The Environmental Burden of the United States’ Bitcoin Mining Boom ⇥ nature.com

Gianluca Guidi, et al., in a peer-reviewed article in Nature Communications:

[…] In this study, we located the 34 largest mines in the United States in 2022, identified the electricity-generating plants that responded to them, and pinpointed communities most harmed by Bitcoin mine-attributable air pollution. From mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 mines consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity — 33% more than Los Angeles — 85% of which came from fossil fuels. […]

To borrow a phrase: yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we solved a lot of Sudokus to buy drugs. Hodl, and so forth.

Credit Card Insurance Is, in My Case, a Good Replacement for AppleCare

A little over a month ago, I had the misfortune of breaking both a fifteen-year record of intact phone screens and, relatedly, my phone’s screen. This sucked in part because I can no longer be so smug about not using a case, and also because I do not have AppleCare. I do have insurance coverage on my credit card. I had never gone through this process before, but it would turn out to be perfectly adequate.

There was some paperwork involved, of course. There was a fair bit of waiting, too. But I got paid in full for the repair. That is, while I had to put $450 up front, I ultimately paid nothing to fix my own accidental damage. For comparison, if I had purchased AppleCare when I got my iPhone 15 Pro, at $13.50 per month, it would have cost me over $240, plus $40 for the screen replacement itself.

I am not saying you should not buy AppleCare or extended warranties in general. Go bananas. In my case, I do not think it would have been worth $280 to save some paperwork and time.

This is also an example of how having a lower income makes everything cost more. There are usually minimum financial requirements for having a card with insurance like this, a level I thankfully meet. It allowed me to briefly shoulder the out-of-warranty repair cost and, ultimately, gave me a free repair. If I did not meet that threshold, I would have had to pay instalments of $13.50 just in case I dropped my phone. It does not seem right I paid nothing for this repair when someone earning less than I do would have paid so much.

Oracle Has Acknowledged Two Security Breaches in the Past Month ⇥ bloomberg.com

Jake Bleiberg, Bloomberg:

Oracle Corp. has told customers that a hacker broke into a computer system and stole old client log-in credentials, according to two people familiar with the matter. It’s the second cybersecurity breach that the software company has acknowledged to clients in the last month.

Here is one more excerpt from the Financial Times’ reporting of the proposed TikTok America ownership, which I linked to yesterday:

Oracle, co-founded by Trump ally Larry Ellison, would secure TikTok’s US data as part of the deal, people said.

Like poetry, these two stories were published on the same day. Sergiu Gatlan of Bleeping Computer broke the news of this Oracle breach last month.

FT: TikTok’s U.S. Business To Be Spun Off With ByteDance Retaining Nearly 20% Ownership ⇥ ft.com

Hannah Murphy, et al., Financial Times:

Under the terms of the transaction, a group of new outside investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Blackstone and other large private capital firms would own about half of TikTok’s US business, according to several people familiar with the matter. That US unit would be spun off from its Beijing-based parent ByteDance, these people said.

[…]

ByteDance would retain a stake at just below 20 per cent of the business, under the terms of the deal, in order to meet requirements in the US legislation that state that no more than a fifth be in the control of a “foreign adversary”.

A cool thing about this arrangement is how it will make everybody mad. ByteDance is still going to own a fifth of the business and it is possible, according to the Times, the U.S. business will still use its recommendation algorithm. But now the U.S. is also going to have majority ownership over one of TikTok’s most important and influential markets, continuing the dominance of U.S. social media companies. This solves nothing except the problem of a bunch of U.S. venture capitalists owning not enough stuff.

One question: will this cut off the U.S. version of TikTok from the rest of the world, exactly as the China-only Douyin is? Freedom, baby.

European Commission Takes Aim at End-to-End Encryption Again ⇥ therecord.media

Alexander Martin, the Record:

Alongside the new Europol, the Commission said it would create roadmaps regarding both the “lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement” and on encryption.

The aim is to “identify and assess technological solutions that would enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data in a lawful manner, safeguarding cybersecurity and fundamental rights,” said the Commission. The identification of such solutions has been the subject of much controversy when attempted elsewhere.

The Commission has released no details yet, and it is hard to know what to expect given that what they want is — as experts keep pointing out — not possible. This keeps happening and the outcome is always a worry. Either lawmakers are going to permit end-to-end encryption, or they are not — with the “not” being a very wide range of compromises and backdoors, to outright criminalization.

Jason Snell’s Unsuccessful Journey Into Netflix’s Ad Tier ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I feel sympathy for whomever Netflix is paying to tag content for the best places to insert ads. There are no clear act breaks in “Adolescence,” and the fact that it’s one continuous shot means that literally any interruption is going to be incredibly disruptive to the content of the show. It was never intended to be shown with advertising inserted mid-stream.

Netflix programmed four separate ad breaks.

In much the same way as the oner format shaped the story of “Adolescence”, ads defined TV shows. I remember how every show would use the ad breaks to create its structure. When movies were aired on broadcast TV, the addition of ad breaks felt entirely unnatural. The lack of advertising on the BBC, for example, similarly defined the storytelling format of its shows. If I were responsible for creating a show for Netflix, it would frustrate me to not know for certain whether it would be broken up by ads.

Also: my dentist’s office has TVs overhead and, today, the one above me was tuned to an Idaho Fox affiliate — not sure why; I thought we were “Canada strong” — playing “Sherri”. I have nothing against that show in particular, but I have not watched daytime TV in many years and the amount of ads shocked me. Near the end of the show, there would be minutes of ads — mostly for medical products — interspersed with short show segments: a minute-long game with an audience member; another minute-long bit with a funny family photo submitted by a viewer. These segments were not back-to-back; they were between multi-minute ad breaks which, at that point, are substantively the show. It was exhausting.

‘Large A.I. Models Are Cultural and Social Technologies’ ⇥ henryfarrell.net

Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, and James Evans, in an article for Science, as published on Farrell’s website because good academics are aware of how restrictive a paywalled journal can be:

Our central point here is not just that these technological innovations, like all other innovations, will have cultural and social consequences. Rather we argue that Large Models are themselves best understood as a particular type of cultural and social technology. They are analogous to such past technologies as writing, print, markets, bureaucracies, and representative democracies. Then we can ask the separate question about what the effects of these systems will be. New technologies that aren’t themselves cultural or social, such as steam and electricity, can have cultural effects. Genuinely new cultural technologies, Wikipedia for example, may have limited effects. However, many past cultural and social technologies also had profound, transformative effects on societies, for good and ill, and this is likely to be true for Large Models.

Some of the questions and discussions in this paper will be familiar. This framing, however, is unique and seems particularly thoughtful.

The Mediocrity of Modern Google ⇥ om.co

Om Malik:

What’s particularly ironic is that today’s Google has become exactly what its founders warned against in their 1998 paper: an advertising company whose business model fundamentally conflicts with serving users’ needs. I remember when Sergey Brin and Larry Page first articulated their vision. I was introduced to them by one of their professors. Their clarity of purpose then makes today’s muddle all the more striking.

The multinational corporate equivalent of that Upton Sinclair quote you know.

I remember a time when tech companies felt like they actually had to work for their ability to exist. Now, they seem to take it largely for granted. As Malik writes, however, Google’s position may be more precarious than it seems, given how much of its revenue still depends on its search engine being the directory for the web.

French Competition Authority Fines Apple Over App Tracking Transparency ⇥ autoritedelaconcurrence.fr

The Autorité de la concurrence:

The Autorité de la concurrence has fined Apple €150,000,000 for abusing its dominant position in the sector for the distribution of mobile applications on iOS and iPadOS devices between April 2021 and July 2023.

[…]

However, while the principle of the ATT framework is not problematic in terms of the likely benefits for users as regards privacy protection, the Autorité found that how the framework is implemented is abusive within the meaning of competition law, in particular as the implementation methods artificially complicate the use of third-party applications and distort the neutrality of the framework to the detriment of small publishers financed by advertising.

These regulators seemed particularly irritated (PDF) by how similar App Tracking Transparency is to GDPR requirements, without being fully aligned with them. Because the ATT prompt does not allow developers to specify which third-parties are receiving tracking data, developers must include a second opt-in screen that provides more details about how their data will be used. This is fairly granular — arguably too much — but Apple’s version lacks detail. If a user agrees to third-party tracking, is their consent fully informed if they do not know with which advertisers their information is being shared, or even how many? I am not sure they do.

They also seemed to disagree with how Apple defines tracking. German regulators are also interested in what amounts to self-preferencing, even if that is not Apple’s intent. The authority has not yet published the text of the decision, which will hopefully answer many of the questions I have.

One thing I am curious about is how the regulator reconciles Apple’s apparently “not problematic” attempts at improving user privacy with the callous disregard toward the same shown by ad tech companies. Trade groups representing those companies, including the French offices of the IAB and MMA, were among those who filed this complaint. Both trade groups are loathsome; their inability and failure to self-govern is one reason for this very privacy legislation. Yet Apple’s particular definition of “tracking” is something only relevant to very large platform operators like itself. There is very clearly a conflict of interest in Apple trying to apply these kinds of policies to competitors, especially as Apple expands its ads business.

John Gruber:

It’s clear that only one of these two things — Apple’s ATT or French/EU privacy regulations — was actually effective at reducing tracking: ATT. No one claimed that French or EU privacy laws resulted in Meta losing a fortune because they had to adjust their kleptomaniacal thievery of users’ privacy. But by all accounts, including Meta’s own, ATT cost Meta billions. And yes, ATT hurt small businesses too — small businesses that were built upon surreptitious tracking that users had neither awareness of nor control over. […]

I am not sure the available evidence supports this conclusion. In response to E.U. legislation and a record fine, Meta has introduced versions of Facebook and Instagram at a free tier with less personalized advertising — targeted only based on factors like a person’s age, gender, and the context of the ad — and a paid tier with no advertising at all. Depending on how many people opt into each tier, it may reduce Meta’s revenue. This, to me, sounds at least as productive as ATT, which had a mixed impact on ad tech companies like Meta. I am sure it cost the company money; I am equally sure it found new ways of figuring out how to target advertising based on the massive amount of personal information it continues to collect.

Smaller ad tech companies have not escaped regulators’ attention, either. Criteo, a French personalized advertising business, was fined €40 million in 2023 over privacy law violations. Orange was fined €50 million last year for a similar reason. Both are IAB members now on the winning side, as it were. Nobody looks good here.

I still believe both of these prompts are an inadequate solution that foists the burden of adequate privacy protections on end users. ATT and privacy legislation are two ways of approaching a similar problem. But one of these is operated by a massive private corporation with its own priorities taking a quasi-regulatory role, and it should be subject to governance with that in mind. I was optimistic about ATT; however, it is insufficient without strong privacy laws. I hope French authorities can settle this with Apple in a way that prioritizes users.

New Apple Intelligence Features and Languages ⇥ apple.com

With the launch of iOS 18.4 today, Apple says Apple Intelligence features are now available in the E.U. and in several new languages. I remain skeptical that Apple Intelligence was ever “delayed” in the region. Until today, it was only available in variations of English. When Apple announced in November it would be bringing these features to the E.U., it sure seemed like it also needed the time to train its models on a range of new languages reflecting the regions where it would be used.

If Apple was so worried about the wrath of regulators, it could have made accessing Apple Intelligence in the E.U. as complicated as it does E.U.-specific features outside the region. But it did not.

There is also some new stuff in these updates:

This release also comes with additional Apple Intelligence features, including Priority Notifications to help users stay on top of time-sensitive communications, the ability to create a memory movie on Mac by simply typing a description, and an added Sketch style in Image Playground that creates academic and highly detailed sketches.

Cannot say I care at all about the latter two things, but Priority Notifications is at least an attempt to solve a problem I have long observed with the notifications system on iOS:

One of the reasons why using an iPhone has been so nice, for a decade now, is because of how little the user must manage it. The App Store gave even novice users the confidence to download new software, implicitly trusting that it would not cause problems on their phone or carry malware. You shouldn’t close open apps, either, and you don’t have to toggle Bluetooth or LTE to get great battery life. The system just sorts it out.

I want that same level of confidence with push notifications.

Since I wrote that in 2018, iOS notifications have improved dramatically. Notifications can now be grouped, for example, or batched into a group of morning and evening updates. Do Not Disturb has become more granular with the introduction of Focus Modes, too. I use those features extensively.

Priority Notifications is another way to balance the number and type of notifications you receive. Like many of the Apple Intelligence features — or, indeed, A.I. features as a whole — it is imperfect. But it is a truly welcome improvement for how I use notifications on my phone.

Elon Musk Gives Himself a Handshake ⇥ bloomberg.com

Kurt Wagner and Katie Roof, Bloomberg:

Elon Musk said his xAI artificial intelligence startup has acquired the X platform, which he also controls, at a valuation of $33 billion, marking a surprise twist for the social network formerly known as Twitter.

This feels like it has to be part of some kind of financial crime, right? Like, I am sure it is not; I am sure this is just a normal thing businesses do that only feels criminal, like how they move money around the world to avoid taxes.

Wagner and Roof:

The deal gives the new combined entity, called XAI Holdings, a value of more than $100 billion, not including the debt, according to a person familiar with the arrangement, who asked not to be identified because the terms weren’t public. Morgan Stanley was the sole banker on the deal, representing both sides, other people said.

For perspective, that is around about the current value of Lockheed Martin, Rio Tinto — one of the world’s largest mining businesses — and Starbucks. All of those companies make real products with real demand — unfortunately so, in the case of the first. xAI has exactly one external customer today. And it is not like unpleasant social media seems to be a booming business.

Kate Conger and Lauren Hirsch, New York Times:

This month, X continued to struggle to hit its revenue targets, according to an internal email seen by The New York Times. As of March 3, X had served $91 million of ads this year, the message said, well below its first-quarter target of $153 million.

This is including the spending of several large advertisers. For comparison, in the same quarter in the pre-Musk era, Twitter generated over a billion dollars in advertising revenue.

I am begging for Matt Levine to explain this to me.

Apple’s Missteps in A.I. Are Partly the Fault of A.I. ⇥ cnn.com

Allison Morrow, CNN:

Tech columnists such as the New York Times’ Kevin Roose have suggested recently that Apple has failed AI, rather than the other way around.

“Apple is not meeting the moment in AI,” Roose said on his podcast, Hard Fork, earlier this month. “I just think that when you’re building products with generative AI built into it, you do just need to be more comfortable with error, with mistakes, with things that are a little rough around the edges.”

To which I would counter, respectfully: Absolutely not.

Via Dan Moren, of Six Colors:

The thesis of the piece is not about excusing Apple’s AI missteps, but zooming out to take a look at the bigger picture of why AI is everywhere, and make the argument that maybe Apple is well-served by not necessarily being on the cutting edge of these developments.

If that is what this piece is arguing, I do not think Apple makes a good case for it. When it launched Apple Intelligence, it could have said it was being more methodical, framing a modest but reliable feature set as a picture of responsibility. This would be a thin layer of marketing speak covering the truth, of course, but that would at least set expectations. Instead, what we got was a modest and often unreliable feature set with mediocre implementation, and the promise of a significantly more ambitious future that has been kicked down the road.

These things do not carry the Apple promise, as articulated by Morrow, of “design[ing] things that are accessible out of the box”, products for which “[y]ou will almost never need a user manual filled with tiny print”. It all feels flaky and not particularly nice to use. Even the toggle to turn it off is broken.

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

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Meta Adds ‘Friends’ Tab to Facebook to Show Posts From Users’ Friends ⇥ about.fb.com

Meta:

Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests.

You know, I think this concept of showing people things they say they want to see might just work.

Meta says this is just one of “several ‘O.G.’ Facebook experiences [coming] throughout the year” — a truly embarrassing sentence. But Mark Zuckerberg said in an autumn earnings call that Facebook would “add a whole new category of content which is A.I. generated or A.I. summarized content, or existing content pulled together by A.I. in some way”. This plan is going just great. I think the way these things can be reconciled is exactly how Facebook is doing it: your friends go in a “Friends” tab, but you will see all the other stuff it wants to push on you by default. Just look how Meta has done effectively the same thing in Instagram and Threads.

The Myth and Reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson in November 2023:

When people wistfully proclaim that they wish for the next major macOS version to be a “Snow Leopard update”, they’re wishing for the wrong thing. No major update will solve Apple’s quality issues. Major updates are the cause of quality issues. The solution would be a long string of minor bug fix updates. What people should be wishing for are the two years of stability and bug fixes that occurred after the release of Snow Leopard. But I fear we’ll never see that again with Tim Cook in charge.

I read an article today from yet another person pining for a mythical Snow Leopard-style MacOS release. While I sympathize with the intent of their argument, it is largely fictional and, as Johnson writes, it took until about two years into Snow Leopard’s release cycle for it to be the release we want to remember:

It’s an iron law of software development that major updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was no exception, of course. The next major update, Mac OS X 10.7.0, was no exception either, and it was much buggier than 10.6.8 v1.1, even though both versions were released in the same week.

What I desperately miss is that period of stability after a few rounds of bug fixes. As I have previously complained about, my iMac cannot run any version of MacOS newer than Ventura, released in 2022. It is still getting bug and security fixes. In theory, this should mean I am running a solid operating system despite missing some features.

It is not. Apple’s engineering efforts quickly moved toward shipping MacOS Sonoma in 2023, and then Sequoia last year. It seems as though any bug fixes were folded into these new major versions and, even worse, new bugs were introduced late in the Ventura release cycle that have no hope of being fixed. My iMac seizes up when I try to view HDR media; because this Extended Dynamic Range is an undocumented enhancement, there is no preference to turn it off. Recent Safari releases have contained several bugs related to page rendering and scrolling. Weather sometimes does not display for my current location.

Ventura was by no means bug-free when it shipped, and I am disappointed even its final form remains a mess. My MacBook Pro is running the latest public release of MacOS Sequoia and it, too, has new problems late in its development cycle; I reported a Safari page crashing bug earlier this week. These are on top of existing problems, like how there is no way to change the size of search results’ thumbnails in Photos.

Alas, I am not expecting many bugs to be fixed. It is, after all, nearly April, which means there are just two months until WWDC and the first semi-public builds of another new MacOS version. I am hesitant every year to upgrade. But it does not appear much effort is being put into the maintenance of any previous version. We all get the choice of many familiar bugs, or a blend of hopefully fewer old bugs plus some new ones.

The New Substack Universe ⇥ nymag.com

Remember when Substack’s co-founders went to great lengths to explain what they had built was little more than infrastructure? It was something they repeated earlier this year:

You need to have your own corner of the internet, a place where you can build a home, on your own land, with assets you control.

Our system gives creators ownership. With Substack, you have your own property to build on: content you own, a URL of your choosing, a website for your work, and a mailing list of your subscribers that you can export and take with you at any time.

This is a message the company reinforces because it justifies a wildly permissive environment for posters that requires little oversight. But it is barely more true that Substack is “your own land, with assets you control” than, say, a YouTube channel. The main thing Substack has going for it is that you can export a list of subscribers’ email accounts. Otherwise, the availability of your material remains subject to Substack’s priorities and policies.

What Substack in fact offers, and what differentiates it from a true self-owned “land”, is a comprehensive set of media formats and opportunities for promotion.

Charlotte Klein, New York magazine:

Substack today has all of the functionalities of a social platform, allowing proprietors to engage with both subscribers (via the Chat feature) or the broader Substack universe in the Twitter-esque Notes feed. Writers I spoke to mentioned that for all of their reluctance to engage with the Notes feature, they see growth when they do. More than 50 percent of all subscriptions and 30 percent of paid subscriptions on the platform come directly from the Substack network. There’s been a broader shift toward multimedia content: Over half of the 250 highest-revenue creators were using audio and video in April 2024, a number that had surged to 82 percent by February 2025.

Substack is now a blogging platform with email capabilities, a text-based social platform, a podcasting platform, and a video host — all of which can be placed behind a paywall. This is a logical evolution for the company. But please do not confuse this with infrastructure. YouTube can moderate its platform as it chooses and so can Substack. The latter has decided to create a special category filled to the brim with vaccine denialism publications that have “tens of thousands of paid subscribers”, from which Substack takes ten percent of earnings.

Public Figures Keep Leaving Their Venmo Accounts Public ⇥ wired.com

The high-test idiocy of a senior U.S. politician inviting a journalist to an off-the-record chat planning an attack on Yemen, killing over thirty people and continuing a decade of war, seems to have popularized a genre of journalism dedicated to the administration’s poor digital security hygiene. Some of these articles feel less substantial; others suggest greater crimes. One story feels like deja vu.

Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman, Wired:

The Venmo account under [Mike] Waltz’s name includes a 328-person friend list. Among them are accounts sharing the names of people closely associated with Waltz, such as [Walker] Barrett, formerly Waltz’s deputy chief of staff when Waltz was a member of the House of Representatives, and Micah Thomas Ketchel, former chief of staff to Waltz and currently a senior adviser to Waltz and President Donald Trump.

[…]

One of the most notable appears to belong to [Susie] Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted political advisers. That account’s 182-person friend list includes accounts sharing the names of influential figures like Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, and Hope Hicks, Trump’s former White House communications director.

In 2021, reporters for Buzzfeed News found Joe Biden’s Venmo account and his contacts. Last summer, the same Wired reporters plus Andrew Couts found J.D. Vance’s and, in February, reporters for the American Prospect found Pete Hegseth’s. It remains a mystery to me why one of the most popular U.S. payment apps is this public.

The War on Encryption Is Dangerous ⇥ ft.com

Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal — which has recently been in the news — in an op-ed for the Financial Times:

The UK is part and parcel of a dangerous trend that threatens the cyber security of our global infrastructures. Legislators in Sweden recently proposed a law that would force communication providers to build back door vulnerabilities. France is poised to make the same mistake when it votes on the inclusion of “ghost participants” in secure conversations via back doors. “Chat control” legislation haunts Brussels.

There is some good news: French legislators ultimately rejected this provision.

WWDC 2025 Announced ⇥ developer.apple.com

Like those since 2020, WWDC 2025 appears to be an entirely online event with a one-day in-person event. While it is possible there will be live demos — I certainly hope that is the case — I bet it is a two-hour infomercial again.

If you are planning on travelling there and live outside the United States, there are some things you should know and precautions you should take, particularly if you are someone who is transgender or nonbinary. It is a good thing travel is not required, and hopefully Apple will once again run labs worldwide.

You Are Just a Guest on Meta’s A.I.-Filled Platforms ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.

[…]

“Brute force” is not just what I have noticed while reporting on the spammers who flood Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Google with AI-generated spam. It is the stated strategy of the people getting rich off of AI slop.

Regardless of whether you have been following Koebler’s A.I. slop beat, you owe it to yourself to read this article at least. The goal, Koelber surmises, is for Meta to target slop and ads at users in more-or-less the same way and, because this slop is cheap and fast to produce, it is a bottomless cup of engagement metrics.

Koebler, in a follow-up article:

As I wrote last week, the strategy with these types of posts is to make a human linger on them long enough to say to themselves “what the fuck,” or to be so horrified as to comment “what the fuck,” or send it to a friend saying “what the fuck,” all of which are signals to the algorithm that it should boost this type of content but are decidedly not signals that the average person actually wants to see this type of thing. The type of content that I am seeing right now makes “Elsagate,” the YouTube scandal in which disturbing videos were targeted to kids and resulted in various YouTube reforms, look quaint.

Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel:

Meta is testing an Instagram feature that suggests AI-generated comments for users to post beneath other users’ photos and videos.

Meta is going to make so much money before it completely disintegrates on account of nobody wanting to spend this much time around a thin veneer over robots.