The Proxy Battle Over A.I. Policy Is Brewing ⇥ wired.com

Lydia Moynihan, New York Post:

“You have this huge ecosystem pushing AI doomerism with zero regard for the consequences — the main one being that America will fall behind in the global AI race,” Nathan Leamer, executive director of Build American AI, told me. “And they genuinely don’t seem bothered by it.”

And according to a report released this week from the Bull Moose Project, doomers have been spending a fortune.

A tight network of donors, with former Facebook executive Dustin Moskovitz’s Coefficient Giving at the center, has already spent $5.9 billion and has $37.8 billion more publicly pledged, according to the report.

They have given out more than $611 million in donations to candidates (99.8% of whom are Democrats), dark money groups and so-called AI safety organizations such as Future of Life Institute, the report adds.

It is the Post, so you expect a degree of bad faith, but this is deceptive even for them.

The Bull Moose Project is one of several organizations sharing an address and financial connections with the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is overseen by the president’s former chief of staff, and to which the president gave $1 million. The Bull Moose Project’s website promotes a “plan to rejuvenate America” and, in the “American Revitalization” section, illustrates this with a lovely painting of a person launching a canoe beside a float plane. This is maybe only funny to me, but I had to track down that image — hotlinked from Pinterest — and it is a painting by Ross Buckland, who was born in Calgary and now lives in Ontario. I am pretty I recognize the mountain peaks as part of the Canadian Rockies.

Anyhow, its report largely concerns the political spending of Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and various other executives, board members, and associated parties. It is so all-consuming it begins to look like a red string board, and is similarly difficult to follow. But it sounds ominous. There is a page dedicated to “the China connection”, but it is pretty weak.

Also, you will note that, instead of citing academics or subject matter experts, Moynihan favourably quotes the executive director of Build America [sic] AI. But Moynihan does not note the group’s funding sources nor explain anything more about it.

Emily Wilkins, CNBC:

The [Leading the Future] PAC, which has said it would support both Democratic and Republican candidates, is also connected to advocacy group Build American AI, which launched a $10 million campaign to push a uniform national AI policy.

Contributors to Leading the Future include private equity firm Andreessen Horowitz, Open AI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel Founder Ron Conway and AI software company Perplexity.

Laura J. Nelson, Wall Street Journal:

While Congress hasn’t passed a comprehensive law for the fast-growing technology, some states have begun discussing or passing regulations rooted in concern about the need for more AI safeguards.

They include policies championed by nonprofit groups tied to the effective-altruism movement, a broad social and moral philosophy that has become divisive in Silicon Valley owing in part to its focus on potential worst-case scenarios in AI development. Pro-AI forces call them “doomers.”

An effort to punch back against Leading the Future went public Tuesday: an organization called Public First that plans to back candidates from both parties through two super PACs. The group, which is organized under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code and isn’t required to disclose its donors, is aiming to raise at least $50 million.

Anthropic gave $20 million to Public First.

Taylor Lorenz, Wired:

Marketing agencies are pitching influencers deals such as $5,000 per TikTok video to amplify Build American AI’s messaging about how China’s technological rise should be seen as a threat. The goal, according to a staffer from SM4, the influencer marketing agency running the campaign on behalf of Build American AI, is to subtly shift public debate by framing China’s AI advancement as a serious risk to the safety and well-being of Americans.

Lorenz learned about this because, she says, SM4 pitched her on the campaign. Leading the Future, which runs Build American AI, raised $125 million last year and it is spending it on this.

These influencers are being used to help settle an argument, among some of the world’s richest and least-likeable people, over whether OpenAI (its position backed by Build American AI and Bull Moose Project) or Anthropic (through Public First) should get to write A.I. policy and regulations. Apparently, “neither” is not an option. To its credit, that report from the Bull Moose Project correctly notes the ongoing “proxy war over A.I. policy”, though it stops short of admitting the part it plays.

What both sides appear to agree on is that they must treat A.I. from China as a threat. Those of us elsewhere, however, likely find both threatening, albeit for different reasons.

Dispute Over Fate of Kenyan Workers Who Were Exposed to Intimate Meta Ray-Bans Recordings ⇥ bbc.com

Chris Vallance, BBC News:

In February, workers at the company, Sama, told two Swedish newspapers they had witnessed glasses users going to the toilet, and having sex.

Less than two months later, Meta ended its contract with Sama, which Sama said would result in 1,108 workers being made redundant.

Meta says it’s because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects. A Kenyan workers’ organisation alleges Meta’s decision was caused by the staff speaking out.

It is abhorrent yet common to treat essential contractors and employees as disposable. Over a thousand people will be out of a job yet still be haunted by what they have been exposed to.

Elections Alberta Investigating Provincial Elector List Published by Separatist Activists ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Carrie Tait and Chen Wang, the Globe and Mail:

Alberta’s separatist campaign has access to personal information belonging to 2.9 million residents, data that closely resembles the province’s most recent list of electors, raising questions about a potential breach of privacy and violation of election laws.

The already sanctioned organization behind this claims all this data is from public sources, but Elections Alberta is convinced it is a genuine elector list used illegally.

Wallis Snowdon, CBC News:

Court heard that an Elections Alberta investigation examined the public, searchable database and determined the list was legitimately provided to the Republican Party of Alberta, a provincial party founded in 2022 that supports Alberta independence.

[…]

Court heard that each electoral list legitimately released by Elections Alberta includes a certain number of fictitious — or “salted” — names. These unique entries on each electoral list allow investigators to trace each dataset back to their source in the event of a breach.

I was able to easily register and view my own record, which had information I have not seen before in data I have requested from brokers and other semi-public sources. The canvassing tool was pulled offline as I was reviewing its architecture.

It is notable that these pro-separatist goobers have to resort to setting up front organizations with scant public information about their leadership and funding, and allegedly obtaining lists of registered electors. These people are very loud on the internet and at rallies, but they use sketchy and underhanded organizing tactics.

Update: It appears Jeremy Appel was first to report this story.

Adobe’s ‘Modern’ User Interface Is Just Webpages ⇥ unsung.aresluna.org

Marcin Wichary did a wonderful job of poking through a few of the dialog boxes revised by Adobe in recent versions of Photoshop and — surprise, surprise — they are not good in lots of pretty rudimentary ways:

I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For Photoshop here, nothing I see indicates any change in course or clientele – and yet all of these good moments in UI that used to help me out no longer exist.

Plus, all those transgressions are solved problems. Those issues are not buried in pages of heavily litigated patents, or in seven collective brains of world-class interface designers whose driveways are presently occupied by cash-filled trucks sent over by frontier companies. This isn’t some long lost art that requires archaeologists to decipher. This feels like carelessness and laziness in face of basic UI engineering; in a likely internally-motivated effort to refresh the interface, the team threw an entire nursery worth of babies with the bathwater.

If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React.

This is loathsome.

There are people out there who will insist it is unfair to blame the tools and that bad user interfaces can be built in entirely native languages, too, which is true. Also, Adobe’s interface has always been unique and not quite at home on either MacOS or Windows. Maybe it really is possible to build a web app that feels platform native. But I have never used one — not once — and for this mess to be increasingly used in the industry-standard professional suite of creative tools is maddening.

There are good reasons why Adobe is ridding itself of allies, and this is one of them. I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it does not matter. Wichary has it right. These are fundamental principles of user interface design that Adobe is ignoring because its internal tooling has taken precedence.

See Also: Michael Tsai’s link roundup.

Artemis II Photo Timeline ⇥ artemistimeline.com

Here is something wonderful. Hank Green took all the amazing photos (previously) shot for the Artemis II mission, combined them with the schedule provided by NASA, and made an interactive timeline of it all. It is really quite nice.

It is also a tribute to publicly available data. Though the timeline includes some videos published to Instagram and YouTube, the vast majority are images from Flickr. NASA usually uploads them with EXIF data intact, and Flickr preserves it. NASA also provided the mission schedule and, even better, has a public API for the position of the Orion spacecraft at any given time. Which means Green was also able to correlate the photos with where they were taken along the craft’s trajectory.

I Kind of Fixed My iCloud Photos Problem and All I Got Was Two Blog Posts and Probably Years Off My Life

An advantage of publishing my problems with wide circulation is that sometimes people will be very helpful in their comments and emails.1 Plenty of people kindly suggested alternatives and ways to correct the problems I was having and, after many days’ work, I think I am on better footing.

But first, it is my fault as a writer that it seems I did not differentiate clearly enough the two related issues I have experienced with iCloud Photos. The first problem is that it is very easy to get images into an iCloud-stored photo library, but extremely difficult to extract them. This issue is compounded by a lack of transparency and data verification. The second problem is that it is necessary to commit to a lifetime of storage if one uses a third-party cloud option.

The software suggestions I received are manifold. The first is a category comprising a bunch of self-hosted options, of which the most popular seems to be Immich. This would solve the problem of a long-term commitment to a third-party provider, but it requires me to be a hobbyist data centre technician and I cannot handle more things on my to-do list. Yes, I have looked at the documentation and it seems straightforward enough. No, I still do not want to take this on. Perhaps one day, but not now.

I am, in fact, happy to pay someone to deal with that for me. Apple should be doing a better job of it than I ever could. Its data centres, whether first-party or third-party, surely have redundancies upon redundancies, and a level of data validation I simply cannot compete with. My dispute with this is not about third-party storage per se. Rather, it is how shoddy an experience it is to move photos out of iCloud and, also, my inability to verify that everything is as safe and secure as it should be.

But I was pointed to two pieces of software I can use that made my life easier and got me onto more stable footing. The first is Parachute Backup (MacOS 15 or later), which created a backup of my entire iCloud photo library and, soon, will also be backing up everything else I have in iCloud, for good measure. This is good software; I like it a lot. But I will provide a couple of caveats up-front if you are attempting a similar strategy.

Most obviously, it will download everything, which means you need a disk big enough to hold a discrete copy of everything you store in iCloud. That could be expensive right now. I bought a 2 TB external Samsung SSD a few years ago for $400, and it is currently nearly $800 on Amazon. But I do hoard old hard disks and I found a 2 TB one I could clear up.

You are also going to need patience. Not only will it take time to download, depending on your internet connection and the amount of stuff you have in iCloud, Parachute does not have any built-in bandwidth controls from what I could see. I am sure I could have found a way to limit it, but I just let it run. It took five days.

But now I am pretty sure I have a local copy of everything in iCloud. This is the feeling I should get from having “download originals to this Mac” switched on — which I have for several years — but that is apparently not a reliable preference. Also, this copy of my photo library is meaningfully organized in a date-based directory tree instead of some abstruse collection of randomized folders.

The other piece of software to which I owe my newfound sense of calm is PowerPhotos. Despite being hands-down the most frequent software recommendation from readers, it never came up in my earlier searches. I guess I was not using the correct keywords. In any case, it is an excellent application. Because I did the full Parachute backup, I felt comfortable with PowerPhotos modifying my library and generally doing its thing. It lets me easily drag photos from my primary iCloud-connected library to my archive, and its duplicate image finder is way better than the one in Photos.

What that means is that I can now confidently maintain that archive photos library. It is not worth the increase in iCloud storage costs for me to carry all of my tens of thousands of photos everywhere I go. For me, it is definitely worth the cost of these two software licenses to have more control.

(Also, an extra nice thing about PowerPhotos is that it has been around for ages, and old versions of the software remain available for download. The latest ones do not work on my iMac, but 2.x versions do, and a license key unlocks them all the same.)

I am receiving nothing by pointing you to either of these applications. I paid for both myself. However, I heard from the new owner of Parachute shortly after I published my article with a license for each of the Mac and iOS versions. I do not usually accept codes and I bought my own license anyhow, so I asked if I could give those codes away. I only have one of each to give out and they are only valid for another couple of days, so shoot me an email and let me know which one you want. (Update: Both licenses have been claimed.)

  1. It also means some other people will be spectacularly unhelpful. Here is a free tip: if your immediate reaction to someone having a problem with a service they are using as marketed is to blame them, consider whether you are actually being a smug jerk. (Ten points to you if you figure out which comment, specifically, encouraged me to write this footnote.) ↥︎

The Case for Canadian Digital Sovereignty ⇥ begiant.ca

Mathew Ingram wrote, for Be Giant, an interesting profile of Gander and other digital sovereignty efforts in Canada and the E.U., which I think is an evenhanded exploration of the excitement and pitfalls. For example, Gander’s founder Ben Waldman notes the de facto requirement to use U.S.-based payment systems on iOS:

There have been some major hurdles along the way, he concedes, which helps explain why Gander didn’t meet its initial goal of launching last October. One challenge was the idea of verifying users. It was suggested that they be asked to send a toonie to the company via the Interac network, but there was a risk that Apple might not approve the new app if payments were made outside its App Store. So the current plan is to have users verify their identity using Interac or Canada Post, both of which allow you to do so without sending your personal information over the internet.

I am not anti-U.S., but I am in favour of identifying singular dependencies.

‘How Europe Regulated Itself Into American Vassalage’ ⇥ economist.com

Stanley Pignal, the Economist (here is a gift link from someone, somewhere):

Here is an uncomfortable truth for hand-wringing policymakers in Paris, Berlin and beyond: Europe’s dependency on America Inc is in no small part Europe’s own fault. Decades of over-regulating the old continent’s economy left businesses there unable to compete with American firms, which went on to trounce European ones even in their own backyards. What Europeans could not build quickly for themselves, due to a thicket of regulations, they often imported just as quickly from abroad. That forcing businesses to jump through endless regulatory hoops would put a burden on Europeans was always understood: meeting ambitious green targets, protecting privacy, preventing bank meltdowns or achieving other necessary goals was always going to carry a cost. But the extent to which it also left Europeans in hock to foreigners — for now mostly America, but also increasingly China—has only belatedly become clear.

This is by no means a new argument; it is one the Economist makes constantly, including in a similar article two months ago, and Pignal in a previous column in October. Yet it is worth considering, nevertheless, that too much regulatory oversight has hampered Europe’s ability to compete with the United States. This is a possibility.

I find it telling, however, that Pignal cannot cite a specific example of this. Each paragraph contains an example of some regulation — limitations on the extractive economics of credit card interchange fees, environmental policies, and so on — and they all seem pretty reasonable. Pignal’s closing paragraph is all about how much he agrees with regulating A.I. and antitrust. But the limp conclusion is that it is the combination of sensible policies that has left Europe in an uncompetitive position with the comparatively lax regulatory environment of the U.S., where the highest court has repeatedly ruled against the authority of regulatory agencies.

It is unclear what E.U. regulators ought to do with Pignal’s feedback. It seems very easy to say there are too many regulations and too much red tape. It seems much more difficult to explain which part of the environment, human and animal safety, customer rights, privacy, or good business behaviour must be sacrificed in the name of international competition.

FOIA Documents ‘Scrubbed’ From Intelligence Agency Website ⇥ bloomberg.com

A strange thing happened last May: the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s FOIA page, which had previously contained a generous list of released documents, was censored. When I asked the agency what was up with that, they told me the site was “currently under construction in order to enhance and streamline the user experience”, with “temporary downtime of certain pages and content”. It turns out that was nonsense, hence my use of “censored” above.

Jason Leopold, in his “FOIA Files” newsletter at Bloomberg:

But an ODNI official told FOIA Files that the removal of the FOIA page was not connected to the Tren de Aragua intelligence assessment released to Harper. Instead, the website overhaul was prompted after another agency flagged a document released during the Biden administration that the official claimed had been improperly posted to ODNI’s FOIA reading room. (The official would not describe the document or say if it was retroactively classified.)

The emails I obtained, which have been partially redacted, reference a “document,” the title of which was blacked out, that sparked ODNI’s aggressive response.

If there was a single erroneously released document, it surely would not necessitate the removal of so many documents. One of the few ones remaining in the reading room is, oddly enough, the partially redacted email exchange (PDF) released to Leopold in which Madeline Meeker asks for the page to be “completely scrubbed”. No request logs have been posted since January 2025 under the “most transparent administration in history”.

Dutch Broadcaster Confirms Identity of Someone Running an Alberta Separatist YouTube Channel ⇥ bnr.nl

Aäron Loupatty, BNR (in Dutch, as interpreted by Safari’s translation feature):

Because Canadian media have taken it out so big, Youp now says he is changing course. “This came out of nowhere for us. It is clear what it has brought about. If I had known earlier that this was a problem, I would have adjusted the content accordingly.’ Contrary to what the universities claim, Youp says there is no coordinated network that wants to fuel separatist sentiments in Alberta. According to him, many of the videos are created precisely because channels look away from each other, but there is no collaboration there.

“Youp” is Youp Licher, who was originally identified by CBC News. I have no reason to disbelieve him in claiming that this is simply a financial play, and not a deliberate effort to meddle in Alberta politics.

One of the YouTube channels in question — the Canadian Reporter — has accumulated around 15.5 million total video views since it was created on May 1 last year. Using an approximate number of 44,000 daily views with Social Blade’s earnings estimator suggests a range of USD $3,960–$63,360 in annual revenue from ads alone. That is a huge range, to be sure, but even the lowest number is a successful side hustle for how little work actually goes into this stuff.

More traditional media organizations — BNR and CBC News being two examples — attempted to separate the business side of what they do from the news side. Paying writers based on clicks used to be a noteworthy exception, but then traffic bonuses became part of the compensation package at some outlets. It eventually paved the way for the YouTube-native model of almost entirely traffic-based compensation. Historically powerful human gatekeepers have been replaced by the singular platform of YouTube, which means anyone can make money and possibly a living if they have a large enough audience. A fandom parlays into other revenue streams, of course; Canadian Reporter sells paid subscriptions on YouTube from $1.50–$10.50 per month, and has a “Buy Me a Coffee” link in the bio albeit with just two subscribers.

In the way this new economy has pushed out the old, it is unfortunately fitting that one of the inadvertent faces of one of these channels is Matt Berry. Berry made an audition tape without knowing how it was going to be used because he had a profile on freelance talent site Upwork. But Berry is no long-term freelancer. He was, until 2021, the award-winning music director at X92.9, Calgary’s alternative rock station. I cannot find any comment from the station’s owner as to why he was among those laid off at the time, but it feels a little on-the-nose that a former broadcaster found his likeness being used without permission to market some clickbait A.I.-generated videos and boost someone else’s AdSense revenue.

(Thank you to reader Sanel for sending me this link.)

Dutch YouTubers Behind Alberta Separatist Videos, Finds CBC News ⇥ cbc.ca

Eric Szeto, et al., CBC News:

CBC News identified three individuals in the Netherlands whose digital trail links them to accounts that hired actors to appear on the YouTube channels. Two of them attended the same online course that teaches customers how to create “faceless” YouTube channels that generate passive income for the creators, who remain in the shadows.

Turns out it was not a VPN connection after all.

Oracle Laid Off (Tens of?) Thousands of People in March ⇥ theregister.com

O’Ryan Johnson, reporting for the Register at the end of March:

Oracle laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday as it ramps spending on AI infrastructure projects internally and with major technology partners.

[…]

Oracle employs about 162,000 people, with 58,000 of those in the US and approximately 104,000 internationally. If the rumored cuts of 30,000 are correct, it would amount to 18 percent of the company’s workforce.

Hugh Langley and Ashley Stewart, Business Insider:

Employees started receiving notifications early Tuesday. The cuts appear to have affected employees globally, but the full extent of the layoffs could not be immediately learned.

“After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change,” copies of the notification email viewed by Business Insider stated. “As a result, today is your last working day.”

This is possibly tens of thousands of people whose lives have been upended after getting an email. They had plans. Since those layoffs, Larry Ellison’s net worth has grown by about $45 billion.

Meta Drops the Other Shoe, Announces Thousands of Layoffs for Next Month ⇥ ft.com

Hannah Murphy, Financial Times:

Meta will cut 10 per cent of its staff next month, or about 8,000 jobs, as the social media platform reduces its workforce to offset chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s AI spending spree.

[…]

Meta also said that it was no longer filling 6,000 positions that it had initially planned to hire for, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Not the 20% reported by Reuters last month, but a huge number nevertheless. This is in addition to a thousand people laid off in January and hundreds more in March. That is a lot of lives upended — a lot of people who relocated, made plans, bought houses, and made commitments they might no longer be able to fulfill — because Meta hired too aggressively, and is now running a “marvel of financial engineering” to build data centres.

The Disappearance of the Public Bench ⇥ placesjournal.org

Gabrielle Bruney, Places:

Benches aren’t just disappearing from large railroad stations, but also from subways, parks, plazas, sidewalks, and esplanades. Public transit systems in Philadelphia, Chicago, Anaheim, and New York City have lost benches, as have the entrance to Seattle’s Pike Place Market, a National Park plaza in Washington, D.C., a thoroughfare of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a boulevard dedicated to Korean veterans in Nashville, and a tiny riverfront park in Janesville, Wisconsin. Some of these seats were replaced with armatures for perching or leaning, but most were not. There is no firm data on how many benches have been removed in total, nor when the trend precisely started. But anecdotal evidence suggests that in the past decade, across the United States, hundreds of places to sit in public have quietly disappeared.

This is New York-centric and U.S.-heavy, but it is something I have also noticed around me, too. A bench is one of the few places you can sit and spend time for free. Their absence in so many public places is notable for what it says about who we consider part of the public.

Joanna Stern Launches ‘New Things’ ⇥ thenewthings.com

Joanna Stern left the Wall Street Journal and is going independent with her new thing called New Things, and I like this overarching editorial question:

But while writing my new book, I AM NOT A ROBOT — where I used AI in as many parts of my life as possible for a year — I realized Is this a good product? isn’t the main question to ask anymore. The bigger question is: Who is this tech for? Wall Street? Greedy CEOs? AI agents? Actual humans? I want it to be for humans. And I want to cover it that way too: as a human living with it, using it, testing it and trying to make sense of what it’s doing to our lives.

After all, tech is not really about products and services; it never has been. It is what they do for us and what they — or the companies that created them — expect of us.

The Online Spam Campaign to Support Alberta Separatism ⇥ thetyee.ca

Charles Rusnell, the Tyee:

A network of 20 inauthentic YouTube accounts has racked up nearly 40 million views by peddling lies, grievance, division and narratives normalizing the prospect of Alberta’s secession and annexation by the United States.

“Because these channels offer no identifying information to real humans or organizations, nor ties to the secession movement in Alberta, we are flagging this phenomenon as a potential covert influence operation produced by unknown actors pursuing unclear objectives,” states a report released today by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network.

The authors of the report “cannot confirm this network’s origin or intent, and the available evidence is inconclusive on both counts”, but it is notable to me that the official X accounts of two of the most-viewed channels, the “Canadian Reporter” and “David Fraser”, say they are either based in or connected via the Netherlands App Store. This seems to me like the product of a VPN, but it is notable they did not even mask their origin and pretend to be in Canada.

This sucks. Our province is such a political catastrophe that we are being exploited from — probably — abroad and close to home. It is unclear to me how much of an effect the YouTube network identified by these researchers would have; many of the channels have video view counts of well under a hundred. And even though a few of these channels appear to be taking off, they are surely eclipsed by a home-grown industry of people who seem to pump out daily videos broadcasting their conspiracy theories and separatist fairytales. I easily found a bunch of separatism-promoting channels — “Fight for Canada”, “PJ the Belt”, “John Bolton”, and “Igor Ryltsev” — each with millions of total lifetime video views. They are loud and probably a minority, but they are probably more likely to tilt a referendum, and that is frightening.

Breaking Up Is Hard for E.U. ⇥ politico.eu

Mathieu Pollet and Anouk Schlung, Politico:

Sensing a change in the air, Big Tech firms have wasted no time rolling out offerings meant to soothe — and cash in on — Europe’s unease.

Over the past year, U.S. hyperscalers have rushed to build products with EU-based governance structures and local operators, while doubling down on technical and legal safeguards. “Our industry, frankly, is doing a lot to address [the concerns] insofar as possible,” said Guido Lobrano, the director general for Europe of tech lobby ITI.

But critics have been dismissing their attempts as “sovereignty washing.” “Marketers realized it sells. Trump was a great salesman for this idea,” said Philippe Latombe, a centrist member of the French parliament.

The red alert push for digital sovereignty is really only about a year-and-a-half old, at most, and it is remarkable what E.U. countries have been able to achieve in that time. Yet it is a fraught and challenging operation, regardless. These big U.S.-based companies are deeply embedded into everything we do and a clean break was never going to be possible, in large part because it is not designed to be easy. That is not to say it is deliberately designed to be difficult — despite the consumer-level evidence offered by Amazon’s Prime cancellation procedure — only that there are few incentives to help users leave.

Meta Tells U.S. Staff It Is Going to Start Surveilling Their Every Digital Move for A.I. Training ⇥ reuters.com

Katie Paul and Jeff Horwitz, Reuters:

Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and ​keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.

If this were happening at any other company, it would be an alarming violation of workers’ expectations. But since it is Meta, I am sure employees, even those who are captive, will be reassured by the pinky promise limited scope in using this information.

That Was Tim, This Is Ternus ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

Oh, and Cook will apparently be taking one very specific job with him to the boardroom, according to the press release:

Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to read between those lines. Cook is keeping one of the stickiest jobs he’s had to do the last decade for himself, for now: connecting with the representatives of various governments in ways that advantage Apple, whether that’s easing China’s worries about Apple’s focus on diversifying its supply chain, or convincing the Trump administration that Apple is investing in the U.S. while also needing tariff relief. Not only does Cook have the personal connections there, but it’s a messy business that perhaps Ternus is best insulated from — for now.

The Tim Cook story at Apple is an almost poetic arc. Upon arrival, he fundamentally overhauled the way its products would be made, primarily by moving manufacturing to Japan, Taiwan, and China. This groundwork is what allowed him to transform the company when he arrived as CEO, growing it into a global behemoth and working within China to create the best and most precise electronics manufacturing chain anywhere. And that became a problem for him. The Chinese government was able to use that as leverage, and the tie-up became politically untenable in the United States, too. Cook’s precise supply chain management directly led to his appeasement of strongmen.

Tim Cook Is Stepping Down as Apple CEO in September, to Be Replaced by John Ternus ⇥ apple.com

With today’s news, we can settle a score. In November, four reporters for the Financial Times wrote that Apple was “stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year”:

An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September, the people said.

Then, in his Bloomberg newsletter a week later, Mark Gurman reported:

[…] Based on everything I’ve learned in recent weeks, I don’t believe a departure by the middle of next year is likely. In fact, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in the time frame outlined by the FT. Some people have speculated that the story was a “test balloon” orchestrated by Apple or someone close to Cook to prepare Wall Street for a change, but that isn’t the case either. I believe the story was simply false.

There are correct elements in both stories: the Times accurately reported that Apple was “preparing for its longtime leader to step down as early as next year”, while Gurman was ultimately right to claim Cook would not leave by midyear. Gurman also had the scoop that John Ternus was the CEO-in-waiting. But, in spirit, I would argue the Times story was more correct than Gurman’s response, which continued:

Yes, Apple will eventually have a new leader. And, yes, it’s probably Ternus. But unless there is some unexpected event that forces Cook to step down sooner than planned, that moment is not at hand. […]

While “as soon as next year” gives the paper a lot of room — anything can happen “as soon as next year” — its sources correctly assessed Tim Cook’s time as CEO was ending. And, despite Gurman responding to the report as though it were “imminent” event, the word does not appear once in the Times’ story. The Times was not running a “test balloon” and the story certainly was not false.