Month: January 2023

Stories From NYT Readers About Their Use of Amazon Alexa Devices ⇥ nytimes.com

Hanna Ingber, New York Times:

We decided to ask readers how they use and interact with Alexa and how the technology fits into their lives. Nearly 200 people in the United States and Europe responded.

Those who relied on the voice assistant said they used it mainly for mundane tasks such as setting timers and checking the weather. Many said they had grown attached to Alexa and missed it when they were away. Most said they did not use Alexa to help them with shopping. Others told us, just as emphatically, that they would never use an Alexa device.

Amazon U.K. released a list of commonly asked questions in 2022 and its use has not much changed from a 2018 survey. If anything, the 2022 list of frequent requests makes it sound often like a children’s toy, with nursery rhymes topping the most requested songs to be sung and a top ten list of farts.

The stories relayed by Ingber which I found myself most struck by are those from or about elderly people who use their voice devices for all kinds of tasks large and small. I am sure Amazon knows about these uses, but it highlights for me how little sense it makes to offload this kind of care to businesses that can pull the plug at any time. I do not blame any of the individuals here — Ingber includes the story of someone who uses Alexa devices to help take care of a parent with dimentia — but it is upsetting to know a loss-leading product could be discontinued and leave these users abandoned.

Dell and Samsung Announce New Displays at CES ⇥ theverge.com

Adam Engst, writing at TidBits in 2018:

In short, the LG UltraFine 5K Display appears to be the only 5K display you can buy today, and you would have to order it online, sight unseen. If you can wait, it’s possible that LG will have a new model, and Apple has said that it will be releasing an Apple-branded professional display alongside the revamped Mac Pro in 2019. Apple has said nothing about specs, but it’s hard to see the company selling a screen that doesn’t at least match up to its iMacs.

Apple did indeed launch a famously expensive display alongside the 2019 Mac Pro, followed by a less costly option last year. Even with Apple’s own-brand entries, there have been painfully few options for anyone who would like to a higher density display than the industry standard 27-inch 4K models allow.

Dan Siefert, the Verge:

That, of course, was until this week, when Samsung and Dell both announced new monitors clearly meant to appeal to Mac users. These new screens aren’t just run-of-the-mill 4K panels with USB-C ports and white plastic — they have the actual high-res pixel densities that work best with macOS and match the sharpness of Apple’s displays. They also offer the “whole package” of integrated webcam, microphone, and speakers that Apple sells with the Studio Display, providing a whole desk setup through one cable.

Samsung’s is a 27-inch 5K model of exactly the same density as Apple’s Studio Display or the now-departed big iMac, while Dell’s is a 32-inch 6K model comparable in size and density to the Pro Display XDR. Why it has taken so long for other options remains a great unanswered question, as does — so far — the pricing of these new displays.

The Curse of Free ⇥ theregister.com

Rupert Goodwins, the Register:

Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can’t be monetized. Google Cloud is $700 million in the red as of last earnings and heading south to a state of madness like a New Jersey retiree. These are mature products in saturated markets. You don’t need an MBA to know what will happen. But even the dean of Harvard Business School can’t say when.

[…] Google is notably brutal in pulling the plug on popular services it considers no longer interesting, but surely Gmail would be impossible to shrug off. And it must be profitable, with all those users. Right?

It is very far from clear that it is. Google isn’t saying. Gmail, like G Suite-cum-Workspace and the whole bouquet of user and business-facing appified services, is reported as part of Google Cloud, which is losing a lot of money now and perhaps a lot more next year. There are subscription models and a little advertising which will be making some money. Clearly not enough.

Google famously baits its users into its free service offerings before either killing them off or beginning to charge for them. I do not think Gmail is at risk of going away or becoming payware, though. As commenter LDS writes, getting users to log into Gmail is an effective way to ensure they remain connected to their Google account across the web. Whatever Gmail costs, I bet Google makes that up in the volume of tracking it enables, especailly as it begins migrating its services to its root domain.

Goodwins’ post reminded me of the other curse of free-to-user services, though, which is their inherently predatory quality. Google was able to buy up a bunch of other companies to create Google Maps, which it then offered free — a move that benefitted both users and Google itself. But it also put a damper on the rest of the industry as few substantial competitors to Google Maps existed for the better part of a decade following its launch. Not only did Google boost its other businesses through mapping data — for example, being able to show nearby business results in search — it also offered developer integrations and API keys. After few major competitors remained and even high-budget attempts like Apple’s were struggling, Google dramatically increased pricing for developers. Today, the landscape looks a little different with Apple’s increased dedication and third-party efforts like Felt, but we should not ignore how dangerous it is for deep-pocketed companies to undercut competitors through pricing schemes like these.

Cyberattack on the Guardian ⇥ semafor.com

Speaking of the Guardian, it is apparently the victim of an ongoing attack which is primarily affecting its print and office systems.

Max Tani, Semafor:

Guardian staffers who spoke to Semafor said there seemed to be a distinction between the systems that were working and those that continued to be shuttered. The paper’s email and digital publishing systems have operated normally.

But some of the more antiquated systems, including company expenses and some elements of print production, remain buggy. Columnist picture bylines have disappeared in print for the moment as the result of the hack, a blow for some of the egos of the paper’s opinion writers.

It sounds like even most staff at the paper do not have a good sense of what is going on despite the attack beginning weeks ago.

Apple Launches Audiobooks Voiced by Digital Narrators ⇥ theguardian.com

Leyland Cecco, the Guardian:

Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour.

[…]

On the company’s Books app, searching for “AI narration” reveals the catalogue of works included in the scheme, which are described as being “narrated by digital voice based on a human narrator”.

Apple says it is starting with fiction and romance titles and, of course, in English only.

In addition to the examples on Apple’s website, I listened to a random selection of previews in Apple Books. They are good and often convincing. But I do not think this is what listeners ought to receive when they spend real money on an audiobook. These voices are only a little better than Apple’s screen reading voices, available in each platform’s Accessibility preferences. “Better than nothing” is not the most compelling argument for me, but I suppose it is inevitable; Google has offered a similar service since last year.

On Internet Silos ⇥ manuelmoreale.com

Monique Judge, the Verge:

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.

I want to go back there.

Good news for my readers: you are already there.

Manuel Moreale:

[…] The more I think and read about it, the more I’m convinced that there’s no solution to the centralisation issue we’re currently facing. And that’s because I think that fundamentally people are, when it comes to the internet, lazy. And gathering where everyone else is definitely seems easier. It’s also easier to delegate the job of moderating and policing to someone else and so as a result people will inevitably cluster around a few big websites, no matter what infrastructure we build.

One thing Judge does not really mention is how, pre-social media, it used to be difficult to make people aware of your blog. You could write and publish all you wanted but it sometimes felt Sysephian when your only audience were a handful of real-life friends and the few people who clicked on your profile on a forum, often leading to ill maintenance. Apologies for not posting in a while were a recurring theme.

Now we have the opposite problem: it is so easy to find other people and everything they have ever posted to a platform that it is, itself, a problem — recall Chris Hayes’ “On the Internet, We’re Always Famous”. That does not mean blogging went away — I do not think it did — but it changed form and became a stream-of-consciousness on someone else’s website against which ads for cereal and crappy cookware could be sold. To build upon what Moreale writes, the people who actually want to maintain a website are a minority. Even if you use that Squarespace offer code to get “your own” website, you are still publishing on a third-party platform.

By all means, please start your own blog and encourage others to do so. But let us not pretend this is what most people actually want to be doing. We are all busy and maintaining a website when the house needs to be cleaned and people need to be fed is a terrible waste of time. Silos suck over the long term, but at least they are easy.

These are good companion pieces to the (previously linked) “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things”.

Irish Data Protection Commission Rules Meta Exploited Contract Provision of GDPR to Illegally Coerce Users Into Personalized Ads ⇥ dataprotection.ie

The Data Protection Commission of Ireland has issued its judgement in a case brought against Meta — then Facebook — when GDPR came into effect nearly five years ago:

Meta Ireland considered that, on accepting the updated Terms of Service, a contract was entered into between Meta Ireland and the user. It also took the position that the processing of users’ data in connection with the delivery of its Facebook and Instagram services was necessary for the performance of that contract, to include the provision of personalised services and behavioural advertising, so that such processing operations were lawful by reference to Article 6(1)(b) of the GDPR (the “contract” legal basis for processing).

The complainants contended that, contrary to Meta Ireland’s stated position, Meta Ireland was in fact still looking to rely on consent to provide a lawful basis for its processing of users’ data. They argued that, by making the accessibility of its services conditional on users accepting the updated Terms of Service, Meta Ireland was in fact “forcing” them to consent to the processing of their personal data for behavioural advertising and other personalised services. The complainants argued that this was in breach of the GDPR.

The Data Protection Commission has fined Meta a total of €390 million and requires its services to be compliant within three months. Perhaps just as important is that it appears the GDPR logjam is slowly beginning to loosen.

Noyb, which helped bring these complaints to the attention of regulators, has responded on its blog, as did Meta. The latter’s response is interesting to me because it appears to be tying its increased personalization push to targeted advertising. That is, Meta’s services are now TikTok-like algorithmically tailored feeds and it is impossible to disentangle that personalization from the way the ads are delivered. Cheeky. It is obviously planning to appeal the DPC’s ruling.

Unsettled Questions About Privacy and Law Enforcement ⇥ twitter.com

Meredith Whittaker of Signal, on that terrible New York Times op-ed:

[…] Those of us invested in defending privacy need to understand that this op-ed wasn’t written for people with expertise, and its purpose won’t be perturbed by expert rebuttal. We’re not the audience.

The op-ed works to create the appearance of a “debate” on more or less settled issues. This is a powerful function, bolstered by the NYT imprimatur, which allows it [to] serve as a “Potemkin citation” — a seemingly credible reference in support of bad privacy laws and platforms.

These issues may be largely settled as far as the law is concerned, but they are not without ongoing controversy. It is somewhat tangential but, in 2016, two polls about the then-current dispute between Apple and the FBI over a terrorist’s encrypted iPhone came to different results but only marginally. I think people actually come closer to Reid Blackman’s stance more than they do Whittaker’s. The one itty-bitty problem is that it is currently impossible to ensure respectable law enforcement can gain access to criminals’ encrypted files while the rest of us find our security and privacy uncompromised.