NSO Group Banned From Using or Supplying WhatsApp Exploits ⇥ courthousenews.com

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.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: Incredibly Private and Secure Safari Web Browsing ⇥ magiclasso.co

My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Pixel Envy this week.

With over 5,000 five star reviews, Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Designed from the ground up to protect your privacy, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances. It stops you from being followed by ads around the web and, with App Ad Blocking, it stops your app usage being harvested by ad networks.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

The New MacBook Pro Is €35 Less Expensive in E.U. Countries, Ships Without a Charger ⇥ macrumors.com

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 franc less, but a charger is 59 franc. 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 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: […]

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

OpenAI and Nvidia Are at the Centre of a Trillion-Dollar Circular Investment Economy ⇥ bloomberg.com

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.

The New ‘Foreign Influence’ Scare ⇥ 404media.co

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.

More on Liquid Glass ⇥ tidbits.com

Adam Engst, TidBits:

So, no, I don’t want tools that “give way to content” or “shrink to bring focus to the content.” When I’m cooking, I want my knives, spatulas, measuring spoons, and the like exactly where they belong, so they’re instantly at hand. My Mac is set up in much the same way, with every app appearing exactly where I expect and, for the most part, providing an interface that looks and works as I want.

Engst pointedly differentiates “productivity apps — real tools” from apps permitting a more passive consumption of media. It may make more sense for controls to fade away in something like a media player. In most of the apps I use every day, however, I want to have obvious and immediate access to the tools I need.

Here is another cooking analogy: a minimum requirement, for me, for a stove is for it to be equipped with physical knobs. I do not want to be hunting for the magic capacitive spot or pressing a +/– toggle to change a burner’s setting. The latter options seem more elegant; they give the impression of refinement. But they are less effective for the same job because they do not allow for real-world practicality.

Engst also wrote a well-illustrated guide to the many accessibility settings and hidden preferences to configure Apple’s operating systems for different contrast and usability preferences. A notable issue with these settings is that some properties of Liquid Glass are not truly the fault of transparency. Instead, a Liquid Glass element — like Control Centre — might be reflecting the colours around it, giving the impression of translucency without actually being translucent. This effect does not appear in window-specific screenshots when you have “Reduce Transparency” turned on so, as Engst writes, it makes it better for creating screenshots for documentation. But it does mean that, while the “Reduce Transparency” setting is literally true, it feels dishonest.

Raluca Budiu, of Nielsen Norman Group, published a critical assessment of Liquid Glass with a number of agreeable points. The customized iMessage conversation is appropriately hideous. However, I found the argument against the more prominent Search button in many apps unconvincing:

Search in earlier versions of iOS lived at the top of the page. In Mail or Messages, users had to scroll down to reveal the bar. It wasn’t the most discoverable pattern, but years of repetition made it second nature.

Now, in iOS 26, search has migrated to the bottom of the screen and is always visible. For newcomers this might feel easier to find, but for long‑time users it’s a jarring break from habit that slows them down until the new pattern becomes ingrained. (Even if the new pattern might prove beneficial over time, existing users must relearn it, which in the short run means lost productivity and added frustration.)

It is not often I see NNG criticizing an improvement in making a control more obvious. While I suppose it is true that users will need to understand they can simply tap the search button instead of remembering to scroll for the hidden field, I cannot imagine this relearning is as arduous as the long-term impact of hiding the search function.

What is disappointing is that the hidden search field still exists in a handful of places. Most notably, Music on iOS 26 still has two different kinds of Search: the one you can get to by tapping on the button in the bottom-right, and the locally-scoped one you will find at the top of views like Playlists.

Meta Takes a Principled Stance Against Having Principles ⇥ wbez.org

In January, Mark Zuckerberg bade farewell to the ostensibly censorial administration of Joe Biden, welcoming in the nominally free speech offered by Donald Trump’s then-incoming presidency. The complaints about Biden aired by Zuckerberg on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast were weak, misleading, and silly, but they helped continue the narrative championed by many U.S. politicians who are now in a position to help Meta.

In a video announcing the changes to the company’s moderation policy, Zuckerberg lamented the “censorship” users have faced, and promised to collaborate with the government to fight those demands:

Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.

This explanation is mostly nonsense — and dishonest.

Nader Issa, WBEZ Chicago:

At the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, a Facebook group used by nearly 80,000 people to report sightings of federal immigration agents in the Chicago area has been taken down by the social media giant Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

The group, called “ICE Sighting-Chicagoland,” has been increasingly used over the last five weeks of “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s intense deportation campaign, to warn neighbors that federal agents are near schools, grocery stores and other community staples so they can take steps to protect themselves.

If this group was actually used for “coordinated harm”, as Meta claims, surely it or the Department of Justice could give some specific examples. I could only find one archived copy of the page and I see nothing of the sort in what is admittedly a handful of posts. I also do not see anything looking remotely like “coordinated harm” in the posts cached by Google.

The point is not Meta’s hypocrisy on what it will remove compared to what it will defend, but what this hypocrisy achieves. Meta spent years using a socially conscious image to help marginalized people feel safer, albeit only after a long history of controversy over privacy violations, harassment, and gender-based abuse (PDF).

Now it is using a combination of regressive policies and assisting the government’s domestic quasi-military invasions to ingratiate itself with this administration. If Meta were trying to appeal to the public or advertisers, it would not be so subservient to this administration — people in the U.S. are more suspicious of government power than in recent memory, and disapprove of ICE. Meta is completely on-board with this administration’s demands. If there is a line these companies will not cross, we might find it if we reach it.

D’Angelo Dies Aged 51 ⇥ variety.com

Steven J. Horowitz and Jem Aswad, Variety:

D’Angelo, a legendary R&B singer who helped pioneer neo-soul, has died. He was 51.

You know how an artist page on Apple Music might have, above the row of their albums, a selection of “Essential Albums”? All three of D’Angelo’s records are deservedly listed as “Essential” on his page. D’Angelo made the kind of music that felt instantly timeless; classic and contemporary in equal measure. Everything he made felt distinctly him. This one hurts.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: Block Ads in iPhone, iPad, and Mac Apps ⇥ magiclasso.co

Do you want to block ads and trackers across all apps on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac — not just in Safari?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you.

Magic Lasso: No ads, No trackers, No annoyances, No worries

The new App Ad Blocking feature in Magic Lasso Adblock v5.0 builds upon our powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking, extending protection to:

  • News apps

  • Social media

  • Games

  • Other browsers like Chrome and Firefox

All ad blocking is done directly on your device, using a fast, efficient Swift-based architecture that follows our strict zero data collection policy.

With over 5,000 five star reviews, it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

Apple Has Discontinued the Clips App You Probably Forgot About ⇥ macrumors.com

Eric Slivka, MacRumors:

Apple has essentially discontinued Clips, its video-editing app designed to allow users to combine video clips, images, and photos with voice-based titles, music, filters, and graphics to create enhanced videos that can be shared on social media sites.

I do not know what Slivka means by “essentially”; Apple says it is gone, though it remains listed in the “Creativity” category on Apple’s first-party apps webpage. This is not surprising to me. Before it was pulled offline, it was most recently updated in May 2024.

I am truly curious about the likely lifespan of a few recent Apple apps. How much longer will Invites last? Sports seems like it could be around for longer, but I am a little worried about Classical, which still does not have a Mac app.

Canadian Liberals Introduce Second, Less-Controversial Border Bill, but Still Want to Pass the First One With Creepiness Intact ⇥ cbc.ca

Michael Geist:

he government today reversed course on its ill-advised anti-privacy measures in Bill C-2, introducing a new border bill with the lawful access provisions (Parts 14 and 15) removed. The move is welcome given the widespread opposition to provisions that would have created the power to demand warrantless access to information from any provider of a service in Canada and increased the surveillance on Canadian networks. The sheer breadth of this proposed system was truly unprecedented and appeared entirely inconsistent with Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. […]

While the removal of those sections is a positive sign, Geist’s celebration is not the full story.

Jim Bronskill, Canadian Press:

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said the government would still pursue passage of the first bill, C-2, which proposes giving authorities new powers to search mail and access personal information.

The move means the federal border security proposals will proceed through Parliament on two separate legislative tracks, with Bill C-12 likely moving ahead first.

Bill C-2 would then make its way through Parliament, with elements included in the new C-12 deleted to avoid duplication.

Last legislative session, and for the past three years, the Liberals have been pitching a much-needed update to our privacy laws. Anandasangaree voted in favour of it. Yet he is also responsible for this privacy hostile legislation that, for some reason, this government is fighting for. And, though the Conservatives are presently objecting to the privacy violating clauses in C–2, Geist points out that “[s]uccessive governments — both Liberal and Conservative — have tried to bring in lawful access” of similar nature. We need to take privacy seriously, not with the cynicism of these two parties.

‘How Did Somebody Make This?’ ⇥ theoatmeal.com

Matthew Inman:

AI has accelerated our abilities like that drug from the movie Limitless. It’s writing our papers, analyzing our bloodwork, and planning our weddings. Now your average Keith has the critical thinking abilities of a supercomputer running at ten-trilion teraclops per floppyshart.

It enables ordinary minds to have extraordinary abilities.

Inman’s thoughts on A.I. tools for creativity are similar to my own. There are plenty of ways to use them to lighten the load on mundane and uncreative tasks. But whole-cloth generation in a fake social network is such a poor outcome.

I got the title of this post from near the top of the comic. It will stick with me. A good question to ask when looking at an artwork is “who made this?”, and learning more about what motivated them and what influences they had. This is a vast opportunity for learning about art of all mediums, and it even applies to commercial projects. Sometimes I look up the portfolios of photographers I find on stock image sites; their non-stock work is often interesting and different. There is potential for asking both questions of A.I.-assisted works in the hands of interesting artists. But it is too often a tool used to circumvent the process entirely, producing work that has nothing to offer beyond its technical accomplishment.

We all have ordinary minds that have been shaped by time and practice to be able to do different extraordinary things. Each of us cannot do most of the skill-dependent things most other people in the world can do. In the right hands, A.I. tools can help produce some fantastic art, but the art probably will not come from the collective digital mind of everything scraped from the internet. It comes from people who think creatively and apply technology to that.

‘Give Me a Single Reason Why Sora 2 Should Exist’ ⇥ youtube.com

The technical accomplishments of Sora 2 are laudable and, frankly, extraordinary. Just watch the first two minutes of the live-streamed announcement, or the examples from six minutes onward. If the ability to turn a few words into all kinds of video — from photorealistic to animated — with sound does not blow your mind, I do not know what will. If I went back in time to just ten years ago to show this to myself, I would have assumed my future self came from far, far in the future.

But OpenAI, like many of its peers, is not super interested in bragging about how clever this technology is in the videos its product generates. Videos made with Sora include a “Sora” watermark that moves to a different location around the margins every few seconds, making it more difficult but not impossible to crop. But nowhere does it say “A.I. generated” on the video. And why not? Surely OpenAI ought to be proud of its achievements.

The wildest thing to me about the Sora app is that it is a social network. It looks like TikTok. You can follow users and scroll through videos in a “For You” stream-of-unconsciousness. Mine is full of several videos gutting the soul of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and replacing it with whining about the barest of restrictions enacted by OpenAI.

The social impact of this — and the new Vibes feed in Meta’s A.I. app — is a realization of an “A.I. television” that will, surely, have grave consequences because the most popular A.I. services care way too much about growth and proving their own cleverness. Sure, there are guardrails and limitations. But, as Hank Green says in a righteously ranty video, “the friction matters”.

This technology may, to some extent, break down the barriers involved in making video, but we should not pretend that is the objective here, or even halfway considered by any of these A.I. companies. They want to make gimmicks. They want to do the problems of the last twenty years of social media, but all of it is fake, and they want to call that “innovation”. I will echo Green’s call: give me a single reason why this should exist.

Apple Is Helping the U.S. Government Chill Speech on ICE ⇥ mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai:

I don’t think the problem is really Tim Cook or whoever at Apple made the ICEBlock decision last week. The current situation is just the symptom of a decision made long ago: for Apple to be a choke point for app distribution. If your solution to government overreach is to depend on the right person being in charge, who will say no, you’ve already lost.

A well articulated argument. As if to prove Tsai’s point, one of the apps Apple removed has nothing to do with the alleged safety concerns for ICE officers.

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

With this particularly corrupt U.S. administration, it is hard not to see Apple’s complicity in the context of other official matters in the United States and abroad. Is it using fealty as a bargaining chip? Or is it just spineless in the face of domestic pressure without corporate-friendly justification? And which one is more concerning or embarrassing?

Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the E.U. ⇥ ccc.de

Thorin Klosowski, Techdirt:

The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people.

Elina Eickstädt, Chaos Computer Club:

Just a quick reminder: Client-side scanning is not only error-prone nonsense, but would also be illegal from the outset. This is because an obligation to monitor chats to the planned abstruse extent is disproportionate and would also contradict the European Court of Justice. Indiscriminate scanning of all chat communication content represents the most serious infringement of fundamental rights imaginable, eclipsing even the brazen idea of data retention.

Fighting over Chat Control is becoming an annual tradition.

U.S. State Department Wants to Use Tech Companies as Leverage Over European Policy ⇥ techpolicy.press

Dean Jackson, Tech Policy Press:

The Trump administration’s ambitions have little to do with safeguarding free expression from tyranny. If they did, the administration would not be searching for cherry-picked examples of content removed under the DSA. Instead, they are using tech policy at the State Department as a tool in their project to reshape the post-war international order in Trump’s image — at the expense of the transatlantic alliance and, potentially, the lives and liberties of activists in authoritarian settings who formerly accepted grants from the US government.

One of the problems with the world tech industry being consolidated in the United States is the country’s ability to use it as leverage against reasonable laws and local standards. This has been the case for decades, but it is more worrisome as tech companies have become sprawling behemoths dominating a range of markets, and — obviously — with this particular president in the White House.

The Antennagate Code Patch ⇥ hachyderm.io

Yes, it is 2025, but Sam Henri Gold decided to pick apart the changes between iOS 4.0 and iOS 4.0.1, which changed the number of bars shown in moderate-to-low reception areas:

The actual calculation is dead simple. When converting signal strength to bars, CommCenter loads each threshold from memory and compares until it finds the right range.

[…]

For example, here you need -107 [dBm] or better signal to see 3 bars.

These values are not the same as those found by AnandTech in 2010, but they are close. And, as Richard Gaywood pointed out at the time, the effect of the attenuation could bring a five-bar signal down to a single bar simply because iOS used to display five bars even in areas with mediocre coverage.

Cory Doctorow Turned His Word of the Year Into a Whole Book ⇥ theguardian.com

In January 2023, Cory Doctorow described the way social media evolves, eventually broadening the theory and giving it the name “enshittification”:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

It did not matter that Doctorow’s original essay is based on something untrue. While there is possibly “a mass exodus [underway from] Facebook” — given the company’s 2024 transition to reporting users of its “family of apps” instead of individual products — in the quarters following Doctorow’s article, Meta posted growing numbers (PDF) of Facebook users. The vibe in Doctorow’s writing was compelling. People started throwing around “enshittification” to describe the worsening of all kinds of online services, and then the analog world, and then everything. Absolutely everything.

The American Dialect Society made “enshittification” its word of the year.

Before all that, however, Doctorow first used “enshittification” to describe Amazon. Now, Doctorow is about to release a new book that manages to stretch this theory to 352 pages. If I sound skeptical, it is because I read an excerpt published in the Guardian, expanding upon the blog post about Amazon that introduced the term. This is a company I entirely believe is deserving of this kind of scorn. Doctorow correctly observes Amazon’s founding premise was to sell products for remarkably low prices, famously sacrificing profitability in its nascent years, a promise that disintegrated as it became the online shopping destination.

Shopping on Amazon sucks now. It sounds, based on Doctorow’s article, like it also sucks to sell on Amazon now, too. But some of Doctorow’s criticisms ring hollow. For example:

Not that you can find lower prices through anything as simple as sorting your search results by price. The merchants that dominate the search listings will play games with quantity to have the result with the lowest price, even if the price per unit is much higher. For example, a four-pack of AAs priced at $3.99 is more expensive per battery than a 16-pack priced at $10 (ie $1 versus $0.63), but sort-by-lowest-price will bury the better deal on the third or fourth page of results.

Amazon’s search engine is pretty terrible, but this is just normal discounts-at-scale stuff. If it were ranked per-unit instead, this 800-count pack would probably rank near the top at just $0.19 each, but then Doctorow might complain about the company putting a $150 box of batteries as one of the lowest-priced items.

Doctorow:

Now Amazon is in the terminal stage. We’re all still stuck to the platform, but we get less and less value out of it. And because we’re all still there, buying Prime and starting (and ending) our purchase planning with Amazon’s enshittified search results, the merchants who rely on selling to us are stuck there, too, earning less and less from every sale.

I am not sure what I am meant to take from the “terminal” diagnosis of Amazon. I agree it all sucks. But there are plenty of thriving businesses that treat their customers with contempt — Adobe, Rogers, Canadian airlines — and I do not see how one of the most valuable and, now, profitable companies on the planet is inching toward death’s door.

I will probably read the book. I am hoping for something more nuanced, but perhaps I am expecting too much when there is a poop emoji on the cover.

The Future of the Sneaker Business First Requires a Future ⇥ defector.com

Corbin Smith, Defector (gift link):

Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Under Armour: These companies do not actually spin thread, tan leather, vulcanize rubber, or even put together the shoe. They design prototypes of a product and then facilitate all the actions necessary to make money off it. They pressure supplies and manufacturers at every level of the manufacturing process, send the product all over the world, sell it at a markup. The people in the brand offices coordinate that labor; the people in those factories actually do it. This is globalization, and it encompasses every transaction in the world economy.

To walk the floor at The Materials Show, an industry event that goes down four times a year — there’s two in Portland, home of Nike, Adidas of America, and several other major activewear concerns, and another pair in Boston, the home of New Balance — is to see that grand abstraction made flesh. In the aisles, a parade of designers, materials acquisition people, and executives clad in Activewear Professional go from booth to booth, look at threads and rubbers and leathers, chat with vendors, and take little notes. “The show is about sourcing raw materials, mostly for the footwear industry,” Hisham Muhareb, the founder and owner of The Materials Show, tells me. “Nike, Adidas, Columbia, Reebok, New Balance — their product teams come here and they meet new vendors, meet their old vendors, talk about materials, components, and process.”

So you can see why I needed to be there. […]

I savoured this essay when I first read it a couple of days ago, and it has been sitting with me ever since. It is tremendous. It is the kind of thing that makes me love paying for Defector, maintaining the kind of subscriber relationship a big corporation could only dream about. You might not care much about shoes or apparel, but I think you will appreciate this article anyway.

Microsoft Uses a Thousand Words to Justify Some New Office Icons ⇥ microsoft.design

I promise I will end the gratuitous and uncomfortable self-quoting soon, but there are so many smart replies to what I wrote about Liquid Glass that I feel I need to point you to them.

Jeff Johnson, quoting me:

“So far, Apple justifies this redesign, basically, by saying it is self-evidently good”

This *should* be the justification. In other words, you don’t really need to justify something that’s self-evidently good, only something that’s self-evidently bad. This is the problem — the badness of Liquid Glass — not the lack of justification.

I completely agree. My sentence continues “…self-evidently good for all of its platforms to look the same”. I wish it was obvious why this should be the case, not something that was preemptively defended.

Take, for example, this long article by Jon Friedman of Microsoft announcing the rollout of new application icons:

[…] That’s the paradigm shift; Microsoft 365 has always empowered productivity but the driving force of the UX was often app features or the tools themselves. Today, the driving force is the outcome you desire.

With that paradigm shift come significant changes to the UX discipline itself and how we approach product making. Longer cycles of heads-down development used to be followed by a big reveal of big changes. Today, with model capabilities rapidly emerging and our learning as UX practitioners rapidly advancing — including becoming more technical as a discipline — product evolution is happening in continuous waves. Research shows changes to iconography are almost always received as a signal for product changes and in an era of ongoing, smaller shifts, the icons should reflect that. As such, we embraced the idea of “evolution, not revolution” throughout our design process.

This try-hard justification made me think of Johnson’s post. It is over a thousand words and I do not believe I view these icons differently after finishing it. The new icons are fine — very Microsoft, in that the company has produced some spectacular-looking 3D renders and illustrations completely unrelated to the actual icons I will be seeing on my desktop when this update is released.