Minimum Viable Curiosity ⇥ randsinrepose.com

Michael Lopp:

In a hypothetical future world where all I ever knew was sitting in the back of a robot car, I would not appreciate the work involved because I’d never had the opportunity to learn to drive. This might be fine for many humans on the planet, but not for me. I learned how to drive on Highway 17, a scary mountain freeway that required me to become a competent driver as quickly as possible. I remember those lessons, they made me… me.

I liked learning to drive.

Better yet, I like learning. It gives me appreciation of the craft.

A great essay, in large part because I do not know that there is a perfect answer to any of the questions posed — and that is okay. That is basically where Lopp ends up at the end. There is, in an uncharitable reading, an element of young people today no longer know how to write a cheque as though that is essential. Maybe it is not inherently worthwhile to know how to drive or write a standardized corporate letter.

But we learn these things both for the end and for the means of getting there. A teacher is not assigning essay writing to high school students because they are expecting profound conclusions. The purpose of that exercise is to teach research skills, citing sources of information, structuring an argument, and writing persuasively. These are all skills with broad uses. As a formerly delinquent high school essay-writer, it took a long time for me to understand why this would become important or useful.

The shortcuts we have today seem useful, in the sense they can get you closer to a finished product with seemingly less work than before. They have their uses. But they are also missing an undervalued emotional quality and, at the heart of it, curiosity.

Apple Seeks to Pause ‘Extraordinary’ App Store Ruling ⇥ macrumors.com

Tim Hardwick

Apple has filed an emergency motion asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to pause key parts of a recent ruling that dramatically changes how the App Store operates, following a contempt finding in its long-running legal battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games.

As expected. I will bet Apple is going to try and take this part of the case to the Supreme Court, even though it did not have much luck in the first attempt.

Israeli Spyware Giant NSO Group Ordered to Pay Nearly $170M to Meta ⇥ politico.com

Maggie Miller, Politico:

Israeli spyware company NSO Group was ordered by a U.S. federal court on Tuesday to pay WhatsApp and its parent company Meta almost $170 million in damages after its cyber tools were used to hack around 1,400 WhatsApp accounts.

I remain confused why Apple thought this case was not worth fighting.

Meta:

In this specific case, we know we have a long road ahead to collect awarded damages from NSO and we plan to do so. Ultimately, we would like to make a donation to digital rights organizations that are working to defend people against such attacks around the world. Our next step is to secure a court order to prevent NSO from ever targeting WhatsApp again.

[…]

Finally, we’re publishing (unofficial) transcripts of deposition videos that were shown in open court so that these records are available to researchers and journalists studying these threats and working to protect the public. We intend to add official court transcripts once they become available.

If Meta so desperately wants to make this donation, it could do so at any time.

Also, while the deposition transcripts are nice to have and certainly contain revealing moments, they are incomplete. Huge chunks of time are missing. This is perhaps for confidentiality or because Meta only wants to publish salient portions, but I would prefer if more were available. Context matters.

Anyway, good for Meta for seeing this through to the end. I am sure it will spend its winnings wisely.

Despite Misleading Marketing, TeleMessage Can Access Plaintext Chat Logs ⇥ micahflee.com

Micah Lee:

Despite their misleading marketing, TeleMessage, the company that makes a modified version of Signal used by senior Trump officials, can access plaintext chat logs from its customers.

In this post I give a high level overview of how the TeleMessage fake Signal app, called TM SGNL, works and why it’s so insecure. Then I give a thorough analysis of the source code for TM SGNL’s Android app, and what led me to conclude that TeleMessage can access plaintext chat logs. Finally, I back up my analysis with as-of-yet unpublished details about the hack of TeleMessage.

TeleMessage suspended its service after NBC News reported a completely different breach to the one Lee and 404 Media reported Sunday. It is horribly bad form to speculate, but if two separate attackers publicly demonstrated their ability to download archived chats without permission, it seems plausible an eager state actor could have also done so. To be clear, there is no evidence for this; all I am saying is it would not surprise me.

Signal is secure. TeleMessage is certainly not.

While TeleMessage has been in the news for its association with various U.S. government agencies, it has a large customer base. You have heard of many of its users. How many of them, do you think, are still comfortable trusting it to capture their internal communications for record-keeping purposes?

Patreon’s iOS App Can Now Accept Web Payments in the U.S. (Again) ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

In the updated version released on Monday (version 125.5.0), users now have the option of making a purchase via the web, where they can choose to pay with other payment methods, including credit cards, Venmo, and PayPal, as well as with Apple Pay.

The option to use Apple’s own in-app purchases method, meanwhile, is shown only in very small text below the larger, bold “Join” button. This change will likely direct more customers to pay via Patreon’s website instead of through Apple’s in-app purchases.

Patreon’s app, for many years, supported web-based payment options, until Apple decided it no longer could.

Matt Birchler’s summary of Apple’s stance on in-app payments is maybe the most cogent I have read:

Apple’s logic around “safety and security” for allowed payment methods was:

- it’s safe enough to enter your credit card in an app to buy physical goods

- it’s safe enough to enter you card into an app to buy digital goods you enjoy on other devices

- it’s unsafe to enter your card in an app to buy digital goods you enjoy on that device

I am jealous of the simplicity and clarity in these four lines.

This nonsense remains true outside the U.S. and the other regions that have mandated, to varying degrees, a revision to Apple’s payment terms. It makes no sense at all — but, of course, nothing about this really does. It is all reverse justification — a way for Apple to absorb a slice of an economy it feels it is owed for little reason other than because. A common thing I now see and hear from people whose work is supported by Patreon — plug — is advising people to subscribe outside the app to avoid giving Apple a cut. The sooner Apple’s “post-PC” devices are treated less like permanent extensions of the company which we are graciously allowed to use, the better it will be for all of us.

A.I. Mistakes Are Way Weirder Than Human Mistakes ⇥ spectrum.ieee.org

Last week, I published some thoughts on Meta’s eventual repositioning as a kind of television channel stocked with generated material for any given user:

Then TikTok came around and did away with two expectations: that you should have to work to figure out what you want to be entertained by, and that your best source of entertainment is your friend group. Meta is taking it a step further: what if the best source of entertainment is generated entirely for them? I find that thought revolting. The magic of art and entertainment is in the humanity of it. Thousands of years of culture is built on storytelling and it is not as though this model has been financially unsuccessful. That is not the lens through which I view art, but it is obviously relevant to Meta’s goals.

I have one small addition to this: there is also humanity in the mistakes we make in creating art. Take any of the examples pointed out by Todd Vaziri recently. Notice how human they are: a period-correct prop license plate covering a more modern one falls off; a camera crew visible in a reflection. These are evidence of the human hands responsible for this art.

Compare this to the mistakes common in generated A.I. images and video, which only serves to underscore the lack of human involvement. When there are errors, they are sometimes human-esque, or at least plausibly so; however, much of the time, they are unnerving.

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote, for IEEE Spectrum in January, a pretty good overview of what this is like from a mostly text perspective:

To the extent that AI systems make these human-like mistakes, we can bring all of our mistake-correcting systems to bear on their output. But the current crop of AI models — particularly LLMs — make mistakes differently.

AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats.

However, the ways mistakes appear in generated visual material is difficult for me to rationalize in the same way. They are unnerving in straightforward videos generated from reality-based prompts, and noticeable even in those intended to be unsettling. It is like if surrealism were expressed through a fungus-infected mind made of Play-Doh.

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TeleMessage, Used by Various U.S. Government Officials, Has Been Breached ⇥ 404media.co

Earlier this week, Joseph Cox of 404 Media noticed a photograph of U.S. official Mike Waltz — previously — using a third-party Signal client from TeleMessage. The whole point of TeleMessage is that it captures and archives messages from third-party messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Signal. Both services are known for being end-to-end encrypted — a degree of protection that disappears when you store messages outside their apps.

And, so.

Joseph Cox, 404 Media, and Micah Lee:

A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.

I remember when people used to pretend to care, for political gain, about the storage and retention of sensitive government information.

Publisher Opt-Outs Affected Half of Google’s A.I. Training ⇥ bloomberg.com

Davey Alba, Bloomberg:

Google can train its search-specific AI products, like AI Overviews, on content across the web even when the publishers have chosen to opt out of training Google’s AI products, a vice-president of product at the company testified in court on Friday.

That’s because Google’s controls for publishers to opt out of AI training only cover work by Google DeepMind, the company’s AI lab, and not any other organization at the company, said Eli Collins, a Google DeepMind vice-president.

This confirms reporting by Alba and Julia Love last year: if publishers want to appear in Google Search, they have to be okay with some amount of A.I. training. If they had a choice, however, it seems unlikely to me they would take it. In court, the Department of Justice showed Collins a document regarding Gemini training:

According to that document, Google removed 80 billion of 160 billion “tokens” — snippets of content — after filtering out the material that publishers had opted out of allowing Google to use for training its AI. The document also listed search “sessions data,” or data collected during a period of time in which a user interacted with Google Search, as well as YouTube videos, as data that could augment Google’s AI models.

Half. Half of the data Google uses to train its A.I. models was removed when publishers were made aware they could opt out. That does not mean the other half have affirmatively opted in, of course, but it means at least half of publishers do not approve of Google’s desire to absorb their corpus of information without payment and with scant credit.

2027 iPhone Will Reportedly Feature an All-Screen Design ⇥ macrumors.com

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

The Information today cited multiple sources who said that at least one new iPhone model launching in 2027 will have a truly edge-to-edge display. The device’s front camera and Face ID system would both be placed under the screen.

I know the Dynamic Island was a clever way of transforming a necessary hardware compromise into a signature feature, albeit an imperfect one. This is a fun visual design problem to have: a hardware improvement to the iPhone will, in time, render some well-considered software obsolete. I imagine this all-screen iPhone will be self-evidently cool and, so, the Dynamic Island just goes away. But I am curious.

Meta’s A.I. Television

If you were listening out of context to something Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel, you might think he is deeply concerned about meaningful personal friendships:

There’s this stat that I always think is crazy: the average American, I think, has I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people that they’d consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more — I think it’s like fifteen friends, or something. […] The average person wants more connectivity — uh, connection — than they have.

For what it is worth, I tried to find the source for these numbers. The “three friends” figure correlates with the findings and phrasing of a 2021 American Enterprise Institute survey (PDF), though other surveys have found broadly similar numbers. In 2023, Pew Research found 39% of Americans say they have one to three close friends, while 38% say they have five or more. Recent YouGov polling finds over 52% saying they have one to three, while 22% say they have four or five.

The second appears to come from the work of Robin Dunbar. The accuracy of this number is disputed.

Still, it sounds like Zuckerberg simply cares about the number of friends people say they have compared to the number they want. And, so, you would think the CEO of the world’s biggest social networks would be concerned about making sure we maintain the real-life connections we already have, and perhaps finding new ones. Alas, the technological solutions along those lines sound pretty boring unless they are marketed based on their quaint vintage appeal.

That is not what Zuckerberg is being interviewed to promote. This line of questioning is bookended by questions about artificial general intelligence and DeepSeek. And, in fairness, I did not quote Patel’s question which prompted this response:

On this point of A.I.-generated content or A.I. interactions, already people have meaningful relationships with A.I. therapists, A.I. friends, you know, maybe more. And this is just gonna get more intense as these A.I.s get more unique and more personable — more intelligent, more spontaneous, and funny, and so forth. […] People are going to have relationships with A.I.s. How do we make sure these are healthy relationships?

Zuckerberg barely answers this. Instead, he pivots to more comfortable territory about how Meta’s vision of A.I. will increase the number of entirely generated “friends” people can have. Or, in the words of Paul Fairie:

The average American has 3 eggs, but has demand for 15. So here are 12 photographs of eggs. I am a business man.

Zuckerberg acknowledges “I think there are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them,” but his primary complaints with A.I. relationships are how technologically primitive they are.

My goal is not to dump on anyone except Henry Blodget who may have found some kind of personal fulfilment in some A.I. program. That is not my place and I have no idea where to begin. What is notable to me is the role Meta plays in manipulating the experience of real-world friendships.

Kyle Chayka, the New Yorker:

[…] The people we follow and the messages they post increasingly feel like needles in a digital haystack. Social media has become less social.

Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted as much during more than ten hours of testimony, over three days last week, in the opening phase of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Facebook’s parent company, Meta. The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

What “friends” mean in this context is different from how it is used by Zuckerberg and in the surveys above. Also, the rest of this material is not necessarily A.I.-generated. Even so, 7–17% of users’ time is spent viewing stuff they say they want to see, and that is not necessarily because they have elected to view it less. That is driven to a considerable degree by the posts Meta has selected for you to see first, and the order in which your friends’ Stories are displayed.

If Meta had an institutional responsibility to help users maintain their real-world friendships, it is failing to do so based on these numbers. But that is not the role it seems to want to play.

John Herrman, of New York magazine, nails it:

Meta’s AI strategy less resembles a bet on an unrecognizable future than a belief, or a wish, that it can simply be Meta, but more so. (It’s also a bet that large-language-model-based AI will present more opportunities for entertainment than for work.) Zuckerberg isn’t just envisioning a Meta staffed by AI engineers and AI moderators, but platforms that stock themselves with content, allow users to request whatever types of interactions they want, and are even more effective at holding attention, keeping people engaged, and, of course, serving and targeting advertising.

Perhaps what people ultimately want — in general and on average — is entertainment brought to them. That is not a denigration of society or anything; it makes sense. We once turned on the radio and enjoy audio-only plays and discussions. Then we had podcasts. We once turned on the television and scrolled through channels until we settled on something we liked. Then we had Netflix and YouTube. Both provide suggestions on what to watch, and some podcast apps have their own recommendations, but there is still a manual quality to discovery.

Then TikTok came around and did away with two expectations: that you should have to work to figure out what you want to be entertained by, and that your best source of entertainment is your friend group. Meta is taking it a step further: what if the best source of entertainment is generated entirely for them? I find that thought revolting. The magic of art and entertainment is in the humanity of it. Thousands of years of culture is built on storytelling and it is not as though this model has been financially unsuccessful. That is not the lens through which I view art, but it is obviously relevant to Meta’s goals.

This is not enough. Meta, institutionally, sees its world through quantities — of friends, of posts made, of ads served, of engagement, of time spent, of interactions — and envisions abundance delivered through A.I. means. Its efforts so far have been sloppy. Maybe they will, as Patel appears to believe, get better: “more unique and more personable” and so forth. Regardless, they will still be fake. I am not the biggest A.I. downer, but this worldview sucks. Human-created art is as irreplaceable by A.I. as is a human friendship. Not every problem is one which can be solved through technological development, and not every problem is real — who is to say that three close friends is too few for most people, or that the amount of entertainment produced by human beings is insufficient?

It would seem an empire can be built only so far on what is real.

MacDailyNews’ Sexist Response to Yesterday’s Epic Games Ruling

Following yesterday’s ruling finding Apple has disregarded a U.S. court’s instructions to permit links to external purchases from within iOS apps under reasonable terms, the publisher of MacDailyNews responded with the site’s take. In case you are not already familiar, MacDailyNews has a consistently right-libertarian editorial slant. It is not one I agree with, but that has only the tiniest bit of relevance to this commentary.

Also, while the site was founded by Steve Jack, it attaches no byline to its articles and so I am uncertain who specifically wrote this tripe:

It’s too bad Gonzalez Rogers expected Apple to provide a service that she ordered for free, because it makes no sense for Apple to do such a thing. Gonzales ordered Apple to allow developers to advertise lower prices elsewhere within Apple’s App Store. It is Apple’s App Store. Despite what Epic Games wishes and misrepresents, the App Store is not a public utility. Apple built it. Apple maintains it. Apple owns it, not Epic Games or some ditzy U.S. District Judge. Advertising within Apple’s App Store has value, a fee for which its owner has every right to charge, regardless of whatever the blank-eyed Gonzalez Rogers, bless her heart, expected.

I am sure there are plenty of people out there who believe Apple is entitled to run the iOS App Store as it sees fit. It is an argument with which I have sympathies outweighed by disagreements, but I get it.

What I do not get is describing a U.S. district court judge as “ditzy”.

It is an adjective invoked by MacDailyNews to describe just two people: Gonzalez Rogers and former European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager. It is an inherently sexist term — a cheap shot thrown at women who happen to have legally restricted the world’s most valuable corporation. Agree or disagree with their work, this kind of response is pathetic.

If, however, one is desperate to be a misogynist, they had better be certain the rest of their argument is airtight. And MacDailyNews falls on its face.

Gonzalez Rogers has not demanded an entirely free ride. In fact, she gave Apple substantial opportunity to explain how it arrived at (PDF) a hefty 27% commission rate for external purchases. Apple did not do so. It took hearings this year to learn it went so far as to get the Analysis Group to produce a report which happened to find (PDF) Apple was responsible for “up to 30% of a developer’s revenue”. But, Gonzalez Rogers writes, this study was not the basis for Apple’s justification for a 27% cut for external purchases, nor could it have been, because it was produced after records show Apple had already decided on that rate. It was reverse-engineered to maintain Apple’s entirely unjustified high commission rate.

To quote Gonzalez Rogers:

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. […]

And again:

Apple was afforded ample opportunity to respond to the Injunction. It chose to defy this Court’s order and manufacture post hoc justifications for maintaining an anticompetitive revenue stream. Apple’s actions to misconstrue the Injunction continue to impede competition. This Court will not play “whack-a-mole,” nor will it tolerate further delay.

Apple could have taken this up in a legally justifiable way that, plausibly, could have given it some reasonable commission on some sales. It did not do that, so now the court says no commission whatsoever is permissible. Simple. Besides, developers pay for hardware, a developer membership, and plenty of Apple’s services. They are not getting a free ride just by linking to an external payment option.

Moreover, developers do not “advertise” in the App Store. They can, but that is not what is being adjudicated in this case.

Media commentators can disagree on this ruling, on the provisions of the Digital Markets Act, and on Apple’s treatment of developers. There are many legitimate views and angles, and I think it is great to see so much discussion about this leading up to WWDC. But we can all do this without resorting to lazy sexism. Do better.

U.S. Judge Rules Apple Is Not in Compliance With Injunction in Epic Games Case

In September 2021, U.S. judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued a judgement in Epic Games’ case against Apple. She mostly sided with Apple but, critically, ruled third-party developers must be permitted to link to external purchasing mechanisms from within their apps.

Even that barest of changes, however, has apparently been too onerous for Apple to comply with in the spirit the court intended. Instead of collecting a typical 30% commission on in-app purchases, Apple said it would take 27% of external purchases made within seven days of someone using an in-app link. This sucks. The various rules Apple implemented, including the different commission rate, have been a problem ever since. In a ruling today, Gonzalez Rogers finds Apple’s measures do not comply with the court’s expectations.

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

Apple willfully violated a 2021 injunction that came out of the Epic Games case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a court filing on Wednesday.

[…]

Rogers added that she referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both [Apple executive Alex] Roman and Apple.

The judge’s order (PDF) is full of withering remarks and findings, like this footnote on the sixth page (citation removed):

Apple’s “entitlement” perspective and mantra persisted beyond the Injunction. For example, Apple’s Communications Director, Marni Goldberg, texted her colleague during the first evidentiary hearings, that “It’s Our F***ING STORE.” Not surprisingly (nor convincingly), she did not “recall” sending those messages.

There are several points like these where the judge makes clear she does not appreciate Apple’s obstinate approach. But the business-related findings are notable, too. For example, this passage on pages 17–18 (citations removed for clarity):

Further, in May 2023, Apple through Oliver and others received feedback from Bumble, a large, well-known developer on Apple’s and Google’s alternative billing programs. Bumble specifically advised Apple that “[p]ayment processing fees average out significantly higher than the 4% fee reduction currently offered by Google in the [user choice billing] program or [the] 3% fee in Apple’s … solution resulting in negative margin for developers.” In other words, Bumble explained to Apple that a “3% discount” was not economically viable for a developer because the external cost of payments exceeds 3%. Apple’s own internal assessment from February 2023 reflects data meriting the same conclusion — that the external costs of payments for developers on link-out purchases would exceed Apple’s 3% discount if it demanded a 27% rate.

The evidence uncovered in the 2025 hearing demonstrated Apple’s knowledge and expectation that the restrictions would effectively dissuade any real developer participation, to Apple’s economic advantage.

To all those who have said Apple’s regulatory and legal responses have amounted to malicious compliance, you appear to be correct. Stripping more formal language, as the judge has done here, reveals how fed up she is with Apple’s petulant misconduct.

Throughout this filing, Phil Schiller comes across very well, unlike fellow executives Luca Maestri, the aforementioned Alex Roman, and Tim Cook. In internal discussions, he consistently sounds like the most reasonable voice in the room — though Gonzalez Rogers still has stern words for him throughout. (For example, Schiller claimed external purchasing links alongside in-app options would make users more susceptible to fraud, even though under Apple’s rules it must review and approve those links. The judge writes “[n]o real-time business documents credit that view”.)

Gonzalez Rogers also has critical words about Apple’s current visual interface design patterns. In a section on page 32 featuring screenshots of possible button styles permissible for developers to provide external links, she writes of a “plain link or button style” not dissimilar to many post-iOS 7-style “buttons”:

Nothing about either example appears to be a “button,” by the ordinary usage and understanding of the word. There is, certainly, an external-link icon next to the call to action and hyperlink, but Apple strains to call either of these strings of text a “button.”

Yet, of a subsequent screenshot featuring one button of this style and another with a rounded rectangle background:

The lower example is readily identifiable as a button.

A final set of passages I would like to point to in this filing is the suspicion of Apple’s intellectual property justification for charging such onerous fees in the first place. Quite a bit of this is repeated from other judgements and filings in this case, but it is quite something to read them all together. For example, in a footnote on page 60 (citations removed for clarity):

[…] Apple also argues that the question of whether Apple’s commission appropriately reflects the value of its intellectual property is not an issue for injunction compliance, and that it is legitimate for a business to promote the value of its corporation for stockholders. Apple misses the point. The issue is that Apple flouted the Court’s order by designing a top-down anticompetitive system, in which its commission played a fundamental role.

For the same reasons, the Court disagrees that requiring Apple to set a commission of zero constitutes and unconstitutional taking. For instance, as described infra Section IV, in the trademark context, “a party who has once infringed is allowed less leniency for purposes of injunction enforcement than an innocent party.” Apple does not have an absolute right to the intellectual property that it wields as a shield to competition without adequate justification of its value. Apple was provided with an opportunity to value that intellectual property and chose not to do so.

On page 21, the judge cites an internal email on the topic:

[T]he team has discussed variations on the commission options with lower rates, but we struggled to land on ironclad pricing rationales that would (1) stand up to scrutinizing comparisons with defenses of the commission and existing discounting approaches in other jurisdictions and (2) that we could substantiate solidly on a bottoms up basis without implicitly devaluing our IP / proprietary technology.

The justification for Apple’s commission is entirely fictional. The company is not expected to, in its words, “give away [its] technology for free”, but it is clearly charging commissions like these simply because it can. It owns the platform and it believes it is entitled to run it in any way it chooses. At Apple’s scale, however, that argument does not fly.

Legal bodies around the world are requiring similar changes, and Apple’s reluctance to rip off the bandage and adopt a single global policy seems increasingly stupid. The longer it drags this stuff out, the worse it looks.

I am sure there are smart people at Apple who believe they are morally and legally correct to keep fighting. But Gonzalez Rogers accused an executive of lying under oath, seems to find the rest of the company’s executive team legally contemptible, and finds the behaviour of the world’s most valuable company to be pretty outrageous. All of this because, according to the company’s internal records on page 42, it might “lose over a billion [dollars] in revenue” if 25% of users chose to use external purchase links and the company collected no commission on them.

Documents Show How Police Track Cars Using Subscription Features ⇥ wired.com

Dell Cameron, Wired:

A cache of more than two dozen police records recently reviewed by WIRED show US law enforcement agencies regularly trained on how to take advantage of “connected cars,” with subscription-based features drastically increasing the amount of data that can be accessed during investigations. The records make clear that law enforcement’s knowledge of the surveillance far exceeds that of the public and reveal how corporate policies and technologies — not the law — determine driver privacy.

On Bluesky, Cameron published a screenshot of what is available by car make and model year “as a treat”. Owners of Ferraris will be delighted to know they are not on this list.

Cameron’s reporting indicates law enforcement is able to obtain information from automakers and cellular network operators. Four years ago, Joseph Cox, then at Vice, reported on capabilities offered by the Ulysses Group, previously linked. Then, last year, Kashmir Hill of the New York Times reported the sharing of data by General Motors to insurance companies and data brokers. Each of these depicts an entirely different avenue by which individual vehicles may be surveilled, stockpiling data which may be produced without a warrant.

In Praise of a Democracy on Paper ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

The Globe and Mail’s editorial board:

There are, of course, practical arguments in favour of the system used for federal elections. Paper ballots cannot be hacked. A hand-count allows for maximum transparency.

But the best reason for a paper ballot is not practical at all. It is more fundamental. A paper ballot gives physical form to democracy. The choice literally sits in a voter’s hand.

I will confess to having an immediately negative reaction to what seems like a saccharine take. Then I thought about it a little bit more and I came around. When everything around us is based on pixels and transistors, the simple action of marking a little bit of paper feels somehow more direct.

And it is not even particularly slow, to boot. We knew within a few hours of polls closing that the Liberal party would get the most votes in a dramatic turnaround over the past few months.

Backblaze Responds to Claims of ‘Sham Accounting’ From Sketchy ‘Research’ Firm ⇥ arstechnica.com

In March, a firm named Morpheus Research published its first report examining Solaris Energy and taking a short position against it. Last week, they published their second report alleging a massive financial scam is brewing at Backblaze. Again, they are shorting Backblaze stock.

There is no information about who is behind Morpheus Research, only an about page saying it is a “team of financial analysts dedicated to exposing fraud and corporate misconduct in financial markets”. That is one clumsy sentence. The domain was only registered in February, and I cannot find any clues about who is behind it aside from a tweet indicating at least some staff used to work at Hidenburg Research before it was shut down earlier this year.

Nevertheless, perhaps it is possible to assess the report on its merits. The facts are not dependent on who is behind it or what interest they have. The gist of its arguments is that Backblaze bet on enterprise storage, but was undercut by a competitor. The company has been consistently unprofitable, and its stock-based compensation program has been undermined by massive sales of shares held by executives. Its current financial reports are, allegedly, fraudulent to some extent.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica:

Ars Technica reached out to Backblaze about its response to concerns about the company’s financials resulting in lost backups. Patrick Thomas, Backblaze’s VP of marketing, called Morpheus’ claims “baseless.” He added:

The report is inaccurate and misleading, based largely on litigation of the same nature, and a clear attempt by short sellers to manipulate our stock price for financial gain.

Thomas also claimed that “independent, third-party reviews” have already found that there have been “no wrongdoing or issues” with Backblaze’s public financial results.

I am worried about this because Backblaze is part of my backup strategy. If it reduces its focus on backups in favour of an enterprise clientele it cannot win, it seems likely both are at risk — assuming Morpheus Research’s findings are in any way accurate. It is possible it arrived at its bet against the company after producing this report; it seems equally possible it created this report to justify a short position by using some cherry-picked quotes. It is a lengthy report that I, like many other readers, do not have time to fully fact-check.

What I do know is I have always been a little bit suspicious of Backblaze. Hacker News commenter klodolph says it well:

I recommend worrying about any service where you don’t pay a fee that scales with usage. This includes Backblaze. Yes, I recommend worrying about Backblaze and I’ve recommended worrying about it for a while.

I have many terabytes backed-up with Backblaze. I entrust it with my precious photos and music collection — the latter was the motivation for my subscription in the first place. But I should have always been more cautious given the company’s flat-rate promise. I simply assumed it would eventually become a tiered system. Now, I feel like I have reason to worry a little more.

Another Papercut from the Always-On Display Feature ⇥ pxlnv.com

In August, I wrote about a number of small usability problems with the iPhone’s Dynamic Island and always-on display features, none of which have been resolved in software updates. Here is another.

Sometimes, I will be listening to a podcast in Overcast, and need to pause it for an extended period of time to work on something else. I cannot listen to words whilst typing different words. The media controls will be displayed on the always-on display. However, when I tap the display, the controls disappear if I have been paused for a long time. I think Overcast has been kicked out of background tasks or something. There are two problems here.

The first is that controls shown on the always-on display do not respond to taps in the same way as when the phone is awake. You might see media controls or a series of tasks, but tapping those controls merely wakes the display; it does not activate the control.

The second problem is the mismatch in the visibility of media controls between changed states.

These are both obvious — to me — user experience issues that should have been resolved when prototype iPhones with this display were being used internally. Yet there are now three years of always-on iPhone models with the same problems. The Apple promise is “seamless integration”, but the display and its software feel like they were developed by two companies who are not on speaking terms.

The Group Chats of the Elite ⇥ semafor.com

Ben Smith, of Semafor, has a scoopy look inside the group chats of elite media and business figures, particularly those who pretend they are not. I often disagree with Smith’s framing — calling Christopher Rufo an “anti-woke conservative activist” and Richard Hanania a “conservative academic” dramatically undersells the vile views held by both — but the article successfully explores the coordination of these people.

One thing is for certain: a Signal group is so much dorkier than a secret society.

Canada’s Tech Executives Are Not Scared of Mark Carney ⇥ disconnect.blog

Paris Marx:

As [Mark] Carney appears set to form government, Canadians must be on guard for the consequences of his alignment with domestic tech CEOs. They may not wield as much power as the billionaires of Silicon Valley, but that does not mean Canada will be immune from short-sighted policy decisions justified in the name of efficiency and innovation that enrich tech executives, while justifying government austerity.

Marx is understandably cautious, a position I welcome. I do not think it is wise to replace the influence one set of oligarchs with another simply because they are domestic. However, given the parallel need to dilute the overwhelming U.S. influence in the industry, we should encourage Canadian businesses while upholding values and ethics. The Carney-led Liberal platform seems like a mixed bag. It will be important for Canadians to keep his government in check.

The Tree Farms Powering Tech Companies’ Carbon Neutral Goals ⇥ technologyreview.com

Apple, earlier this month:

Apple today announced that the company has surpassed a 60 percent reduction in its global greenhouse gas emissions compared to 2015 levels, as part of its Apple 2030 goal to become carbon neutral across its entire footprint in the next five years. The company achieved several other major environmental milestones, including the use of 99 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets and 99 percent recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries. Apple shared this and other progress in its annual Environmental Progress Report, published today.

[…]

Apple’s 2030 strategy prioritizes cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent compared with its 2015 baseline year, before applying high-quality carbon credits to balance the remaining emissions. Last year, Apple’s comprehensive efforts to reduce its carbon footprint — including the continued transition of its supply chain to renewable electricity and designing products with more recycled materials — avoided an estimated 41 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

The phrasing of Apple’s 2030 goals is slightly different than when announced, when it said 25% of its emissions would be offset by “developing innovative carbon removal solutions”. Turns out, that is planting trees.

Gregory Barber, MIT Technology Review:

On a practical level, the answer seemed straightforward. Nobody disputed how swiftly or reliably eucalyptus could grow in the tropics. This knowledge was the product of decades of scientific study and tabulations of biomass for wood or paper. Each tree was roughly 47% carbon, which meant that many tons of it could be stored within every planted hectare. This could be observed taking place in real time, in the trees by the road. Come back and look at these young trees tomorrow, and you’d see it: fresh millimeters of carbon, chains of cellulose set into lignin.

At the same time, Apple and the others were also investing in an industry, and a tree, with a long and controversial history in this part of Brazil and elsewhere. They were exerting their wealth and technological oversight to try to make timber operations more sustainable, more supportive of native flora, and less water intensive. Still, that was a hard sell to some here, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of pasture are already in line for planting; more trees were a bleak prospect in a land increasingly racked by drought and fire. Critics called the entire exercise an excuse to plant even more trees for profit.

This is a long and detailed exploration of how these projects work. I think is worth your time in part because of how captivating it is in words and, indeed, in photographs. I learned plenty.