any creative person who has been on the receiving end. Yet exploring why something is not good enough is an important skill to develop as both a critic and a listener.

Dan Brooks, Defector:

There has been a lot of discussion about what music criticism is for since streaming reduced the cost of listening to new songs to basically zero. The conceit is that before everything was free, the function of criticism was to tell listeners which albums to buy, but I don’t think that was ever it. The function of criticism is and has always been to complicate our sense of beauty. Good criticism of music we love — or, occasionally, really hate — increases the dimensions and therefore the volume of feeling. It exercises that part of ourselves which responds to art, making it stronger.

There are huge problems with the way music has historically been critiqued, most often along racial and cultural lines. There are still problems. We will always disagree about the fairness of music reviews and reviewers.

Apple’s list has nothing to do with any of that. It does not interrogate which albums are boring, expressionless, uncreative, derivative, inconsequential, inept, or artistically bankrupt. So why should we trust it to explain what is good? Apple’s ranking of albums lacks substance because it cannot say any of these things. Doing so would be a terrible idea for the company and for artists.

It is beyond my understanding why anyone seems to be under the impression this list is anything more than a business reminding you it operates a music streaming platform to which you can subscribe for eleven dollars per month.

Speaking of the app — some time after I complained there was no way in Apple Music to view the list, Apple added a full section, which I found via foursliced on Threads. It is actually not bad. There are stories about each album, all the reveal episodes from the radio show, and interviews.

You will note something missing, however: a way to play a given album. That is, one cannot visit this page in Apple Music, see an album on the list they are interested in, and simply tap to hear it. There are play buttons on the website and, if you are signed in with your Apple Music account, you can add them to your library. But I cannot find a way to do any of this from within the app.

Benjamin Mayo found a list, but I cannot through search or simply by browsing. Why is this not a more obvious feature? It makes me feel like a dummy.

Hey, remember that Apple Store I thought Tim Cook would visit in his Southeast Asia tour last month? It is scheduled to open in a few weeks and it looks pretty unique.

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The bad news: Apple shipped an alarming bug in iOS 17.5 which sometimes revealed photos previously deleted by the user and, in the process, created a reason for users to mistrust how their data is handled. This was made especially confusing by Apple’s lack of commentary.

The good news: Apple patched the bug within a week. Also, the lone story about deleted photos reappearing on a wiped iPad given to someone else was deleted and seems to be untrue.

The bad news: aside from acknowledging this “rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted”, there was still little information about exactly what happened. Users quite reasonably expect things they deleted to stay deleted, and when they do not, they are going to have some questions.

The good news: as I predicted, Apple gave an explanation to 9to5Mac, which generously allowed for it to be on background. Chance Miller:

One question many people had is how images from dates as far back as 2010 resurfaced because of this problem. After all, most people aren’t still using the same devices now as they were in 2010. Apple confirmed to me that iCloud Photos is not to be blamed for this. Instead, it all boils to the corrupt database entry that existed on the device’s file system itself.

A much more technically-minded answer was provided by Synacktiv, a security firm that reverse-engineered the bug fix release and compared it to the original 17.5 release.

Bugs are only as bad as the effects they have. I heard from multiple readers who said this bug damaged how much they trust iOS and Apple. This is self-selecting — I likely would not have heard from people who both experienced this bug and thought it was no big deal. I can imagine a normal user who does not read 9to5Mac and finding their deleted photos restored are still going to be spooked.

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Apple issued an update today which, it says, ought to patch a bug which resurfaced old and deleted photos:

This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.

I suppose even a “rare” bug would, at Apple’s scale, impact lots of people. I heard from multiple readers who said they, too, saw presumed deleted photos reappear.

The thing about these bare release notes — which are not yet on Apple’s support site — is how they do not really answer reasonable questions about what happened. It is implied that the photos in question may have been marked for deletion and were visibly hidden from users, but were not actually removed under an old iOS version. Updating to iOS 17.5 revealed these dormant photos.

Bugs happen and they suck, but a bug like this really sucks — especially since so many of us sync so much of our data between our devices. This makes me question the quality of the Photos app, iCloud, and the file system overall.

Also, the anecdote of photos being restored to the same device after it had been wiped has been deleted from Reddit. I have not seen the same claim anywhere else which makes me think this was some sort of user error.

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