Polarization in the United States Has Become the World’s Side Hustle ⇥ 404media.co

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.

Meta’s Accounting of Its Louisiana Data Centre ‘Strains Credibility’ ⇥ wsj.com

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”.

A.I. Mania Looks and Feels Bigger Than the .Com Bubble ⇥ crazystupidtech.com

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.

We Need to Stop Talking About the Erosion of Privacy as Though It Is Inevitable ⇥ techdirt.com

Rohan Grover and Josh Widera, Techdirt:

Taking data disaffection into consideration, digital privacy is a cultural issue – not an individual responsibility – and one that cannot be addressed with personal choice and consent. To be clear, comprehensive data privacy law and changing behavior are both important. But storytelling can also play a powerful role in shaping how people think and feel about the world around them.

The correct answer to corporate and government contempt for our privacy must be in legislation. A systemic problem is not solved by each of us individually fiddling with confusing settings. But we do not get to adequate laws by treating this as a lost argument.

European Commission Proposes Sweeping Changes to A.I. And Privacy Policies ⇥ theguardian.com

Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian:

The European Commission has been accused of “a massive rollback” of the EU’s digital rules after announcing proposals to delay central parts of the Artificial Intelligence Act and water down its landmark data protection regulation.

If agreed, the changes would make it easier for tech firms to use personal data to train AI models without asking for consent, and try to end “cookie banner fatigue” by reducing the number times internet users have to give their permission to being tracked on the internet.

If you are annoyed about cookie banners, get ready to have that dialled back — maybe, a bit. The proposed changes will allow users to set their cookie preference in their web browser. But media companies will be free to ignore those automatic signals and ask for your permission to set cookies anyway. Also, the circumstances under which consent is not required will be broadened, but websites will still need to ask before using cookies for targeted advertising. Oh, and consent is still required by laws elsewhere and, until policies are harmonized around the world, consent banners are here to stay. Even if everyone copies the proposed changes for the E.U., you will still see a lot of these banners if you spend a lot of time reading news.

I think relying on individual consent is ridiculous. If that is the best we can do, instead of outlawing creepy and privacy-hostile behaviour in its entirety, then a browser preference seems fine. It is too bad the Do Not Track standard, originally proposed by the U.S. FTC, was not mandatory for advertisers to follow, and that its replacement is not well supported either. Maybe this is the legislative push it needs.

My knee-jerk reaction to the weakening of A.I. regulation is that it is yet more evidence of a corporate-influenced race to the bottom. This is overly simplistic, however. It is true that A.I. companies in the U.S. love the country’s relatively lax regulatory environment, though it is apparently not lax enough. But the other country leading the charge on A.I. is heavily-regulated China which is, perhaps, a special case.

The E.U.’s proposal seems to be a compromise position for an industry that does not want to compromise. It just wants to ingest everything, explore what it can generate without constraint, and be completely insulated from the consequences. So I am skeptical these changes will move the needle on whether the E.U. can become an A.I. powerhouse any more than its current policies. That is not a knock against the E.U. specifically; all of the non-U.S. countries, including mine, are struggling to get their sweet piece of the trillion-dollar pie. I suspect the reason the money cannon has not been pointed at us has less to do with regulation, or culture, or geography. I bet it is more likely the same reason as why investment banking lives in places like New York and London and not, say, in small towns scattered across the Canadian Shield.

A.I. Competition Might Not Disrupt Google ⇥ bloomberg.com

Leah Nylen, Bloomberg:

Google is certainly unlikely to be passive now that a judge has given it the green light to continue using the money derived from its monopolies to pay for the development and dominance of its AI tools.

[…]

The Acquired podcast hosts honed in on this point about complementarity in discussing why they believe Google will likely do better than its AI rivals in the long run. Only Google has the advantage of up-to-date information from its search monopoly and YouTube. It has massive computing resources from its main business and its cloud computing arm. It has the ability to personalize models thanks to its massive collection of information about users. And it has lots and lots of money.

There was a brief moment in early 2023 when some commentators were certain Google would face serious competition from the then-recent arrival of A.I. results in Bing. Those were quaint times. Microsoft still insists Bing is growing its market share, which might be true, but only barely. For most people, Google’s monopoly is fairly durable, and it will probably continue as it fights ChatGPT, specifically, not Copilot in Bing.

To Be Clear, Instagram Was Acquired to Eliminate a Competitor, and That Was Fine With the FTC ⇥ theverge.com

Casey Newton and Nilay Patel, the Verge, in July 2020:

It’s a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook, Zuckerberg said in a reply. “There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”

[…]

Forty-five minutes later, Zuckerberg sent a carefully worded clarification to his earlier, looser remarks.

You have read these emails before, I am sure, but I think it is worth a reminder post-trial.

The latter email was written for the very circumstance of this thread being found. You have to imagine that, in the forty-five minute break after which Zuckerberg replied to himself to clarify he did not actually intend to write the illegal thing, he chatted with the CFO — to whom he was emailing his plans to do illegal things — and maybe some lawyers, and they advised him it might look bad if regulators looked at this.

Barbara Ortutay, the Associated Press, earlier this week following the results of the trial:

During his April testimony, Zuckerberg pushed back against claims that Facebook bought Instagram to neutralize a threat. In his line of questioning, FTC attorney Daniel Matheson repeatedly brought up emails — many of them more than a decade old — written by Zuckerberg and his associates before and after the acquisition of Instagram.

While acknowledging the documents, Zuckerberg has often sought to downplay the contents, saying he wrote the emails early in the acquisition process and that the notes did not fully capture the scope of his interest in the company. But the case was not about the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago, which the FTC approved at the time, but about whether Meta holds a monopoly now. Prosecutors, Boasberg wrote in the ruling, could only win if they proved “current or imminent legal violation.”

To describe his in-trial response as “push[ing] back” and “downplay[ing]” is, I think, charitable. Zuckerberg acknowledged the company struggled to build competitive apps independently.

The FTC could have reviewed these frank and incriminating emails when it approved the acquisition in 2012. Yet, to repeat myself, it approved the acquisition anyhow. The United States has, since the mid-1970s, exercised a pretty weak enforcement of its antitrust laws compared to the way it policed corporate size before. It allowed this kind of stuff to happen in the first place, where one goal of the acquisition was explicitly to eliminate competition. Whether Instagram would exist today as an independent company is a great hypothetical question, and the FTC could have laid the groundwork to answering it in 2012.

Sketch ‘Copenhagen’ Update Adds Custom Liquid Glass Implementation ⇥ sketch.com

Freddie Harrison of Sketch:

Our latest update — Copenhagen — features a major redesign of Sketch’s UI. Redesigns like this don’t happen often. In fact, our last one was in 2020, when Apple launched macOS Big Sur.

Just like Big Sur, macOS Tahoe has brought about a whole new design language and — for teams like ours making pro tools — a whole new approach to consider for our UI.

This probably will not convert the kind of person who finds Liquid Glass revolting in its entirety, but I think this implementation is thoughtful and well-considered. Note, too, that Apple itself has not shipped any of its own Mac pro apps with Liquid Glass changes. The choices made by the Sketch team are instructional.

Meta Prevails in U.S. Antitrust Case ⇥ cnbc.com

Jonathan Vanian, CNBC:

Meta won its high-profile antitrust case against the Federal Trade Commission, which had accused the company of holding a monopoly in social networking.

In a memorandum opinion released Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the FTC failed to prove its argument. The case, initially filed by the FTC five years ago, centered on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now,” Boasberg said in the filing. “The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so. A judgment so stating shall issue this day.”

Briefly, I think the personal jabs at former FTC Khan by Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the lobbying group Chamber of Progress, are worth addressing:

A decisive, but not remotely surprising, loss for one of Lina Khan’s most prominent anti-big tech cases.

[…]

Brutal loss for Khan.

Kovacevich has a real axe to grind. In his first X thread about the suit — originally filed under the first Trump administration — Kovacevich does not take such a personal tone. In fact, he never mentioned then-FTC chair Joseph Simons on X during Simons’ entire tenure. But he tweeted about Khan by name incessantly during and after her time running the Commission. Strange guy.

As for the case itself, there are two things I think are true: the FTC’s argument was improbable at best, and Boasberg’s decision (PDF) is kind of bananas. (In case that link disappears, I have also put it on Dropbox.) You can read it for yourself; it is not a particularly dense text. While the judge accepts loads of evidence from Meta’s side with little snark, he undermines the credibility of C. Scott Hemphill, an expert witness who offered testimony, on the basis that he advocated for this very investigation of Meta’s market power. It is pretty clear throughout he barely believes the FTC’s argument is valid. And, based on the way it was presented, I find it difficult to disagree.

The thing that unlocked for me in reading this opinion is that the FTC created a market definition in which few platforms other than classic Facebook and Instagram lived which, almost by definition, meant that Meta monopolized the market. (What about WhatsApp? you might ask; the judge argues the FTC’s own definition of the market excludes WhatsApp from consideration.) Meta’s argument, though, is that the company no longer exists in that market at all. Its competitors are not Snapchat and MeWe; they are TikTok and YouTube. Meta is now fully an entertainment company whether users like it or not:

Nor is it clear that users want more friend posts. True, they report on surveys that they do. […] But their actions tell a different story.

What follows on page 33 is an almost entirely redacted paragraph, aside from the following lines:

[…] Instead, what users really seem to want is Reels. Meta measured the effect of Reels […] An equivalent experiment on Facebook found […]

My single ellipses are for readability but do not tell the story of how much text is redacted. Just imagine several lines of black bars in their place each time. The paragraph ends:

So whatever users might say they desire, what seems to draw them to Meta’s apps is not marginal posts from marginal friends, but unconnected videos picked just for them. Meta’s shift to the latter does not reveal monopoly power so much as a profit-maximizing corporation giving its customers what they want.

We have no idea if Meta’s experiments measured qualitative or more quantitative data. I suspect it is the latter since that is what Meta focuses on; it has reported more time spent (PDF) in its apps thanks largely to Reels. What Meta has built with the results of these experiments is personalized television. Facebook and Instagram began as utilities, and they are now fully entertainment, thereby justifying their legal claim. And, yeah, absolutely — that is the choice Meta made. The judge writes of the “small fortune in dollars and resources” (page 54) it cost Meta to change strategy, spending “around $4 billion on Reels last year and is on track to spend about $4.5 billion this year” without accounting for its reduced ad load.

What the FTC unsuccessfully tried to argue is, more or less, that Meta could only have mounted this competitive defence because it purchased Instagram in 2012, even as it maintains a monopoly in the market segment the FTC created. Boasberg did not buy this argument in part because competition for users’ time is finite, and the data shows users would rather scroll through videos than to briefly check friends’ updates and then go do something else (pages 64–65):

True enough, but TikTok has a social graph, too. It lets users follow people they know and has tried to make mapping those offline connections a bigger part of the app. It prompts users to import their list of Facebook and Instagram friends as well as their phone contacts […] TikTok has also added a Friends tab, which contains only posts created or reshared by accounts that the user follows and that follow the user back.

To be sure, TikTok’s social graph has not achieved great success. A TikTok executive estimated that fewer than 10% of users import their contacts. Meanwhile, users spend only about 1% of time on the app watching videos in the Friends tab.

Then again, these features are now also ancillary on Facebook and Instagram. […]

To be sure, TikTok is not used in remotely the same way as Facebook and Instagram were, but I will still use it as a retort to the FTC because Facebook and Instagram are now TikTok clones anyway. It is a bad argument, but it is more compelling than the one the FTC presented.

Alberta Government Invokes Notwithstanding Clause to Override Legal Challenges to Anti-Trans Legislation ⇥ cbc.ca

Jason Markusoff, CBC News:

This broad exemption from Charter rights, used sparingly in Alberta over the 43 years of the notwithstanding clause’s existence, is being invoked for the second, third and fourth time within a month, following Premier Danielle Smith’s wielding of it to end the teachers’ strike.

But Albertans can understand which Charter rights one of the laws the government’s restrictions on gender-affirming surgery and treatment for teens might have violated.

Albertans know because a Court of King’s Bench justice told us so in her ruling whose injunction blocked the ban from taking effect on gender dysphoric young people living in this province.

The shamelessness of this government is matched only by its viciousness. It is functionally treating its need for hostility against transgender people as a kind of emergency — during trans awareness week, no less.

Testing Microsoft’s Copilot Ads ⇥ theverge.com

Microsoft, like a lot of tech companies, sincerely believes we want to have conversations with our computers. It makes ads showing how Copilot can answer questions based on what is visible onscreen and with apparent knowledge of a user’s personal context.

Or can it?

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, the Verge:

I spent a week with Copilot, asking it the same questions Microsoft has in its ads, and tried to get help with tasks I’d find useful. And time after time, Copilot got things wrong, made stuff up, and spoke to me like I was a child.

There are excuses people make up for artificial intelligence features — ways to explain away its inconsistencies and unreliability. None of those need to be invoked here. This is a major corporation orientating its entire strategy around features that simply do not work as advertised.

The Mac Pro Is, Quite Obviously, ‘On the Back Burner’, According to Mark Gurman ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart when Apple finally added an M2 Ultra processor to the tower in mid-2023, making it one of the very last Macs to switch from Intel to Apple Silicon—surely this would mean that the computer would at least be updated once every year or two, like the Mac Studio has been? But Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Mac Pro buyers shouldn’t get their hopes up for new hardware in 2026.

Gurman says that the tower is “on the back burner” at Apple and that the company is “focused on a new Mac Studio” for the next-generation M5 Ultra chip that is in the works. As we reported earlier this year, Apple doesn’t have plans to design or release an M4 Ultra, and the Mac Studio refresh from this spring included an M3 Ultra alongside the M4 Max.

This is as unsurprising as it is disappointing. There used to be a time when the high-end desktop Mac was expensive but attainable, with clear differentiation from the iMac and, later, Mac Mini. It was the one for computationally difficult work.

But the Apple Silicon era has granted high CPU capability — if not GPU performance — to computers across the lineup. If you believe benchmarks, the 2024 Mac Mini gets better CPU scores in single and multi-core than the best-performing Mac Pro from just one year earlier. (The Mac Pro gets way better GPU performance at least in part because it has sixty cores to the Mini’s twenty.) And, sure, that is one test; I am sure the Pro could run circles around the Mini if it were being used intensively all day long. Still, it shows just how fast Apple is moving with the standard Mx chips compared to the higher-spec variants.

The Apple Silicon era has also ended the era of expandability in the Mac. The Mac Pro shipping today is differentiated from the Studio by having an older chip, and a handful of limited PCI expansion slots. All this could be yours starting at nine thousand dollars in Canada. Nine grand!

I remember when this model was the Mac you saw in recording studios, editing bays, and science labs. Then it became the halo supercar in the lineup. Now? It feels like a bizarre collectible.

Hit by a Truck

On May 3, my wife was hit by a semi truck while driving to work.

What happened is simple. She was driving in the third lane of a four-lane one-way road, approaching some roadworks in lanes one and two. The truck driver, travelling in the second lane, moved into the third lane and “did not see” — a statement as unbelievable as it is redundant — the Golf with my wife inside. She noticed what was happening in her mirror and accelerated to try and create more space behind, but a collision could not be avoided. The truck driver hit the Golf on the driver’s side above the rear wheel, spinning the car into the truck’s path, then pushed it from the side until he stopped.

A Volkswagen Golf is perpendicular to the front of a large semi truck that crashed into it.

This was the photo my wife sent me after the crash. The most important outcome is that she was able to walk away unscathed. It was a slow impact, so the truck driver was able to drive away. But our Volkswagen Golf was damaged enough to be written off.

After it was towed to a body shop and the assessment was completed, our insurance company declared it a total loss and paid out $19,600 based on the price of comparable cars in our area. This is the point at which I learned auto insurance companies do not write off a car because it costs more to fix than to simply pay someone out. They do so after factoring in salvage value and room for error on the repair estimate.

A Volkswagen Golf is pictured with crumpled drivers'-side bodywork.

As we got paid, I found our ruined Golf on a salvage auction website with a damage estimate of $12,986.17. Factoring in the amount the insurance company paid us, it needed to sell for at least $6,614 for them to come out ahead. I am not sure it did. While the final auction sale price was not made public — I am not sure why — the highest bid I saw was $2,400.

Some people get excited for a write-off because it means they can go shopping. My wife and I dreaded it. We liked our Golf, but Volkswagen no longer imports the regular model to Canada — we only get the GTI and the Golf R, both of which are much more expensive. (Also, the eighth-generation Golf is not quite as nice as the one we had.) We wanted to keep our relatively small, relatively inexpensive hatchback. But auto manufacturers have spent the seven years since we bought our Golf shifting their inventory to SUVs and making everything more expensive.

We would have much preferred if the car could be repaired. Unfortunately, that would have required the insurance company to pay for that before knowing if it was truly repairable, taking on the risk of perhaps finding significant structural damage or similar. Perhaps it would have been unwise to drive the car after it has been in that crash, even with a successful repair. It is hard to know, and the incentives are not aligned with allowing us to find out. Regardless, it seems more likely to me that any insurance company — not just ours — would decide the likelihood of attempting a repair by prioritizing cost.

This is not too dissimilar to the right-to-repair movement in tech circles. Jason Koebler, of 404 Media, reported on Apple’s steep iPad parts pricing earlier this year:

Jonathan Strange, the founder of XiRepair, put together a spreadsheet of all the new parts and found that more than a third of the iPad parts Apple is now selling are not being sold at a price that is economically viable for independent repair shops. The way he calculated this was by taking the price of the part, adding in $85 for labor and a 10 percent profit margin for a repair shop. If the total repair cost was more than half the price of buying a totally new device, he considers it to be not economically viable.

Even if you do it yourself, parts are very expensive. A brand new 11-inch iPad Pro costs $1,400 in Canada. If you shatter its display, the Self-Service Repair Store bill will come to $945 plus tax for the display, adhesive, and tool kit rental. That is less than a full replacement, especially if you do not have a base model, but it is close enough to the cost of a new iPad to make it an appealing choice.

Fixing things should be the first choice over replacing them, and repairs should be made as inviting as possible. I do not want to think about replacing the battery on my MacBook Pro but, when it is inevitably exhausted, I wish the process were as simple as removing some screws and as inexpensive as battery replacements once were. I do not want my things to be repairable in theory; I would like them to be repairable as a priority.

That is what this article was supposed to be about. But I kept an eye on the used car market in Calgary because, after all, the old Golf was sold at auction, not destroyed. And, a few months later, it showed up for sale at a used car lot here.

Or, well, almost. The one I found has matching specs, a near-identical odometer reading, the same nick in the leather at the bottom of the steering wheel, and the same smudge on the rear passenger-side door where we poorly covered a ding in the door with a paint pen. But its VIN is listed as 3VWG17AU7JM281867, while our Golf’s VIN was 3VWG17AU6JM281867.

It turns out that single different number is the check digit. Entering our Golf’s VIN into the NHTSA decoder validates. The one from the dealership? Nope.

Ultimately, the dealership listed the car for just shy of $17,000. I hope whomever bought was made aware of its real history, and that repairs are satisfactory. The best case is that a not particularly old car gets to keep working for years to come. If incentives were aligned with repairability, however, that car would still be ours, and we would know its provenance and how it was fixed.

Financial Times: ‘Apple Intensifies Succession Planning for CEO Tim Cook’ ⇥ ft.com

Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris, Michael Acton, and Daniel Thomas, Financial Times:

Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year.

I do not doubt this story overall. It was published at an advantageous time for Apple, too, on a Friday after the stock market closed. The rumoured timeline is real weird, though. “As soon as next year” makes it sound like Cook’s retirement may still be far off, but a few paragraphs later, it is basically around the corner:

The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, which covers the critical holiday period.

An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September, the people said.

Cook is Apple’s longest-serving CEO. If the Times’ report is true and his departure is imminent, he leaves the company in a politically difficult state, and rich beyond the wildest predictions of anyone circa 2011.

Needy Software ⇥ tonsky.me

Nikita Prokopov made a list of the ways modern software demonstrates how desperate it is for users’ attention. Not social media clients, mind you — developer tools, design software, and utilities are just as guilty, like when they show onboarding tips:

The company needs to announce a new feature and makes a popup window about it.

Read this again: The company. Needs. It’s not even about the user. Never has been.

Adobe is so awful about this, it added an option called “Quiet Mode” in Photoshop “to reduce in-app pop-ups and non-essential notifications”. Not eliminate — that would be too kind — but reduce. And this preference is not in every Adobe app, so every time I update Illustrator or InDesign, I am treated like I have never used either one before. (Notably, I was not informed about this “Quiet Mode” preference with an in-app notification. I stumbled across it after desperately searching the web.)

So I agree with this sentiment, but I would like to present a steelmanned argument: a change introduced in an update may either benefit or confuse a user. In the old days, a software update was determined by the user — and in the old old days software came in a box with printed documentation — so someone knew they could expect differences. Updates are now largely automatic or even, in the case of many software-as-a-service apps, mandatory. This means changes will be introduced without any warning. So, I kind of get why this has become a standard, but it is rooted in something that also kind of stinks.

Thankfully, Prokopov also carves out time to note the neediness of software updates. Why are so many big developers shipping new versions every two weeks? What could possibly warrant that?

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0× Faster Web Browsing in Safari ⇥ 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.

As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances — delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure web browsing experience.

And with the new App Ad Blocking feature in v5.0, it extends the powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking protection to all apps including news apps, social media, games, and other browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

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

Apple Data Detectors Reroute Parcel Tracking Through an Apple Web Service ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson:

Today I received a shipment notification via text message to my phone number from a company unrelated to Apple. The shipped product was not ordered with my iPhone, and in fact the product manufacturer doesn’t even know that I own any Apple devices. The message included a US Postal Service tracking number. Messages app on my iPhone transformed the tracking number into a link. When I pressed down on the link to reveal the URL, I was surprised by it:

https://trackingshipment.apple.com/ ?Company=USPS&Locale=&TrackingNumber=

[…]

[…] Apple has inserted itself where it doesn’t belong with this Messages “feature,” or misfeature. Why does Apple want to send itself our tracking numbers? Apple tracking is the opposite of privacy!

Apps throughout Apple’s operating systems can support different data detectors to automatically identify things like phone numbers, flight numbers, and shipment numbers. The latter are, indeed, rerouted through that trackingshipment.apple.com website; I have found this to be the case in first-party apps like Messages and Notes, as well as third-party apps, like MarsEdit, with support for data detectors.

A curl request to that endpoint on a sample parcel number reveals no explicit tracking scripts or methods are used:

curl "https://trackingshipment.apple.com/?
Company=Ontrac&Locale=
&TrackingNumber=ANUMBERIFOUNDONTHEWEB"

<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Found</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Found</H1>This document has moved 
<a href="https://www.ontrac.com/tracking/?
number=ANUMBERIFOUNDONTHEWEB">here</a>. 
</BODY></HTML>%

What is interesting to me is that the trackingshipment URL already contains the shipping company when it is created by the data detector. That is, Apple’s web-side service is not used to determine which courier this number corresponds to. It is only performing a straight redirect. My guess about why it is set up like this is so Apple can push minor changes to the web service if a courier changes their parcel tracking URL format instead of shipping it in the next operating system update.

It is, however, entirely possible Apple is retaining server logs with identifying parcel tracking information. As Johnson writes, this is not a claim that Apple is misusing this data, only that it is possible.

Michael Tsai:

As he says, “Apple considers itself implicitly trustworthy,” so there are all these specific examples of violations that it just doesn’t count. But when it comes to others, Apple will assume the worst intentions and make the least charitable reading. […]

This is one of the glaring problems with leaving privacy governance up to self-interested corporations. I have no reason to believe Apple is doing anything wrong with this information. If I were designing this data detector, I would probably do it in a similar way. But because everything you do within Apple’s platforms could be governed by the company’s broad privacy policy, it has wider latitude than any individual developer.

Update: Johnson in a reply on Mastodon posits a smarter and more privacy-sensitive approach. (And goes to show why I am not designing data detectors; see above.)

In 2002, Last.fm Was the Cutting Edge of the Social Web ⇥ cybercultural.com

Richard MacManus, Cybercultural:

[Martin] Stiksel explained that the idea for Last.fm came about when the students asked themselves, “how do you look for something that you don’t know?” So in the case of music, how to discover new music when you don’t necessarily know what type of music you’re looking for? The answer, he said, was the social component.

[…]

What both Last.fm and Audioscrobbler stumbled onto in 2002 was the collective value of user data in discovering new content — something that Amazon was also taking advantage of at this time. […]

The recommendations suggested by Last.fm have been among the best for any service I have used — music or otherwise. What I mean by that is that it often suggests things I have not listened to, it explains why I am seeing this recommendation, and it is very often right. And this is all based on data I choose to hand over.

I am a tiny bit worried about Last.fm’s future, given it is a subsidiary of CBS Interactive, now owned by Paramount Skydance. Also, it is now governed under that company’s expansive privacy policy and I have no idea what to make of that; it is so comprehensive as to be vague. I enjoyed reading this lovely history of the service, however.

The Consumer Welfare Standard and E-Book Pricing ⇥ newyorker.com

Remember how I wrote that consumer pricing is not the only factor in determining the success or failure of policy? On a related note, remember Apple’s e-book price fixing scheme?

Vauhini Vara, the New Yorker, in December 2014:

Last year, a federal judge named Denise Cote found that Apple had, in fact, collaborated in a horizontal price-fixing scheme, not that it had orchestrated a vertical one. Cote noted that Apple executives kept the publishers informed about what other publishers were up to; she also pointed out that Apple made clear to the publishers that it was important for as many of them as possible sign on to the proposed deal. Both of these activities, among others, Cote argued, showed that the company had facilitated horizontal price-fixing. “Here we have every necessary component: with Apple’s active encouragement and assistance, the Publisher Defendants agreed to work together to eliminate retail price competition and raise e-book prices, and again with Apple’s knowing and active participation, they brought their scheme to fruition,” she wrote. As such, there was no need for Cote to consider arguments, made by Apple’s lawyers, about the company’s intentions and the effects of its actions, which might have been used to justify vertical price-fixing.

The U.S. Department of Justice in June 2016:

On March 7, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Apple’s petition for certiorari and made final the lower court decisions in the case. The Supreme Court’s action triggered Apple’s obligation to pay $400 million to e-book purchasers under Apple’s July 2014 agreement to settle damages actions brought by the attorneys general of 33 states and territories and a private class of e-book purchasers. With the $166 million previously paid by the conspiring publishers to settle claims against them, Apple’s payment brings to $566 million the amount repaid to e-book purchasers overcharged as a result of Apple’s and the publishers’ illegal conspiracy.

This is a case where both Amazon and Apple were wrong. Amazon’s Kindle model mimicked that of the iTunes Store by pricing e-books at a flat rate, though publishers argued this was keeping prices artificially low by using its overwhelming dominance of the market for e-books and readers. In attempting to compete with the launch of the iPad and the iBookstore, Apple coordinated with publishers to set their own prices. Amazon’s position was anticompetitive; Apple’s actions were ultimately ruled illegal. Yet the agency model, where publishers set the price, ultimately became standard for Amazon, too.

If a simplistic approach to consumer pricing is all we ought to care about, Amazon’s original model is the ideal. But it would require competitors to take a loss and encourage a race-to-the-bottom approach that devalues books. The response to this should not have been Apple’s colluding behaviour. Rather, antitrust law should have corrected the predatory nature of Amazon’s model at the time. Because it was not, and Apple’s attempt backfired, Amazon now has an 80% market share of online e-book sales.

The price paid by customers is only one of several factors to consider. In the case of the Digital Markets Act, it is factor the European Commission is considering, but only by way of more choice within and between platforms.

(Thanks to Sam Gross.)

Apple-Funded Study Finds DMA-Motivated Changes Save Developers Over €20 Million in Commission Fees in Three Months ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors, reports on a new study from Apple’s best professional friends:

Apple today shared a study commissioned from Analysis Group [PDF] that looks at App Store pricing changes before and after reduced fees took effect in the EU in March 2024 under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The report shows that the DMA has not resulted in lower prices for consumers.

This study has not yet appeared on Apple’s Newsroom page or its Developer site. Per its recent strategy, it circulated the PDF to Reuters plus publications like AppleInsider who framed it in company-friendly terms. Ben Lovejoy, of 9to5Mac, for example, received an advance copy of the report:

The EU argued that having competing app stores would result in lower commissions and therefore lower app prices for consumers. However, an Apple-funded study carried out by The Analysis Group says it checked for reductions in app prices after commissions were reduced and says it can find very little evidence of this.

That link points to a 404 error, and not because a page never existed there, but because it was pulled offline in the last month. The version most recently saved in the Wayback Machine, from October 10, says the DMA’s rules would result in “fairer prices” for consumers, though that is in the context of a longer bullet point about competition generally:

Consumers will have more and better services to choose from, more opportunities to switch their provider if they wish so, direct access to services, and fairer prices.

This is the only mention of pricing on the page. The way the European Commission has generally framed the DMA is as a matter of consumer choices and reducing the distortions of a market within a market. More competition within these platforms and better interoperability between them, it is arguing here and elsewhere, can lower prices. Interpreting this sentence to mean “lower commissions and therefore lower app prices for consumers” seems to me like a stretch.

The study’s headline findings might sound negative, but it actually documents a modest increase in developer earnings (PDF) after adopting Apple’s “alternative business terms” from March – June 2024 compared to July – September after developer adoption:

The transaction data consists of over 41 million transactions for approximately 21,000 products on EU App Store storefronts, which generated €403 million in sales. The transactions were roughly split between the three months before and after enrolling in the alternative business terms.

[…]

First, looking at all digital products offered on each EU storefront, across all developers who enrolled in the alternative business terms from March 2024 through September 2024, the commission rate typically decreased by 10 percentage points after enrollment. This decrease is expected given the structure of the alternative business terms (see Box 1). These developers paid an estimated €20.1 million less in commission fees in the three months following their adoption of the alternative business terms.

[…]

Last, in addition to developers keeping most of the commission savings for themselves, the overwhelming majority of benefits to developers went to developers based outside of the EU. Of the €20.1 million reduction in commission fees, over 86% went to non-EU developers.

Against €403 million in sales, a €20 million reduction in commission is noteworthy. And even though most developers who benefitted are outside the E.U., many are probably small businesses; “more than 80% of the products studied” were not subject to the Core Technology Fee, which only applies to apps with more than a million annual installs. Few will be massive corporations like Meta and Uber, since those companies monetize their apps through advertisements or physical purchases not subject to Apple’s commission. It is hard for me to believe Apple having €20 million less in its bank account is of comparable impact to that of a bunch of small developers having €20 million more to spend and invest.

The price paid by consumers is not the only metric by which this legislation can or should be judged. I am not arguing the DMA is flawless, nor that it is necessarily achieving its objectives. This study, however, is being used to create a completely independent narrative. Perhaps somewhere the European Commission has argued consumers will see lower prices thanks to reduced App Store commissions, in which case this study provides some evidence to the contrary. If it has made that claim, I have not found it. What I do see in this report is a benefit to small developers despite Apple’s best efforts to make its alternative business terms uncompelling.