Apple’s Rebranded Apple Ads Probably Forecasts More Advertising ⇥ digiday.com

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Apple today announced that it has officially rebranded Search Ads as ‘Apple Ads’, reflecting the expanding scope of Apple’s advertising business.

When Apple first launched ads in the App Store, they were only shown as promoted search results, hence the name ‘Search Ads’. But the company now offers advertising placements in many more places beyond just the Search tab, so the old name had become a bit anachronistic.

Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon, Digiday:

The timing matters. Apple has spent years building its defenses, designing its own chips, overhauling supply chains — but tariffs on Chinese imports, especially under Trump’s return to the campaign trail, are reintroducing uncertainty. Some products have dodged the impact, others haven’t. And with hardware margins already tight, Apple needs new ways to protect its bottom line.

I do not think it is nitpicking to dispute calling margins of 35% on hardware “tight”.

Still, Apple is at risk of being squeezed in both hardware and software — to the extent a corporation the size of Apple can actually be squeezed, of course. Its hardware made in China is now exempt from Trump’s escalating and volatile tariff demands, but that could obviously change if Tim Cook is insufficiently grateful. Meanwhile, its Google search deal with 100% margins is at risk of being disallowed.

The advertising market is an obvious but dispiriting place to find money. Apple already has a few spots available in the App Store, and in News and Stocks, and I could see the potential for placements in apps like Maps, Music, Podcasts, and Wallet.

This rebranding and the increasingly important Services revenue charts look like a forecast for more ads. I hope I am wrong. I do not use News or Stocks, but the ads in the App Store are already a gross exploitation of Apple’s position owning these platforms. It is the kind of move that encourages understandable regulatory scrutiny.

Microsoft Is Bringing Recall Back to Windows ⇥ arstechnica.com

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica:

Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended Recall. On Thursday, the company said it was reintroducing Recall. It currently is available only to insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version. Over time, the feature will be rolled out more broadly.

Kevin Beaumont:

After a bunch of discussions with a bunch of folks, it’s pretty clear there’s been zero published research on Copilot Recall in almost a year – all the news articles have just reprinted Microsoft’s talking points saying it is secure now.

Beaumont says there are improvements to the onboarding process and security, but also found there is still no way for applications to opt out of being recorded, and it still captures private information like Signal chats and credit card numbers. Oh, and Beaumont may have found the decryption key. I see the utility in a feature like this, but I am not sure that outweighs the risks for the user or anyone they communicate with.

Google Loses Online Advertising Monopoly Case ⇥ axios.com

Scott Rosenberg and Sara Fischer, Axios:

Google’s dominance of the online advertising and ad-tech markets violates U.S. antitrust laws, a federal court ruled Thursday, in a decision that could scramble the massive digital ad universe.

[…]

The court drew a distinction between the markets for advertising exchanges and ad servers, where it found Google has an illegal monopoly, and the general market for display ads online, where it found Google does not.

Emma Roth and Lauren Feiner, the Verge:

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement to The Verge. “The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

If the conclusion of this case is held after what I assume will be a lengthy and expensive appeals process, the corrections for this and Google’s illegal search monopoly will have a noticeable effect on the web.

Bluesky, Censorship, and Country-Based Moderation ⇥ fediversereport.com

Laurens Hof, the Fediverse Report:

There is a technical story, of how Bluesky and the AT Protocol (ATProto) do composable moderation for specific countries. But this is not just an interesting technology, it has implications of government censorship more broadly. Not only is the Turkish censorship of accounts even easier to sidestep, it also allows for new ways to highlight and create visibility for the content that the Turkish government wants to be hidden. To explain how that all works, first a closer look at how moderation works on Bluesky.

I understand why some would disagree with Bluesky’s approach and prefer the way of Mastodon. But I do not think Bluesky’s handling is invalid or necessarily inferior — just different.

MITRE Makes CVE Program Independent After U.S. Government Funding Expires ⇥ krebsonsecurity.com

Brian Krebs:

A critical resource that cybersecurity professionals worldwide rely on to identify, mitigate and fix security vulnerabilities in software and hardware is in danger of breaking down. The federally funded, non-profit research and development organization MITRE warned today [April 15] that its contract to maintain the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program — which is traditionally funded each year by the Department of Homeland Security — expires on April 16.

[…]

Update, April 16, 11:00 a.m. ET: The CVE board today announced the creation of non-profit entity called The CVE Foundation that will continue the program’s work under a new, unspecified funding mechanism and organizational structure.

I do not love how I am learning how many critical things worldwide are dependent on an increasingly unstable U.S. government.

Lyft Texted a Rider a Transcript of the Conversation She Had in a Car ⇥ cbc.ca

Nicole Brockbank, CBC News:

Anvi Ahuja noticed a “freaky” new text message from a number she didn’t know right after getting back to her downtown Toronto apartment last month.

The text was a transcript of the conversation she’d just had with her roommates during their eight-minute Lyft ride home from a friend’s place.

[…]

The company confirms the incident took place, but has offered varying explanations.

None of Lyft’s explanations make sense to me. Bizarre and creepy.

Meta’s Poor Prebuttal to “Careless People”

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Meta’s leadership team found out about Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book “Careless People”. This conversation could have taken place anywhere, but I imagine it was in a glass-walled meeting room which would allow one of these millionaire’s shouted profanities to echo. That feels right. Wynn-Williams, a former executive at Facebook, is well-placed to tell stories of the company’s indifference to user privacy, its growth-at-all-costs mentality, its willingness to comply with the surveillance and censorship requirements of operating in China, and alleged sexual harassment by Joel Kaplan. And, of course, its inaction in Myanmar that played a “determining role” in a genocide that killed thousands in one month in 2017 alone.

Based on some of the anecdotes in this book, I am guessing Zuckerberg, Kaplan, and others learned about this from a public relations staffer. That is how they seem to learn about a lot of pretty important things. The first public indication this book was about to be released came in the form of a preview in the Washington Post. Apparently, Meta had only found out about it days before.

It must have been a surprise as Meta’s preemptive response came in the form of a barely formatted PDF sent to Semafor, and it seems pretty clear the company did not have an advance copy of the book because all of its rebuttals are made in broad strokes against the general outline reported by the Post. Now that I have read the book, I thought it would be fun and educational to compare Meta’s arguments against the actual claims Wynn-Williams makes. I was only half right — reading about the company’s role in the genocide in Myanmar remains a chilling exercise.

A caveat: Wynn-Williams’ book is the work of a single source — it is her testimony. Though there are references to external documents, there is not a single citation anywhere in the thing. In an article critical of the book, Katie Harbath, one of Wynn-Williams’ former colleagues, observes how infrequently credit is given to others. And it seems like it, as with most non-fiction books, was not fact-checked. That is not to disparage the book or its author, but only to note that this is one person’s recollections centred around her own actions and perspective.

One other caveat: I have my own biases against Meta. I think Mark Zuckerberg is someone who had one good idea and has since pretended to be a visionary while stumbling between acquisitions and bad ideas. Meta’s services are the product of bad incentives, an invasive business model, and a caustic relationship with users. I am predisposed to embracing a book validating those feelings. I will try to be fair.

Anyway, the first thing you will notice is that most of the points in Meta’s response do not dispute the stories Wynn-Williams tells; instead, the company wants everyone to think it is all “old news” and it resents all this stuff being dredged up again. Yet even though this is apparently a four-hundred-page rehash, Meta is desperate to silence Wynn-Williams in a masterful gambit. But of course Wynn-Williams is going to write about things we already know a little bit about; even so, there is much to learn.

Most of Meta’s document is dedicated to claims about the company’s history with China, beginning with the non-news that it wanted to expand into the country:

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Facebook Had A Desire To Operate In China.

Old News:

Zuckerberg Addressed This In 2019 Televised Speech. Mark himself said in a televised address in 2019, “[He] wanted our services in China … and worked hard to make this happen. But we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there.’ That is why we don’t operate our services in China today.”

No, it is not just you: the link in this section is, indeed, broken, and has been since this document was published, even though the page title suggests it was available six months prior. Meta’s communications staff must have known this because they include a link to the transcript, too. No, I cannot imagine why Meta thought it made sense to send people to an inactive video.

At any rate, Zuckerberg’s speech papers over the lengths to which the company and he — personally — went to ingratiate himself with leaders in China. Wynn-Williams dedicates many pages of her book to examples, but only one I want to focus on for now.

But let me begin with the phrase “we could never come to an agreement on what it would take for us to operate there”. In the context of this speech’s theme, the importance of free expression, this sounds like Meta had a principled disagreement with the censorship required of a company operating in China. This was not true. Which brings me to another claim Meta attempts to reframe:

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Facebook Developed Censorship Tools For Use By Chinese Officials.

Old News:

2016 New York Times Report On Potential Facebook Software Being Used By Facebook In Regard To China; Noted It “So Far Gone Unused, And There Is No Indication That Facebook Has Offered It To The Authorities In China.” […]

This is not a denial.

Wynn-Williams says she spent a great deal of time reading up on Facebook’s strategy in China since being told to take it over on a temporary basis in early 2017. Not only was the company okay with censoring users’ posts on behalf of the Chinese government, it viewed the capability as leverage and built software to help. She notices in one document “the ‘key’ offer is that Facebook will help China ‘promote safe and secure social order'”:

I find detailed content moderation and censorship tools. There would be an emergency switch to block any specific region in China (like Xinjiang, where the Uighurs are) from interacting with Chinese and non-Chinese users. Also an “Extreme Emergency Content Switch” to remove viral content originating inside or outside China “during times of potential unrest, including significant anniversaries” (like the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests and subsequent repression).

Their censorship tools would automatically examine any content with more than ten thousand views by Chinese users. Once this “virality counter” got built, the documents say that Facebook deployed it in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it’s been running on every post.

Far from a principled “agreement on what it would take for us to operate [in China]”, Facebook was completely fine with the requirements of the country’s censorial regime until it became more of a liability. Then, it realized it was a better deal to pay lobbyists to encourage the U.S. government to ban TikTok.

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Facebook Tested Stealth App In China.

Old News:

2017 New York Times Headline: “In China, Facebook Tests The Waters With A Stealth App” “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country in different ways,” Facebook said in a statement.”

Wynn-Williams provides plenty more detail than is contained in the Times report. I wish I could quote many pages of the book without running afoul of copyright law or feeling like a horrible person, so here is a brief summary: Facebook created an American shell company, which spun up another shell company in China. Meta moved one of its employees to an unnamed “Chinese human resources company” and makes her the owner of its Chinese shell company. A subsidiary of that company then launched two lightly reskinned Facebook apps in China, which probably violate Chinese data localization laws. And I need to quote the next part:

“Are Mark and Sheryl okay with it?” I ask.

He [Kaplan] admits that they weren’t aware of it.

I am unsure I believe Zuckerberg did not know about this arrangement.

As far as I can find, most of these details are new. The name of the Chinese shell company’s subsidiary was published by the Times, but the only reference I can find — predating this book — to the other shell companies is in an article on Sohu. I cannot find any English-language coverage of this situation.

Nor, it should be said, can I find any discussion of the legality of Facebook’s Chinese operations, the strange leadership in the documentation for the shell companies, the other apps Facebook apparently released in China, and the fallout after the Times article was published. Meta’s anticipatory response to Wynn-Williams’ book pretends none of this is newsworthy. I found it captivating.

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Chinese Dissident Guo Wengui Was Removed Due To Pressure From The Chinese Government.

Old News:

The Reasons Facebook Removed Guo Wengui From The Platform Were Publicly Reported In 2017;

Unpublished His Page And Suspended His Profile Because Of Repeated Violations Of Company’s Community Standards.

Wynn-Williams says this is false. She quotes the same testimony Facebook’s general counsel gave before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, but only after laying out the explicit discussions between Facebook and the Cyberspace Administration of China saying the page needed to be removed. At a time when Facebook was eager to expand into China, the company’s compliance was expected.

Then we get to Myanmar:

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Facebook Dragged Its Feet On Myanmar Services.

Old News:

Facebook Publicly Acknowledged Myanmar Response In 2018. The facts here have been public record since 2018, and we have said publicly we know we were too slow to act on abuse on our services in Myanmar […]

“Too slow to act” is one way to put it — phrasing that, while not absolving Meta, obscures a more offensive reality.

Myanmar, Wynn-Williams writes, was a particularly good market for Facebook’s Free Basics program, a partnership with local providers that gives people free access to services like Facebook and WhatsApp, plus a selection of other apps and websites. It is an obvious violation of net neutrality principles, the kind Zuckerberg framed in terms of civil rights in the United States, but seemed to find more malleable in India. Wynn-Williams’ description of the company’s campaign to save it in India, one that was ultimately unsuccessful, is worth reading on its own. Facebook launched Free Basics in Myanmar in 2016; two years later, the company pulled the plug.

From 2014 to 2017, Kevin Roose reported for the New York Times, Facebook’s user base in Myanmar — a country of around fifty million people — grew from two million to thirty million, surely accelerated by Free Basics. During that time period, Wynn-Williams writes, Facebook observed a dramatic escalation in hate speech directed toward the Rohingya group. As this began, Meta had a single contractor based in Dublin who was reviewing user reports. One person.

Also, according to Wynn-Williams, Facebook is not available in Burmese, local users “appear to be using unofficial Facebook apps that don’t offer a reporting function”, and there incompatibility between Unicode and Zawgyi. As a result, fewer reports are received, they are not necessarily in a readable format, and they are processed by one person several time zones away.

Leading up to the November 2015 election, Wynn-Williams says they doubled the number of moderators speaking Burmese — two total — plus another two for election week. Wynn-Williams says she worked for more than a year to get management’s attention in a candidate for Myanmar-specific policies, only for Kaplan to reject the idea in early 2017.

From the end of August to the end of September that year, 6,700 people are killed. Hundreds of thousands more are forced to leave the country. All of this was accelerated by Facebook’s inaction and ineptitude. “Too slow to act” hardly covers how negligent Facebook was at the scale of this atrocity.

SWW’s New Claim:

Facebook Offered Advertisers The Ability To Target Vulnerable 13-17 Year Olds.

Old News:

Claim Was Based On A 2017 Article By The Australian, Which Facebook Refuted. “On May 1, 2017, The Australian posted a story regarding research done by Facebook and subsequently shared with an advertiser. The premise of the article is misleading. Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state.”

In fact, Wynn-Williams quotes the refutation, calling it a “flat-out lie”. She says this is one of at least two similar slide decks discussing targeting ads based on a teenager’s emotional state, and in an internal discussion, finds an instance where Facebook apparently helped target beauty ads to teenage girls when they deleted pictures of themselves from their accounts. She also writes that the deputy chief privacy officer confirmed it is entirely possible to target ads based on implied emotion.

After the “lie” is released as a statement anyway, Wynn-Williams says she got a phone call from a Facebook ad executive frustrated by how it undermined their pitch to advertisers for precise targeting.

SWW’s New Claim:

Donald Trump Was Charged Less Money For Incendiary Adverts Which Reached More People.

Old News:

Claim Was Based On A 2018 Article By Wired, Which Facebook Refuted.

The argument made by Meta’s Andrew Bosworth, in a since-deleted Twitter thread, was that Trump’s average CPM was almost always higher than that of the Clinton campaign. But while this is one interpretation of the Wired article — one the publication disputed — this is not the claim made by Wynn-Williams. She only says the high levels of engagement on Trump’s ads drove their prices down, but not necessarily less than Clinton’s ads.

Those were all of the claims Meta chose to preemptively dispute or reframe. The problem is that Wynn-Williams did make news in this book. There are plenty of examples of high-level discussions, including quoted email messages, showing the contemporaneous mindset to build its user base and market share no matter the cost. It is ugly. Meta’s public relations team apparently thought it could get in front of this thing without having all the details, but their efforts were weak and in vain.

Following its publication, Meta not only sought and received a legal demand that Wynn-Williams must stop talking about the book, it followed its “playbook for answering whistleblowers”. I am not a highly paid public relations person; I assume those who are might be able to explain if this strategy is effective. It does not seem as though it is, however.

This is all very embarrassing for Meta, yet seems entirely predictable. Like I wrote, I have my own biases against the company. I already thought it was a slimy company and I hate how much this confirms my expectations. So I think it is important to stay skeptical. Perhaps there are other sides to these stories. But nothing in “Careless People” seems unbelievable — only unseemly and ugly.

The Acquisition of Instagram Made Sense to Facebook Even at the Time ⇥ nytimes.com

Mike Isaac, New York Times:

In 2012, when Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg cut a $1 billion check to buy the photo-sharing app Instagram, most people thought he had lost his marbles.

“A billion dollars of money?” joked Jon Stewart, then the host of The Daily Show. “For a thing that kind of ruins your pictures?”

Mr. Stewart called the decision “really lame.” His audience — and much of the rest of the world — agreed that Mr. Zuckerberg had overpaid for an app that highlighted a bunch of photo filters.

While Stewart’s bit remains funny, I must again note that many people with actual expertise in this area treated the acquisition as a reasonable cost to neutralize a surging competitor.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission Takes on Meta ⇥ nytimes.com

Cecilia Kang, Mike Isaac, and David McCabe, New York Times:

The case against Meta could affect its 3.5 billion users, who on average log on to Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp multiple times a day for news, shopping and texting. Instagram and WhatsApp have attracted more users in recent years as Facebook, Meta’s flagship app, has stopped growing.

“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed,” said Daniel Matheson, the F.T.C.’s lead litigator in the case, in his opening remarks. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”

“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” he added.

Lily Jamali, BBC News:

Meta countered that the lawsuit from the FTC, which reviewed and approved those acquisitions, is “misguided.”

Meta “acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to improve and grow them alongside Facebook,” the company’s attorney Mark Hansen argued.

To my layperson’s eyes, this does not seem like a counterpoint to the FTC’s arguments as much as it is a reframing of them.

Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer:

In order for the FTC to win this case, they need to prove both that Meta has a dominant share in a properly defined product market that includes all competitors, and that the two acquisitions harmed competition and consumers. They are wrong on both claims. That’s why they’ve gerrymandered a fictitious market in which Facebook and Instagram compete only with Snapchat and an app called MeWe. In reality, more time is spent on TikTok and YouTube than on either Facebook or Instagram – if you only add TikTok and YouTube into the FTC’s social media market definition, Meta has <30% market share.

This is going to be a fascinating trial. It seems clear based on evidence in emails, chats, and underhanded tactics that Instagram and WhatsApp were acquired to neutralize their competitive power. Yet we have no idea what the tech landscape of today would look like had both remained independent companies. Meta’s products still have competition from other social networks and, in theory, it must fight them for every user-minute and ad dollar. However, we know for certain Meta does not need to compete today against Instagram and WhatsApp.

Lawsuits Allege Trade Desk Secretly Breaks Privacy Laws ⇥ adweek.com

Kendra Barnett, AdWeek:

Filed on March 31 in the Central District of California, one of the class action cases takes aim at The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) identifier, alleging that the tracking tech collects personally identifiable information, like email addresses and phone numbers, and uses it to enable user profiling and real-time bidding.

[…]

The Trade Desk, plaintiffs allege in this case, operates like a data broker as it tracks, profiles, and de-anonymizes internet users without their knowledge or consent via its Adsrvr Pixel, which follows users across different parts of the web and across devices.

I mentioned UID2 in passing a couple of years ago. The claims (PDF) in these lawsuits (PDF), untested in court, are certainly worrisome but only as much as any of these user identification and enrichment services. At least California has privacy laws to hold the Trade Desk accountable instead of relying on the Federal Trade Commission’s less direct processes.

How Record Store Day Became the Stupidest Day in Music ⇥ defector.com

John Semley, Defector:

At a very basic level, commodity fetishism is fine, and probably pretty normal: a way of declaring, “Here is my stuff that I like.” It can be an expression not only of personal curatorial habits, but of taste, and identity. But commodities conceived along the line of Record Store Day exclusives push this to an extreme. Their use-value is practically nil. They are only commodities. And as far as statements of taste and identity go, they announce only “I am a big-time commodity fetishist!”

It is truly remarkable to me how pliable we all are even when we know these tactics. We know this is why smartphones come in different colours every year, and why there is the very notion of a “limited edition” even if that edition numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

To repurpose or recontextualize Goodhart’s law, when something becomes the product of attention, it will eventually lose the reason for that attention. Record Store Day began in good faith, which has been taken advantage of to, in 2025, sell Post Malone’s Nirvana livestream on vinyl for $37. Be quick — there are only seventeen thousand copies available.

Taking the User by the Reins ⇥ rakhim.exotext.com

Rakhim Davletkaliyev:

Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok — which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It’s like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.

There is an element of this critique that feels very now and may become outdated, as TikTok’s relevance could perhaps fade with time, but platforms wresting control from users and foisting decisions upon them is a long and ongoing trend. To wit, here is Davletkaliyev:

Even the “New” section [in Netflix] is meaningless. It opens with a “For You” row (huh?), then “Continue Watching”, followed by generic “Popular in ” rows. It feels like YouTube search: ask for something specific, get a few hits, and then a flood of unrelated “popular” and “recommended” content.

The screenshots preceding this paragraph show Netflix’s homepage in 2012. The subtitle on the page reads “Based on what you like, we’ve filled it with personalized suggestions JUST FOR YOU”. The first row of items is “Popular on Netflix”. These are superficially similar qualities to those Davletkaliyev complains about in Netflix today.

If you scratch a little deeper, I think the version today feels different for two reasons. First, Netflix has a lot more original media; instead of a page filled with movies and shows you recognize, it is now full of Netflix-branded material. Second, Netflix is just one of many services prioritizing recommendations and suggestions, and perhaps this feeling accumulates to the point where none seem to be serving our interests. Davletkaliyev’s other example is Spotify, but it could just as easily be Apple Music. I use it very simply, yet I feel as though I am fighting with its home screen. I have to use entirely separate apps — MusicHarbor and Record Club — to learn about new releases from my favourite artists. If I dip into one of the suggestions and then go back to the home screen, the whole thing usually refreshes and shows me entirely different suggestions. It is all just one big fight with large business interests.

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

Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac?

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

Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0× Faster Web Browsing in Safari

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

By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2× faster and browsing uses less data while saving energy and battery life.

Rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:

  • Improve your privacy and security by removing ad trackers

  • Block all YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads

  • Block annoying cookie notices and privacy prompts

  • Double battery life during heavy web browsing

  • Lower data usage when on the go

With over 5,000 five star reviews, it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

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

Post-Twitter Services as Covered by the New Yorker ⇥ newyorker.com

Kyle Chayka, of the New Yorker, wrote a pretty good profile of Bluesky and its CEO Jay Graber recently which, as it turns out, is his third in what is now a set of articles about the post-Twitter services trio. On Mastodon in November 2022:

Users who want to have a lively, varied experience on Mastodon have to put in effort, too. On Twitter, you log in to your account and are immediately thrust into the melee of the “global town square,” for better or worse. On Mastodon, you can start accounts on as many servers as you like but you have to log on to each one in turn, as if each were its own separate social network. The server your account is hosted on is embedded in your username (mine is @chaykak@zirk.us) and becomes a kind of home base. Mastodon offers various feed configurations, from a “local” one that shows only posts from accounts on your server to a more bustling admixture of all the users you follow across any server. There’s a tool called Debirdify that can tell you which Twitter users you follow are already on Mastodon. But Mastodon’s built-in friction and fragmentation make it harder to communicate with many people at once. You can peer into servers you don’t belong to, like a curious tourist, but you won’t be able to post to their feeds.

This is a strange interpretation of how Mastodon works. It is technically correct but irrelevant; there is no need for someone to have accounts on multiple servers as they all communicate over the same protocol. You do not need a Gmail account to send a message to a Gmail user, for example. But I think it illustrates the perceived complexity of the service while, unfortunately, doing little to clarify it.

Do not get me wrong — I like Mastodon a lot. It is the post-Twitter service I use most often. But it reminds me a lot of something like Usenet or mailing lists while the others remind me of forums. It has a little more technical overhead and a few more quirks. If you are sent a link to a post on another server, for example, and you want to boost it, you have to go find it from your own server. It remains a clunky process.

Next up, Chayka wrote about Threads in July 2023, shortly after it launched:1

[…] It is currently impossible to see posts solely from followed accounts; Meta executives promise that a chronological feed is in the works, but, as on Facebook and Instagram, that feature is unlikely to be the default. As a result, much of what I see on Threads is the kind of banal celebrity and brand self-promotion that I tried to avoid on Twitter — posts from Chris Hemsworth and Ellen DeGeneres, Spotify asking fans for their favorite playlists, and suggestions to follow Kardashians. The Threads feed rarely appears in a chronological order and often serves up disparate posts from the same account in a row.

Even though Meta has made many changes to Threads in the interim, it still feels like a pretty hollow place. Jon Passantino, of Status, attributes this “lifeless” feeling to “Meta’s antagonistic relationship with power users” — an “indifference toward those powering the platform”. Perhaps.

I think the problem is simpler: Threads has no character. It feels like the conference room at any three-star chain hotel. It has all the attitude of a corporate retreat and the energy of a midsize rental car. That is simply the vibe Meta brings. No amount of power users can change that.

Finally, on Bluesky. This is the second such article published by the New Yorker about the platform; the first was in May 2023, but that one was shorter and not by Chayka, so it does not fit the theme I am setting. Chayka:

With its post-election boom, Bluesky has become by far the largest decentralized social network and Graber (who, citing privacy concerns, gives her age as “around thirty-three”) the most high-profile female head of a social network in an industry known for eccentrically megalomaniacal men. With Trump and Musk in power, Silicon Valley leaders have taken a rightward turn. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has cut back on fact checking, abandoned D.E.I. efforts, and said that the corporate world needs more “masculine energy.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has ordered that the paper’s opinion pages publish only pieces that support “personal liberties and free markets.” Graber, who defines her politics as “anti-authoritarian,” sees Bluesky as a corrective to prevailing social media that subjects users to the whims of billionaires. “Elon, if he wanted to, could just delete the whole X time line — just do these totally arbitrary things,” she said, adding, “I think this self-styled tech-monarch thing is worth questioning. Do we want to live in that world?”

A punk rock attitude is not really compatible with being a corporate executive — only to the detriment of the latter — yet Graber and Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko are the closest I have felt to that spirit. I hope I am not wrong about either of them. I feel like these two platforms can coexist without either one needing to win or become absorbed in the drama of the other. I am a little disappointed to read the two “discussed a collaboration that would have allowed their two protocols to interoperate, but each told me that the other seemed more interested in having the rival platform migrate onto their own protocol”. I think it is fine to keep them entirely separate, but it makes sense to me for the two to be compatible so long as they retain a spirit of openness and portability.

  1. This article ends:

    […] What I still miss is the dependable simplicity of Twitter, the digital Brutalism of two-hundred-and-forty-character bursts of news in a constant stream. Neither Twitter itself nor its competitors have lately been able to capture that energy.

    This appears to be a reference to Twitter’s character limit, but that was 140 characters before becoming 280. One could make the argument the latter character limit is inclusive of Chayka’s example, but that is clearly not what he is going for. One would think that is something the New Yorker’s famously rigorous fact-checkers would ask about. ↥︎

How Crawlers Impact the Operations of the Wikimedia Projects ⇥ diff.wikimedia.org

Birgit Mueller, Chris Danis, and Giuseppe Lavagetto, of the Wikimedia Foundation:

Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.

Given the sheer volume of stuff scraped by A.I. companies, it is hard to say how much value any single source has in generating material in response to an arbitrary request. Wikimedia might be the exception, however. It is so central and its contents so expansive that it is hard to imagine many of these products would be nearly so successful without it.

I do not see the names of any of the most well-known A.I. companies among the foundation’s largest donors. Perhaps they are the seven anonymous donors in the $50,000-and-up group. I suggest they, at the very least, give more generously and openly.

Established Writers Are Making More Money After Leaving Substack ⇥ digiday.com

Alexander Lee, Digiday:

A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms.

Across the board, writers such as Marisa Kabas, Luke O’Neil, Jonathan M. Katz and Ryan Broderick — all of whom exited Substack in early 2024 following the publication of an open letter in December 2023 decrying the presence of politically extreme voices on the platform — told Digiday that they are receiving a higher share of subscription revenue after making the switch from Substack to rival newsletter services such as Ghost and Beehiiv.

That these services are less expensive for writers is distinct from subscriber growth. Substack’s network is surely a subscription driver, but that becomes less important as a writer’s popularity grows and people begin spreading their work in other ways. Beehiiv and Ghost are a little more old-fashioned — which is not necessarily a bad thing: they focus on providing a specific service instead of trying to be a social media company. But that means more self-promotional efforts by less established writers.

Safari Technology Preview Supports a More Comprehensive Interpretation of ‘Pretty’ Text-Wrap ⇥ webkit.org

I needed cheering up after the last post. Sorry about that.

Jen Simmons, of Apple’s WebKit team:

While support for pretty shipped in Chrome 117, Edge 177, and Opera 103 in Fall 2023, and Samsung Internet 24 in 2024, the Chromium version is more limited in what it accomplishes. According to an article by the Chrome team, Chromium only makes adjustments to the last four lines of a paragraph. It’s focused on preventing short last lines. It also adjusts hyphenation if consecutive hyphenated lines appear at the end of a paragraph.

The purpose of pretty, as designed by the CSS Working Group, is for each browser to do what it can to improve how text wraps.

Where many in my profession get excited for new APIs to make web apps more capable, this is what brings me similar joy. Maybe more. I love to see any typography improvements on the web which I, in my finest fuddy-duddy fashion, still regard as a primarily document-based environment.

A ‘U.S.-Made iPhone’ is Pure Fantasy ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

These articles are good exercises but they are also total fantasy. There is no universe in which Apple snaps its fingers and begins making the iPhone in the United States overnight. It could theoretically begin assembling them here, but even that is a years-long process made infinitely harder by the fact that, in Trump’s ideal world, every company would be reshoring American manufacturing at the same time, leading to supply chain issues, factory building issues, and exacerbating the already lacking American talent pool for high-tech manufacturing. In the long term, we could and probably will see more tech manufacturing get reshored to the United States for strategic and national security reasons, but in the interim with massive tariffs, there will likely be unfathomable pain that is likely to last years, not weeks or months.

Apple itself is already attempting to make its manufacturing less dependent on factories in China, specifically, but it is a slow transformation over years, and not necessarily in a single direction. Notably, it is not moving production to the United States, instead working with Foxconn to build factories in India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Not only do these countries have lower labour costs and proximity to parts sourcing countries, they also have higher population densities permitting a greater workforce near a factory. Foxconn’s ridiculous con of a U.S. factory for “AI 8K+5G” was built on farmland outside a village outside Wisconsin’s fifth biggest city. Total population of the entire county: 197,727. That is less than the workforce of just one of Foxconn’s factories making iPhones.

Anyone who has spent time digging into the supply chains of just about any industry is probably similar parts amazed and disgusted by what they find, and rightfully so. It strains my ability to understand anything to know a device as precise as a smartphone can be made at scale, about as much as I am also baffled when I see Walmart selling a pair of jeans for less than $20. The only way this is possible is at a huge human cost. This happens far away and — in a way beneficial to the name brands involved — at third-party factories, subcontractors, or a component business deep in the supply chain. But this human exploitation is not relegated to over there; it happens closer to home too.

I think it is fair and correct to support greater diversification of manufacturing, including to rich countries. What bothers me is how much of the discussion I have seen concerns the dollar value of a hypothetical made-in-the-U.S. iPhone, and how little focuses on higher labour standards no matter where a product is made. Workers’ rights are not what U.S. tariffs are ultimately about. But the exploitation is ours. We, the richest countries in the world, go into developing nations and extract from their people and environment the products we want for the incredibly generous lifestyle we have. Some factory owners have become very rich in being able to meet our demands; many people have not. And then we just move on. Now the U.S. is punishing everyone around the world for partaking, necessarily, in an entrenched global system of trade. Maybe iPhones get more expensive later this year, and maybe that means we buy fewer. The human and environmental cost will be similar. But we will still buy them.

White House Investigation Implicates Siri Suggestions in ‘Signalgate’ ⇥ theguardian.com

Hugo Lowell, the Guardian:

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, [the Atlantic’s Jeffrey] Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of [Mike] Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.

Then, when Waltz went to add Hughes to the Signal chat, so this goes, he instead added Goldberg. Presumably, this is related to Siri suggestions. This version of events sounds plausible to me, if a little too perfect, but stranger things have happened.

The distrustful and cynical voice deep inside me wants to think Waltz has been a source or contact for Goldberg, and that this is a neat way to keep that secret. There is no evidence for this. The White House’s explanation really does sound right. But try telling anyone they should trust the results of an internal investigation into one of the most dunderheaded security breaches in living memory — even surpassing the time when a couple of lawyers during the first Trump administration were blabbing within earshot of a New York Times reporter.

Sam Altman Wants to Give Himself a Handshake, Too ⇥ techcrunch.com

Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch:

OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products.

This feels less icky to me than the acquisition of X by xAI, but still the kind of thing that makes me tilt my head like a confused border collie.