I Regret the Blood Pact I Have Made With iCloud Photos

Sometimes, I do not recognize a trap until I am already in it. Photos in iCloud is one such situation.

When Apple launched iCloud Photo Library in 2014, I was all-in. Not only is it where I store the photos I take on my iPhone, it is where I keep the ones from my digital cameras and my film scans, and everything from my old iPhoto and Aperture libraries. I have culled a bunch of bad photos and I try not to hoard, but it is more-or-less a catalogue of every photo I have taken since mid-2007. I like the idea of a centralized database of my photos, available on all my devices, that is functionally part of my backup strategy.1

But, also, it is large. When I started putting photos in there eleven years ago with a 200 GB plan, I failed to recognize it would become an albatross. iCloud Storage says it is now 1.5 TB and, between the amount of other stuff I have in iCloud and my Family Sharing usage, I have just 82 GB of available space. 2 TB seemed like such a large amount of space until I used 1.9 of it.

Apple’s next iCloud tier is a generous 6 TB, but it costs another $324 per year. I could buy a new 6 TB hard disk annually for that kind of money. While upgrading tiers is, by far, the easiest way to solve this problem, it only kicks that can down that road, the end of which currently has whatever two terabytes’ worth of cans looks like.

A better solution is to recognize I do not need instant access to all 95,000 photos in my library, but iCloud has no room for this kind of nuance. The iCloud syncing preference is either on or off for the entire library.

Unfortunately, trying to explain what goes wrong when you try to deviate from Apple’s model of how photo libraries ought to work will become a bit of a rant. And I will preface this by saying this is all using Photos running on MacOS Ventura, which is many years behind the most recent version of MacOS. It is not possible for me to use the latest version of Photos to make these changes because upgraded libraries cannot be opened by older versions of Photos. However, in my defense, I will also note that the version on Ventura is Photos 8.0 and these are the kinds of bugs and omissions inexcusable after that many revisions.

So: the next best thing is to create a separate Photos library — one that will remain unsynced with iCloud. Photos makes this pretty easy by launching while holding the Option (⌥) key. But how does one move images from one library to the other? Photos is a single-window application — you cannot even open different images in new windows, let alone run separate libraries in separate windows. This should be possible, but it is not.

As a workaround, Apple allows you to import images from one Photos library into another — but not if the source library is synced with iCloud. You therefore need to turn off iCloud sync before proceeding, at which point you may discover that iCloud is not as dependable as you might have expected.

I have “Download Originals to this Mac” enabled, which means that Photos should — should — retain a full copy of my library on my local disk. But when I unchecked the “iCloud Photos” box in Settings, I was greeted by a dialog box informing me that I would lose 817 low-resolution local copies, something which should not exist given my settings, though reassuring me that the originals were indeed safe in iCloud. There is no way to know which photos these are nor, therefore, any way to confirm they are actually stored at full resolution in iCloud. I tried all the usual troubleshooting steps. I repaired my library, then attempted to turn off iCloud Photos; now I had 850 low-resolution local copies. I tried a neat trick where you select all the pictures in your library and select “Play Slideshow”, at which point my Mac said it was downloading 733 original images, then I tried turning off iCloud Photos again and was told I would lose around 150 low-resolution copies.

You will note none of these numbers add or resolve correctly. That is, I have learned, pretty standard for Photos. Currently, it says I have 94,529 photos and 898 videos in the “Library” view, but if I select all the items in that view, it says there are a total of 95,433 items selected, which is not the same as 94,529 + 898. It is only a difference of six items but, also, it is an inexplicable difference of six.

At this point, I figured I would assume those 150 photos were probably in iCloud, sacrifice the low-resolution local copies, and prepare for importing into the second non-synced library I had created. So I did that, switched libraries, and selected my main library for import. You might think reading one Photos library from another stored on the same SSD would be pretty quick. Yes, there are over 95,000 items and they all have associated thumbnails, but it takes only a beat to load the library from scratch in Photos.

It took over thirty minutes.

After I patiently waited that out, I selected a batch of photos from a specific event and chose to import them into an album, so they stay categorized. Oh, that is right — just because you are importing across Photos libraries, that does not mean the structure will be retained. There is no way, as far as I can tell, to keep the same albums across libraries; you need to rebuild them.

After those finished importing, I pulled up my main library again to do the next event. You might expect it to retain some memory of the import source I had only just accessed. No — it took another thirty minutes to load. It does this every time I want to import media from my main library. It is not like that library is changing; it is no longer synced with iCloud, remember. It just treats every time it is opened as the first time.

And it was at this point I realized the importer did not display my library in an organized or logical fashion. I had expected it to be sorted old-to-new since that is how Photos says it is displayed, but I saw photos from many different years all jumbled together. It is almost in order, at times, but then I would notice sequential photos scattered all over.

My guess — and this is only a guess — is that it sub-orders by album, but does no further sorting after that. This is a problem for me given a quirk in my organizational structure. In addition to albums for different events, I have smart albums for each of my cameras and each of my iPhone’s individual lenses. But that still does not excuse the importer’s inability to sort old-to-new. The event I spotted early on and was able to import was basically a fluke. If I continued using this cross-library importing strategy, I would not be able to keep track of which photos I could remove from my main library.

There is another option, which is to export a selection of unmodified originals from my primary library to a folder on disk, and then switch libraries, and import them. This is an imperfect solution. Most obviously, it requires a healthy amount of spare disk space, enough to store the selected set of photos thrice, at least temporarily: once in the primary library, once in the folder, and once in the new library. It also means any adjustments made using the Photos app will be discarded — but, then again, importing directly from the library only copies the edited version of a photo without any of its history or adjustments preserved.

What I would not do, under any circumstance — and what I would strongly recommend anyone avoiding — is to use the Export Photos option. This will produce a bunch of lossy-compressed photos, and you do not want that.

Anyway, on my first attempt of trying the export-originals-then-import process, I exported the 20,528 oldest photos in my library to a folder. Then I switched to the archive library I had created, and imported that same folder. After it was complete, Photos said it had imported 17,848 items, a difference of nearly 3,000 photos. To answer your question: no, I have no idea why, or which ones, or what happened here.

This sucks. And it particularly sucks because most data is at least kind of important, but photos are really important, and I cannot trust this application to handle them.

There is this quote that has stuck with me for nearly twenty years, from Scott Forstall’s introduction to Time Machine (31:30) at WWDC 2006. Maybe it is the message itself or maybe it is the perfectly timed voice crack on the word “awful”, but this resonated with me:

When I look on my Mac, I find these pictures of my kids that, to me, are absolutely priceless. And in fact, I have thousands of these photos.

If I were to lose a single one of these photos, it would be awful. But if I were to lose all of these photos because my hard drive died, I’d be devastated. I never, ever want to lose these photos.

I have this library stored locally and backed up, or at least I though I did. I thought I could trust iCloud to be an extra layer of insurance. What I am now realizing is that iCloud may, in fact, be a liability. The simple fact is that I have no idea the state my photos library is currently in: which photos I have in full resolution locally, which ones are low-resolution with iCloud originals, and which ones have possibly been lost.

The kindest and least cynical interpretation of the state of iCloud Photos is that Apple does not care nearly enough about this “absolutely priceless” data. (A more cynical explanation is, of course, that services revenue has compromised Apple’s standards.) Many of these photos are, in fact, priceless to me, which is why I am questioning whether I want iCloud involved at all. I certainly have no reason to give Apple more money each month to keep wrecking my library.

I will need to dedicate real, significant time to minimizing my iCloud dependence. I will need to check and re-check everything I do as best I can, while recognizing the difficulty I will have in doing so with the limited information I have in my iCloud account. This is undeniably frustrating. I am glad I caught this, however, as I sure had not previously thought nearly as much as I should have about the integrity of my library. Now, I am correcting for it. I hope it is not too late.

  1. It is no longer the sole place I store my photos. I have everything stored locally, too, and that gets backed up with Backblaze. Or, at least, I think I have everything stored locally. ↥︎

Bill C–22 Gives Canadian Authorities Additional Warrantless Powers ⇥ ottawacitizen.com

Gabriel Hilty, Toronto Star:

Speaking alongside Chief Myron Demkiw on Thursday at Toronto police headquarters, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, will “create a legal framework for modernized, lawful access regime in Canada,” something that police forces have been requested “for decades.”

The bill is Prime Minister Mark Carney government’s second push to pass expanded police search powers into law. An earlier proposal on lawful access was met with widespread concerns over potential overreach.

Paula Tran, Ottawa Citizen:

“The bill effectively lowers the standard that police have to meet. Sure, law enforcement says they’re happy, but that means they need less evidence and need to do less work to get the information about subscribers, and I don’t think that’s that’s a good thing. It’s the lowest standard in Canadian criminal law,” [Michael] Geist said.

[…]

Bill C-22 also proposes new legislation that would compel telecommunication companies to store and retain client metadata, like device location, for a year and to make it available to law enforcement and CSIS with a warrant. The metadata can be used to track a person’s live location in case they pose a national security threat or are considered to be in danger.

OpenMedia is running a campaign to email Members of Parliament, though I am suspicious these form letter campaigns actually work. It is a bare minimum signal since it requires almost no commitment. My M.P. is usually opposed to anything proposed by this government, since he is in the official opposition, but his reaction to this bill’s much worse predecessor is that it contained “the most commonsensical security changes we need to make in Canada”. I expect I will be writing him and, when I do, I will be sure to adjust OpenMedia’s form letter. If you are writing to your M.P., I suggest you do the same if you can spare the time.

Wealthsimple Clears Regulatory Hurdle to Bring ‘Prediction Markets’ to Canada ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Meera Raman, Globe and Mail:

Wealthsimple is seeking to offer prediction trading in Canada, a controversial type of betting on real-world events that has surged in popularity in the past year, and has been largely banned in this country.

[…]

The approval for Ontario-based Wealthsimple permits it only to offer contracts tied to economic indicators, financial markets and climate trends, the company confirmed – not sports or elections, which are among the most popular uses of prediction markets in the United States.

Interactive Brokers launched here last April. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

A Different Perspective on the ‘Design Choices’ Social Media Company Verdicts ⇥ techdirt.com

Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, unsurprisingly opposes the verdicts earlier this week finding Meta and Google guilty of liability for how their products impact children’s safety. I think it is a perspective worth reading. Unlike the Wall Street Journal, Masnick respects your intelligence and brings actual substance. Still, I have some disagreements.

Masnick, on the “design choices” argument:

This distinction — between “design” and “content” — sounds reasonable for about three seconds. Then you realize it falls apart completely.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine Instagram, but every single post is a video of paint drying. Same infinite scroll. Same autoplay. Same algorithmic recommendations. Same notification systems. Is anyone addicted? Is anyone harmed? Is anyone suing?

Of course not. Because infinite scroll is not inherently harmful. Autoplay is not inherently harmful. Algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful. These features only matter because of the content they deliver. The “addictive design” does nothing without the underlying user-generated content that makes people want to keep scrolling.

This sounds like a reasonable retort until you think about it for three more seconds and realize that the lack of neutrality in the outcomes of these decisions is the entire point. Users post all kinds of stuff on social media platforms, and those posts can be delivered in all kinds of different ways, as Masnick also writes. They can be shown in reverse-chronological order in a lengthy scroll, or they can be shown one at a time like with Stories. The source of the posts someone sees might be limited to just accounts a user has opted into, or it can be broadened to any account from anyone in the world. Twitter used to have a public “firehose” feed.

But many of the biggest and most popular platforms have coalesced around a feed of material users did not ask for. This is not like television, where each show has been produced and vetted by human beings, and there are expectations for what is on at different times of the day. This is automated and users have virtually no control within the platforms themselves. If you do not like what Instagram is serving you on your main feed, your choice is to stop using Instagram entirely — even if you like and use other features.

Platforms know people will post objectionable and graphic material if they are given a text box or an upload button. We know it is “impossible” to moderate a platform well at scale. But we are supposed to believe they have basically no responsibility for what users post and what their systems surface in users’ feeds? Pick one.

Masnick, on the risks of legal accountability for smaller platforms:

And this is already happening. TikTok and Snap were also named as defendants in the California case. They both settled before trial — not because they necessarily thought they’d lose on the merits, but because the cost of fighting through a multi-week jury trial can be staggering. If companies the size of TikTok and Snap can’t stomach the expense, imagine what this means for mid-size platforms, small forums, or individual website operators.

I am going to need a citation that TikTok and Snap caved because they could not afford continuing to fight. It seems just as plausible they could see which way the winds were blowing, given what I have read so far in the evidence that has been released.

Masnick:

One of the key pieces of evidence the New Mexico attorney general used against Meta was the company’s 2023 decision to add end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger. The argument went like this: predators used Messenger to groom minors and exchange child sexual abuse material. By encrypting those messages, Meta made it harder for law enforcement to access evidence of those crimes. Therefore, the encryption was a design choice that enabled harm.

The state is now seeking court-mandated changes including “protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors.”

Yes, the end result of the New Mexico ruling might be that Meta is ordered to make everyone’s communications less secure. That should be terrifying to everyone. Even those cheering on the verdict.

This is undeniably a worrisome precedent. I will note Raúl Torrez, New Mexico’s Attorney General and the man who brought this case against Meta, says he wants to do so for minors only. The implementation of this is an obvious question, though one that mandated age-gating would admittedly make straightforward.

Meta cited low usage when it announced earlier this month that it would be turning off end-to-end encryption in Instagram. If it is a question of safety or liability, it is one Meta would probably find difficult to articulate given end-to-end encryption remains available and enabled by default in Messenger and WhatsApp. An executive raised concerns about the feature when it was being planned, drawing a distinction between it and WhatsApp because the latter “does not make it easy to make social connections, meaning making Messenger e2ee will be far, far worse”.

I think Masnick makes some good arguments in this piece and raises some good questions. It is very possible or even likely this all gets unwound when it is appealed. I, too, expect the ripple effects of these cases to create some chaos. But I do not think the correct response to a lack of corporate accountability — or, frankly, standards — is, in Masnick’s words, “actually funding mental health care for young people”. That is not to say mental health should not be funded, only that it is a red herring response. In the U.S., total spending on children’s mental health care rose by 50% between 2011 and 2017; it continued to rise through the pandemic, of course. Perhaps that is not enough. But, also, it is extraordinary to think that we should allow companies to do knowingly harmful things and expect everyone else to correct for the predictable outcomes.

Apple Discontinues the Mac Pro ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Chance Miller, of 9to5Mac, serving here as Apple’s official bad news launderer:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

Mark Gurman reported last year that it was “on the back burner”.

The Mac Pro was, realistically, killed off when the Apple Silicon era ended support for expandability and upgradability. The Mac Studio effectively takes its place, and is strategically similar to the “trash can” Mac Pro with all expandability offloaded to external peripherals. Unfortunate, but I think it was dishonest to keep selling this version of a “pro” Macintosh.

Meta Loses Two Landmark Cases Regarding Product Safety and Children’s Use; Google Loses One ⇥ latimes.com

Morgan Lee, Associated Press:

A New Mexico jury found Tuesday that social media conglomerate Meta is harmful to children’s mental health and in violation of state consumer protection law.

The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial. Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety. The jury determined Meta violated parts of the state’s Unfair Practices Act on accusations the company hid what it knew [about] the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and impacts on child mental health.

Meta communications jackass Andy Stone noted on X his company’s delight to be liable for “a fraction of what the State sought”. The company says it will appeal the verdict.

Stephen Morris and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times:

Meta and Google were found liable in a landmark legal case that social media platforms are designed to be addictive to children, opening up the tech giants to penalties in thousands of similar claims filed around the US.

A jury in the Los Angeles trial on Wednesday returned a verdict after nine days of deliberation, finding Meta’s platforms such as Instagram and Google’s YouTube were harmful to children and teenagers and that the companies failed to warn users of the dangers.

Dara Kerr, the Guardian:

To come to its liability decision, the jury was asked whether the companies’ negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to KGM [the plaintiff] and if the tech firms knew the design of their products was dangerous. The 12-person panel of jurors returned a 10-2 split answering in favor of the plaintiff on every single question.

Meta says it will also appeal this verdict.

Sonja Sharp, Los Angeles Times:

Collectively, the suits seek to prove that harm flowed not from user content but from the design and operation of the platforms themselves.

That’s a critical legal distinction, experts say. Social media companies have so far been protected by a powerful 1996 law called Section 230, which has shielded the apps from responsibility for what happens to children who use it.

For its part, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is standing up for beleaguered social media companies in an editorial today criticizing everything about these verdicts, including this specific means of liability, which it calls a “dodge” around Section 230.

But it is not. The principles described by Section 230 are a good foundation for the internet. This law, while U.S.-centric, has enabled the web around the world to flourish. Making companies legally liable for the things users post will not fix the mess we are in, but it would cause great damage if enacted.

Product design, though, is a different question. It would be a mistake, I think, to read Section 230 as a blanket allowance for any way platforms wish to use or display users’ posts. (Update: In part, that is because it is a free speech question.) From my entirely layman perspective, it has never struck me as entirely reasonable that the recommendations systems of these platforms should have no duty or expectation of care.

The Journal’s editorial board largely exists to produce rage bait and defend the interests of the powerful, so I am loath to give it too much attention, but I thought this paragraph was pretty rich:

Trial lawyers and juries may figure that Big Tech companies can afford to pay, but extorting companies is certain to have downstream consequences. Meta and Google are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence this year, which could have positive social impacts such as accelerating treatments for cancer.

Do not sue tech companies because they could be finding cancer treatments — why should I take this editorial board seriously if its members are writing jokes like these? They think you are stupid.

As for the two cases, I am curious about how these conclusions actually play out. I imagine other people who feel their lives have been eroded by the specific way these platforms are designed will be able to test their claims in court, too, and that it will be complicated by the inevitably lengthy appeals and relitigation process.

I am admittedly a little irritated by both decisions being reached by jury instead of a judge; I would have preferred to see reasoning instead of overwhelming agreement among random people. However, it sends a strong signal to big social media platforms that people saw and heard evidence about how these products are designed, and they agreed it was damaging. This is true of all users, not just children. Meta tunes its feeds (PDF) for maximizing engagement across the board, and it surely is not the only one. There are a staggering number of partially redacted exhibits released today to go through, if one is so inclined.

If these big social platforms are listening, the signals are out there: people may be spending a lot of time with these products, but that is not a good proxy for their enjoyment or satisfaction. Research indicates a moderate amount of use is correlated with neutral or even positive outcomes among children, yet there are too many incentives in these apps to push past self-control mechanisms. These products should be designed differently.

Meta Laid Off Several Hundred People Today ⇥ cnbc.com

Ashley Capoot and Jonathan Vanian, CNBC:

Meta is laying off several hundred employees on Wednesday, CNBC confirmed.

The cuts are happening across several different organizations within the company, including Facebook, global operations, recruiting, sales and its virtual reality division Reality Labs, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named because they are confidential.

Some impacted employees are being offered new roles within the company, the person said. In some cases, those new positions will require relocation.

“Several hundred” employees is a long way off from the numbers reported earlier this month. Perhaps Reuters got it all wrong but, more worryingly for employees, perhaps those figures were correct and this is only the beginning.

Talking Liquid Glass With Apple ⇥ captainswiftui.substack.com

Danny Bolella attended one of Apple’s “Let’s Talk Liquid Glass” workshops:

Let’s address the elephant in the room. If you read the comments on my articles or browse the iOS subreddits, there is a vocal contingent of developers betting that Apple is going to roll back Liquid Glass.

The rationale usually points to the initial community backlash, the slower adoption rate of iOS 26, and the news that Alan Dye left Apple for Meta. The prevailing theory has been: “Just wait it out. They’ll revert to flat design.”

I shared this exact sentiment with the Apple team.

Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding onto this position. They made it emphatically clear that Liquid Glass is absolutely moving forward, evolving, and expanding across the ecosystem.

Unsurprising. Though I expect a number of people reading this will be disappointed, I cannot imagine a world in which Apple would either revert to its previous design language or whip together something new. It is going to ride Liquid Glass and evolve it for a long time; if history is a good rule of thumb, assume ten years.

In theory, this is a good thing. Even on MacOS, I can find things I prefer to its predecessor, though admittedly they are few and far between. This visual design feels much more at home on iOS. The things that cause me far more frustration on a daily basis are the unrelenting bugs across Apple’s ecosystem, like how I just finished listening to an album with my headphones and then, when I clicked “play” on a new album, Music on MacOS decided it should AirPlay to my television instead of continuing through my headphones. That kind of stuff.

Regardless of whatever one thinks the visual qualities of Liquid Glass, the software quality problem is notable there, too. We are now on the OS 26.4 set of releases and I am still running into plenty of instances with bizarre and distracting compositing problems. On my iPhone, the gradients that are supposed to help with legibility in the status bar and toolbar appear, disappear, and change colour with seemingly little relevance to what is underneath them. Notification Centre remains illegible until it is fully pulled down. Plus, I still see the kinds of graphics bugs and Auto Layout problems I have seen for a decade.

I hope to see a more fully considered version of the Liquid Glass design language at WWDC this year, and not merely from a visual perspective. This user interface is software, just like dedicated applications, and it is chockablock full of bugs.

Bolella, emphasis mine:

I plan to share an article soon where I break down the exact physics, z-axis rules, and “Barbell Layouts” of this hierarchy. But the high-level takeaway from the NYC labs is crystal clear: maximize your content, push your controls to the poles, and never let the interface compete with the information.

If you say so, Apple.

OpenAI to Discontinue Sora App, Video Platform ⇥ wsj.com

Berber Jin, Wall Street Journal:

CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.

OpenAI is not shutting this down because it has ethical qualms with what it has created, despite good reasons to do just that. It is because it is expensive without any clear reason for it to exist other than because OpenAI wants to be everywhere.

If you are desperate for a completely synthetic social media feed, Meta’s Vibes is apparently still around. Users are readily abusing it, of course, because that is what happens if you give people a text input box.

Update: In a tweet, OpenAI has confirmed it is shutting down Sora. But, while it originally announced “We’re saying goodbye to Sora”, it changed that about an hour later to read “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app“, emphasis mine. The Journal has not changed its report to retract claims about shutting down the platform altogether, though, while OpenAI continues to promote Sora API pricing.

Ads Are Coming to Apple Maps Later This Year ⇥ apple.com

Apple, in a press release with the title “Introducing Apple Business — a new all‑in‑one platform for businesses of all sizes”, buried in a section tucked in the middle labelled “Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps”, both of which are so anodyne as to encourage missing this key bit of news:

Every day, users choose Apple Maps to discover and explore places and businesses around them. Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

The way they are “clearly marked” is with a light blue background and a small “Ad” badge, though it is worth noting Apple has been testing an even less obvious demarcation for App Store ads. In the case of the App Store, I have found the advertising blitz junks up search results more than it helps me find things I am interested in.

This is surely not something users are asking for. I would settle for a more reliable search engine, one that prioritizes results immediately near me instead of finding places in cities often hundreds of kilometres away. There are no details yet on what targeting advertisers will be allowed to use, but it will be extremely frustrating if the only reason I begin seeing more immediately relevant results is because a local business had to pay for the spot.

Update: I have this one little nagging thought I cannot shake. Maps has been an imperfect — to be kind — app for nearly fifteen years, but it was ultimately a self-evident piece of good software, at least in theory. It was a directory of points-of-interest, and a means of getting directions. With this announcement, it becomes a container for advertising. Its primary function feels corrupted, at least a little bit, because what users care about is now subservient to the interests of the businesses paying Apple.

Someone Has Publicly Leaked an Exploit Kit That Can Hack Millions of iPhones ⇥ techcrunch.com

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:

Last week, cybersecurity researchers uncovered a hacking campaign targeting iPhone users that used an advanced hacking tool called DarkSword. Now someone has leaked a newer version of DarkSword and published it on the code-sharing site GitHub.

Researchers are warning that this will allow any hacker to easily use the tools to target iPhone users running older versions of Apple’s operating systems who have not yet updated to its latest iOS 26 software. This likely affects hundreds of millions of actively used iPhones and iPads, according to Apple’s own data on out-of-date devices.

This is an entirely different exploit chain to the “Coruna” one which also surfaced earlier this month — so now there are two massive security exploits just floating around in the wild affecting a large number of iPhones. Apple is apparently concerned enough about these vulnerabilities that it is issuing patches as far back as iOS 15 though, disappointingly, only for devices that do not support newer major versions. If you have a device that can run iOS 26, you will be safer if it is running iOS 26.

It is, I should say, pretty brazen for the developers of this exploit chain to call the JavaScript file “rce_loader.js”. RCE stands for remote code execution. It is basically like calling the file “hacking_happens_here.js”.

In a ‘Test’, Google Is Automatically Rewriting News Headlines in Its Search Results ⇥ searchengineland.com

Sean Hollister, the Verge:

Since roughly the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been the bedrock of the web. People loved Google’s trustworthy “10 blue links” search experience and its unspoken promise: The website you click is the website you get.

Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

As I noted when I linked to Hollister’s article about Discover back in December, this is not new in search results; it has been happening for years.

Danny Goodwin, Search Engine Land:

Dig deeper. Google changed 76% of title tags in Q1 2025 – Here’s what that means […]

According to the Google Search Central section on title links, originally published in 2021:

I am not arguing this is good or normal — the examples Hollister shows are extremely poor reflections of the articles in question — but I do not understand why it is only gaining traction now, nor how it meaningfully differs from what Google has been doing all along. It is indeed frustrating.

Many of the results you see in Google Search misrepresent the source material and are misleading. But that has been true for a while — which is a problem unto itself. People should not trust the results they see as represented by Google Search. The visual tone Google has maintained, however, is that it is a neutral directory. The summaries in A.I. Overview are delivered with an unearned dry authority, and the ten links below it are there because of a tense truce between Google’s goals and those of search optimization professionals.

Also, I had no idea that Search Engine Land had been acquired at some point by Semrush which, in turn, was bought by Adobe.

Lobbying Firms Funded by Apple and Meta Are Duelling on Age Verification ⇥ bloomberg.com

Emily Birnbaum, writing for Bloomberg in July:

Meta is also helping to fund the Digital Childhood Alliance, a coalition of conservative groups leading efforts to pass app-store age verification, according to three people familiar with the funding.

The App Store Accountability Act is based on model legislation written by the Digital Childhood Alliance. The lobbying group also publishes marketing pieces, including one (PDF) that calls Apple’s age verification frameworks “ineffective”. Specifically, it points to the lack of parental consent required “for kids to enter into complex contracts”, with “no way to verify that parental consent has been obtained”.

Meta, for its part, requires users to self-report their birthday and click a button that says “I agree” to create an Instagram account. In fairness, the title of that page says “read and agree to our terms” and, on the terms page, Meta does say you need to be 13 years old. This is pretty standard stuff but, if Meta actually cared about this, it could voluntarily implement the stricter controls at sign-up without a legislative incentive.

Though this article was published last year, I am linking to it now because something called the TBOTE Project recently resurfaced these findings and added some of its own in an open source investigation. Unlike similar investigations from sources like Bellingcat, it does not appear that the person or people behind TBOTE have editors or fact-checkers to verify their interpretation of this information. That does not mean it is useless; it is simply worth exercising some caution. Regardless, their findings show a massive amount of lobbyist spending on Meta’s part to try and get these laws passed.

Birnbaum continues:

The App Association, a group backed by Apple, has been running ads in Texas, Alabama, Louisiana and Ohio arguing that the app store age verification bills are backed by porn websites and companies. The adult entertainment industry’s main lobby said it is not pushing for the bills; pornography is mostly banned from app stores.

This is obviously bad faith, but also flawed in the opposite direction: the porn industry wants device-level verification.

Tech CEOs and Investors Are Just Saying Stuff ⇥ businessinsider.com

Jacob Silverman, Business Insider:

The growing bloat of popular tech rhetoric could serve as evidence for how the tech industry, having conquered so much of daily life, work, and entertainment, has begun to exhaust its imaginative capacities. Industry leaders promised that the mammoth capital for AI outlay would lead to the creation of a smarter-than-human intelligence that would serve as a universal solvent, fixing climate change, poverty, and even the problem of death itself. But that horizon — which we are supposed to reach by pumping out more fossil-fuel emissions and destabilizing labor and education — remains impossibly far away.

Gallup’s polling on views of different business sectors has, frustratingly, no ability to permalink to a particular industry and its historical rankings; so, you will need to go down to “Industry and Business Sector Ratings, B Through E” and then click the pagination arrow to get to “Computer Industry” on the second page. Once there, you will find what seem at first glance to be some remarkably stable figures.

Look a little closer, though, and the numbers tell a different story. Summing the “very” and “somewhat” figures for each type of response shows a marked decline in positive reception since a high in 2017, and a steady climb in negative reception. There are lots of reasons for this; many of them I have written about. But I do not think these loudmouth executives are doing the industry any favours by bullshitting their way through interviews and promising nonsense.

That is the data-driven answer. These guys also just sound really stupid when they say stuff like “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human” or “the long-term vision is to […] create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion” or “I bought Twitter […] to try to help humanity, whom I love”. I know I am writing this on a website called Pixel Envy and I am, well, me, but these barons sound comical and dorky.

Adobe Pays Early Termination Fee, or ‘Settlement’, in U.S. Lawsuit Over Hidden Fees ⇥ pcmag.com

When the United States Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice jointly filed a lawsuit in 2024 against Adobe, I commented on the similarities between that complaint and the one against Amazon. Both are about the ease of entering into subscriptions that are later difficult or expensive to leave, both had alleged personal liability by executives — and, now, both have been settled out of court.

Michael Kan, PC Magazine:

Adobe has settled a 2024 lawsuit from the US government that alleged the company used hidden fees to trap users into paying for subscriptions.

On Friday, Adobe “finalized” an agreement with the Justice Department, which accused the software vendor of failing to inform new customers about payment terms or early termination fees. “While we disagree with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter,” Adobe says.

I am sure Adobe has learned its lesson. Let us go and check its work. In its statement, Adobe says it has “made [its] sign-up and cancellation processes even more streamlined and transparent”. Here is how it describes its annual pricing, billed monthly, on its U.S. website:

Fee applies of half your remaining annual commitment if you cancel after Mar 31.

This is not the most direct sentence, but it is an accurate explanation of how much the fee will be, and when that fee takes effect — fourteen days from when I am writing this. It is followed by a little “i” informational icon. Clicking on it will display a callout noting when service will be cut off. For comparison, here is the equivalent disclaimer on its Canadian site:

Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days.

Here, too, there is a little informational icon. When you hover over it, Adobe says the same thing about cancellation, and adds that cancelling will incur an early termination fee. It is the same on the U.K. site.

What is the answer here? Does each country need to sue Adobe for its billing flow to disclose a reasonable amount of information?

Meta Realizes Horizon Worlds on Quest Never Had Legs, Will Shut It Down in June ⇥ communityforums.atmeta.com

A few weeks ago, Meta published an update from Samantha Ryan, of Reality Labs, announced a “renewed focus” and a “doubling down” on virtual reality. It planned to achieve this by “almost exclusively” betting its future on the smartphone Horizon Worlds app.

In an announcement today, Meta shifted its definition of “almost exclusively” to simply “exclusively”:

Earlier this year, we shared an update on our renewed focus for VR and Horizon. We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience. This separation will extend across our ecosystem, including our mobile app. To support this vision, we are making the following changes to streamline your Quest experience throughout 2026.

This opening paragraph is opaque and, though the announcement goes on to explain exactly what is happening, it is not nearly as clear as the email sent to Horizon Worlds users. I really think Meta is looking to exit from its pure V.R. efforts, especially with the sales success of the perv glasses.

As I write this, the Horizon app for iOS is the sixty-ninth most popular free game in the Canadian App Store, just behind Wordscapes and ahead of Perfect Makeover Cleaning ASMR. Nice?

A Roadmap for Currency Symbol Implementation ⇥ blog.unicode.org

The Unicode Consortium would like to remind you to work closely with them if you are introducing a new symbol for your currency:

Such public usage leads to a need for the symbol to be encoded in the Unicode Standard and supported in commercial software and services. Standardization of a new character and subsequent support by vendors takes time: typically, at least one year, and often longer. All too often, however, monetary authorities announce creation of a new currency symbol anticipating immediate public adoption, then later discover there will be an unavoidable delay before the new symbol is widely supported in products and services.

I had no idea so many currency symbols had been introduced recently. Then again, before I read this, I had not given much thought to the one we use: $.

Hephzibah Anderson, for the BBC, in 2019:

The most widely accepted theory does in fact involve Spanish coinage, and it goes like this: in the colonies, trade between Spanish Americans and English Americans was lively, and the peso, or peso de ocho reales, was legal tender in the US until 1857. It was often shortened, so historians tell us, to the initial ‘P’ with an ‘S’ hovering beside it in superscript. Gradually, thanks to the scrawl of time-pressed merchants and scribes, that ‘P’ merged with the ‘S’ and lost its curve, leaving the vertical stroke like a stake down the centre of the ‘S’. A Spanish dollar was more or less worth an American dollar, so it’s easy to see how the sign might have transferred.

Not only the explanation for why all the world’s dollars have the same symbol, but also why we share it with the peso.

A Friendly Wager on the Future of Repairability and Performance ⇥ dithering.passport.online

On a recent episode of “Dithering”, Ben Thompson and John Gruber discuss the Tech Re-Nu teardown of the MacBook Neo and what it reveals about the supposed trade-offs of repairability. Thompson says at about 5:48 into the paywalled episode:

The MacBook Neo is a perfect counterpoint to the iFixit perspective. It’s like: you can get repairability, but what it’s going to cost you is a less capable computer with lower battery life.

And that’s fine. We’re at the stage where these iPhone chips are so good — it’s still a very good computer. But it’s quite handy to have the MacBook Air next to the MacBook Neo. They weigh the same. One has much more performance than the other, and that’s the price.

To summarize: “the price”, it is implied, is that the MacBook Air must be less repairable for it to have good battery life and better performance.

I am less certain. You can complain as I did about the adhesive-attached batteries and unrepairable keyboards in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but the most recent updates are effectively speed increases with few other changes. If Apple would like to bring the same repairability advantages of the Neo to the Air and the Pro, it would do so when it redesigns those computers.1 And I think Apple could bring at least some of those repairability improvements — battery or keyboard, perhaps? — to those products in the next major hardware revision.

Call this a friendly wager which I will only be making in internet points. Also, this might be wishcasting — but I think this is the way the winds are blowing. My impression of Apple’s approach to repairability is that it was not a high priority for a long time — particularly for products nearer the beginning of their development cycle — and that it argued for trade-offs that were ultimately irrelevant. That is not only Apple’s approach; there are plenty of companies with poor track records on this stuff. But a patchwork of right-to-repair legislation around the world is helping make devices easier to fix. Also, if assembly costs are indeed reduced by using screws instead of glue — something I am skeptical of but which Thompson and Gruber posit — surely Apple would want to do the same in other products.

  1. I am giving myself a little exit ramp in this footnote for the MacBook Ultra, or whatever Apple ends up calling the rumoured touch laptop. I assume that thing will be full of glue. ↥︎

Trump Administration to Receive $10 Billion Kickback for TikTok Deal ⇥ wsj.com

Miriam Gottfried and Amrith Ramkumar, Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration is set to receive a roughly $10 billion fee from investors in the recently completed deal to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business, delivering it a windfall for keeping the popular social-media app alive in America.

The payment is part of the agreement through which investors friendly with the administration gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from Chinese parent ByteDance, people familiar with the matter said. It comes in addition to the investments made to create a new entity to run the app in the U.S.

Over five years ago, during the first Trump administration, he floated the possibility of getting “key money” for the U.S. Treasury, something he later bemoaned was apparently illegal. So much for that, where by that I mean respect for the law. This is a 70% commission rate to be given to — well, exactly where it will be booked seems like a mystery because it is not like there is a U.S. Department of Bribery.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian […]

“View from nowhere” journalism means these reporters from the Journal cannot call this naked corruption what it is, nor can they quote someone stating it. They can only gesture toward the obvious while writing the straightest of articles about the wackiest events. Things are going well.

Transport Canada’s Vehicle Headlights Survey ⇥ tc.canada.ca

Transport Canada is running a survey about the brightness of car headlights:

While new headlight technology in vehicles can help drivers see better, they can also cause problems for other road users. Transport Canada wants to learn how headlight glare affects road users and what vehicle or lighting features may influence how people experience it at night.

If you live in Canada and have been momentarily blinded by over-bright and poorly aimed headlights, it is worth taking this brief survey to share your thoughts.

Reuters: Meta Is Planning to Wreck the Lives of 20% of Its Staff Because It Is Spending So Much on Data Centres ⇥ reuters.com

Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman, Reuters:

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs ​that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said.

I do not know what is the right number of staff to run Meta’s operations but, whatever it is, there has to be a better way of figuring it out than by luring tens of thousands of people to work for you with promises of a huge salary and benefits, then upending their lives some time later. They have rent or a mortgage; they might have a family depending on their income; their ability to remain in a country may depend on their having a job. Perhaps it could be beneficial for staff to bargain with their company in a more collective manner.

BuzzFeed’s A.I. Pivot Might End in Bankruptcy ⇥ futurism.com

I know — weird that there is news about Digg and BuzzFeed on the same day in 2026. Anyway.

Victor Tangermann, Futurism:

Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

Just a few months after BuzzFeed announced it was pivoting to A.I. to generate more personalized quizzes, it closed its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division.

Not to worry, though, because it launched a new company called Branch Office, which has an on-trend for last year website, some vague apps, and a name that shares an abbreviation with “body odour”. The announcement comes with a killer quote from BuzzFeed’s CEO:

“We’re accelerating into an era of infinite fake news, slop, personalization bubbles, and cuts at the organizations that actually care about content,” said Jonah Peretti. “We need a solution. Branch Office is that solution.”

An era of “slop”? “Cuts at the organizations that actually care”? Listen to yourself, Peretti.

Digg Reboot Needs to ‘Reset’, Lays Off a ‘Significant’ Amount of Staff ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing site — is laying off a sizable portion of its staff, the company announced on Friday. The startup is not closing, however, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said. Instead, Rose will return to work on Digg full-time as the company tries to find its footing.

Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investing firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his primary focus from here on out.

When this “reboot” was announced about a year ago, I was not optimistic. I feel bad for the staff who took a chance on this experiment, but I will be surprised if it comes back.

Meta Says It Is Removing End-to-End Encryption From Instagram Direct Messages ⇥ about.fb.com

In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg announced his “privacy-focused vision for social networking”.

This did not come out of nowhere. Facebook is a technology firm hostile to user privacy, and media coverage has reflected its poor record. The company had even been pursuing a deal to operate in China and accept that government’s surveillance and censorship demands. So it decided to make some changes. It ended its plan for operating in China — not because it no longer wanted that massive audience, but because it was easier to lobby for a U.S. TikTok ban.

It also decided on six principles for that “privacy-focused vision”, among them:

Encryption. People’s private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — including us — from seeing what people share on our services.

Zuckerberg noted some of the risks for end-to-end encryption, but “[o]n balance,” Zuckerberg wrote, “I believe working towards implementing end-to-end encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do”. As a result, Meta’s Sara Su announced in August 2022 that the company would begin testing it in two key applications:

People want to trust that their online conversations with friends and family are private and secure. We’re working hard to protect your personal messages and calls with end-to-end encryption by default on Messenger and Instagram. […]

To Meta’s credit, Messenger defaulted to end-to-end encryption in December 2023. But the company has never flipped the switch for Instagram.

Earlier this week in a note appended to the top of Su’s post, the company said it was ending this pursuit:

Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. You can keep messaging with end-to-end encryption easily on WhatsApp.

I am not sure if it is worth reading anything into the explicit callout of WhatsApp but not Messenger.

In any case, this is another one of those fleeting Zuckerberg obsessions that is only relevant so long as it serves a media relations purpose. Of course not many people opted into end-to-end encryption — that is the whole point of the power of defaults, and something users should not have to think about. This is not an outright rejection of end-to-end encryption, given Meta’s support in other apps, but it is no longer important because it is a few trends behind.

This is now an artificial intelligence company. Do not ask what “Meta” means. It is not important either.

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, Mac, or Apple TV — not just in Safari?

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

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock

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 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

Social Media’s Walled Gardens ⇥ mastodon.ar.al

Aral Balkan:

When you post things on Instagram, Facebook, and X, this is what they look like to people who don’t use those platforms.

They are login walls. Sometimes, these platforms will let you see an individual post without having an account or logging in, but very often they do not. This sucks for many reasons, but one thing I remain surprised by is how the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seems completely okay with Meta using Mark Zuckerberg’s login-walled Facebook and Instagram pages to disclose material information about the company.

Sucker ⇥ theatlantic.com

McKay Coppins, the Atlantic (gift link):

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

[…]

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

I rarely think much of anything published in the Atlantic, and I cannot recall the last time I thought something from Coppins was worth recommending, but you should take the time to read this gut-wrenching reflection on the saturation of gambling in sports and, increasingly, media as a whole. I have read and watched countless stories about the fallout from the legalization of gambling in the United States and Canada — in particular, I think CBC News covered it well in an episode of the “Fifth Estate” (that video might be geographically restricted), while Drew Gooden’s video reflected on it from a fan’s perspective. But Coppin lived it.

This comparison is intriguing:

Executives at the major online sportsbooks are quick to trumpet their commitment to “responsible gaming.” But that purported commitment runs up against an economic reality: As much as 90 percent of the sportsbooks’ revenue comes from less than 10 percent of their users. Their apps seem clearly designed, much like TikTok and Candy Crush, to keep users scrolling and tapping in a hypnotic stupor. If your account is nearing empty, DraftKings will offer a “reload bonus” of gambling credits to entice you to deposit more money; if you’ve gone a couple of days without making a wager, you might get a push alert from FanDuel offering a “no sweat bet,” promising to refund a loss with site credits to be used for more gambling.

Social media is commonly compared to gambling. I recently wrote a headline referring to it as a “slot machine for feelings”. Coppins flips that around, pointing to the personalized notifications that lure people back, a feature that was also presented in the “Fifth Estate” documentary. There is no way for your phone to dispense cigarettes or alcohol, but gambling is right there, all the time.

Regardless of whether prohibition was the right call for gambling — and there is compelling evidence for that — I think the advertising and integration into sports and other media must be stopped.

‘This Is Not the Computer for You’ ⇥ samhenri.gold

Sam Henri Gold:

The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you are thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” The people saying this are not wrong. It is also not the point.

Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.

This is such a good essay. It takes me right back to the first computers I used when I was a kid, trying everything and finding whatever limits exist. And they do exist, but they are far beyond what most people will even attempt because technology has far outpaced our typical use. Apple can make a full-on Mac with “a phone chip” because that phone has a display with nearly as many pixels as were in the 30-inch Cinema Display you used to need Apple’s most expensive Mac and a specific graphics card to run.

People are going to use this Mac like a Mac.

TechCrunch: L3Harris, a U.S. Military Contractor, Likely Built ‘Coruna’ iPhone Hacking Toolkit ⇥ techcrunch.com

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch:

A mass hacking campaign targeting iPhone users in Ukraine and China used tools that were likely designed by U.S. military contractor L3Harris, TechCrunch has learned. The tools, which were intended for Western spies, wound up in the hands of various hacking groups, including Russian government spooks and Chinese cybercriminals.

While Franceschi-Bicchierai notes the case of a former L3Harris executive who sold exploits to a Russian company, it remains unclear how this specific toolkit was leaked.

Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its A.I. ‘Expert Review’ Feature ⇥ wired.com

Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly’s parent company Superhuman, on LinkedIn of all places:

Back in August, we launched a Grammarly agent called Expert Review. The agent draws on publicly available information from third-party LLMs to surface writing suggestions inspired by the published work of influential voices.

[…]

After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review while we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented — or not represented at all.

This has been around since August without anyone noticing until recently, which likely means few people used it. Certainly none of the experts, whose likenesses were being used without permission to give advice, had any idea.

Regardless, I do not think this is something Mehrotra or Superhuman can duck out from with a simple my bad.

Miles Klee, Wired:

Superhuman, the tech company behind the writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product.

Good.

MacBook Neo Teardown Reveals a Highly Repairable Laptop ⇥ youtube.com

Earlier this week, I linked to iFixit’s exploration of ways Apple used to prioritize repairability in its laptops. The headline on the article is “How Apple Used to Design Its Laptops for Repairability”, but the <title> tag reveals a more incendiary thesis:

Macbook Neo Shows how far Apple’s repairability design has fallen – iFixit

That is quite the bold statement for an article published just a few days after the MacBook Neo was announced and nearly a week before it became available.

Luckily, the good people at Tech Re-Nu in Melbourne got their hands on a Neo on launch day in Australia, and took it apart. They found modular internals held in place with dozens of screws. They only found adhesive on the back of the trackpad — hardly the end of the world. It is a far cry from the glued-in battery of the MacBook Pro. (Warning: that link goes to a page where Apple has decided to use PNGs for photographs instead of JPEGs, rendering the guide hundreds of megabytes large. Embarrassing.) Tech Re-Nu does not entirely disassemble the Neo, but it is possible to remove the keyboard for repair without replacing the entire top case.

This does not entirely invalidate iFixit’s argument, of course. Apple’s laptops used to have replaceable memory and storage, but none of that can be changed post-purchase. But the Neo is way more repairable than I think iFixit expected it to be. I wish that were true for the other laptops Apple introduced last week, both of which still use adhesive to secure the battery, and seemingly do not permit replacing the keyboard independently of the top case.

Also, it is always worth putting iFixit’s advocacy in the context of a company that also sells parts and tools. A conflict of interest, to be sure, but not invalidating — just something to be mindful of.

Online Age Verification Tools for Child Safety Are Surveilling Adults ⇥ cnbc.com

Barbara Booth, CNBC:

Civil liberties’ advocates warn that concentrating large volumes of identity data among a small number of verification vendors can create attractive targets for hackers and government demands. Earlier this year, Discord disclosed a data breach that exposed ID images belonging to approximately 70,000 users through a compromised third-party service, highlighting the security risks associated with storing sensitive identity information.

[…]

According to Tandy, as more states adopt age-verification mandates and companies race to comply, the infrastructure behind those systems is likely to become a permanent fixture of online life. Taken together, industry leaders say the rapid spread of age-verification laws may push platforms toward systems that verify age once and reuse that credential across services.

The hurried implementation of age verification sounds fairly terrible, counterproductive, illegal in the U.S., and discriminatory, but we should not pretend that we are only now being subject to risky and overbearing surveillance on the web. The ecosystem powering behavioural ad targeting — including data brokers, the biggest of which have reported staggering data breaches for a decade — has all but ensured our behaviour on popular websites and in mobile apps is already tracked and tied to some proxy for our identity.

That is not an excuse for the poor implementation of age verification, nor justification for its existence. If anything, it is a condemnation of the current state of the web that this barely moves the needle on privacy. If I had to choose whether to compromise for commerce or for the children, it would be the latter, but the correct answer is, likely, neither.

Grammarly’s ‘Expert Review’ Feature Presents Fake Advice in the Names of Real Journalists and Authors ⇥ platformer.news

Casey Newton, Platformer:

On Friday I learned to my surprise that I had become an editor for Grammarly. The subscription-based writing assistant has introduced a feature named “expert review” that, in the company’s words, “is designed to take your writing to the next level — with insights from leading professionals, authors, and subject-matter experts.”

Read a little further, though, and you’ll learn that these “insights” are not actually “from” leading professionals, or any human person at all. Rather, they are AI-generated text, which may or may not reflect whichever “leading professional” Grammarly slapped their names on.

Miles Klee, Wired:

As advertised on a support page, Grammarly users can solicit tips from virtual versions of living writers and scholars such as Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson (neither of whom responded to a request for comment) as well as the deceased, like the editor William Zinsser and astronomer Carl Sagan. Presumably, these different AI agents are trained on the oeuvres of the people they are meant to imitate, though the legality of this content-harvesting remains murky at best, and the subject of many, many copyright lawsuits.

I do not think a disclaimer explaining it does “not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities” will sufficiently distance the company from its claim of providing “insights from leading professionals, authors, and subject-matter experts” attributed to the names of people who did not agree to participate in this. Apparently, it is incumbent upon them to opt out by emailing expertoptout@superhuman.com. Most people will obviously not do this — because why would anyone realize they need to opt out? — but especially those who are dead yet are still being called upon for their expertise. Let Carl Sagan rest.

Apple Used to Design Its Laptops for Repairability ⇥ ifixit.com

Charlie Sorrel, of iFixit:

Apple’s MacBooks haven’t always been monolithic, barely repairable slabs of aluminum, glass, and glue. They used to be almost delightful in their repairable features, from their batteries to their Wi-Fi cards. Powerbooks, iBooks, and especially early MacBooks showed what happens when Apple applies its design skills directly to repairability and maintenance, instead of to thinness above all. Today we’re going to take a look at the best repairability features that Apple has ditched.

These four complaints range from the somewhat quaint — swappable Wi-Fi cards — to the stuff I actually miss, which is everything else. RAM and disk upgrades are a gimme since the cost-per-gigabyte (generally) declines over time, and I would love easily swappable batteries. But right now, nearly four years into owning this MacBook Pro, I would also really like to be able to swap in a new keyboard in the future. Not only are the keycaps unintentionally becoming polished, some oft-used keys feel a little mushy. Not much, and barely enough to notice, but I imagine their clickiness will not improve over time.

One quibble, emphasis mine:

[…] I have an old 2012 MacBook Air running Linux. I swapped the HDD for an SSD, maxed out the RAM, and dropped in a new battery, and I see no reason it wouldn’t easily keep rolling for another 10 years.

Unlikely. The 2012 MacBook Air only came with an SSD; a standard hard disk was not an option.

Another Appearance Control Is Coming to Accessibility Settings in iOS 26.4 ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple renamed the prior Reduce Highlighting Effects Accessibility setting to “Reduce Bright Effects,” and explained what it does.

Apple says the feature “minimizes highlighting and flashing when interacting with onscreen elements, such as buttons or the keyboard.

In my testing, this does exactly what you would expect. In places like toolbar buttons — or the buttons in the area of what is left of a toolbar, anyhow — the passcode entry screen, and Control Centre, the glowing tap effects are minimized or removed.

I do not find those effects particularly distracting, and I think turning them off saps some of the life out of the Liquid Glass design language, but I can see why some would be bothered by them. It is not the case that iOS 26 would be better if none of these appearance controls were present, only that they should not be necessary.

Minister for Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Announces ‘Guardrails’ for TikTok Canada Operations ⇥ canada.ca

There are three agreed-upon policies which, in the airy language of a government press release, seem reasonable enough to apply to all social platforms, yet are only relevant to TikTok. The first is exceedingly vague:

TikTok will implement enhanced protection for Canadians’ personal information, including new security gateways and privacy-enhancing technologies to control access to Canadian user data in order to reduce the risk of unauthorized or prohibited access.

There are no details about what the “new security gateways and privacy-enhancing technologies” are, nor why the sole goal is preventing “prohibited access” rather than “exploitative access”.

The second — complying with the recommendations of the Privacy Commissioner — was already underway, and the third is an “independent third-party monitor”, which seems fine.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: Effortlessly Block Ads on Your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV ⇥ magiclasso.co

Do you want an all-in-one solution to block ads, trackers, and annoyances across all your Apple devices?

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

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock

With Magic Lasso Adblock you can effortlessly block ads on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV.

Magic Lasso is a single, native app that includes everything you need:

  • Safari Ad Blocking — Browse 2.0× faster in Safari by blocking all ads, with no annoying distractions or pop ups

  • YouTube Ad Blocking — Block all YouTube ads in Safari, including all video ads, banner ads, search ads, plus many more

  • App Ad Blocking — Block ads and trackers across the news, social media, and game apps on your device, including other browsers such as Chrome and Firefox

  • Apple TV Ad Blocking — Watch your favourite TV shows with less interruptions and protect your privacy from in-app ad tracking with Magic Lasso on your Apple TV

Best of all, with Magic Lasso Adblock, 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, Mac, and Apple TV.

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, ensure your browsing history, app usage, and viewing habits stay private with Magic Lasso Adblock.

Join over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

Mixing News Coverage and ‘Prediction Markets’ Is a Dangerous Gamble ⇥ theverge.com

Nilay Patel and Liz Lopatto discussed “prediction markets” on the Verge’s “Decoder” podcast; here is Patel’s summary:

Insider trading is supposed to be illegal, and so is operating an unregulated sports book. So you’re now starting to see Kalshi and Polymarket getting hit from both sides of this broader regulatory debate, and 2026 is shaping up to be the year that all of this really comes to a head. To what end? It’s hard to say, especially as these companies cozy up to the Trump administration.

But it’s also becoming increasingly untenable for prediction markets to sit in the middle of the tension between gambling on the news and trying to self-regulate such that they don’t encourage insider trading.

A little under a month after Gallup announced it would stop polling for presidential approval, the Associated Press said it would begin integrating Kalshi bets into its election coverage. As Patel and Lopatto say, however, election betting is among the least problematic news gambling.

The Central Lie of Prediction Markets ⇥ theatlantic.com

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic (gift link):

Prediction markets claim to harness the wisdom of crowds to provide reliable public data: Because people are putting real money behind their opinions, they are expressing what they actually believe is most likely to happen, which, according to the reasoning of these platforms, means that events will unfold accordingly. Many news organizations, and Substack, now have partnerships with prediction markets — the subtext being that they provide some kind of news-gathering function. Some users who distrust mainstream media turn to the markets in place of traditional journalism.

But in reality, prediction markets produce the opposite of accurate, unbiased information. They encourage anyone with an informational edge to use their knowledge for personal financial gain. In this way, prediction markets are the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder.

I had no idea so-called “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket were promoting themselves as forecasters of real information, let alone that anyone believed them. I always assumed “prediction markets” was a euphemism.

A spokesperson for Kalshi told Warzel that betting on current events is a way to “create accurate, unbiased forecasts”, and that is something we can verify. If this were true, bettors should have been able to forecast, for example, the popular vote split of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Polls had Harris and Trump neck and neck, but on election day, 75.8% of Kalshi bettors believed Harris would prevail. There is not much granularity to Kalshi’s charts, but the forecast on Polymarket was favourable to Harris at 5:00 PM on November 5 — election day — and it flips to a Trump lead at the next available data point, 5:00 AM the following day, and well after it was obvious Trump won the popular vote.

This is just a way to gamble on current events, which is tragic and pathetic. We do not need to pretend these sites are anything more substantial than that.

Google and Epic Games Announce Settlement ⇥ theregister.com

Sameer Samat, Google’s president of Android Ecosystem:

Today we are announcing substantial updates that evolve our business model and build on our long history of openness globally.  We’re doing that in three ways: more billing options, a program for registered app stores, and lower fees and new programs for developers.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on X:

Google is opening up Android all the way with robust support for competing stores, competing payments, and a better deal for all developers. So, we’ve settled all of our disputes worldwide. THANKS GOOGLE!

Simon Sharwood, the Register:

Epic Games approved of the changes.

“These changes will evolve Android into a true open platform with competition among stores,” the company stated. “Globally, developers will have choices in how they make payments using Google Play’s payment system and competing payment systems, with reduced fees and the ability to point users outside apps to make purchases.

Epic also said “Google will take steps to support the future open metaverse,” a probable reference to the deal that will see games made with the Unity engine made available within Fortnite.

Neither Sweeney nor Epic Games can express anything less than elation with this outcome in no small part because they signed away their ability to do that. It still amazes me that concession ended up in the final agreement. It seems like the kind of thing that Google’s very expensive lawyers would pitch as leverage with Epic Games’ not-quite-as-expensive lawyers. In an interview with Dean Takahashi, of GamesBeat, it seems like Epic was eager to settle with terms that apply worldwide:

Asked why Sweeney decided to settle rather than litigate in every court in the world, he said, “This is just a really important thing that people should understand. The Epic versus Google court decision in the United States only has effect in the United States. It does nothing about the rest of the world. And the United States is about 30% of Google Play revenue and about 5% of Google Play users.”

He said it was never going to be a complete worldwide solution, and the court, throughout the proceedings, very clearly, said that the court wanted to establish competition among stores and competition among payments without setting prices in the market.

Curiously, not long before this settlement, Google announced it would begin requiring Android developers to be verified for their software to be installable, even by side-loading. I am curious if the combination of these changes meaningfully impacts users’ security or privacy. At a glance, the changes that settled this lawsuit seem like a welcome set of improvements that, sure, was assuredly not an altruistic fight by Epic Games, and will probably result in Sweeney getting even richer.

Regardless, it is notable for these sweeping changes to be brought to Android phones worldwide in the coming years, while Apple’s App Store is a patchwork of region-specific policies difficult for developers to navigate. It is too bad there is not really competition between these stores. Most people who buy smartphones choose the platform as a whole and accept whatever software experience they are provided. They do not need to bother themselves with the business terms of each store. With the improvements to third-party stores on Android, it sets up the possibility for greater competition within that platform. Apple should do the same.

Apple’s New Studio Displays, Plural ⇥ 512pixels.net

In hardware terms alone, Apple has been delivering an incredible run of Macs arguably since 2020, and easily since 2021. There are quibbles, sure — the display notch still bugs some people, the keyboard material wears poorly, and repairability has declined — but these are, overall, pretty sweet machines. The Macs announced this week seem like they will continue that hot streak.

I happen to be in the market for a new Mac, perhaps this year, and I should be spoiled for choice. I kind of am — the Mac Mini and Mac Studio are both alluring. But I am sadly attached to the room offered by my beloved 27-inch iMac, and Apple’s new lineup of displays is a sore point.

Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels:

Yes, those are two different products, but they both feature 27-inch, 5K displays in the same enclosure as the previous Studio Display.

Starting at $1599, the new Studio Display is a slight upgrade to the 2022 model.

[…]

The much more interesting of the pair is the $3299 Studio Display XDR.

Those prices are, respectively, $2,100 and $4,500 in Canada. I am not a stranger to spending a lot of money on a screen — I bought a Thunderbolt Display at $1,000 — but that is a lot of money for even the basest of base models, especially since I have no idea whether the sketchy firmware issues have been resolved.

It is not that these displays are bad — far from it — but it is extraordinary that we are ten years removed from 27-inch Retina iMacs that started at just $200 more than the Studio Display is today. Only recently are we seeing more choice in 27-inch 5K displays at considerably lower prices, though without Apple’s very nice stand and quality of materials. At least the XDR has a seemingly new panel.

Three of the seven models in the Mac lineup require an external display. Apple has two choices: one really advanced one that costs as much as a generously-specced Mac Studio, and another that feels like it is stumbling along.

Anyway, here I go again looking for a sick deal I will not find on a Pro Display XDR. Those things really hold their value. Pity.

Tim Sweeney Is Contractually Prohibited from Criticizing Google’s Developer Terms for Years ⇥ theverge.com

Sean Hollister, the Verge:

But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It’s right there in a binding term sheet for his settlement with Google.

On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and disparage the company, he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google’s app store polices. He can’t criticize Google’s app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them.

The terms (PDF) helpfully clarify that Epic is still allowed to “advocat[e] changes to the policies or practices of […] other companies, including Apple”. This does not mean future criticism of Apple’s business practices — or past criticism, for that matter — is unwarranted or invalid, but it now carries the blunted quality of someone who is not allowed to make the same complaints about Google.

A Toolkit for Hacking iPhones, Possibly Created for the U.S. Government, Has Leaked ⇥ cloud.google.com

Google’s Threat Intelligence Group:

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new and powerful exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023). The exploit kit, named “Coruna” by its developers, contained five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits. The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits, with the most advanced ones using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses.

The Coruna exploit kit provides another example of how sophisticated capabilities proliferate. Over the course of 2025, GTIG tracked its use in highly targeted operations initially conducted by a customer of a surveillance vendor, then observed its deployment in watering hole attacks targeting Ukrainian users by UNC6353, a suspected Russian espionage group. We then retrieved the complete exploit kit when it was later used in broad-scale campaigns by UNC6691, a financially motivated threat actor operating from China. […]

Andy Greenberg, Wired:

Conspicuously absent from Google’s report is any mention of who the original surveillance company “customer” that deployed Coruna may have been. But the mobile security company iVerify, which also analyzed a version of Coruna it obtained from one of the infected Chinese sites, suggests the code may well have started life as a hacking kit built for or purchased by the US government. Google and iVerify both note that Coruna contains multiple components previously used in a hacking operation known as “Triangulation” that was discovered targeting Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in 2023, which the Russian government claimed was the work of the NSA. (The US government didn’t respond to Russia’s claim.)

I am so curious to know how this thing made it outside the carefully guarded digital walls of the U.S. government or a contractor. While a rare event, it is not the first time the classified weapons of espionage have become public.

U.S. Immigration Police Bought Real-Time Ad Bidding Data for Automated Tracking System ⇥ 404media.co

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.

[…]

Although CBP described the move as a pilot, the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) later found both CBP and ICE did not limit themselves to non-operational use. The OIG found that CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service all illegally used the smartphone location data, and found a CBP official used the data to track coworkers with no investigative purpose. CBP and ICE went on to repeatedly purchase access to location data.

There are people out there who will insist, to this day, that behaviourally targeted advertising is not actually a mechanism for surveillance despite all the evidence showing it is, in fact, an essential component.

Annotators in Kenya Describe How They Review Sensitive Data Captured by Meta’s Ray-Bans ⇥ svd.se

Naipanoi Lepapa, Ahmed Abdigadir, and Julia Lindblom, Svenska Dagbladet:

The workers in Kenya say that it feels uncomfortable to go to work. They tell us about deeply private video clips, which appear to come straight out of Western homes, from people who use the glasses in their everyday lives.

Several describe video material showing bathroom visits, sex and other intimate moments.

Another worker talks about people coming out of bathrooms.

It is appalling that massively rich corporations like Meta continue to offload critical tasks like these onto people who receive little support or pay. I recently finished “Ghost Work” by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri and, while not my favourite book nor surfacing anything conceptually new, is worth your time. Meta can and should be doing far better, but can avoid association with labour atrocities better than, say, Nike in the 1990s in part because I doubt most people think too much about human intervention in artificial intelligence. Meta does not celebrate the hard work of its contract labour in Kenya; it does not even acknowledge them.

Speaking of not acknowledging the human labour involved, this story is the obvious nightmare you would expect. Some of these incidents of sensitive video recordings appear to be accidental, while others are seemingly deliberate. Without excusing the people who seem to be recording creepy videos on purpose, I assume few people would have believed it would be seen by someone at a company they probably have not heard about.

At first glance, it appears that we have significant control over our data. It states that voice recordings may only be saved and used for improvement or training of other Meta products if the user actively agrees.

But for the AI assistant to function, voice, text, image and sometimes video must be processed and may be shared onwards. This data processing is done automatically and cannot be turned off.

This is the kind of thing I would expect would be bundled into the additional diagnostic information Meta asks if you would like to opt into sharing. But Meta says this “does not include the photos and videos captured by your glasses”. That is, as this investigation found, part of the mandatory data collection.

This is offensive on behalf of users who might be less likely to consent if they had this full information. But it is also offensive to their romantic partners, friends, acquaintances, and passers-by, none of whom agreed to have their image or conversations adjudicated by these contractors.

The Window Chrome of Our Discontent

In a WWDC 2011 session, Dan Schimpf explained some of the goals of the refreshed design for Aqua in Mac OS X Lion were “meant to focus the user attention on the active window content”. This sentiment was echoed by John Siracusa in his review of Lion for Ars Technica:

Apple says that its goal with the Lion user interface was to highlight content by de-emphasizing the surrounding user interface elements.

When Apple redesigned Mac OS X again in 2014 with Yosemite, it promised…

[…] a fresh modern look where controls are clearer, smarter and easier to understand, and streamlined toolbars put the focus on your content without compromising functionality.

Then, when it revealed the Big Sur redesign in 2020, it explained:

The entire experience feels more focused, fresh, and familiar, reducing visual complexity and bringing users’ content front and centre.

And you will never guess what it promised in 2025 with the announcement of MacOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass, as introduced by Alan Dye:

Our goal is a beautiful new design that brings joy and delight to every user experience. One that’s more personal, and puts greater focus on your content — all while still feeling instantly familiar.

It is not just Apple, either. Here is Microsoft’s Jensen Harris at Build 2011 describing a key goal for the company’s then-new Metro design language:

Metro-style apps have room to breathe. They’re not about the chrome, they’re about the content. […] For years, Windows was always about adding stuff. We added bars, and panes, and doodads, and widgets, and gadgets, and bars — and stuff everywhere. And that’s how we defined our U.I., based on what new widgets we added. Now, we’ve receded into the background, and the app is sitting out there on the stage.

And later, as Microsoft rolled out app updates with its Fluent Design language, it described them in familiar terms:

With the updated OneDrive, your content takes center stage. The improved visual design reduces clutter and distractions, allowing you to focus on what’s important – your content.

This is a laudable goal if the opposite is, I assume, increasing the amount of clutter in user interfaces and making them more distracting. Nobody wants that. Then again, while the objective may be quite reasonable, there are surely different ways of achieving it — but Apple has embraced a single strategy: make the interface blend into the document. (I will be focusing on MacOS here as it is the platform I am most familiar with.)

Here is what a Pages document looks like running under Mac OS X Lion:

Click to expand (except on mobile).
A screenshot of Pages running under Mac OS X Lion

Here is that same document in a newer version of Pages running on MacOS Catalina, with the Yosemite-era design language that replaced the one that came before:

Click to expand (except on mobile).
A screenshot of Pages running under MacOS Catalina

Here it is in the last version of Pages on MacOS Tahoe, using the design language introduced with Big Sur:

Click to expand (except on mobile).
A screenshot of Pages running under MacOS Tahoe

And, finally, the newest version of Pages on MacOS Tahoe using the current Liquid Glass visual design language:

Click to expand (except on mobile).
A screenshot of Pages running under MacOS Tahoe

There are welcome improvements in newer versions of this comparison, like the introduction of the “Format” panel on the right-hand side, which makes better use of widescreen landscape-oriented displays, and allows for larger controls. While I admire the density of the Lion-era screenshot, the mini-sized controls in that formatting menu are harder to click.1

Overall, however, what Apple has done to Pages over this period of time is representative of a broader trend of minimizing the delineation of user interface elements from each other and the document itself. This is the only tool in the toolbox, and I am skeptical it achieves what Apple intends.

Compare again the two more recent screenshots against the ones that came before, and focus on the toolbar at the top of each. In the older two, there is a well-defined separation between the toolbar — the window itself — and the document. In the Big Sur visual language, however, the toolbar is the same bright white as the document. By Tahoe and the Liquid Glass language, there is barely a distinction; the buttons simply float over the document. And, bizarrely, that degrades further with the “Reduce Transparency” accessibility preference enabled:

Click to expand (except on mobile).
A screenshot of Pages running under MacOS Tahoe with the Reduce Transparency setting enabled

(Also, no, your eyes do not deceive you: the icons in the drop cap menu, barely visible in the lower-right, are indeed pixellated.)

For me, this means a constant distraction from my document because the whole window has a similar visual language. As the toolbar and its buttons become one with the document, they lose their ability to fade into the background. In the two older examples, the contrast of the well-defined toolbar allows me to treat them as an entirely separate thing I do not need to pay attention to.

This is further justified by the lower contrast within those two older toolbars. In Lion, the grey background and moderately saturated colours are a quiet reminder of tools that are available without them being intrusive. The mix of shapes is a sufficient differentiator, something Apple threw away in the following screenshot. By making all the buttons literal and with the same bright background, the toolbar becomes a little more distracting — but at least it does not blend into the document. Without the context of the previous screenshot, the colours of each icon seem almost random, and I find the yellow-on-white “Table” button difficult to distinguish at a glance from the black-on-yellow-on-white “Comment” button.

The Big Sur-era design language is, frankly, an atrocious regression. The heterogeneous shapes may have returned, but in the form of monochromatic medium-grey icons set against a uniform white background. The icons are not bad, per se — though putting “Add Page” and “Insert” next to each other in this default toolbar layout, both represented by a plus sign, is a little confusing. But I will bet you would not guess that some of these are buttons, while others are pop-up buttons with a submenu.

Finally, there is Liquid Glass which, in its default form, has more contrast than the previous example; with “Reduce Transparency” enabled, which is how I use MacOS, it has even less. The buttons themselves have a greater amount of internal contrast with bigger, darker grey icons on a white background. This is preferential within the context of the toolbar compared to the thin, small, and low-contrast buttons in the past example, but it also means this toolbar has similar contrast to the document itself.

I would not go so far as to argue that Pages ’09 has a perfect user interface and that everything since has been a regression. The average colours used for the icon fill in both older toolbars generally fails accessibility contrast checks which, remarkably, the Big Sur design will pass. The icons in Pages ’09 rely on dark outlines and unique shapes to have sufficient contrast with the toolbar background. However, Apple has since discarded most variables it could change to design these interfaces. Every button contains an icon of a single uniform colour, within barely defined holding containers of the same shape, and without text labels by default.

This monochromatic look means any splash of colour is distracting. The yellow accent used in Pages is garish — though, thankfully, something that can mostly be mitigated by changing the Theme Colour in System Settings, under Appearance. (Unfortunately, the yellow background remains on the “Update” button in the most recent version of Pages regardless of the system accent colour.) But perhaps you also noticed the purple icon in the Liquid Glass screenshot above. Here is the full toolbar:

Click to expand (except on mobile).
A screenshot of the full Pages toolbar featuring monochromatic dark grey icons except for a few purple ones

Those purple icons signify features that are part of Apple Creator Studio, a paid subscription to Pages and other applications that allows you to — in the order they are presented above — generate an image, artificially boost the resolution of an image, and access a stock image library. If you would like to insert one of your own images into your Pages document, that feature has been moved to the paperclip icon. Yes, it is a menu and not a button, despite lacking the disclosure triangle of the zoom menu right beside it, and it also reminds you about the “Content Hub” and “Generate Image” features. In Pages under Lion, colour was used in the icons to help guide the user as they complete a task — click the green thing to add a shape; click the darker yellow thing to add a table. Colour is not being used in the newer version to signify these are A.I. features, as the “Writing Tools” icon remains dark grey. In this version, the coloured icons are there to guide the user to premium add-ons regardless of whether they are currently paying for them.

I decided to focus on Pages for this comparison because it has lived so many different lives in MacOS. However, it is perhaps an imperfect representation for the rest of the system. Across Mac OS X Lion, for example, the toolbars of first-party applications like Finder and Preview almost exclusively use monochromatic icons. This has been true since Mac OS X Leopard, which also introduced barely differentiated folder icons. Some toolbars in Tiger, introduced two years prior, featured icons inside uniform capsule shapes. These were questionable ideas at the time, but they still retained defining characteristics. The capsules, for example, may have had a uniform shape, but contained within were full-colour icons. Most importantly, they were all clearly controls that were differentiated from the document.

Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise, but I cannot see how dialling back the lines between interface and document is supposed to be beneficial for the user. It does not, in my use, result in less distraction while I am working in these apps. In fact, it often does the opposite. I do not think the prescription is rolling back to a decade-old design language. However, I think Apple should consider exploring the wealth of variables it can change to differentiate tools within toolbars, and to more clearly delineate window chrome from document.

  1. These screenshots are a bit limited as, to capture a high-resolution interface, I switched my mid-2012 MacBook Air to a 720 × 450 display output, which shrank the available space for Pages in the Lion and Catalina screenshots. ↥︎

Software Quality Postscript and Clarification ⇥ morrick.me

I have a document open in BBEdit right now named “2025-06-22 – MacOS SaaS.markdown”. I started drafting this thing last year about how Apple has transitioned its operating systems to something closer to a software-as-a-service model. I was trying to describe how the difference between major versions has become generally more modest since many features are rolled out across the year, and how — particularly on Apple’s non-Mac platforms — updates are more-or-less forced since the company stops digitally certifying older versions.

It is not a perfect comparison and not quite a fully-developed idea — note the difference between the filename and the last sentence above — but I thought it was going somewhere. Of course, you had no idea about this because I never published, which is why it must have seemed strange when I dropped a reference to software-as-a-service in the middle of my piece about software quality:

There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.

Riccardo Mori was understandably confused by this:

[…] I very much enjoy using older Mac OS versions, but not being able to browse the Web properly and securely, not being able to correctly sign in to check a Gmail account, not being able to fetch some RSS feeds because you can’t authenticate securely or establish a secure connection is very frustrating. Not having Dropbox work on my 2009 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.11 El Capitan is a minor annoyance and means I just won’t have access to certain personal files and that I’ll have to sync manually whatever I do on this other machine.

But if I put these two factors aside, there’s nothing about those older Macs, nothing about the older Mac OS versions they run that makes them less reliable. […]

What Mori explains as this paragraph continues is what I had meant to write at the time. What I should have written was this (emphasis mine):

There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; an operating system on a software-as-a-service treadmill means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.

The cycle of having a major new version ready to preview by June and shipping in September means the amount of time Apple spends focusing on the current version must necessarily shrink. How many teams at the company do you suppose are, right now, working on MacOS 26 when WWDC is a little over three months away? Engineering efforts are undoubtably beginning to prioritize MacOS 27. There are new features to prepare, after all.

So, yes, what Mori writes is what I was trying to express. I wish I had given that sentence a little more thought. Do read Mori’s piece — the second part, “On Software Frugality”, is thought-provoking.

The Perfect Music App ⇥ hicks.design

Jon Hicks, last year:

Music apps leave me wanting.

While I collect albums both physically (Vinyl + CD) and digitally (from Bandcamp), there are still missing pieces that streaming services provide: discovering new music, sharing playlists and seeing what friends are playing so that I can try their recommendations. They’re a valuable part of my listening habits, but none of them feel like ‘the one’. […]

I only stumbled across this today, but it remains a wonderful encapsulation of the state of music apps today. I share Hicks’ criteria, though I would add three things for myself:

  1. More expansive metadata. I would like genres that work more like tags. An artist may generally make records in one genre, but different albums have different influences. Even individual songs may considerably differ in sound and style. This is the kind of thing that would help me make playlists or find songs that sound better together.

    This would be a management challenge across the tens of thousands of songs in my library, but I feel like integration with RateYourMusic and other databases might help partially automate this.

  2. iPhone syncing over a wire. One of Hicks’ criteria is streaming and local library in the same app, and I completely agree. But I do not want anything — especially iPhone syncing — to be predicated on an assumption I have Apple’s first-party iCloud Music stuff turned on.

  3. No lock-in. I want to be able to point it at my existing library and for things to just work. I would like to be able to import my entire setup from Music — all my playlists, including smart playlists, plus all my stats and ratings — and I would like it to be stored in a format some other application could read if I ever need to move to a different client in the future.

There are many indie apps that get close to this. I checked out Radiccio recently, but it unfortunately does not work with the iMac on which my music library is stored. Maybe that is the fourth criteria: backwards compatibility as far as possible.

Nobody has ever said I am easy to please.

The Political Effects of Twitter’s Feed Algorithm ⇥ nature.com

Germain Gauthier, et al., in a recent peer-reviewed paper in Nature:

Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. […]

One can be pedantic about the use of “algorithmic” and “the algorithm” to describe a particular set of rules for recommending tweets, given that you could also say a reverse-chronological timeline is its own kind of algorithm. A simple one, to be sure, but an algorithm. I will not quibble with this.

Here is one thing I will be pedantic about, though: this study is not an examination of the “political effects of X’s feed algorithm”, as the title of the study suggests. It was conducted in 2023 — just a little bit after Elon Musk bought the platform and when it was still named Twitter. That is a long time ago in online platform terms, and the recommendations engine has probably changed a lot since — but almost certainly not in the direction of political even-handedness — even though the GitHub commit log suggests it has not been.

This study’s design seems better to me than a report published shortly after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, which I found limited and unconvincing.

There should always be a way for users to set a reverse-chronological timeline, and to opt out of recommendations features. We should be suspicious of any platform that refuses to trust us with control over our own experience.

It Sure Looks to Me Like Meta Is Winding Down Its V.R. Efforts ⇥ developers.meta.com

Samantha Ryan, “VP of Content” at Meta’s Reality Labs:

We’ve recently made some pretty big changes, including right-sizing our Reality Labs investment to ensure that our efforts remain sustainable over time. We’ve been in this space for over a decade, and we aren’t going anywhere. We’re in it for the long haul.

By “right-sizing”, Ryan means laying off ten percent of the Reality Labs workforce, and pouring money into the Ray-Ban partnership instead of metaverse initiatives. By “in it for the long haul”, Ryan means shifting the definition of the “metaverse” to meet Mark Zuckerberg’s latest obsession. They did not whiff by renaming the entire company around a crappy update to Second Life; you just are not getting it.

Ryan:

Our goal remains constant: to empower developers and creators as they build long-term, sustainable businesses. We used to have a pretty well-defined audience for VR, but as we’ve grown, we’ve attracted new audiences — who want different things — and the onus is on us to make sure that each of these distinct groups can find the apps and games that appeal to them.

That’s why we’re changing our roadmaps to increase your chances for success. We’re explicitly separating our Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform in order to create more space for both products to grow. We’re doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile. By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each.

Meta can say it is “doubling down on the V.R. developer ecosystem” all it wants, but it announced in January it would be shutting down its work-focused V.R. app with only a month’s notice, and it has cancelled third-party headsets. Now, it is saying Horizon Worlds is basically a phone app. Last February, Andrew Bosworth wrote in a memo about the importance of this very strategy:

[…] And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. […]

As I write this, Meta Horizon is the fifty-seventh most popular free game in the Canadian App Store, just two spots behind Hole.io, “the most addictive black hole game”. Maybe people do not, in general, want to wear a computer on their entire head — not for the thousands of dollars Apple is charging, and not for the hundreds Meta is.

Personal (Computer) Assistants ⇥ omarknows.ai

Omar Shahine:

For years, I’ve wanted a personal assistant. Someone who knows my preferences, manages my inbox, tracks my packages, and helps my family stay organized. The problem? Good assistants are expensive, require training, and still need constant direction.

So I built one. His name is Lobster. 🦞

The key insight that made this work wasn’t technical—it was conceptual. I stopped thinking “AI chatbot” and started thinking “new hire.”

I think this analogy is downright perfect.

When I first read this piece, my mind started to spin with all the things I could offload to my own digital personal assistant. Imagine how much time I could save by… wait. What could I use it for? Shahine says it helps summarize recent emails, figure out travel details, find event tickets, and more, all through iMessage conversations. This is a remarkable technical achievement. But what it drove home for me is how little I could ultimately relate to the scenarios presented by Shahine, even as I am trying to plan dinner with friends and a couple of trips later in the year.

Perhaps the same is true for you, too. Take a moment and think about what tasks you would give a personal assistant that can only work through software. Is it a long list? Is delegating checking your email saving you time? If you automate your vacation planning, does it make you happier than figuring that out alongside your partner or family? I am not saying Shahine is wrong or misguided. I just cannot see my life in this, and I do not think I am alone.

On Software Quality

Jason Snell has published the results from his annual survey of a panel of Apple observers and, as I expected, there seems to be wide agreement that the company’s software quality is not up to scratch thanks primarily to Liquid Glass. This year’s average score of 2.7 for operating system quality and 3.1 for first-party app quality is a decline from the average score of 3.4 and 3.5, respectively, last year.

But look back a little further and the grades for Apple’s software quality have been hovering at a similar level for a while: 3.6 in 2023, 3.4 both years prior, and 3.5 in 2020. This is well below the average hardware reliability ranking which is a full point higher, and does not match the typical grades given to the Mac and iPhone in the same time frame. Snell converts the software score to an average letter grade of B to B–. Is Apple satisfied with shipping a consistently B product?

I confess the grade I have given has been lower than this average. My experience with Apple’s software for the past several years has been markedly less than fine. Given that my scores have deviated from those given by many others, I started to question my own fairness — which, given that I am merely A Guy giving my opinion about a multi-trillion-dollar corporation, is a little silly. Then again, software is made — mostly — by people, and the intent I have in participating in the Six Colors survey is that a person working at Apple might possibly read my feedback.

When I think about the quality of something, I put my expectations in context. If I were thinking about the quality of a restaurant meal, for example, it is not enough to merely provide sustenance. It must taste good, should look good, and ideally be more interesting than the individual ingredients suggest. The balance is different in software. The most important factor is whether the features I use perform as expected. If it does so with unique design and flair, that is a welcome bonus, but it must be built on a solid foundation.

In short, the way I think about software quality is the amount of meaningful problems.

I use three of Apple’s platforms across five devices: an iPhone 15 Pro, a 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro, a 27-inch iMac 5K, and two generations of Apple TV. Each of these is running the latest capable software — all OS 26 except the iMac, which is stuck on MacOS Ventura. I use iCloud to sync a bunch of stuff. I can set aside Liquid Glass and related design decisions for now because there are more fundamental concerns. Even in this limited set of products, I stumble constantly into the kinds of bugs that impact core parts of the system.

There are problems in Finder — resizing columns, renaming or deleting files synced with a FileProvider-based app, and different views not reflecting immediate reality. There are problems with resizing windows. AirPlay randomly drops its connection. AirDrop and other “continuity” services do not always work or, in an interesting twist I experienced a couple days ago, work fine but display an error anyway. The AirPlay and AirDrop menus shuffle options just in time for you to tap the wrong one. The translation button loads in Safari on the opposite side of the address bar from where you can actually open translation options. On my iMac, the scroll bar in Safari no longer reflects the scroll position of the webpage. The Contacts app on MacOS barely works. The Apple Pay handshake between a Mac and my iPhone is unreliable. My iPhone does not always set aside software update space, but it also refuses to purge cached iCloud-stored photos. I have to confirm I trust my own iMac nearly every time I plug in my iPhone to sync. One word: Siri. Okay, let me expand on Siri with a more recent bug: when I tell it to pause music, it sometimes asks me to confirm I want to pause by tapping the screen, and the only time I ever do this is because I am cooking and my hands are full or dirty. These are just some of the bugs I experience regularly — some are papercuts, while others are a throbbing migraine.

These are the products and features I actually use. There are plenty others I do not. I assume syncing my music collection over iCloud remains untrustworthy. Shortcuts seems largely forgotten. Meanwhile, any app augmented by one of Apple’s paid services — Fitness, News, TV — has turned into an upselling experience.

I am somewhat impressed by the breadth of Apple’s current offerings as I consider all the ways they are failing me, and I cannot help but wonder if it is that breadth that is contributing to the unreliability of this software. Or perhaps it is the company’s annual treadmill. There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.

The most incredible thing is that this software is shipping on hardware that feels damn near bulletproof. I am frustrated by the unitary quality of these devices, unable to be upgraded post-purchase, and I quibble with some choices made over the years. The butterfly keyboard fiasco was notable because it was such an outlier. There is a clear expectation for what Apple considers acceptable to ship in aluminum and glass, and it does not apply to bits or GET requests.

Yet, if you were to ask a Mac user whether they would be happier with Windows on a high-spec MacBook Pro, or MacOS on some gaming pc, I bet they would rather give up the hardware than the software. I would. Similarly, I bet most people would prefer iOS on some run-of-the-mill Android hardware. Software is hard, and frequent over-the-air updates mean it is possible to meet a launch deadline even if some problems will be solved later.

What I expect out of the software I use is a level of quality I simply do not see. I do not think I have a very high bar. The bugs in the big paragraph above are not preferences or odd use cases. They are problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps. I do not have unreasonable expectations for how things should work, only that they ought to work as described and marketed. But complaints of this sort have echoed for over a decade and it seems to me that many core issues remain unaddressed.

People buy hardware, and it shows. People subscribe to services. But people use software. This is not solely an Apple problem. Many of us spend our time fighting with tools that feel unfinished and flawed; it seems to have become the norm. But it is particularly glaring when the same attitude is taken by Apple, a company that ships some of the nicest hardware in the business. I would love to see the same tolerances for what is shown onscreen as Apple has for how the screen is made.

How Tech Giants Track You Across the Web ⇥ bbc.com

Thomas Germain, BBC News:

TikTok keeps track of everything you do on its app – no surprises there. What’s less obvious is how the company follows you around other parts of the internet that have nothing to do with TikTok.

This article is a good introduction to the problem of tracking pixels, but its focus on TikTok feels like off-base when it is nowhere near the biggest offender. Germain, later in the same article:

If you’re concerned about these individual websites you’re missing the point. Critics say the issue is that large tech companies like TikTok are increasingly following everything you do online. According to DuckDuckGo, a privacy company, TikTok has trackers on 5% of the world’s top websites. That number has grown steadily, though it’s nothing compared to Google with trackers on almost 72% of top websites and Meta at about 21%.

If more people realize their browsing is being tracked so exhaustively by these three companies — plus Amazon tracking visitors to something like 17% of top websites — that is a good thing. The focus on the villain du jour, though, seems misguided when you realize Bytedance is less prevalent in DuckDuckGo’s tracking tool than dozens of adtech companies you probably have not heard of.

Zack Whittaker:

That said, it still happens and using pixels for data collection across sensitive industries has caught out some big players in the past. Several healthcare, telehealth companies, and health insurance giants have in recent years fallen foul of federal privacy laws by sharing in some cases millions of users’ private information with ad giants. In 2024, I exclusively reported for TechCrunch that the website of the U.S. Postal Service was also sharing the private home addresses of logged-in users with Meta, LinkedIn, and Snap. USPS curbed the practice after I alerted the postal service to the security lapse.

This stuff should be impossible. Not illegal, or merely punishable after the fact — there should be no way for this to happen. And, no, I am not proposing a technical solution like some kind of stricter filtering.

Tumbler Ridge ⇥ thewalrus.ca

Though I want to write about many things on my own website, I sometimes struggle to find a way to do so. That can be because I do not have enough experience or expertise, or I cannot add something meaningful. And then there are the things that leave me without words. The mass shooting two weeks ago in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, is one such tragedy.

The murder of six children — five in their school — and two adults is difficult to comprehend. Nearly thirty more were injured, one of whom — a twelve-year old child — is recovering from serious wounds in a Vancouver hospital. We remain a nation in mourning.

Christina Frangou, the Walrus:

Grief at this magnitude is crushing anywhere, but especially in a place so little. The numbers of dead leave a different-sized hole in the social architecture of a place where everyone knows where everyone lives. The people of Tumbler Ridge will see their streets differently now — which road has a house that is home to someone who has died or was injured or at school that day. “I will know every victim,” Mayor Darryl Krakowka told the CBC in those early hours when Tumbler Ridge waited to find out the names of the casualties.

I process events through writing — but, here, all I can think to write is: everything about this is devastating.

Georgia Wells, Wall Street Journal:

Months before Jesse Van Rootselaar became the suspect in the mass shooting that devastated a rural town in British Columbia, Canada, OpenAI considered alerting law enforcement about her interactions with its ChatGPT chatbot, the company said.

While using ChatGPT last June, Van Rootselaar described scenarios involving gun violence over the course of several days, according to people familiar with the matter.

The documentation of a murderer’s online footprint is a now-familiar pattern after a tragedy like this one. It sometimes reveals behaviour that, in hindsight, would have raised alarms to someone who knew the fuller picture. But each of these things is, for good reason, siloed — what the police know, what a social worker may be aware of, and what OpenAI is notified about.

Caring communities can help bridge those cracks. Not because people come together to increase surveillance, but through actual compassion and interaction. I am not saying love is the key to preventing mass shootings; I am not diagnosing a problem here. It is a time of grief like this when we can so viscerally recognize that none of us are alone.

Wikipedia Deprecates Archive.today After Its Owner Seemingly Launched a Targeted DDoS Campaign and Altered Archived Pages ⇥ arstechnica.com

Jani Patokallio:

Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal blog. […]

Daniel Sims, TechSpot:

Wikipedia is currently weighing three options to address the issue: retaining the status quo, removing all links, or discouraging future citations while keeping existing links. Some also argue that pivoting away from Archive.today is prudent regardless of the current dispute due to the site’s inherently precarious existence. In 2021, Archive.today’s creator admitted that it is “doomed to die at any moment.”

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:

In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name. These threats were discussed by Wikipedia editors in their deliberations over whether to blacklist Archive.today, and then editors noticed that Patokallio’s name had been inserted into some Archive.today captures of webpages.

“Honestly, I’m kind of in shock,” one editor wrote. “Just to make sure I’m understanding the implications of this: we have good reason to believe that the archive.today operator has tampered with the content of their archives, in a manner that suggests they were trying to further their position against the person they are in dispute with???”

This apparently all started when some media organizations reporting on the FBI’s subpoena cited a 2023 post from Patokallio, in which he tried to figure out the identity of Archive.today’s owner. As he writes more recently, very little of what he found was entirely new, and it is unlikely he uncovered the owner’s true identity.

Regardless of what you think about that, using the visitors of Archive.today as digital ammunition against Patokallio’s vastly smaller blog is bad enough. But then the operator went and violated perhaps the only inviolable rule of website archiving: they modified the contents of the websites they were ostensibly preserving. It is now unreliable.

Magic Lasso Adblock, Now for tvOS ⇥ magiclasso.co

One last link to complete the good indie apps trifecta for today — frequent site sponsor Magic Lasso Adblock now has support for tvOS:

Magic Lasso Adblock for tvOS processes everything directly on your local Apple TV. That means ads are blocked without any data ever leaving your device — offering stronger privacy than VPN or DNS-based ad blockers that rely on external servers.

We also follow a strict zero data collection policy. We don’t collect, track, or store your viewing history, app activity, or any personal data — period.

This post is not part of a sponsorship deal. I have allowed Magic Lasso to sponsor my website several times because it is an app I actually use and like; it is the only ad blocker I run. I clearly think there is room for tasteful advertising and I do not block ads everywhere. But I also think there are good reasons for users to take control of the exhaustive amount of ads and trackers they — we — must endure.

It is frustrating to see paid streaming services double-dip by also inserting a heavy ad load within every show. It is almost like they are aching to re-create the worst parts of the cable television experience. I think it is perfectly fair for users to respond by mimicking DVRs that let you skip ads.

Among my friends, I am notoriously bad at keeping up to date with shows, but I am actually caught up on “The Pitt”. I watched the latest episode last week with ad blocking turned on and it was a wonderful experience. Magic Lasso Pro is $40 per year in Canada.

Skyscraper Is a Bluesky Client for iOS, and Some Other Things ⇥ getskyscraper.com

Skyscraper is a suite of tools created by Cameron Banga for Bluesky: feed monitoring for marketing people, a terminal client for MacOS — wild — and an iOS app. I do not have the same visceral dislike of the first-party Bluesky app as I do for, say, Instagram or Twitter/X, but Skyscraper on iOS feels like a nice change of pace.

A cool thing about open standards is how I can use Skyscraper on my iPhone, Aeronaut on my Mac, and the website anywhere I do not have access to those two native clients. As far as I know, there is no way to sync read position across different clients, but that is okay with me. I do not need to read everything.

Skyscraper has a generous free tier; using it with multiple accounts, part of a more expansive feature set, costs $4 per month or $25 per year in Canada.

Current Is an RSS Reader With a Twist ⇥ terrygodier.com

Terry Godier introducing Current, his new RSS reader:

Each article has a velocity, a measure of how quickly it ages. Breaking news burns bright for three hours. A daily article stays relevant for eighteen. An essay lingers for three days. An evergreen tutorial might sit in your river for a week.

As items age, they dim. Eventually they’re gone, carried downstream. You don’t mark them as read. You don’t file them. They simply pass, the way water passes under a bridge.

I have been using Current for a couple of days now. I am a longtime NetNewsWire user, so I have needed to shake a little bias about how an RSS reader “should” work. And, ultimately, it is an RSS reader, so it is on some level a different presentation of familiar elements.

Sometimes, though, a modest rethinking is all that is needed for something to feel entirely different, and Current does. I quite like what Godier has come up with here. In the spirit of water metaphors, my main feed almost feels like an expansive pool of things to read, just floating there. No pressure. Some of the feeds I read are updated frequently; most less so. Godier’s design means the more rapid feeds do not overwhelm more careful personal essays. It all seems to work pretty well, I think.

A cool thing about open standards is that it means I can use Current on my phone and NetNewsWire on my Mac. Each feels right to me for its individual context. On my Mac, I might want to churn through a bunch of recent stories; on my phone, though, I might just want to find one great thing to read while I am taking a coffee break.

Current is a one-time $13 Canadian charge in the App Store, or $10 in the U.S., which feels like a throwback. Turns out it is still possible to sell apps without subscription pricing.

Flickr’s URL Scheme ⇥ unsung.aresluna.org

Marcin Wichary:

Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this:

flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites

flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets

flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904

flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834

flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834/in/set-72177720330077904

The persons responsible for this URL scheme thought well enough ahead for the complexity and scope it could encapsulate, yet kept it remarkably simple.

It is the kind of logical directory-style scheme I wish I would see in library-based desktop applications, too. I still have copies of my libraries for Aperture and iPhoto on the same Mac as I use for Photos. Each of those has a pretty understandable structure within the library package: the most substantial part is a “Masters” folder containing a year, month, day, and then project folder hierarchy; among others, there is also a “Database” folder with nondestructive edit operations, though that becomes less intelligible structure if you drill down to the project level.

For contrast, the library structure for the Photos app has no such logic. The “originals” folder contains fifteen subfolders labelled 0–9, then A–F. Each photo’s filename is a unique alphanumeric code, and there is no discernible logic or structure to which photos end up where. I found an image from 2012 following one from 2023, then another from 2022, all in the same folder. This feels undesigned, yet it is far more recent than any of the structures that preceded it.

Video in Apple Podcasts ⇥ podnews.net

Apple:

Apple today announced a transformative update coming to Apple Podcasts this spring that will bring advanced video podcast capabilities to the app. This enhanced video podcast experience uses Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) technology to set a new standard that empowers podcast creators with unprecedented control and monetization opportunities while delivering the highest-quality viewing experience for users.

The “advanced” part of this is that switching between the video and audio versions of an episode is basically seamless. When I tried it on both my fast home Wi-Fi and my tepid cell connection, it was as smooth as in Stephen Robles’ demo. That is pretty nice.

What is not so nice is that it is another proprietary take on the otherwise open standards world of podcasting. It requires a special agreement with Apple, which is why it is limited at launch to four ad-tech podcast hosting providers, and does not support a generic HLS URL. Maybe this is because it is a technical feat but, also, “Apple will charge participating ad networks an impression-based fee for the delivery of dynamic ads in HLS video”.

James Cridland, Podnews:

Up until now, transcripts, chapters, subscriptions – all these features have been available to anyone, in a truly open manner. Other launches have been enhancement: auto-submissions of new shows, for example. But now, there is no access to HLS video if you’re self-hosting, or if you are using a small podcast hosting company. Apple Podcasts can’t talk about being open when this feature is closed to all but four companies.

By keeping HLS video away from the RSS feed, this is a proprietary solution for Apple Podcasts. No other player will see these HLS video feeds (unlike creator-produced transcripts, for example, which are visible everywhere). This is a shame.

Tedious arguments about terminology aside, the infrastructure required for delivering video seems to have finally opened the door to big companies applying a lock-in strategy to a format based on open standards.

An Ars Technica Reporter Blamed A.I. Tools for Fabricating Quotes in a Bizarre A.I. Story ⇥ theshamblog.com

On Thursday, Scott Shambaugh published a bizarre story about a rejected pull request from what seems to be an OpenClaw A.I. agent. The agent then generated a blog post accusing Shambaugh of “gatekeeping” contributions, and personally attacking him. After backlash in the pull request, the agent deleted its own post and generated an apology.

Allegedly.

The tale here is so extraordinary that it is irresponsible to take it at face value, as it seems the Wall Street Journal has. It seems plausible to me this is an elaborate construction of a person desperate to make waves. We should leave room for the — likely, I think — revelation this could be a mix of generated text and human intervention. That ambiguity is why I did not link to the original post.

A part of the subsequent reporting, however, has become a story just as interesting. Shambaugh, in a follow-up article:

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.

This was disheartening news to learn. I like Ars Technica’s reporting; in the twenty-plus years I have read the site, I have found its articles generally careful and non-alarmist without pulling deserved punches. I cite it frequently here because I respect my readers, and I assume it does the same.

This revelation was upsetting, and the editor’s note issued by Ken Fisher perhaps even more so:

That this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns. In this case, fabricated quotations were published in a manner inconsistent with that policy. We have reviewed recent work and have not identified additional issues. At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident.

Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here.

Fisher provides no additional detail about how fake quotes ended up in a published article. There are multiple parts of the reporting process that must have failed here to not only invent these statements, but also to escape any sort of fact-checking. There is no description of what steps will be taken to prevent this from happening in the future.

Fortunately, Benj Edwards, one of the story’s authors, posted a statement to Bluesky acknowledging he was the one who used A.I. tools that falsified these quotes:

Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday.

During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based Al tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline.

When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why.

This is a more specific explanation than the one offered by Fisher, but also opens its own questions. Why would Edwards need a Claude tool to summarize a not-particularly-long blog post? Why would he then jump to ChatGPT? Is this the first time Edwards used this tool, or is it an example of over-reliance that went horribly awry? And, again, is there no proof-reading process at Ars Technica to confirm that the quotations from source material are accurate and in-context?

This looks bad for Edwards, of course, though it seems like he has deep remorse. As bad of a screw-up as this is, I do not think it is worth piling on him personally. What I want from Ars Technica is an explanation of how this kind of thing will be prevented in the future. The most obvious is to prohibit all tools based on large language models or generative A.I. by its reporters. However, as technologies like these begin to power things as seemingly simple as spelling and grammar checkers, that policy will be difficult to maintain in the real world. Publications need better processes for confirming that, regardless of the tools used to create an article, the reporting is accurate.

Apple Updates Its Own iOS Version Figures ⇥ macrumors.com

Apple has updated its own iOS usage figures (Internet Archive link for posterity). These figures measure “devices that transacted on the App Store on February 12, 2026” — but what “transacted” means is not entirely clear.

Even so, of transacting iPhones introduced in the last four years, 74% are running iOS 26; overall, 66% of iPhones measured are on iOS 26. This compares to year-ago figures of 76% and 68%, respectively, on iOS 18 — except it is not exactly a perfect comparison.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

At first glance, the iOS 26 and iOS 18 adoption figures appear to be similar, but this is only because Apple released the iOS 26 statistics later than usual. iOS 26’s statistics are based on devices that transacted with the App Store approximately 150 days after the update was released to the public, compared to 127 days for iOS 18. In other words, iOS 26 was available for around three weeks longer by comparison.

As was suspected, this means that iOS 26 adoption has officially been slower than iOS 18 adoption, but not to the extent that some earlier, unofficial estimates had claimed. There is no way of knowing exactly why iOS 26 adoption has been slower, but some users have opted to avoid the new Liquid Glass design for now.

The most likely explanation is that Apple began pushing users to update to iOS 26 later than it did for iOS 18. What this does not indicate is a mass or even medium-scale rejection of Liquid Glass, and I question whether a large number of users are actively avoiding the iOS 26 update. I am sure some are but, given the scale at which Apple operates and defaulting to automatic updates, I cannot imagine this has as much of an effect as Apple’s decision of when to aggressively push an update.

I thought there was a 20-point gap between adoption last year and this year, and I thought that might be user-motivated. I got that wrong. I still have a mindset of someone who grew up with elective software updates, when we are now in a software-as-a-service model. What I think I got right, though, is my comparison with iOS 7, which achieved rapid uptake in just a few months. If iOS 26’s design or features were exciting to enough people, they would clamour to manually update. Instead, they seem perfectly happy for Apple to make that choice for them.

‘CEO Said a Thing’ Journalism Props Up the Myth of Elon Musk ⇥ karlbode.com

Karl Bode, referencing a dumb Fortune article published last month:

Nothing that headline says is true. It doesn’t seem to matter. “CEO said a thing!” journalism involves, again, no actual journalism. Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Mark Zuckerberg are frequent beneficiaries of the U.S. corporate press’ absolute dedication to propping up extraction class mythologies via clickbait.

Nobody has benefited more from this style of journalism than Elon Musk. His fake supergenius engineer persona was propped up by a lazy press for the better part of two decades before the public even started to realize Musk’s primary skillset was opportunistically using familial wealth and the Paypal money he lucked into to saddle up to actual innovators and take singular credit for their work.

There is a symbiotic relationship these CEOs have with modern and traditional media alike. Musk goes on a three-hour “deeply researched” podcast and says some bullshit about how space will “be by far the cheapest place to put A.I. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months”. And then the host replies “36 months?” and Musk says “less than 36 months”, and then they are off for ten minutes discussing this as though it is a real thing that will really happen. Then real publications cover it like it is serious and real and, when asked for comment, Musk’s companies do not engage.

All these articles and videos bring in the views despite lacking the substance implied by either their publisher or, in the case of these video interviews, their length and serious tone. These CEOs know they can just say stuff. There is no reason to take them at their word, nor to publish a raft of articles based on whatever they say in some friendly and loose interview. Or a tweet, for that matter.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: YouTube Ad Blocker for Safari ⇥ magiclasso.co

Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac?

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

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.

Best in class YouTube ad blocking

Magic Lasso Adblock is easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads, and also blocks all YouTube ads — including all:

  • video ads

  • pop up banner ads

  • search ads

  • plus many more

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.

Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition to Its Smart Glasses ⇥ nytimes.com

Kashmir Hill, Kalley Huang, and Mike Isaac report, in the New York Times, that Meta has been planning on bringing facial recognition features to its smart glasses. There is a money quote in this article you may have seen on social media already, but I want to give a greater context to it (the facial recognition feature is called “Name Tag”, at least internally):

[…] The document, from May, described plans to first release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company did not do last year, before making it available to the general public.

Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

The second part of this is a cynical view of public relations that would be surprising from most any company, yet seems pretty typical for Meta. This memo is apparently from May, a few months before a Customs and Border Protection agent wore Meta’s Ray-Bans to a raid, so I am not sure civil rights organizations would ignore the feature today. However, the first part of the quote I included also seems pretty cynical: releasing it as an accessibility feature first.

Facial recognition may potentially be useful to people with disabilities, assuming it works well, and I do not want to sweep that aside in the abstract. But this is Meta. It is a company with a notoriously terrible record on privacy, to the extent it is bound by a 20-year consent order (PDF) with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which it violated in multiple ways, one of which concerned facial recognition features. Perhaps there is a way for technology to help people recognize faces that is safe and respectful but, despite positioning itself as a privacy-focused company — coincidentally, at the same time as the FTC said it violated its consent decree — Meta will not be delivering that future.

For one, it is still considering the scope of which faces its glasses ought to recognize:

Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.

The feature would not give people the ability to look up anyone they encountered as a universal facial recognition tool, two people familiar with the plans said.

Instagram has over three billion monthly users and, while that does not translate perfectly to three billion public personal accounts, it seems to me like a large proportion of people any of us randomly meet would be identifiable. Why should that suggestion even make it past the very first mention of it in some meeting long ago? Some ideas are obviously bad and should be quashed immediately.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Signs New Clearview A.I. Deal ⇥ wired.com

Dell Cameron, Wired:

United States Customs and Border Protection plans to spend $225,000 for a year of access to Clearview AI, a face recognition tool that compares photos against billions of images scraped from the internet.

The deal extends access to Clearview tools to Border Patrol’s headquarters intelligence division (INTEL) and the National Targeting Center, units that collect and analyze data as part of what CBP calls a coordinated effort to “disrupt, degrade, and dismantle” people and networks viewed as security threats.

Lindsey Wilkinson, FedScoop:

In the last year, CBP has deployed several AI technologies, such as NexisXplore, to aid in open-source research of potential threats and to identify travelers. The Homeland Security organization last year began using Mobile Fortify as a facial comparison and fingerprint matching tool to quickly verify persons of interest. CBP Link is another AI use case that cropped up in the past year, streamlining facial recognition and real-time identity verification.

CBP began piloting Clearview AI’s technology in 2025, too, according to DHS’s AI inventory. The technology needed to be — and was — tuned to produce better results and limit misidentification. Guardrails have been identified to some degree.

A reminder that the way Clearview works is by scraping images it associates with specific individuals, including from sources like Facebook, across the web at massive scale — over sixty billion, according to Cameron. This is not facial recognition of criminals or even people suspected of wrongdoing. It is recognition of anyone who has a face that has been photographed and shared even semi-publicly.

This contract is likely part of the technologies for identifying incoming travellers, and not just in the U.S. — a 2022 article on the CBP website says other countries are using the CBP software that will likely have Clearview integration.

MacOS Tahoe 26.3 Fixes a Few Bugs With ‘Reduce Transparency’ ⇥ eclecticlight.co

Howard Oakley:

What Apple doesn’t reveal is that it has improved, if not fixed, the shortcomings in Accessibility’s Reduced Transparency setting. When that’s enabled, at least some of the visual mess resulting from Liquid Glass, for example in the Search box in System Settings, is now cleaned up, as the sidebar header is now opaque. It’s a small step, but does address one of the most glaring faults in 26.2.

In apps like Messages and Preview, the toolbar finally has a solid background when Reduce Transparency is turned on instead of the translucent gradient previously. The toolbar itself and the buttons within it remain ill-defined, however, unless you also turn on Increase Contrast, which Apple clearly does not want you to do because it makes the system look ridiculous. Also, when Reduce Transparency is turned on, Siri looks like this:

Siri on MacOS Tahoe with illegible white text against a pastel background

One would assume this is the kind of thing someone at Apple would notice if there were people working there who used Siri, tested Accessibility features, and cared about contrast.

Adam Engst, TidBits:

Two other Liquid Glass-related pecadillos fared less well. First, although Apple fixed a macOS 26.2 problem that caused the column divider handles to be overwritten by scroll bars (first screenshot below), if you hide both the path bar and status bar, an unseemly gap appears between the scroll bar and the handles (fourth screenshot below). Additionally, while toggling the path and status bars, I managed to get the filenames to overwrite the status bar (third screenshot below). Worse, all of these were taken with Reduce Transparency on, so why are filenames ever visible under the scroll bar?

The problem with a cross-platform top-to-bottom redesign that puts translucency at the forefront is that it means controlling for an increasing number of specific conditions. And then you are still stuck with Liquid Glass’ reflective quality. Even with Reduce Transparency turned on, the Dock will brighten — in light mode — when dragging an application window near it, because it is reflecting the large white expanse. Technically, the opacity of the Dock has not changed, but it still carries the perception of a translucent area with the impact it has on its contrast. Apple has written itself a whole new set of bugs to fix.

Fears About TikTok U.S. Are Only as Grounded as Fears About Other Products Supported by Behavioural Ads ⇥ newrepublic.com

Logan McMillen, of the New Republic, is very worried about TikTok’s new ownership in the United States — so worried, in fact, that it deserves a conspiratorial touch:

The Americanization of TikTok has also introduced a more visible form of suppression through the algorithmic throttling of dissent. In the wake of recent ICE shootings in Minneapolis, users and high-profile creators alike reported that anti-ICE videos were instantly met with “zero views” or flagged as “ineligible for recommendation,” effectively purging them from the platform’s influential “For You” feed.

The new TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC attributed these irregularities to a convenient data center power outage at its Oracle-hosted facilities. While the public attention this episode garnered will make it more conspicuous if user content gets throttled on TikTok again, the tools are there: By leveraging shadow bans and aggressive content moderation, TikTok can, if it wanted to, ensure that any visual evidence of ICE’s overreach is silenced before it reaches the masses.

If these claims sound familiar to you, it is probably because the same angle was used to argue for the divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. assets in the first place. The same implications and the same shadowy tones were invoked to make the case that TikTok was censoring users’ posts on explicit or implied instruction from Chinese authorities — and it was not convincing then, either.

These paragraphs appear near the bottom of the piece, where readers will find the following note:

This article originally misidentified TikTok’s privacy policy. It also misidentified the extant privacy policy as an updated one.

This article has been updated throughout for clarity.

That got me wondering. I compared the original article against the latest version, and put them into Diffchecker. The revisions are striking. Not only did the original version of the piece repeat the misleading claim that TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy changes were an effort to collect citizenship status, it suggested TikTok was directly “feed[ing] its data” to the Department of Homeland Security. On the power outage, quoted above, McMillen was more explicitly conspiratorial, originally writing “the timing suggests a more deliberate intention”.

404 Media reporter Jason Koelber, in a Bluesky thread [sic]:

it’s important to keep our guard up and it can be very useful to speculate about where things may go. that is not the same as saying without evidence that these things are already happening, or seeing different capabilities and assuming they are all being mashed together on a super spy platform

The revised version of the article is more responsible than the original. That is not a high bar. There are discrete things McMillen gets right, but the sum of these parts is considerably less informative and less useful.

For example, McMillen points out how advertising identifiers can be used for surveillance, which is true but is not specific to TikTok either before or after the U.S. assets divestiture. It is a function of this massive industry in which we all participate to some extent. If we want to have a discussion — or, better yet, action — regarding better privacy laws, we can do that without the snowballing effect of mashing together several possible actions and determining it is definitely a coordinated effort between ICE, TikTok, Palantir, Amazon’s Ring, and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Information Superhighway, Now With One Liquid Glass Button ⇥ superhighway.info

Speaking of infinite scrolling, Kyle Hughes just updated Information Superhighway, his app for endlessly reading randomized Wikipedia articles. It has a new icon and a Liquid Glass button — and that is the update, as far as I can tell.

The only kind of brain rot this will give you is more of an ageing and fermenting process that is the result of scrolling from an article about a Japanese erotic black comedy-horror film, to another about an archaeological site in Belize, and then to one about the British Pirate Party.

A free app, with no strings attached. Probably the best way to infinitely scroll your day away.

TikTok’s Design Breaches Digital Services Act, According to Preliminary European Commission Findings ⇥ ec.europa.eu

The European Commission:

The Commission’s investigation preliminarily indicates that TikTok did not adequately assess how these addictive features could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of its users, including minors and vulnerable adults.

For example, by constantly ‘rewarding’ users with new content, certain design features of TikTok fuel the urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain of users into ‘autopilot mode’. Scientific research shows that this may lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users’ self-control.

Additionally, in its assessment, TikTok disregarded important indicators of compulsive use of the app, such as the time that minors spend on TikTok at night, the frequency with which users open the app, and other potential indicators.

It is fair for regulators to question the efficacy of measures claiming to “promote healthier sleep habits”. This wishy-washy verbiage is just as irritating as when it is employed by supplement companies and it should be more strictly regulated.

Trying to isolate infinite scrolling as a key factor in encouraging unhealthy habits is, I think, oversimplifying the issue. Contrary to the conclusions drawn by some people, I am unsure if that is what the Commission is suggesting. The Commission appears to have found this is one part of a constellation of features that are intended to increase the time users spend in the app, regardless of the impact it may have on users. In an article published last year in Perspectives on Public Health, two psychologists sought to distinguish this kind of compulsive use from other internet-driven phenomena, arguing that short-form video “has been particularly effective at triggering psychological patterns that keep users in a continuous scrolling loop”, pointing to a 2023 article in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. It is a mix of the engaging quality of video with the unknown of what comes next — like flipping through television channels, only entirely tailored to what each user has previously become enamoured with.

Casey Newton reported on the Commission’s investigation and a similar U.S. lawsuit. Here is the lede:

The old way of thinking about how to make social platforms safer was that you had to make them do more content moderation. Hire more people, take down more posts, put warning labels on others. Suspend people who posted hate speech, and incitements to violence, or who led insurrections against their own governments.

At the insistence of lawmakers around the world, social platforms did all of this and more. But in the end they had satisfied almost no one. To the left, these new measures hadn’t gone nearly far enough. To the right, they represented an intolerable infringement of their freedom of expression.

I find the left–right framing of the outcomes of this entirely unproductive and, frankly, dumb. Even as a broad generalization, it makes little sense: there are plenty of groups across the political spectrum arguing their speech is being suppressed. I am not arguing these individual complaints are necessarily invalid. I just think Newton’s argument is silly.

Adequate moderation is an effective tool for limiting the spread of potentially harmful posts for users of all ages. While Substack is totally cool with Nazis, that stance rarely makes for a healthy community. Better behaviour, even from pseudonymous users, is encouraged by marginalizing harmful speech and setting relatively strict boundaries for what is permissible. Moderation is difficult to do well, impossible to do right, and insufficient on its own — of course — but it is not an old, outdated way of thinking, regardless of what Mark Zuckerberg argues.

Newton:

Of course, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts work in similar ways. And so, whether on the stand or before the commission, I hope platform executives are called to answer: if you did want to make your products addictive, how different would they really look from the ones we have now?

This is a very good argument. All of these platforms are deliberately designed to maximize user time. They are not magic, nor are they casting some kind of spell on users, but we are increasingly aware they have risks for people of all ages. Is it so unreasonable for regulators to have a role?

Ads in Artificial Intelligence ⇥ openai.com

When I watched a bunch of A.I. company ads earlier this year, I noted Anthropic’s spot was boring and vague. Well, that did not last, as it began running a series of excellent ads mocking the concept of ads appearing in a chatbot. They are sharp and well-written. No wonder Anthropic aired them during the Super Bowl.

Anthropic also published a commitment to keep Claude ad-free. I doubt this will age well. Call me cynical, but my assumption is that Anthropic will one day have ads in its products, but perhaps not “Claude” specifically.

The reason anyone is discussing this is because ads are coming to OpenAI’s ChatGPT:

ChatGPT is used by hundreds of millions of people for learning, work, and everyday decisions. Keeping the Free and Go tiers fast and reliable requires significant infrastructure and ongoing investment. Ads help fund that work, supporting broader access to AI through higher quality free and low cost options, and enabling us to keep improving the intelligence and capabilities we offer over time. If you prefer not to see ads, you can upgrade to our Plus or Pro plans, or opt out of ads in the Free tier in exchange for fewer daily free messages.

Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you. When you see an ad, they are always clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated from the organic answer.

It is incredible how far we have come for these barely-distinguished placements to be called “visually separated”. Google’s ads, for example, used to have a coloured background, eventually fading to white. The “sponsored link” text turned into a little yellow “Ad” badge, eventually becoming today’s little bold “Ad” text. Apple, too, has made its App Store ads blend into normal results. In OpenAI’s case, they have opted to delineate ads by using a grey background and labelling them “Sponsored”.

Now OpenAI has something different to optimize for. We can all pretend that free market forces will punish the company if it does not move carefully, or it inserts too many ads, or if organic results start to feel influenced by ad buyers. But we have already seen how this works with Google search, in Instagram, in YouTube, and elsewhere. These platforms are ad-heavy to the detriment and frustration of users, yet they remain successful and growing. No matter what you think of OpenAI’s goals already, ads are going to fundamentally change ChatGPT and the company as a whole.

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.

Substack Is Still Happy to Host and Recommend Nazi Publications ⇥ theguardian.com

Geraldine McKelvie, the Guardian:

The global publishing platform Substack is generating revenue from newsletters that promote virulent Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism, a Guardian investigation has found.

I appreciate the intent of yet another article drawing attention to Substack’s willingness to host straightforward no-ambiguity Nazi publications, but I wish McKelvie and the Guardian would have given more credit to all the similar reporting that came before them. For example:

Among them are newsletters that openly promote racist ideology. One, called NatSocToday, which has 2,800 subscribers, charges $80 – about £60 – for an annual subscription, though most of its posts are available for free.

This is the very same account which, according to reporting by Taylor Lorenz last year, was promoted in a push notification from Substack. Substack told Lorenz the notification was “a serious error”. In the same article, Lorenz drew attention to NatSocToday’s recommendation of another explicitly Nazi publication hosted on Substack called the White Rabbit. This, too, is included as an example in McKelvie’s more recent report. Lorenz’s prior reporting goes unmentioned.

However, because both stories have contemporary screenshots of each Nazi publication’s profile, we can learn something — and this is another reason why I wish Lorenz’s story was cited. NatSocToday’s 2,800 subscribers as of this week does not sound like very much, but when Lorenz published her article at the end of July, it had only 746 subscribers. It has grown by over 2,000 subscribers in just six months. The same appears true of the White Rabbit, which went from “8.6K+” subscribers to “10K+” in the same timeframe.

One thing McKelvie gets wrong is suggesting “subscribers” equates to “paying members”. Scrolling through the subscriber lists of both of the publications above shows a mix of paid and free members. This is supported by Substack’s documentation, which I wish I had thought of checking before visiting either hateful newsletter. That is, while Substack is surely making some money by mainstreaming and recommending the kind of garbage people used to have to deliberately try and find, it is not a ten percent cut of the annual rate multiplied by the subscriber count.

By the way, while I am throwing some stones here, I should point out that Lorenz herself launched her User Magazine newsletter about a year after Jonathan M. Katz’s article “Substack Has a Nazi Problem”. Based on its archive, Lorenz just repurposed her personal Substack newsletter and existing audience to create User Mag. But Substack’s whole premise is that you own your email list and can bring it elsewhere, so Lorenz could have chosen any platform. Substack was never just infrastructure — it is a social media website with longform posts as its substance, and indifferent moderation as a feature.

MKBHD Behind the Scenes for a Year ⇥ youtube.com

If you want to understand what goes into a big YouTube production, this behind-the-scenes look from the tenth most popular tech channel seems to be a good place to start. It is remarkable how Marques Brownlee has grown from being just a guy making webcam videos from home to having a dedicated production space full of staff — and it all kind of hinges on YouTube, a singular video hosting platform. That would make me anxious daily, but Brownlee has made it work for about nine years.

Another thing that surprised me about this behind-the-scenes is just how far some companies will go to accommodate Brownlee. The Google Pixel team brought a bunch of unreleased devices to him for a first impressions video. That video was embargoed until an hour before Google was set to announce those devices. Brownlee, like anyone in the review space, has been accused of bias and favouritism, usually unfairly. If I were him, this kind of closeness would make me feel uncomfortable, as though Google is using me. I think Brownlee’s videos speak for themselves, however.

Engagements on Canada’s Next A.I. Strategy ⇥ betakit.com

Josh Scott, BetaKit:

Earlier this week, Canada’s innovation ministry shared the results from the 30-day national consultation it held late last year to inform the country’s upcoming AI strategy. The consultation included feedback from 28 members of Canada’s AI task force, appointed by AI Minister Evan Solomon, which included representatives from industries and fields from tech to academia.

[…]

All of the AI strategy task force member submissions can be read in full here. The official government report on those submissions was put together with a mix of AI tools; BetaKit, instead, assigned a human reporter to review all 348 pages.

I read the high-level summary (PDF) and it very much has the vibe of being created with A.I. — it is unbearably dull.

Michael Geist:

There are many other examples, including differing views on digital sovereignty, regulatory sequencing (what should be prioritized first), and inclusion. Put 28 experts on a panel and there is obviously going to be differing views. Indeed, that’s the point of gathering a diversity of perspectives. In theory, the government got what it asked for with expert reports that frequently point to uncomfortable questions. However, many disappear in the government summary that smooths over urgency and re-frames hard choices as balanced policy choices.

Perhaps my favourite passage is on page 9 of the summary (PDF):

Stakeholders were divided between optimism for AI’s potential and skepticism about its risks. Supporters see opportunities for productivity gains and economic growth, while critics warn of ethical, environmental and social harms.

It is entirely accurate, yes, but it is so funny to me to summarize the arguments raised by critics in this breezy, balanced matter. It says nothing and yet gives the impression that these are of similar weight.

How Bad Faith Publishers Are Weaponizing FOIA ⇥ cjr.org

Sharon Lerner and Andy Kroll, reporting for ProPublica in 2024:

An analysis of more than 2,000 public-records requests submitted by [Colin] Aamot, [Mike] Howell and [Roman] Jankowski to more than two dozen federal offices and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission, shows an intense focus on hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.

Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told ProPublica in an interview. Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group had submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years. He described the project as “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”

Miranda Green, reporting for Columbia Journalism Review this week:

Founded in 2019, Metric has been criticized for jury tampering and tied to pay-for-play political schemes and fake newspapers that land in mailboxes ahead of key elections. Recently, it has focused on obtaining troves of public records. In the past year, an investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has found Metric filed more than nine thousand Freedom of Information Act requests across all fifty states.

[…]

Brian Timpone, one of the founders of Metric Media, disputed Tow’s FOIA count, saying, “We have sent far more FOIAs than that.” He did not respond to a list of detailed questions. Metric’s other founders, Dan Proft and Bradley Cameron, did not respond to requests for comment.

I recognize that, as a resident of a country outside the United States — in fact, a resident of one that is struggling with its own sunshine law problems — my commentary here is of little weight. I am, in principle, not opposed to a voluminous set of requests, and especially not when they are for things that should be public already.

However, while the Heritage Foundation portrays its efforts as “oversight”, the sheer number of requests made by these groups creates logjams for everyone thereby preventing oversight. Oftentimes, they are merely requesting a huge aimless dump of communications to sift through. For example, the most recent log (PDF) from the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is mostly comprised of requests from Aamot and Howell for emails and text messages.

Some people believe adding a fee to each request — perhaps only for commercial requests. But it is generally not free to file these kinds of requests in Canada, and we also have a massive backlog. Another option is proactive disclosure of high-ranking officials’ communications and calendar entries, but I imagine that will cause all sorts of tangential problems even with liberal use of redactions. Perhaps there are technological improvements that could allow for more automated discovery, but a real person would still need to verify the work and screen for exclusions. There is no way out of this without a significant increase in funding and staffing, especially not when it is easier than ever to flood agencies with automated requests that, regardless of their intentions, must be processed like any other.

Scam Ads on Apple News ⇥ kirkville.com

Kirk McElhearn:

I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in sources I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple News+ – £13 – because, while you get more publications, you still get ads.

And those ads have gotten worse recently. Many if not most of them look like and probably are scams. Here are a few examples from Apple News today.

Apple promotes News by saying it offers “trusted sources” in an app that is “rewriting the reading experience”. And, when Apple partnered with Taboola, Sara Fischer at Axios reported it would “establish certain levels of [quality] control around which advertisers it will sell through to Apple apps”. Unsurprisingly, the highest quality Taboola ads are still bait for doing some fraud, and it is all over Apple’s ostensibly selective apps. Probably good for services revenue, though.

The CIA Killed the World Factbook ⇥ cia.gov

Bad news from the CIA. I mean, probably not what Senator Ron Wyden was referring to and, on a relative scale for the CIA, this is pretty tame. But, still, disappointing:

One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. The World Factbook served the Intelligence Community and the general public as a longstanding, one-stop basic reference about countries and communities around the globe. Let’s take a quick look into the history of The World Factbook.

Simon Willison:

In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they’ve not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they’ve also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.

The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There’s no reason not to continue to serve archived versions – a banner at the top of the page saying it’s no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely.

I am just guessing here, but I think the CIA can afford to keep this stuff available online indefinitely. The Internet Archive can and it is not being given tens of billions of dollars annually

Leaks and Leakers ⇥ zetter-zeroday.com

There have been a few stories recently involving the investigation of leaks by U.S. government employees and contractors, and the naked aggression shown toward leakers, and I thought it would be useful to round them up.

First, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, in a press release announcing the cancellation of contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton:

Most notably, between 2018 and 2020, Charles Edward Littlejohn — an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton — stole and leaked the confidential tax returns and return information of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers. To date, the IRS determined that the data breach affected approximately 406,000 taxpayers. Littlejohn has pled guilty to felony charges for disclosing confidential tax information without authorization.

Littlejohn was prosecuted under the Biden administration, and is being sued by the current president. The stories produced from the information he revealed, however, thankfully remain available. The New York Times and ProPublica each have stories revealing how little income tax is paid by the wealthiest Americans. It is not just a pittance relative to their net worth; in some cases, it is absolutely nothing.

Kim Zetter, Zero Day:

In February 2018, he was back in a position with access to IRS taxpayer data but didn’t immediately steal records. Prosecutors say he developed a “sophisticated” scheme to download the documents nine months later. This included not searching directly for documents related to the government official, which might have triggered a system alert, but querying the database “using more generalized parameters.” Prosecutors don’t specify the search terms Littlejohn used, but they note that the search parameters he used would have produced not only the tax records of the government official he sought to expose, but also those of other taxpayers he wasn’t targeting. By November 2018, he had extracted 15 years worth of tax records for President Trump, prosecutors say.

Because IRS protocols can detect and prevent “large downloads or uploads from IRS systems and devices,” according to prosecutors, Littlejohn avoided copying the records to removable media such as a USB stick — as Edward Snowden had done when he took documents from NSA servers. Instead Littlejohn “exploited a loophole in those controls” by transmitting the stolen tax records to a private website that he controlled, which was not accessible to the public.

Despite these careful steps, Littlejohn was ultimately caught, though I am not sure how. I read through relevant docket entries and, unless I missed something, I am not sure the government has explained its investigation, particularly since Littlejohn pleaded guilty.

A different case — Richard Luscombe and Jeremy Barr, reporting for the Guardian, last month:

The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter early on Wednesday in what the newspaper called a “highly unusual and aggressive” move by law enforcement, and press freedom groups condemned as a “tremendous intrusion” by the Trump administration.

Agents descended on the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.

Nikita Mazurov, the Intercept:

Federal prosecutors on January 9 charged Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, an IT specialist for an unnamed government contractor, with “the offense of unlawful retention of national defense information,” according to an FBI affidavit. The case attracted national attention after federal agents investigating Perez-Lugones searched the home of a Washington Post reporter. But overlooked so far in the media coverage is the fact that a surprising surveillance tool pointed investigators toward Perez-Lugones: an office printer with a photographic memory.

It is particularly rich for the Intercept to be pointing to the printer as a reason this individual was allegedly outed. Secret documents published by the site in 2017 included printer stenography that, while not directly implicated (PDF) in revealing the leaker’s identity, was insufficiently protective of their source.

In the case of Perez-Lugones, investigators were apparently able retrace his footsteps, as described in paragraphs 16 through 29 of the affidavit (PDF). It does not sound like he took particularly careful steps to avoid leaving a history of the documents he accessed and then printed. I have no illusions that my audience is full of people with top secret clearance and an urge to leak documents to the press, but anyone who is should consider reading — on their personal device in private browsing mode — the guidance provided by Freedom of the Press Foundation and NiemanLab.

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter’s seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records.

Some general-audience publications, like the HuffPost, are promoting the use of Lockdown Mode as a “useful and simple built-in tool you should turn on ASAP” for anyone who “feels targeted by cybersecurity threats”. But we are all targeted, to some extent or another, by cybersecurity threats. Most people should not use Lockdown Mode. It is an enormously disruptive option that is only a reasonable trade-off for anyone who has good reason to believe they would be uniquely targeted.

Cox:

The FBI was still able to access another of Natanson’s devices, namely a second silver Macbook Pro. “Once opened, the laptop asked for a Touch Id or a Password,” the court record says. Natanson said she does not use biometrics for her devices, but after investigators told her to try, “when she applied her index finger to the fingerprint reader, the laptop unlocked.” The court record says the FBI has not yet obtained a full physical image of the device, which provides an essentially complete picture of what was stored on it. But the agents did take photos and audio recordings of conversations stored in the laptop’s Signal application, the court record says.

Warrants for seizing electronic devices have, for several years now, sometimes contained a clause reading something like “law enforcement personnel are authorized to […] press or swipe the fingers (including thumbs) of (the warrant subject) to the fingerprint scanner of the device(s) [and] hold the device(s) in front of the face of (the warrant subject to activate the facial recognition feature”.

One thing every iPhone owner should know is that they can temporarily disable biometric features by pressing and holding the power button (on the right-hand side of the device) and either volume button for a few seconds, until the “slide to power off” option appears. To reactivate biometric features, you will need to enter your passcode. You can press these buttons while your phone is in your pocket. You should do this any time you are anticipating an interaction with law enforcement or those working on their behalf.

However, I cannot find a similar capability for a MacBook with a Touch ID sensor. If you are the kind of person who feels like Lockdown Mode might apply to you, you should consider turning off Touch ID, too, and sticking with a strong and memorable passphrase.

Using an iPod in 2026 ⇥ disconnect.blog

Paris Marx is trying to wean himself off U.S. tech services, in large part because of the leverage this dependence enables. On streaming music, and with a reasonable rejection of Sweden-based Spotify, Marx was left with a couple other options:

I’ve been on Apple Music for the past few years, but recently switched to Deezer 🇫🇷 and don’t see why I would need to go back given the catalogs of music-streaming services are pretty similar — unlike on the video side of things. Maybe another plus: Deezer isn’t trying to push video at me like Spotify does.

[…] Like streaming video though, there is another option: grabbing an old iPod or new MP3 player and loading it up with the music you want to listen to.

Well, Marx found his old iPod and is figuring out what needs modernizing and fixing up.

For Christmas this past year, a family member wanted a replacement for their iPod Nano. I looked up and down for options — something small and usable while running, but still a quality product with an easy syncing experience. I found I had basically two options: cheap iPod Shuffle lookalikes that are slow and difficult to use, and extremely expensive players for enthusiasts. So I bought a refurbished iPod Nano — and they love it.

While I was shopping in that store, it was awfully tempting to pick up a refurbished iPod Classic for myself. I still have a 60 GB fifth-generation model, though I do not think it can hold a charge. I remember when that felt like a lot of storage. I do not miss my iPod Touch or old iPhones, but I miss that iPod.

What’s Up With All Those Equals Signs Anyway? ⇥ lars.ingebrigtsen.no

Lars Ingebrigtsen:

For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. The most vital question everybody’s asking themselves is: What’s up with all those equals signs?!

And that’s something I’m somewhat of an expert on. I mean, having written mail readers and stuff; not because I’ve been to Caribbean islands.

Good to know for anyone reading a giant tranche of someone else’s email which, through context clues, you may realize is the least creepy part of it all.

News Sites Are Bringing Comments Sections Back as a Paid Feature ⇥ open.substack.com

Ben Whitelaw, writing for the New Public:

Publishers saw comment sections as a reputational hazard and a cost centre and, by the middle of the decade, a dozen sites — including Popular Science, Chicago Sun-Times, Motherboard, Reuters, and NPR — had significantly reduced or completely disabled commenting features. Each argued, often without the data to back it up, that its readers preferred to discuss stories via social media. And so, what was once heralded as a new frontier of reader dialogue died a not-so-quiet death.

A decade on, something surprising is happening: reader comments are having a mini renaissance. After years of chasing social media engagement and being burned in the process, publishers have realised that commenting has a tangible value — to the broader public, yes, but also in terms of advertising and subscription revenue.

Via Karl Bode, Techdirt:

The rush to vilify and eliminate the comment section ignored, as Ben notes, that a subscription to news outlets doesn’t just have to provide access to journalism, it can feature participation in journalism. As an online writer for decades, I’ve seen every insult known to man; at the same time I’ve routinely seen comment insight that either taught me something new or helped me correct errors in my reporting that both I and my editors missed.

The obliteration of the comment section threw that baby out with the bath water. Facebook comments are, if you haven’t noticed, a homogenized shit hole full of bots, rage, and bile that undermines connection and any effort at real conversation. These sorts of badly run systems are also more easily gamed by bad actors (like, say, authoritarians using culture war agitprop to confuse the electorate and take power).

I think I remain personally uninterested in having a comments section, but Whitelaw’s article has certainly made me consider how strongly I have that stance. It is tough because, while I expect readers would be respectful of one another — I often appreciate the comments under one of Michael Tsai’s posts — I am still wary of taking on the role of a moderator.

One thing both of these articles reinforced, however, is my pet theory that anonymity was never the problem. Whitelaw, who formerly led moderation of the Times of London’s comment section, writes of a commenter who wrote under their real name and was so “infamously combative” that they were eventually banned. Bode’s reference to the Facebook comments plugin — which goes away next week — is also a reminder that even people using their real identity were hostile commenters. The problem has always been with overly permissive moderation policies.

WhatsApp Encryption, a Lawsuit, and a Lot of Noise ⇥ blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Joseph Menn, the Washington Post:

Most of WhatsApp’s 3 billion users probably don’t know it, but a prominent Los Angeles law firm is trying to speak on their behalf in a lawsuit filed against its owner Meta that alleged the company can “access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.”

Security experts questioned the lack of technical detail in the lawsuit, and WhatsApp denied the claims.

I read the suit (PDF) last week after I stumbled across it while trying to find a different Meta lawsuit on CourtListener, and it can be accurately summarized as big, if true, with a heavy emphasis on if. There is basically no evidence presented for the claims, and I wrote it off as some kind of rambling nonsense because I completely missed it was filed by attorneys working at Quinn Emanuel.

Matthew Green:

The Internet has mostly divided itself into people who already know these allegations are true, because they don’t trust Meta and of course Meta can read your messages — and a second set of people who also don’t trust Meta but mostly think this is unsupported nonsense. Since I’ve worked on end-to-end encryption for the last 15+ years, and I’ve specifically focused on the kinds of systems that drive apps like WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal, I tend to fall into the latter group. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to pay attention to here.

Hence: in this post I’m going to talk a little bit about the specifics of WhatsApp encryption; what an allegation like this would imply (technically); we can verify that things like this are true (or not verify, as the case may be). More generally I’ll try to add some signal to the noise.

Green is careful to describe the limited visibility any outsider has when it comes to closed-source applications. Even so — and even with Meta’s scumbag reputation — it is difficult for me to believe the company is simply lying about end-to-end encryption, and Green presents compelling evidence for why this is unlikely. A vulnerability? Perhaps. But the claims in this apparently serious lawsuit go well beyond that.

Elon Musk Gives Himself the Biggest Handshake ⇥ theregister.com

You may remember how, a little under a year ago, Elon Musk’s company xAI bought Elon Musk’s other company X, “valuing” it at $44 billion, exactly the same as the amount he paid for it despite Fidelity valuing it at more like $9 billion. Then, just a few months later, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX gave Elon Musk’s company xAI $2 billion. And, just last week, Tesla — a publicly traded company Elon Musk runs — gave xAI another $2 billion.

Anyway, here is Tobias Mann, with the Register:

Elon Musk on Monday revealed his space company SpaceX has acquired his AI outfit xAI, and that the two will work together to escape the surly bonds of Earthly powers by tapping the sun’s enduring glow.

“This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” Musk wrote in a bizarre blog post published to SpaceX’s website on Monday.

Apparently, the combined company is worth $1.25 trillion on annual revenue of $15 billion, up from a valuation of $400 billion six months ago, presumably because investors love stuff like this:

“My estimate is that within two to three years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space,” Musk contends in his post. “Long term space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.”

“Obviously”. Sure, man. How else would you scale up your massive CSAM generator if not for the vastness of outer space? All of this is completely reasonable, and I am just a very stupid person for not getting it.

Call Screening Is the Best Reason to Update to iOS 26 ⇥ businessinsider.com

Apple:

Call Screening automatically answers calls from unknown numbers without interrupting you. Once the caller shares their name and reason for their call, your iPhone rings and shares their response so you can decide if you want to pick up. You can also choose to silence calls from unknown callers and send them directly to voicemail.

I understand being reluctant to update to iOS 26, but if you are as irritated by spam calls throughout your day as I am, this feature is a compelling reason to make the leap. I have had it switched on since the first iOS 26 beta releases and, while I still receive spam calls, virtually none of them have actually notified me.

If you frequently get calls from numbers you are not saving to your contacts, this is probably not a feature for you. It is also something you have to remember to turn off in instances where you might get calls from an unknown number. I have forgotten to do so before and then I need to rush to answer the phone. But I do not live the life of a publicist or celebrity lawyer, and the main reason I get phone calls to my personal number is because someone is trying to defraud me, and I would rather not speak to them.

Katie Notopoulos, of Business Insider, does not like this feature:

Sure, you say, most of those unknown calls are junk. Well, not exactly — there’s already a spam filter that’s separate from unknown callers. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but I find it’s pretty accurate in assessing “spam risk.” (Android users here will probably laugh, since they’ve had this feature for a long time.)

This feature — unknown call screening — is for non-spam unknown callers — a doctor’s office, your kid’s school, a friend with a new number, someone from work whose number you don’t have saved yet. Sure, some of these may be annoyances that you don’t actually want to deal with (I don’t want to “deal” with my dentist reminding me of my appointment, but that’s life). Still, having a phone number where people who need to reach you can reach you is the point of the phone.

The separate spam filtering feature appears to be carrier-specific; it is not an option available to me.

I am not someone who is opposed to phone calls in general; I do not usually mind answering them even when I am doing something else. However, one of the things Notopoulos’ article omits is how the reception of the cold phone call changed as cell phones became the norm. The fact that someone can call me anywhere does not mean I wish to be reached everywhere I happen to be carrying the device that is, among many other things, a phone.

Notopoulos is nostalgic for “having a clever outgoing answering machine message” and seems to be fine with voicemail, so the principle of deciding whether to answer the phone does not seem to be a problem. But having a middle layer that gives the recipient more information is, apparently, a step too far, for reasons I do not understand. Nothing about this prevents making or receiving phone calls. It just means I get to decide whether I want to interact with criminals.

Amazon, Google, Meta, and SpaceX Want to Be Africa’s Internet Providers ⇥ restofworld.org

Damilare Dosunmu, Rest of World:

In contrast to Europe and North America, where connectivity is well distributed, Africa still offers hundreds of millions of potential first-time users. Only about 38% of Africans were online in 2024, according to the International Telecommunication Union. This leaves more than 400 million people without internet access. Even where networks exist, usage remains constrained by high costs and poor service quality. Mobile broadband penetration in sub-Saharan Africa remains below 50%, while fixed broadband access is limited largely to major cities.

Control of infrastructure — not consumer apps — has become the strategic priority, Oniosun said.

It is extraordinary to think that companies like Google and Meta, already dominant in much of the software infrastructure used in African countries, are also angling to assert control over the physical realm, too. Worth noting Meta has repeatedly claimed it is developing novel infrastructure only to bail after the public relations sheen had faded.

Sponsor: StopTheMadness Pro — Take Back Your Web Browser ⇥ underpassapp.com

StopTheMadness Pro by indie developer Jeff Johnson is a web browser extension that stops website annoyances and privacy violations. A one-time universal purchase in the App Store, StopTheMadness Pro supports Safari on iOS, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on macOS.

StopTheMadness Pro is not an ad blocker but rather a one of a kind web browser extension, with a huge number of unique features. Its main purpose is to force websites to behave as you expect and intend, by stopping them from sneakily subverting your web browser’s built-in functionality. For example, websites can block your copy and paste, block your contextual menu, block your keyboard shortcuts, play videos without your permission, hide the native video controls, and hijack your link clicks for tracking purposes. StopTheMadness Pro stops all that madness!

You can also customize your web browsing experience in several ways with StopTheMadness Pro. Set the video playback speed on websites, redirect URLs to alternative websites (or to alternative web browsers in macOS Safari), force links to open in the same tab or to open in new tabs, substitute fonts on websites, and add your own CSS and JavaScript to websites.

Beloved for years by users, widely praised by the Apple news media, StopTheMadness Pro is the essential companion to your web browser.

How Do You Comparison Shop in the App Store? ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson:

As an App Store developer myself, I’ve stubbornly resisted the trend, perhaps to my financial detriment, though I’m currently doing ok with upfront paid apps. One thing that drives me nuts about the In-App Purchase business model is that it creates massive customer confusion. How do you know in advance exactly how much the app costs, what exactly you’re getting for the price, and what functionality, if any, is free? And if you’re confused about any of these things, then how can you possibly comparison shop between various apps in the App Store?

Johnson mentions several ways, but I have one more complaint: Apple utterly buries this information on individual app listings. To get even a vague idea of how much an app is going to cost, a user must scroll all the way past screenshots, the app’s description, ratings and reviews, the changelog, the privacy card, and the accessibility features — all the way down to a boring-looking table that contains the seller, the app’s size, the category, the compatibility, supported languages, the age rating, and only then is there a listing for “In-App Purchases”. And, if they exist, a user must still tap on the cell to find the list of options and their associated cost.

This is almost at the very bottom of the app’s listing. The only things on the page after the In-App Purchases section are the copyright string, links to the developer’s website and privacy policy, and then the recommendations section. Apple thinks the cost of an up-front purchase is so important it replaces the text in the “get” button with the price. But for freemium apps? The possible costs are tucked away in a place I bet many users never look.

(For full disclosure: Johnson’s StopTheMadness Pro is sponsoring Pixel Envy this week, but he has not asked me to post this, and I would have linked to it regardless.)

Alberta Separatists Are Desperate to Attract U.S. Interference, Money ⇥ ft.com

Ilya Gridneff and Myles McCormick, in a Financial Times article with the headline “Trump Officials Met Group Pushing Alberta Independence From Canada”:

Leaders of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a group of far-right separatists who want the western province to become independent, met US state department officials in Washington three times since April last year, according to people familiar with the talks.

A worrisome paragraph if I have ever read one. The separatists’ behaviour has understandably been interpreted as treasonous, and the possible interference of the U.S. is a question of national sovereignty.

But — and maybe I am being naïve — I think this article is less of a description of reality, and more like a marketing stunt by these traitors. Here are the next two paragraphs:

They are seeking another meeting next month with state and Treasury officials to ask for a $500bn credit facility to help bankroll the province if an independence referendum — yet to be called — is passed.

“The US is extremely enthusiastic about a free and independent Alberta,” Jeff Rath, APP legal counsel, who attended the meetings, told the FT.

And later in the article:

Rath declined to say who the APP spoke to in Washington. “We’re meeting very, very senior people leaving our meetings to go directly to the Oval Office,” he claimed.

I would like to believe the Times has better sourcing than trusting the word of a ding-dong like Rath, but I have my doubts. The Times has previously relied on self-aggrandizing leaks for news stories, and this sounds like more of the same. These meetings surely happened — which is scary enough — but Rath could have leaked this in order to pressure State Department officials ahead of another meeting next month.

This is very dangerous, of course. These jokers are inviting meddling and laundering it through the respectable and staid pages of the Financial Times. If these guys so badly want to live in the U.S., they are capable of moving there. But they should not drag the rest of us into their braindead plan, nor should the U.S. government encourage or support them.

The one thing giving me hope is that, according to Ipsos polling, 28% of Albertans would vote to separate, and only 56% of that segment are actually committed. This is nowhere near the kind of public support as, for example, Brexit. On the other hand, that committed group still represents one in six Albertans who want to ruin the lives of the rest of us because, again according to Ipsos, they feel we have been “historically mistreated within Canada”. These people are fools — but we often fail to take seriously the power of very foolish people.

Publishers Are Restricting Internet Archive, Access Attempting to Avoid A.I. Scraping ⇥ niemanlab.org

Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez, NiemanLab:

“A lot of these AI businesses are looking for readily available, structured databases of content,” he [the Guardian’s Robert Hahn] said. “The Internet Archive’s API would have been an obvious place to plug their own machines into and suck out the IP.” (He admits the Wayback Machine itself is “less risky,” since the data is not as well-structured.)

As news publishers try to safeguard their contents from AI companies, the Internet Archive is also getting caught in the crosshairs. The Financial Times, for example, blocks any bot that tries to scrape its paywalled content, including bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and the Internet Archive. The majority of FT stories are paywalled, according to director of global public policy and platform strategy Matt Rogerson. As a result, usually only unpaywalled FT stories appear in the Wayback Machine because those are meant to be available to the wider public anyway.

Hahn may find the Wayback Machine “less risky” than the official API, but that was the reason Reddit cited when it blocked the Internet Archive last year. I feared this likely outcome. Publishers’ understandable desire to control the use of their work is going to make the Internet Archive less useful because neither A.I. scrapers nor the Internet Archive matches the robots.txt rules at the original domain with their policies on archival websites.

Secrets of a Scam Compound ⇥ wired.com

Wired this week published an extraordinary story sourced from a forced scammer inside a compound in Laos. The premise of being lured into running romance scams is a well-known one; if you have heard about “pig butchering”, you are likely familiar with it. But the granularity of information shared by this source with Andy Greenberg is staggering: internal chats among leadership, video recordings inside the compound, and guides to teach these imprisoned people how to do crime.

In a companion article, Greenberg writes about the source:

Over the next days, with little in the way of orientation, he was pulled into the machinery of the scamming organization he’d come to know as the Boshang compound: He was trained to create fake profiles, given scam scripts, and then set to work on a nocturnal schedule, manually spamming out hundreds of introductory messages every night to lure new victims. At the end of his shifts, he would return to the top bunk of his six-man dorm room — little bigger than the hotel room he’d occupied those first nights — with a toilet in the corner.

Yet from the very beginning, he says, he was determined to again defy his circumstances. It struck him that he knew more about computers than most of his coworkers, or even his bosses, who seemed to understand only how to use social media, AI tools, and crypto currency. Within days, he began daydreaming of using his technical skills to quietly gather information on the compound and, somehow, expose it.

Brave.

Romance scams are not new. The reason this particular type of scam is so novel is because the technologies that enable it are brand new: cryptocurrencies, ChatGPT to spit out convincing scripts, generative image tools for producing “photographs”, and even deepfake software for video calls.

Aeronaut Is a Great Bluesky Client for MacOS ⇥ aeronautapp.com

You know how I have been banging on about the lack of a good Mac client for Bluesky? Like, for years? Well, I stopped complaining in October because I started using a terrific Bluesky app for MacOS.

Aeronaut is that app. It is native Mac software, not a wrapper around a Chromium instance, and it behaves like a proper Mac app, too. It feels, in the best possible way, like a throwback to the days of great indie software: clever name, beautifully designed, resource-light, and respectful. $3 per month or $20 per year.

‘Phantom Obligation’ ⇥ terrygodier.com

Terry Godier, in an article nominally about RSS readers, but applicable for any app that sends notifications of any kind:

An interface that shows you an unread count is making an argument: that reading is something to be counted, that progress is something to be measured, that your relationship to this content is one of obligation.

We should be more conscious of which arguments we’re immersing ourselves in, hour after hour, day after day.

This is the kind of essay that has gotten me to rethink my own habits. I am the kind of sicko who enables badges on most types of communication apps, and it is often unnecessary. I do not actually think of reading my feeds as a task list, so why do I enable features to create that implication? It is madness, and it is my own fault.

A Slot Machine for Feelings in Every Pocket ⇥ platformer.news

Casey Newton is not very impressed by the recently published study the effect of screen time on over 25,000 Manchester-area youth, the same one I linked to last week. Newton is especially dubious of the conclusions drawn by two of the researchers in an article for the Conversation:

Here the researchers extend their conclusions beyond what their data can support. On one hand, I believe them when they suggest that banning social media for under-16s will not instantly improve the median teen’s mental health. On the other, though, blanket bans do offer a simple solution to any number of ongoing problems on these platforms: the ease with which they connect predators to children; addictive mechanics like “streaks” and notifications that roil classrooms and wreck sleep; predictive algorithms that introduce young girls to disordered eating and related harms; and the unsettled feeling that comes from staring way too long at a feed you had only intended to look at for a minute.

Though Newton links to Mike Masnick’s coverage of two studies, Newton only dissects the one that is not behind a paywall. I get it; the other study is $45 USD, and I only read free Platformer articles. But it would behoove him to try to find both for a more comprehensive article. For example, the Australian researchers found usage of under two hours a day was not correlated with negative outcomes, but a good retort is that teens are spending an average of nearly five hours across seven social media apps per day. I would say get a friend in academia, or see if your local public library has access to JAMA Pediatrics, Newton.

Anyway, one thing you will notice about Newton’s list of harms is that only one of them is actually child-specific: assuming a blanket ban is entirely effective, predators would indeed find few-to-no children on these platforms.

The rest of the list contains problems without any age limit. I have plenty of friends in their thirties and forties — and older — who bemoan the time-sucking quality of social media apps, and the forced engagement mechanics they employ, though not in those words. We have decreasing control over our experience on these platforms. I can use whatever newsreader I want, but if I want see my friends’ Instagram pictures, I have to wade through a jumbled-up mess in my feed of posts from accounts I do not follow that could be several days old. I have little control over this because Meta thinks it knows what I want better than I do.

Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch — Newton links to this article approvingly — write of finding “mountains of evidence” in Meta’s research into the damaging effects of its own products. Over thirty studies which, they are careful to note, span a gamut of ages. Nevertheless, they conclude that “social media is not safe for children and adolescents”. If there are legitimate questions of product safety that also impact adults, perhaps a mere age check is insufficient. Newton says “there are no 13-year-olds in casinos because we know that the environment is designed to exploit them”, which is true enough, but if we are all carrying a little slot machine in our pocket, maybe that is a different problem.

Newton is right: age-gating is a “simple solution” compared to writing regulations that could limit these gambling-adjacent features and withstand inevitable legal challenges. But if the risks are as grave as portrayed by Newton, and Haidt and his collaborators, perhaps this is not an issue of carding every user.

NetNewsWire Updated With Liquid Glass Support ⇥ netnewswire.blog

Brent Simmons:

NetNewsWire 7.0 for Mac is now shipping!

The big change from 6.2.1 is that it adopts the Liquid Glass UI and it requires macOS 26.

(Note to people who aren’t on macOS 26: we fixed a lot of bugs in 6.2 and 6.2.1 knowing that many people might skip, or at least delay, installing macOS 26. Also note that there’s a page where you can get old versions of NetNewsWire.)

This is a rather tasteful implementation of Apple’s new visual design language, as is the still-in-beta iOS version, but if you are a hard no on Liquid Glass, I doubt it will change your mind.

The good news is that this particular genre of software is built on open standards: as Simmons writes, older versions of NetNewsWire. Or, if that is still not enough, other RSS readers like (previous site sponsor) Unread are available. You can even use different readers on different devices if you use a syncing service like Feedbin. Imagine that.

Apple ‘Honours’ Martin Luther King While Working Against His Legacy ⇥ jagsworkshop.com

Jason Anthony Guy:

Dr. King was a radical. Yes, he spoke of peace and nonviolence, and also advocated for dramatic social change and economic justice. Dr. King didn’t encourage passivity, he endorsed disruption. […]

Guy posted this on 20 January, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, and just days before Alex Pretti was murdered and Tim Cook attended a screening of ‘Melania’. I had been meaning to link to it since then, and last week’s events made it all the more pressing. Guy quotes King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, though I have chosen some additional context:

[…] First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action” […]

Cook is, at best, the kind of white moderate who would disappoint King: someone who, optimistically, agrees with the goals of those protesting the horrific turn this second administration has taken but disagrees with their methods. Cook’s legacy used to be carrying Apple in the post-Jobs era to new financial heights. Now it is gold trophies and authoritarian appeasement.

Tim Cook Attends Screening of Propaganda for Authoritarian’s Wife ⇥ rollingstone.com

Regular readers may have observed I have tried to be careful with how much I write about the rise of fascism in the United States. It is not because I do not notice or care — quite the opposite — but because I think the correct viewpoint for me is of an outside observer: what is most relevant about this administration from a Canadian perspective. And, also, because I assume many of you are already getting your fill of truly awful news. Some things are just so obviously bad that it seems almost perfunctory for me, of all people, to say anything. However.

Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone:

On Saturday, the same day that an ICE agent shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti as he was restrained, face first on ground in Minneapolis, a few dozen VIPs — including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Queen Rania of Jordan, and former heavy-weight champion Mike Tyson — gathered at the White House for a lavish party, complete with custom-made popcorn buckets and gift boxes emblazoned with the first lady’s portrait, to celebrate the forthcoming documentary Melania: Twenty Days to History.

Andy Jassy and Mike Hopkins, both of Amazon, were also in attendance, but that is partly explained by the company’s $40 million bid for the rights to film part of the brief period between the election and inauguration. $28 million of that went straight into Melania Trump’s bank account. Apparently, this is not a bribe or unduly coercive in any way. Imagine that.

Cook, though? He was there because he wanted to be. This was on the same day that, as Stuart writes, agents of the U.S. government murdered a second citizen in Minneapolis in three weeks, and then lied about it. Renée Good and Alex Pretti both embodied courage. Cook chose fealty and, ultimately, cowardice.

FTC Says It Will Appeal Ruling in Meta Monopolization Case ⇥ ftc.gov

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission:

Today, the Federal Trade Commission filed a notice that it will appeal the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s November 2025 ruling in favor of Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) in the FTC’s monopolization case against Meta. The appeal will be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

I wonder if Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the Chamber of Progress, will continue referring to it as “one of Lina Khan’s most prominent anti-big tech cases”, despite its origins in the first Trump administration and this appeal landing in the second one.

Sponsor: StopTheMadness Pro — Take Back Your Web Browser ⇥ underpassapp.com

StopTheMadness Pro is a Safari extension for iOS and macOS that stops website annoyances and privacy violations. When websites try to block your copy and paste, block your contextual menu, block your keyboard shortcuts, play videos without your permission, or track your link clicks, just stop the madness!

Made by indie developer Jeff Johnson, StopTheMadness Pro is a one of a kind Safari extension with a huge number of unique features, too many to list them all! Here are a few more:

  • Show Safari’s native video controls, including Picture-in-Picture.

  • Set video playback speed on websites.

  • Redirect URLs to alternative websites. In macOS Safari, redirect URLs to alternative web browsers.

  • Force links to open in the same tab, or force links to open in new tabs.

  • Customize fonts on websites.

  • Add your own CSS and JavaScript to websites.

In addition to Safari on iOS and macOS, StopTheMadness Pro supports Firefox and Google Chrome on macOS.

StopTheMadness Pro is a one-time universal purchase for iOS and macOS in the App Store.