Google held its I/O conference earlier this month, and for longtime Google watchers, the event felt like a seance. Google CEO Sundar Pichai stepped on stage for his keynote address and channeled the spirits of long-dead Google products. “I’m hearing… something about an Android tablet? And a smartwatch?” he seemed to say.
[…]
Like most Google products in the Sundar Pichai era, what will really matter for all of these resurrections is if Google continues to care about them for several years. Way too many Google products seem to have a one-year roadmap. The company pins 100 percent of its hopes on a project’s initial launch, and the product is canceled if it isn’t an overnight success. Google rarely allows products enough runway to adapt to feedback or convince the “wait and see” crowd. The problem is that Google has burned so many of its early adopters over the years that there are not many of them left.
I wonder whether it is true that Google has few remaining enthusiasts. Who else is buying its Pixel phones, if not for users committed to the company’s specific vision for Android devices? Google’s problem is getting everybody else to care about these products beyond its early adopters, and all of those people need time and evidence of ongoing commitment to buy into that vision too.
The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against Twitter, Inc. for deceptively using account security data for targeted advertising. Twitter asked users to give their phone numbers and email addresses to protect their accounts. The firm then profited by allowing advertisers to use this data to target specific users. Twitter’s deception violates a 2011 FTC order that explicitly prohibited the company from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices. Under the proposed order, Twitter must pay a $150 million penalty and is banned from profiting from its deceptively collected data.
Sometimes, when it seems like there are no words left, a writer finds the last few hundred that feel relevant and right. This post deals with some pretty heavy subject matter, for obvious and painful reasons.
Those 19 little kids will never get to learn anything else about the world after what this country showed them in the violent, incomprehensible last moments of their lives, when the people who loved them could not protect them or be with them or help them make sense of it. What they learned then, whatever they learned, is the verdict. Watch America decide that this is the only way things can be. Watch it sentence more little kids to abbreviated lives and lonely, terrified, violent deaths. Watch the grownups squabble and roll the dice on every small new person who greets the world with eager curiosity, who doesn’t know better than to just assume that life can be gentle and guided by care. Watch them negotiate each little life against what they want to pretend to believe about some garbled shit written on a piece of parchment 200 years ago by no one who could imagine what happened in that school on Tuesday. This is what it’s like here. […]
It is unsurprising to see many people my age reporting a loss of confidence in lawmakers and political systems that never fail to fail. It is governance being dismantled from the inside, with predictable and devastating results.
The core idea of “digital sovereignty” is that the digital exhaust created by a person, business or government should be stored inside the country where it originated, or at least handled in accordance with privacy and other standards set by a government. In cases where information is more sensitive, some authorities want it to be controlled by a local company, too.
That’s a shift from today. Most files were initially stored locally on personal computers and company mainframes. But as internet speeds increased and telecommunications infrastructure advanced over the past two decades, cloud computing services allowed someone in Germany to store photos on a Google server in California, or a business in Italy to run a website off Amazon Web Services operated from Seattle.
In authoritarian states, governments use this theory to exercise greater control and surveillance over people. But their behaviour should not be conflated with data sovereignty overall. It is entirely reasonable for individuals to believe their national rights are upheld when it comes to their data, but that has often not been the case. Instead, people individually contract jurisdiction of their photos and location and web history and financial records to companies almost always based in the United States. For many of us, this is a rights regression. This is an unsurprising tidal shift given the U.S.’ notoriously absent personal privacy laws and its exploitative data economy.
Contrary to the Times’ reporting above, a user in Germany is more likely now to have their Google photos stored somewhere closer than a Californian server. Google operates several data centres in Europe. This is not a consequence of GDPR; many of them are older than GDPR’s introduction. Even though internet speeds are faster, latency is still a concern and geographic distance is a significant factor. It would be interesting — albeit niche — if individual users could choose where their data is domiciled, much like corporate users often can.
Jane Horvath, Apple’s chief privacy officer, as quoted by Claire Stern in Elle:
[…] So every day you hear or read about different incursions … advertising is big right now, and I think people would be quite surprised by the amount of data that exists out there in the B2B world about them. That’s something that we’re very much trying to bring to the attention of our customers, not because we want them to make a choice one way or the other, but because we actually want them to be aware of it.
Apple executives are media trained and it is rare for them to stray off-message; this interview with Horvath is not an exception. But I thought this segment was notable for its shift in perspective. Much has been written about the effects of Apple’s recent privacy efforts, such as App Tracking Transparency, from the effects they have on advertisers.
But perhaps not enough attention has been directed toward the insidious data enrichment industry powering business-to-business (B2B) tools. Plenty of software packages for businesses can automatically extrapolate an entire persona from nothing more than an email address or a phone number. Many of them can associate personal and professional identities, therefore erasing any line between the two, and establish a more comprehensive picture of a business’ internal matters. It sounds invasive to normal people, but all of this has been normalized in the business-to-business software world.
Horvath and Apple may be worried about how their devices and software feed this industry, but this is not something that can be restrained by a single company, no matter how large it is. Careful regulation is the only viable path for curtailing these ridiculous privacy abuses.
Like a few other TV projects these days, the documentary zeroes in on the strategy employed by many Silicon Valley leaders to talk up the possibilities of their companies’ products before their achievements are fully realized. It’s a “fake it until you make it” style that allows companies to harness enthusiasm and capital to push toward goals which might otherwise seem impossible to reach.
But Elon Musk’s Crash Course is a straightforward look at the dangers of such an approach when the product involved controls a speeding automobile.
I watched this documentary tonight. Even somewhat passive followers of Tesla’s announcements — myself included — will likely be familiar with much of its contents. But seeing it laid out in a single hour-and-change record is an arresting experience.
One Tesla “Full Self Driving” beta participant was interviewed for the film, and something she said toward the end stuck with me:
There are definitely people who do not agree with Tesla’s approach. I don’t feel that it’s risky. I have never felt endangered, okay?
Setting aside the possibility of some creative editing — I have no way of knowing whether she said these three sentences in this exact order — this made me realize the biggest flaw in this film: it is solely focused on the risks to Tesla drivers. There are certainly several examples of drivers being killed because they were, in the words of several interview subjects, lulled to “complacency” in their cars, perhaps in part by Tesla’s overconfident marketing. But it is the risk to surrounding people that is barely considered in this documentary aside from some video clips at the end.
I would also not feel endangered to be in the driver’s seat of a Tesla on a highway if I treated its automation features as slightly more advanced cruise control. But if I am a cyclist riding in a crappy painted bicycle lane, I certainly hope the Tesla driver I am riding beside does not think their car can drive itself. It is one thing for a driver to be texting behind the wheel of any car knowing full well they are doing something dangerous. It is an entirely different thing if they believe their inattentiveness is compensated for by the car’s cameras and software.
In the U.S., this film can be seen on Hulu; in Canada, it is on Crave.
Tech journalism is evolving, including how it reports on and critiques tech companies. At the same time, tech journalists should still serve as bullshit detectors and hype slayers. The following tips are intended to help navigate the terrain.
As a general rule, beware of overconfident techies bragging about their innovation capabilities [and] overconfident critics accusing that innovation of atrocities. If featured in your article, provide evidence and diverse perspectives to balance their quotes.
I thought this article and the linked piece by Lee Vinsel, from February 2021, are fair analyses of technology hype and scaremongering. The most headline-grabbing worries are probably inaccurate as they are often based on marketing that is equally wrong. The concerns we ought to be paying attention can be less conspicuous. Similarly, the promises made by tech companies are often hopelessly unrealistic. It does not matter whether they are showing off a new product on a stage or responding to a legal body — they are marketing and spinning, and their claims should be treated skeptically.
They are built to a passing grade, but nothing more. Basic features found in services from rival companies are either lacking altogether in Apple’s apps, or implemented half-heartedly and performance is sluggish. Browsing in Music and TV is painful, with an over-reliance on the infinite scroll. New content is just tacked on the bottom of already long lists. Meanwhile, the navigation bars are blank when they could include simple shortcut buttons and filters to help users navigate and explore. Moreover, these apps feature too many loading states and too much waiting around. They are akin to janky web apps, rather than richly-compelling responsive experiences.
This is something I think about a lot, especially as Apple grows Services revenue and competes in more of these markets. Apple’s native apps on these devices simply are not good enough, and that is bananas. The company’s whole thing is that it makes the entire widget, so hardware, software, and services can work seamlessly together. But they do not. They feel brittle, like I am using prototypes where any deviation from a golden path is a risky endeavour.
There are plenty of engineers working hard on all of these products, and there are evidently people who care. The Music app on MacOS is better than it used to be. Alas, it remains a far cry from how it ought to be, and only managers and executives have the power to set quality as a priority.
Every year for the past few, my main hope for WWDC is a renewed emphasis on stability and higher standards. The growth of this segment of Apple’s revenue is impressive, and its web capabilities are way better than they used to be — remember MobileMe? But there is still so far before Apple’s software and, particularly, services reflect the qualities of its thoughtful and elegant hardware.
What separates a forum like MetaFilter from Quora, Reddit, or even 8chan? The answer is culture — rules and expectations, developed over a long time. To be clear: MetaFilter isn’t good because it has a lot of old rules, it’s good because it has the right old rules. Below, I lay out some unique, interesting qualities that have developed at MetaFilter over the years and how they’ve contributed to a culture that is still thriving after two decades.
Not only does MetaFilter have many rules, its moderators earnestly enforce them; but they do not always get it right and are subject to their own biases. While I generally favour the idea of larger social networks moving their moderation policies closer to those offered by MeFi, the sorts of stories linked to by a commenter on Kramer’s article paint a picture of moderators who sometimes struggle to identify bigoted conversations when it is not immediately obvious.
Going through some of those older threads, another thing becomes clear: complaints about the sensitivity of moderators are as commonplace then as they are now. There are plenty of complaints from users who feel moderators are oversensitive; there are also plenty from people who feel they are not taking an active-enough role. Even the places on the web where conversations are pretty good have a hard time keeping them that way, as a wander through the etiquette and policy feedback area makes clear.
MetaFilter occupies an increasingly niche part of the web — last year, it was forced to cut back on moderation — and I wonder if its approach can be replicated or improved upon elsewhere. It sounds like Twitter’s Birdwatch is an attempt to do something similar.
Between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. [on May 17], New Yorkers could use a Grubhub promo code to get a $15 discount on lunch. Naturally, restaurants got flooded with an unexpected deluge of orders. According to Buzzfeed, a worker at a Mexican restaurant in Harlem hand-delivered orders herself via Uber, since their in-house delivery driver was too overloaded. An employee at Greenberg’s Bagels in Brooklyn also told Buzzfeed that they received 50 orders in an hour, whereas they typically receive about 10 orders from Grubhub per day.
Across New York City, Grubhub said that it received about 6,000 orders per minute. Within an hour, some users tweeted that the promo code was no longer working, or that restaurants had marked themselves closed to avoid receiving any more orders. All in all, many orders got delayed and/or cancelled, but restaurant workers and delivery drivers were most adversely impacted, struggling to fulfill orders at an impossible rate.
Grubhub says it told restaurant owners about this promotion, but some said they had no idea. Local blogs promoted the deal last week and indicated it was a limited-time and limited-quantity order. But that does not mean restaurants were prepared for this scale — and neither was Grubhub.
“Between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., all hell broke loose,” says Max Zumwalt, chef of Hana House, a forthcoming Korean food hall at Borough Hall. The two-story operation, which is currently open for takeout and delivery ahead of its full opening this year, typically receives between 40 and 50 lunch orders on a normal Tuesday afternoon. Yesterday, it received more than 100 in the first 20 minutes of the promotion.
[…]
For some restaurants, more orders didn’t necessarily mean more money. “Even though it was our busiest day ever, we made less money,” Zumwalt says. The Hana House chef says the restaurant’s average order size dropped by about $10, with most people placing orders of $15 or less to make use of the promotion, while he had to refund roughly 15 customers for orders he had already prepared due to technical difficulties on the delivery app.
The tense relationship between delivery app companies and restaurants, where a portion of an order’s value is taken by the company in exchange for providing delivery services, only makes sense for the restaurant if the delivery app upholds its end of the deal. That is, like, Grubhub’s one job and is still unprofitable. On Tuesday, it flunked hard when it ran this promotion. Restaurants scrambled to prepare food for it to sit in the window without a driver to pick it up.
Grubhub surely knew this promotion was causing chaos as it unfolded. It could have restricted orders using the promo code; it already said this was a limited-quantity offer. It could have better-prepared restaurant owners. But Gruhub let this thing unfold in a way that treats restaurants as interchangeable and disposable components of its business instead of the only reason anyone uses the company’s apps. And let us not forget the people who struggled most on Tuesday: underpaid restaurant staff and drivers blamed for late or undelivered food.
If an advocacy organization is going to report on an astroturfing front group, should it not be more transparent in its own donors? That is a stance I have maintained since I reported a truncated history of donations to the Tech Transparency Project’s parent organization, the Campaign for Accountability. Surely that should be a low bar to clear — acknowledge all significant funders and donors so there is no question about what interests they represent.
In 2020, Tony Romm of the Washington Post reported on Facebook’s involvement in a newly-formed advocacy group called American Edge. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said it was one of many funders. But according to new reporting today, that claim does not appear to hold water.
[…] But tax records show the organization was founded entirely by Facebook, with a single donation of $4 million between December 2019 and October 2020.
Facebook’s Stone once again replied to the Post’s request for comment, this time saying Facebook provided a “seed grant” to American Edge which now, he says, has many more financial supporters. That is plausible, but it is not yet possible to check since this filing is for its 2019 tax year and it is too new for it to appear in tax documents from other nonprofits.
Of note, the Post did not obtain these tax filings itself. They were provided by the Tech Transparency Project, which is dismayed by this astroturf group advocating for Facebook’s interests and hiding its funders. But there is one little thing that is bugging me, which the Post’s reporters asked the organization about:
“As a nonprofit that solicits donations from the public, we don’t release a comprehensive list of our donors,” said Michelle Kuppersmith, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, who oversees the Tech Transparency Project. “It would be incredibly rare to find a public-facing nonprofit that does so.” Kuppersmith added that they go beyond disclosure requirements for the Tech Transparency Project “because we are acutely aware that tech companies with resort to bad faith ad hominem attacks.”
In its original form, TTP was the Google Transparency Project and received a sizeable donation from legal rival Oracle. Could that be considered a “seed grant”? As I wrote before, I truly do not think the TTP is a front group for rivals of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, but the Campaign for Accountability steadfastly refuses to release a list of its major funders aside from what it lists on the TTP’s website. It is not a bad faith attack to question the sources of funding relied upon by organizations like the Campaign for Accountability or American Edge; it is a worthwhile cause, especially after their respective histories. As an advocacy group, the Campaign for Accountability should be much more transparent in its funding. It should be better than the organizations it calls out for astroturfing.
Aside from questions about funding, American Edge is an organization that runs ads promoting the advantages for the United States of a tech industry centred in the country. They lean heavily on a national security angle, dragging out former CIA officials and military leadership to warn that regulating American tech companies would permit Russia or China to “win the tech race”. It is not clear where the finish line is.
This fear-mongering and arguably xenophobic argument is a cynical attempt at averting any policy that interferes with the agenda of companies like Facebook. It is a zero-sum game that seeks to avoid new regulation by pointing to countries without similar rules and claiming they will have advantages. But many policy proposals are beneficial for Americans regardless of which company is providing services or where they are located. Better privacy rules, for example, would mean users would share less data with third parties and have less chance of it being exploited. A new report from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties found European internet users had their privacy and web activity exposed to advertisers about half as often as American users.
These ads also nearly make explicit the implicit advantage of an American tech industry unencumbered by stricter privacy rules or antitrust regulations: it makes its own intelligence gathering that much easier. The NSA continues to ingest unimaginable amounts of data produced by people around the world through its wiretapping arrangements. It is not supposed to access anything between Americans, but data generated by foreigners is fair game.
The NSA’s general counsel, Glenn S. Gerstell, used similar language — warning about “los[ing] the digital revolution” to Russia and China — in a 2019 editorial for the New York Times. His concern was the ongoing development of quantum computers and their ability to crack encryption standards. NIST is currently running competitions to develop new standards — standards which, the NSA says, it cannot crack nor do they have any back doors this time. I feel like I have seen this movie before.
It is unsurprising to me that big business has teamed up with influential figures to astroturf their way into minimizing oversight and regulation. These same cynical arguments are heard all the time. I am thankful the Tech Transparency Project was able to document such strong connections between Facebook and American Edge so there is a record of who, exactly, is bankrolling this ad campaign. But I wish we also knew more about the TTP and its parent organization, the Campaign for Accountability. This is an unlikeable story at every turn. At least one of these organizations should be doing a better job than it is now.
Link-in-bio platform Linktree is the latest company that is looking to integrate NFTs into its service, as the company has revealed a set of new features that will allow creators to showcase their NFTs and “build a community around ownership.” The company says that with this new launch, creators will have new ways to monetize their craft and curate a digital identity. The new features were developed in partnership with NFT marketplace OpenSea.
Last month, Apple confirmed to Sarah Perez it was testing with Disney a new way for developers to increase the price of subscriptions without requiring user confirmation. Today, Apple launched that capability.
With this update, under certain specific conditions and with advance user notice, developers may also offer an auto-renewable subscription price increase, without the user needing to take action and without interrupting the service. The specific conditions for this feature are that the price increase doesn’t occur more than once per year, doesn’t exceed US$5 and 50% of the subscription price, or US$50 and 50% for an annual subscription price, and is permissible by local law. In these situations, Apple always notifies users of an increase in advance, including via email, push notification, and a message within the app. Apple will also notify users of how to view, manage, and cancel subscriptions if preferred.
With all those notifications, it sounds like this is a fair change with reasonable safeguards. But in the paragraph immediately prior, Apple gives the impression that opting back into a cancelled subscription is some kind of arduous process:
Currently, when an auto-renewable subscription price is increased, subscribers must opt in before the price increase is applied. The subscription doesn’t renew at the next billing period for subscribers who didn’t opt in to the new price. This has led to some services being unintentionally interrupted for users and they must take steps to resubscribe within the app, from Settings on iPhone and iPad, or in the App Store on Mac.
If this experience is not so great for someone having to re-subscribe after failing to confirm they are okay with a new price, does it not also mean it is not ideal for someone unsubscribing from an app when they want to reject a price increase?
This is going to make a lot of people upset when their $10-per-month subscription can double within two years without their approval. People are going to remember how they feel when they figure that out. I know exactly how I reacted when my internet provider did that to me.
Scrupulous developers will avoid doing anything too extraordinary, but there are a whole lot of App Store developers abusing subscription pricing today. I think I understand the intent, but I do not like the sound of this.
Earlier this year, Google announced it would be transitioning “legacy” free G Suite users to paid Google Workspace plans. To its credit, Google’s plans are reasonably priced and it offered a further discount. Unfortunately, the way it handled this transition was a mess.
Users being hit by the shutdown faced two options: either suddenly start paying for their accounts, which had been free for years, or lose access to core Workspace apps like Gmail. Users who didn’t want to pay could only export data with Google Takeout, which would download some account data that would become a bunch of cumbersome, local files. Takeout was a terrible option because it makes it difficult to get your data back in the cloud, and you can’t export things like purchased content from Google Play or YouTube.
Google added options to help users transition purchased materials to a standard Google account. But many users of the legacy G Suite offering are individuals and families who just wanted to connect a personal domain to an email provider. There are now many options open to these users at similar price points — Fastmail, ProtonMail, and even Apple have custom domain options — but this sort of thing is just enough of an irritation that it would be nice to avoid it.
I am one of those people. I have had this on my Things “Today” list for months now because I do not understand the concept of today and I do not want to deal with my DNS. I should move things off Google entirely, but its G Suite offerings generally have better privacy protections than its consumer accounts. Plus, I do not want to lose access to Mimestream, a Gmail client I think is the best email app for MacOS.
It turns out my procrastination has been rewarded. Google has updated its transition document to say users like me can retain our free accounts if they are for personal use (via Steve Whitcher):
If you’re using the G Suite legacy free edition for non-commercial purposes, you can opt out of the transition to Google Workspace by clicking here (requires a super administrator account) or going to the Google Admin console. You can continue using your custom domain with Gmail, retain access to no-cost Google services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and keep your purchases and data.
You will need to take these steps by August 1. Google advises contacting its support team if you are not a procrastinator and already paid to upgrade.
I suppose this is a good reminder that we should move things away from providers like Google who offered free services for a long time, since they are able to take that away at any time. It is unfortunate because Mimestream really is my favourite email application for the Mac, so I am probably going to forget about my own advice and forget about migrating until the next time Google pulls the rug out from under me.
Don’t be put off by its title: Apple Platform Security Guide is mandatory reading for all advanced Mac Users, and the only way we get to learn about important details of macOS, iCloud, and much else.
If you prefer this document with a little more gravitas, Apple also provides it in PDF format. Max Zinkus tweeted a thread of notable new sections and updates, like this one:
First interesting deletion in the Messages for Business Chat (those grey iMessage conversations with Apple or a supported business support text line).
May 21: “The Business Chat service never stores conversation history.”
And then May 22: *gone*
This is part of a broader question about whether Apple could switch any iMessage discussion to Messages for Business Chat, which has looser security and privacy standards than peer-to-peer iMessage.
[…] Apple doesn’t log the contents of messages or attachments, which are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can access them. Apple can’t decrypt the data.
This remains true of iMessage in isolation. But Apple’s law enforcement guidelines (PDF) continue to indicate iMessages may be provided by subpoena if iCloud Backups or Messages in the Cloud are enabled.
Tom Gatti wrote a rather lovely eulogy for the iPod for the New Statesman. I was nodding along until I got to the last sentence of this excerpt, where I think my brain played a subliminal record scratch:
Crucially, the music was yours – made up of albums you owned, whether you’d spent many evenings patiently “ripping” your CD collection to your iTunes (it was lucky I already had a girlfriend by my early twenties otherwise I might have struggled to find one) or spent your disposable income in the infinite aisles of Apple’s digital music store. Of course, there were the illegal downloaders, too – peer-to-peer file-sharing continued long after Napster was shut down in July 2001. But I suspect the music fans who dumped enormous quantities of material onto their iPod for free ultimately regretted it – stuck in an endless scroll of the entire Bob Dylan and Jay-Z back catalogues, they lost sight of what they actually liked.
“Regret”? What is Gatti talking about? Anyone who has immersed themselves in an artist’s catalogue has used that as a jumping-off point and a way to develop their musical taste. If you spend enough time with a single artist, you will go through their highs and lows, their “new sound” album, their “return to form”, their masterpieces, their throwaway tracks. And then you will discover the artists they inspired and drew inspiration from. Piracy, for all its ills, is one reason why any music fan’s library these days has breadth and depth that would be unheard-of in the days of milk crates full of records.
Gatti:
Which is, of course, where we find ourselves today: a digital landscape dominated by Spotify and other streaming platforms, in which music is not exactly free, but not owned either. Instead of a collection that has been expanded and cultivated over years, we have a bottomless pool of recorded music. You can “like” an album and “follow” the artist, but the transaction is so low-stakes that it feels meaningless, and your “library” is not really yours at all.
But I do sympathize with Gatti’s other argument: these music libraries do not belong to anyone. For all music customers won by encouraging record labels to drop DRM, the labels clawed their way back with a reverse bargain: anyone can listen to all the music they want for $10 per month. But there is no way for that to be a sustainable business model if all that music could simply be walked off with, so we are back to having DRM-encumbered libraries.
As I said at the beginning, a device like the iPod touch is rather redundant for the way we consume music nowadays. However, I think a device like the iPod shuffle still makes a lot of sense. Its main characteristics, what made it an ingenious and very successful device back then, still make it an interesting and appealing device today: […]
With all the shit in the world in the last few years, listening to music has become even more of a refuge and safe space for me than it ever was before.
But, for me at least, the incredible technological convergence of every single use-case into a deck of cards-sized pocket super-computer means that when I do want to only listen to music – there are a million beeps, boops, and badges fighting for my attention.
An underappreciated feature of the iPod (because it wasn’t a feature you could market during its heyday) was that it was only an iPod. Not also a mobile phone and internet communicator.
For all the new things added to Apple Music in the past couple years — animated covers, Spatial Audio, a dedicated section for songs that friends have texted me — all I really want most of the time is to put on a record and listen to it uninterrupted. I do not care what device that is on.
Hall bought an Android-based Sony Walkman. I know Sony has a few of these players and I am sort of intrigued by them. Not enough to buy one, though; that is what my turntable is for. Sometimes, I just want to escape and, for me, music provides that venue. I wish the experience on my existing devices were better suited to that. Unfortunately, the incentives for streaming services are not always aligned with these modest goals.
But this does not have to mark the end of the personal music library. The iPod was a signifier of that, but its death — which really happened several years ago; the iPod Touch is more like a stripped-down iPhone than an iPod, but never mind — does not mean personal libraries have to go away. You can still buy music on iTunes, Bandcamp, and elsewhere. Vinyl records often come with download codes. And, yes, there are still plenty of places to acquire music illegitimately. I will keep building my personal music library in a way unencumbered by DRM, without rights negotiation issues, and free of dependence on third-party services. If you care about the music you listen to, I encourage you to do the same.
Leaky Forms is a new study by Asuman Senol, Gunes Acar, Mathias Humbert, and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius (emphasis theirs):
Email addresses — or identifiers derived from them — are known to be used by data brokers and advertisers for cross-site, cross-platform, and persistent identification of potentially unsuspecting individuals. In order to find out whether access to online forms are misused by online trackers, we present a measurement of email and password collection that occur before form submission on the top 100K websites.
These researchers received marketing emails from some of the leaky sites where, I will repeat, they never submitted a form. Their typed email address was captured and whisked into the ad tech and data broker machinery without their explicit consent. When using a U.S.-based crawler to assess these forms, researchers found a greater proportion of incidents (PDF, section 4.3) of email address collection than when they used an E.U.-based crawler, “perhaps due to stricter data protection regulations”.
The worst offenders were, according to researchers, fashion and beauty websites, with shopping and general news sites in second and third places. Notably more private: porn sites, the only category for which not a single one was found to have leaky forms.
The Competition Bureau earlier this week released a statement objecting to the merger of Rogers and Shaw, to which the providers preemptively responded. Unfortunately, it is entirely focused on the wireless space, which makes sense given the two companies’ firewall avoiding competing in cable TV or internet:
The Bureau’s investigation concluded that the proposed merger would substantially prevent or lessen competition in wireless services.
The Bureau is challenging the merger to shield Canadians from higher prices, poorer service quality and fewer choices which are likely to occur as a result of the merger.
It is too bad the Bureau cannot seem to nullify the longstanding non-competition agreement between Rogers and Shaw. It cannot force them to compete in the same markets, but it should not permit such a blatant divvying up of the country.
The European Union has formally presented its proposal to move from a situation in which some tech platforms voluntarily scan for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to something more systematic — publishing draft legislation that will create a framework which could obligate digital services to use automated technologies to detect and report existing or new CSAM, and also identify and report grooming activity targeting kids on their platforms.
Lomas reports this is an attempt to unify a splintered set of policies that apply to individual countries within the E.U. but, as written, it appears to require the ability for providers to locally scan the contents of messages and even detect the possibility of minors being coerced, if ordered.
The European Commission has published a guide in question-and-answer format. While it assures there are multiple safeguards, that is not comforting to European Digital Rights, an advocacy group:
The proposal may appear superficially to contain a balanced and proportionate approach. In particular, providers can only be forced to scan on their platform or service if required to do so by a judicial authority, and are subject to a series of safeguards. According to Contexte, many of these safeguards have only been introduced in the last few days, which shows that pressure from the EDRi network and our supporters has had a positive effect.
However, there are several provisions which would indicate that these protections are mainly cosmetic, and that we may in fact be facing the worst-case scenario for private digital communications. For example, providers of services and platforms have to take actions to mitigate the risk of abuse being facilitated by their platform. But they will still be liable to be issued with a detection order forcing them to introduce additional measures unless they have demonstrated in their risk assessment that there is no remaining risk of abuse at all.
Even German child protection advocates are worried this is overbroad. This proposal is one to keep an eye on for its potentially far-reaching consequences.
I am truly blown away by all of the winners in this year’s Automation April. I have not found the patience or time to truly figure out what Shortcuts can do for me, but I learn so much from what others are building. These are all very impressive.
Last year, Texas House representatives voted in favour of a bill that was effectively a copy of one in Florida to prohibit social media platforms from moderating based on “viewpoints”. It was blocked by a judge in December after two tech industry trade groups argued it was unconstitutional. Obviously.
Earlier this week, a panel of judges voted two to one to lift the injunction and allow the government of Texas to enforce that law.
See, the Texas law lets the AG, or any aggrieved user, sue if they think the site censored improperly, and get attorney fees and costs and injunctions if they win. If the Texas law stands, there’s no more saying “it’s Twitter’s First Amendment right to moderate.”
Say Twitter has a no-swearing policy and I say “@DavidAFrench has a shit-ass opinion about Aquaman.” Twitter suspends me. All I have to do is sue and claim Twitter’s REAL reason for censoring me is my viewpoint on David, or Aquaman, not my swearing. Twitter has to litigate it
This will be made easier because automated moderation on scale is always difficult and usually inconsistent and I will be able to point to other times when non-anti-Aquaman swears weren’t punished. And people ALWAYS think they’re being singled out. It’s in the GOP Platform.
It’s even worse Ken since the law prohibits moderation of posts based on viewpoints expressed on OR OFF the site. So even if the post itself expresses no viewpoint, a litigious plaintiff can claim that the action was a response to some viewpoint they expressed somewhere else.
There are many more problems with this law, but I am perplexed at how anyone could possibly think this is either workable or Constitutional. It’s neither. The only proper thing to do would be to shut down in Texas, but again the law treats that as a violation itself. What an utter monstrosity.
Unsurprisingly, the tech industry trade groups are going to be asking the Supreme Court to deal with this completely deranged law.
Tech groups fighting Texas’s social media “censorship” law may file an emergency application with the Supreme Court as early as Friday, according to two sources familiar with the case. The groups, NetChoice and CCIA, have said they plan to ask the justices to vacate the Fifth Circuit’s Wednesday ruling, which lifted an injunction on the Texas law, allowing it to go into effect and prompting panic throughout the tech industry.
NetChoice and CCIA are now soliciting amicus briefs in their application to be filed by next week. NetChoice did not respond to Protocol’s request for comment. CCIA wouldn’t confirm its plans, but president Matt Schruers said in a statement, “We will take whatever steps are necessary to defend our constituents’ First Amendment rights. These include the right not to be compelled by the government to carry dangerous content on their platforms.”
It is still shocking to me how many tech companies decided to expand their presence in Texas just to save a little in local taxes. It was not exactly a bastion of reasonable laws and careful thinking before, and then the state government there went and got their technology policy arguments from Florida. What did they think was going to happen?
Google’s new A-series Pixel phone, the Pixel 6A, does not have a headphone jack. This phone comes less than a year after the Pixel 5A ad in which Google loudly trumpeted the headphone jack in that model.
The thing is, this isn’t even the first time this circle has come full circle. In an ad for the very first Pixel — released in 2016, the same year as the iPhone 7 — Google noted this key feature: “3.5mm headphone jack satisfyingly not new.” But the headphone jack was gone from the Pixel 2 released just a year later. The first A-series Pixel, the Pixel 3A, would bring it back, but not until 2019. Once again, Google has parodied Apple only to become a parody itself the following year.
I was one of many people who thought Phil Schiller’s use of the word “courage” was a bit much to describe the company’s decision to drop the headphone jack. But you know what? Apple made that decision and then stuck to it; it did not chicken out and do anything like Google’s weird back-and-forth nonsense. You may still disagree with that decision and wish Apple had reverted; that is fine. But it would be infuriating if Apple kept changing its mind.
Does what I do here make a difference in other people’s lives? In my life? Is this still scratching the creative itch that it used to? And if not, what needs to change? Where does kottke.org end and Jason begin? Who am I without my work? Is the validation I get from the site healthy? Is having to be active on social media healthy? Is having to read the horrible news every day healthy? What else could I be doing here? What could I be doing somewhere else? What good is a blog without a thriving community of other blogs? I’ve tried thinking about these and many other questions while continuing my work here, but I haven’t made much progress; I need time away to gain perspective.
Good questions to ponder for anyone, even us hobbyists. Best wishes to Kottke for finding the time and space to get to know himself again.
Rusty Foster, of the truly excellent Today in Tabs newsletter:
TerraUSD is an “algorithmic stablecoin,” where the much-abused word “algorithmic” here means “bullshit.” It is the third largest stablecoin in existence, with almost 18 billion tokens in circulation. The way it works is this: a developer named Do Kwan made two new crypto tokens. One is called Terra, and Kwan said “those are each worth one dollar.” The other is called Luna, and the value of Luna is allowed to float, so it’s worth whatever someone wants to pay for it. The two tokens can be converted into each other, so if Luna is worth $30, you can destroy one Luna and get 30 Terra (which are supposed to be worth $1 each). And if Terra was worth less than a dollar, you could destroy 30 Terra to create 1 Luna at a discount, which also will decrease the supply of Terra and make it more valuable, via good old supply and demand, eventually pulling it back up to $1.
Have you spotted the problem yet? If you have: lol, right? If not: I promise you have, you just think it can’t possibly be that stupid. […]
TerraUSD in Monday evening trading was at about 80 cents, after touching the low of 69 cents earlier, according to CoinMarketCap. Panic selling also hit the related Luna cryptocurrency, which plunged 50% from Sunday to Monday, wiping out more than $10 billion of market value, CoinMarketCap data show.
This was entertaining to watch yesterday until I saw a suicide hotline topping their subreddit.
That is what is going on at a smaller player in the cryptocurrency world. How about one of the biggest and most popular exchanges? What is the situation like at, say, Coinbase?
Coinbase stock is down 83% from an all-time high of $368.90 last November, when Bitcoin’s price also peaked at $67,802.30 per coin.
Coinbase reported a loss of $1.98 a share, missing estimates for a 1-cent loss based on generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, on sales of $1.165 billion, below forecasts for $1.5 billion. That was down 27% from one year ago.
If you tweet the word “Coinbase” right now, you may get some automatic replies masquerading as Coinbase support, with a link to a Google form where you can enter your Coinbase login information.