Sara M. Watson, writing for Columbia Journalism Review’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism in 2016:
Technology criticism evokes visions of loom-smashing Luddites and told-you-so Cassandras. Something about criticism in the context of technology seems to suggest that technological change is problematic, or something to be resisted entirely. Yet other forms of cultural criticism don’t share this fault-finding burden. In other contexts, criticism is understood to be thoughtful consideration and close analysis rather than oppositional judgment and rejection.
I rediscovered this essay following discussion of Marc Andreessen’s whining essay published earlier this week. I think Watson’s report is as important as Andreessen’s would be disposable if not for its author; though it is long, it is worth your time.
The time when Watson’s report was released seems significant to me: October 2016. As she observed, it was just three years and a few month after Edward Snowden’s leaked intelligence documents dinged up the reputation of the U.S. technology sector — arguably the first major challenge to generally glowing coverage of new tech products and services for the preceding decade. But it was published just before the 2016 U.S. presidential election produced an upset — and downright upsetting — victor, a result enabled in part by targeted advertising.
That event sent much of the mainstream U.S. press to more completely investigate the mysterious world of large technology companies from a perspective that could most optimistically be described as “more skeptical”, but more realistically as “more negative”. There were some pretty badly reported stories from this period of time, for sure, but I do not think that is a fair summary of the entire field. It meant publications with more prestigious names and larger budgets were able to dig into the kinds of topics industry websites had been writing about for years. Reporters asked about privacy and discriminatory advertising and moderation policies and all kinds of things which had mostly stayed out of mainstream newspapers. Their coverage was not entirely rosy before the election but, afterward, it was decidedly more pointed.
Unfortunately, that means much of the ongoing discussion about platforms is still the product of a partisan political context. To be sure, it is worth scrutinizing how targeted advertising could play a role in putting an extremist candidate in one of the most powerful offices in the world, but it is not remotely the whole story. Erin Kissane has been reexamining and more fully contextualizing the role of Meta’s products in Myanmar, for example.
Watson’s exploration of technology criticism clearly comes from a place of appreciation for both technology and criticism. That is among the many things which I think Andreessen’s series of mission statements misses entirely. High technology is the fabric for our world today, and the companies which produce it ought to be treated as such: they create extremely useful things which are very powerful and, thus, demand an expectation of responsibility previously ascribed in the private sector only to petrochemical companies and banks. It is perfectly reasonable to question their motivations, products, services, tax structures, power, marketing, media relationships, and societal impact. I am as guilty as anyone of straying from the frameworks Watson has suggested, and I intend as always to do better.
Today’s Google Doodle recognizes the legacy of Violet King Henry, born in Calgary in 1929, and becoming the first black woman to practise law in Canada in 1954.
Her daughter, Jo-Anne Henry, wrote about her for Google’s blog:
My favorite quote of my mom is one I only discovered 2 years ago in preparing a presentation about her. A few years after making history as the first Black woman lawyer in Canada, my mother was speaking at an event and reflected on her journey to becoming a lawyer. She said “people told me it wasn’t a good idea for a girl to be a lawyer, particularly a coloured girl… so I went ahead.”
Songtradr, the Santa Monica-based music licensing service that acquired Bandcamp from Epic Games, said on Monday that it had closed the deal for the music discovery platform. Some 60 Bandcamp staffers, out of 118, were offered employment to join Songtradr’s staff of 369 workers, a company spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter, adding: “People who didn’t receive offers from Songtradr will receive severance from Epic as part of their layoffs as communicated on September 28.”
My tepid optimism for Bandcamp’s long-term success under the ownership of Songtradr is taking a few hits. My thoughts are with the fifty-eight staff laid off in this brutal year for tech labour.
Update: The people working on unionization efforts at Bandcamp were among those dismissed. No surprises, just disappointment.
The timing feels right. Twitter has imploded and social sites/services like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are jockeying to replace it (for various definitions of “replace”). People are re-thinking what they want out of social media on the internet and I believe there’s an opportunity for sites like kottke.org to provide a different and perhaps even better experience for sharing and discussing information. Shit, maybe I’m wrong but it’s definitely worth a try.
Only active kottke.org members will be permitted to comment, and there is a reasonable set of guidelines. Defector and few other sites I visit have also tied commenting to paid memberships, and it seems like a good compromise all around. It creates a more balanced investment — emotional and financial — between the author and their community, and gives people a little badge of honour.
I have long had comments switched off here and I, too, have wondered if the stratification of social media should encourage a more localized community. There are sites out there with good comments sections: in addition to the aforementioned Defector, the discussion on some Techdirt and Metafilter posts are also often good. Alas, it is another thing to maintain, another vector for marketing spam, and something else I would need to design. Truly — one of the reasons I have not put comments here is because I do not like the way they look.
One thing I have noticed since the great fleeting of Twitter has been an uptick in the number of reader emails I receive. I think I prefer that, even though I am terrible at replying. I delight in a little one-on-one discussion with someone challenging something I wrote, adding to it with a personal experience, or merely correcting a typo. If you have ever emailed me, please know that I have read what you wrote. The same is true of mentions on any other platform, too, but email feels especially personal. For commenting on a personal website, that seems right to me.
It is not succinct and it is not especially coherent, but at least we now have a full record of the beliefs Marc Andreessen — and others of his ilk — are going to bat for. It is just about every right-libertarian fantasy — except that one — wrapped in the kind of absolutist framing that strives to negate disagreement, fact-checking, or critical thinking.
I think anyone can find themselves agreeing with parts of this in a broad sense. Progress is, indeed, a good thing, and regression is usually bad. Brilliant. But the point of this essay is not in its most general and defensible interpretation. If you start digging into the details of this essay — however abstract they often are — they reveal a dark, deeply pessimistic worldview in which the solutions to all our problems can be found in products we can buy, and that market forces should triumph over caution. For example, Andreessen writes that “[d]eaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder”, but does not write the same of deaths due to a lack of oversight. Any deaths caused so far by autonomous vehicles are excusable but, in Andreessen’s world, one cannot say the same for cases where such technology was subjected to regulatory controls.
I could go on, but I do not think it is necessary. This is a useful shibboleth for elite venture capitalist philosophy in 2023, and little more.
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Internal Tech Emails posted an email exchange between Tim Cook and Eddy Cue, as revealed during the ongoing Google antitrust trial. Cue had just met with Sundar Pichai about renegotiating their Safari deal [sic]:
[…] He tried to say we pay you more than anyone, numbers are increasing and i will pay you for everything so we should keep it at [REDACTED]I told him that him and I need to sit down alone next week and agree to the economic terms or we shouldn’t move forward.
David Pierce, of the Verge, covered Cue’s in-court testimony concerning this email:
Meagan Bellshaw, a Justice Department lawyer, asked Cue if he would have walked away from the deal if the two sides couldn’t agree on a revenue-share figure. Cue said he’d never really considered that an option: “I always felt like it was in Google’s best interest, and our best interest, to get a deal done.” Cue also argued that the deal was about more than economics and that Apple never seriously considered switching to another provider or building its own search product. “Certainly there wasn’t a valid alternative to Google at the time,” Cue said. He said there still isn’t one.
In a sense, I believe Cue that this is about more than a simple exchange of money for power and position. Google is, for most people, the only name in searching the web. The invalid alternatives Cue is referencing are, presumably, existing search engines like Bing, though it is interesting to me that Cue reportedly ruled out a much-rumoured Apple search project as a serious alternative.
One could argue it would be stupid for Apple to leave money on the table for a decision many users would probably make for themselves — and it is probably a lot of money. While the exact numbers have been revealed in court, they were done so in closed discussions and are being kept confidential, but analysts’ estimates have been steadily climbing. Two years ago, Bernstein thought it was $15 billion; now, it is a fair bit more.
“We believe there is a possibility that federal courts rule against Google and force it to terminate its search deal with Apple,” said Bernstein in the report sent to The Register. “We estimate that the ISA is worth $18B–20B in annual payments from Google to Apple, accounting for 14–16 percent of Apple’s annual operating profits.”
This gets booked as services income and, if this estimate was accurate for Apple’s 2022 fiscal year, it represents up to 25% of its revenue for that category, or up to 36% of its services profits — for setting a single default that is the dictionary definition for searching the web. So, yeah, you get it, right?
But that is obviously the point the government is making. Google does not need to pay Apple because it is worried it will immediately lose an entire audience of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users who do not change their default settings — and, if the number of people I have seen who do not even set a new wallpaper is any indication, that is a lot — it pays Apple so nobody even thinks of another option in search, email, advertising, and video hosting.
But whatever could Cue mean by saying that, if Apple and Google would be unable to come to a deal, that “we shouldn’t move forward”? If there were no other options at the time, as Cue said, this is an empty threat — the kind of negotiating posture that seems unlikely to give Apple an increasingly lucrative contract.
Like so many other web 2.0 companies, CollegeHumor started as one thing (a site for posting memes, humorous essays, and short-form videos), then became something else (a home for scripted sketch, as well as the production company behind shows like Adam Ruins Everything), before devolving into a zombie shell of itself after Barry Diller and IAC decided a modest comedy audience wasn’t good enough for investors. But unlike so many other companies that ran aground on the shores of Facebook, CollegeHumor came back. In 2018 the brand launched Dropout, a subscription-based platform with original, mostly unscripted, mostly longform content. […]
The world is rich with ways to spend a few dollars per month to get access to a library of video. Hand on heart, Dropout might be one of the best choices you can make; and, in a rare move for streaming services, the Apple TV app is pretty good.
Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.
There might be low overlap between a stereotypical reader of public broadcasting and the Elon Musk fans that have claimed Twitter, sort of like how pests and roaches take over a building and drive everyone out. This tracks with an overall decline in Twitter activity. Sure, there are some people sticking around — maybe you are one of them — and it is not a dead platform; it is still a great way to get customer support, though not from Apple. It is still a large and popular platform. But it is less essential than it used to be for breaking news, comedy, media types, or keeping up with your community.
It is not clear there is a single replacement platform right now, either. Maybe that is a good thing.
Code snippets shown to the jury demonstrated how Nishad Singh wrote some code that would update the insurance fund amount by adding to it the daily trading volume, multiplied by a randomish number around 7,500, and dividing it by a billion, thus making it appear as though the website was referencing a real account balance that was fluctuating as the exchange added funds or withdrew from it to cover losses. In reality, it was all made up.
It is so rare in computing controversies to see something so scandalous spelled out in such simple terms. You have got to appreciate FTX’s clean coding standards for making their fraudulent activity clear as day.
The proposed regulations set a $230-million cap on the amount Google and Facebook would together have to inject into Canada’s news sector. Google would have to pay $172-million of that.
But in an e-mailed statement on Monday, the final day of a month-long public consultation period on the draft regulations, Google said the government’s proposals have not fixed what it sees as fundamental flaws with the legislation. It warned that making wholesale changes to the text of the Online News Act may be the only way to address its concerns. This would require bringing the bill back to Parliament.
If Canadian publishers did not like the unfair arrangement of losing so much of their potential revenue to U.S.-based ad-based businesses that also happen to be a significant source of referrals, they will definitely dislike it when they still have to advertise with Google’s technology but no longer see its referrals.
Since Google’s introduction of its Pixel 8 phones earlier this month, it has been interesting and a little amusing to me to read the reactions to its image manipulation tools. It feels like we have been asking the same questions every year — questions like what is a photograph, anyway?, and has technology gone too far? — since Google went all-in on computational photography with its original Pixels in 2016. In fact, these are things which people have been asking about photography since its early development. Arguments about Google’s complicity in fakery seem to be missing some historical context. Which means, unfortunately, a thousand-word summary.
As it happens, I took a photo history course when I was in university many years ago. I distinctly remember the instructor showing us an 1851 image shot by Edouard Baldus, and revealing to us that it was not a single photo, but instead a series of exposures cut and merged into a single image in a darkroom. That blew my mind at the time because, until then, I had thought of photo manipulation as a relatively recent thing. I had heard about Joseph Stalin’s propaganda efforts to remove officials who displeased him. But, surely, any manipulation that required precisely cutting negatives or painting over people was quite rare until Photoshop came along, right?
No. Not even close. The legacy of photography is a legacy of lies and liars.
In the introductory essay for the 2012 exhibition “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop” — sponsored by Adobe — Mia Fineman writes of the difference between darkroom techniques to adjust regions of a photo for exposure or cropping for composition, and photos where “the final image is not identical to what the camera ‘saw’ in the instant at which the negative was exposed”.1 The catalogue features nearly two hundred years of images which fit this description: from subtle enhancements, like compositing clouds into an overexposed sky, to artistic or humorous choices — “Man on a Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders” is an oft-cited delight — to dastardly projections of political power. Perhaps the most insidious examples are those which seem like journalistic “straight” images; one version of an image of the Animas Canyon by William Henry Jackson includes several fictional elements not present in the original.
Even at the time of manipulation-by-negative, there were questions about the legitimacy and ethics of these kinds of changes. In his 1869 essay “Pictorial Effect in Photography”, Henry Peach Robinson writes “[p]hotographs of what it is evident to our senses cannot visibly exist should never be attempted”, concluding that “truth in art may exist without an absolute observance of facts”. Strangely, Robinson defends photographic manipulation that would enhance the image, but disagrees with adding elements — like a “group of cherubs” — which would be purely fantastical.
This exhibition really was sponsored by Adobe — that was not a joke — and the company’s then-senior director of digital imaging Maria Yap explained why in a statement (sic):2
[…] For more than twenty years — since its first release, in 1990 — Adobe® Photoshop® software has been accused of undermining photographic truthfulness. The implicit assumption has been that photographs shot before 1990 captured the unvarnished truth and that manipulations made possible by Photoshop compromised that truth.
Now, “Faking It” punctures this assumption, presenting two hundred works that demonstrate the many ways photographs have been manipulated since the early days of the medium to serve artistry, novelty, politics, news, advertising, fashion, and other photographic purposes. […]
It was a smart public relations decision for Adobe to remind everyone that it is not responsible for manipulated images no matter how you phrase it. In fact, a few years after this exhibition debuted at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Adobe acknowledged the twenty-fifth anniversary of Photoshop with a microsite that included a “Real or Photoshop” quiz. Several years later, there are games to test your ability to identify which person is real.
The year after Adobe’s anniversary celebration, Google introduced its first Pixel phone. Each generation has leaned harder into its computational photography capabilities, with notable highlights like astrophotography in the Pixel 4, Face Unblur and the first iteration of Magic Eraser in the Pixel 6, and Super Res Zoom in the Pixel 7 Pro. With each iteration, these technologies have moved farther away from reproducing a real scene as accurately as possible, and toward synthesizing a scene based on real-life elements.
The Pixel 8 continues this pattern with three features causing some consternation: an updated version of Magic Eraser, which now uses machine learning to generate patches for distracting photo elements; Best Take, which captures multiple stills of group photos and lets you choose the best face for each person; and Magic Editor, which uses more generative software to allow you to move around individual components of a photo. Google showed off the latter feature by showing how a trampoline could be removed to make it look like someone really did make that sick slam dunk. Jay Peters, of the Verge, is worried:
There’s nothing inherently wrong with manipulating your own photos. People have done it for a very long time. But Google’s tools put powerful photo manipulation features — the kinds of edits that were previously only available with some Photoshop knowledge and hours of work — into everyone’s hands and encourage them to be used on a wide scale, without any particular guardrails or consideration for what that might mean. Suddenly, almost any photo you take can be instantly turned into a fake.
Peters is right in general, but I think his specific pessimism is misguided. Tools like these are not exclusive to Google’s products, and they are not even that new. Adobe recently added Generative Fill to Photoshop, for example, which does the same kind of stuff as the Magic Eraser and Magic Editor. It augments the Content Aware Fill option which has been part of Photoshop since 2010. The main difference is that Content Aware Fill works the way the old Magic Eraser used to: by sampling part of the real image to create a patch, though Adobe has marketed it as an “artificial intelligence” feature before the current wave of “A.I.” hype began.
For what it is worth, I tried that with one of the examples from Google’s Pixel 8 video. You know that scene where the Magic Editor is used to remove the trampoline from a slam dunk?
A screenshot from Google’s Pixel 8 marketing video.
I roughly selected the area around the trampoline, and used the Content Aware Fill to patch that area. It took two passes but was entirely automatic:
The same screenshot, edited in Adobe® Photoshop® software.
Is it perfect? No, but it is fine. This is with technology that debuted thirteen years ago. I accomplished this in about ten seconds and not, as Peters claims, “hours”. It barely took meaningful knowledge of the software.
The worries about Content Aware Fill are familiar, too. At the time it came out, Dr. Bob Carey, then president of the U.S.-based National Press Photographers Association, was quoted in a Photoshelter blog post saying that “if an image has been altered using technology, the photo consumer needs to know”. Without an adequate disclaimer of manipulation, “images will cease to be an actual documentation of history and will instead become an altered history”.3 According to Peters, Google says the use of its “Magic” generative features will add metadata to the image file, though it says “Best Take” images will not. Metadata can be manipulated with software like ExifTool. Even data wrappers explicitly intended to avoid any manipulation, like digital rights management, can be altered or removed. We are right back where we started: photographs are purportedly light captured in time, but this assumption has always been undermined by changes which may not be obvious or disclosed.
Here is where I come clean: while it may seem like I did a lot of research for this piece, I cannot honestly say I did. This is based on writing about this topic for years, a lot of articles and journal papers I read, one class I took a long time ago, and an exhibition catalogue I borrowed from the library. I also tried my best to fact-check everything here. Even though I am not an expert, it made my head spin to see the same concerns dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. We are still asking the same things, like can I trust this photo?, and it is as though we have not learned the answer is that it depends.
I, too, have criticized computational photography. In particular, I questioned the ethics of Samsung’s trained image model, made famous by its Moon zoom feature. Even though I knew there has been a long history of inauthentic images, something does feel different about a world in which cameras are, almost by default, generating more perfect photos for us — images that are based on a real situation, but not accurately reflecting it.
The criticisms I have been seeing about the features of the Pixel 8, however, feel like we are only repeating the kinds of fears of nearly two hundred years. We have not been able to wholly trust photographs pretty much since they were invented. The only things which have changed in that time are the ease with which the manipulations can happen, and their availability. That has risen in tandem with a planet full of people carrying a camera everywhere. If you believe the estimates, we take more photos every two minutes than existed for the first hundred-and-fifty years after photography’s invention. In one sense, we are now fully immersed in an environment where we cannot be certain of the authenticity of anything.
Then again, Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster sightings are on a real decline.
We all live with a growing sense that everything around us is fraudulent. It is striking to me how these tools have been introduced as confidence in institutions has declined. It feels like a death spiral of trust — not only are we expected to separate facts from their potentially misleading context, we increasingly feel doubtful that any experts are able to help us, yet we keep inventing new ways to distort reality.
Even this article cannot escape that spectre, as you cannot be certain I did not generate it with a large language model. I did not; I am not nearly enough of a dope to use that punchline. I hope you can believe that. I hope you can trust me, because that is the same conclusion drawn by Fineman in “Faking It”:4
Just as we rely on journalists (rather than on their keyboards) to transcribe quotes accurately, we must rely on photographers and publishers (rather than on cameras themselves) to guarantee the fidelity of photographic images when they are presented as facts.
The questions that are being asked of the Pixel 8’s image manipulation capabilities are good and necessary because there are real ethical implications. But I think they need to be more fully contextualized. There is a long trail of exactly the same concerns and, to avoid repeating ourselves yet again, we should be asking these questions with that history in mind. This era feels different. I think we should be asking more precisely why that is.
I am writing this in the wake of another Google-related story that dominated the tech news cycle this week, after Megan Gray claimed, in an article for Wired, that the company had revealed it replaces organic search results with ones which are more lucrative. Though it faced immediate skepticism and Gray presented no proof, the claim was widely re-published; it feels true. Despite days of questioning, the article stayed online without updates or changes — until, it seems, the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel asked about it. The article has now been replaced with a note acknowledging it “does not meet our [Wired’s] editorial standards”.
Gray also said nothing publicly in response to questions about the article’s claims between when it was published on Monday morning to its retraction. In an interview with Warzel published after the article was pulled, Gray said “I stand by my larger point — the Google Search team and Google ad team worked together to secretly boost commercial queries” — but this, too, is not supported by available documentation and it is something Google also denies. This was ultimately a mistake. Gray, it seems, interpreted a slide shown briefly during the trial in the way her biases favoured. Wired chose to publish the article in its “Ideas” opinion section despite the paucity of evidence. I do not think there was an intent to deceive, though I find the response of both responsible parties lacking — to say the least.
Intention matters. If a friend showed you a photo of them apparently making an amazing slam dunk, you would mentally check it against what you know about their basketball skills. If it does not make sense, you might start asking whether the photo was edited, or carefully framed or cropped to remove something telling, or a clever composite. This was true before you knew about that Pixel 8 feature. What is different now is that it is a little bit easier for that friend to lie to you. But that breach of trust is because of the lie, not because of the mechanism.
The questions we ask about generative technologies should acknowledge that we already have plenty of ways to lie, and that lots of the information we see is suspect. That does not mean we should not believe anything, but it does mean we ought to be asking questions about what is changed when tools like these become more widespread and easier to use.
We put our trust in people to help us evaluate information. Even people who have no faith in institutions and experts have something they see as reputable, regardless of whether it actually is. Generative tools only add to the existing inundation of questionably-sourced media. Something feels different about them, but I am not entirely sure anything is actually different. We still need to skeptically — but not cynically — evaluate everything we see.
Update: Corrected my thrice-written misuse of “jump shot” to “slam dunk” because I am bad at sports. Also, I have replaced the use of “bench” with “trampoline” because that is what that object in the photo is.
The initial data leak was limited, with the threat actor releasing 1 million lines of data for Ashkenazi people. However, on October 4, the threat actor offered to sell data profiles in bulk for $1-$10 per 23andMe account, depending on how many were purchased.
A 23andMe spokesperson confirmed the data is legitimate and told BleepingComputer that the threat actors used exposed credentials from other breaches to access 23andMe accounts and steal the sensitive data.
They apparently used the site’s “DNA Relatives” feature to hop across profiles, and have gained a database of users’ full names, location, and the full genetic results of their 23andMe test. It is unclear exactly how much data was stolen, though it appears to be from at least 7 million people. So there is lots to choose from but, in a move as unsurprising as it is dismaying, the first forum user to post data from the breach went for a plainly antisemitic angle first.
If there is the tiniest of silver linings, it is that services like 23andMe are kind of bunk: identical twins received entirely different results, and none of the five services they tested could agree on the basics. Some crooks may have stolen your DNA test results, but at least they are probably wrong.
Last night, I published a short piece detailing my understanding of Megan Gray’s claim, made in Wired, that Google silently replaces search queries with ones which are more lucrative for the company. I sat on that for a couple of days because I was hoping someone would be able to substantiate, refute, or contextualize Gray’s story.
Well, in waiting for reporting elsewhere, I missed a lengthy public denial from Google “Search Liason” Danny Sullivan, published October 4. And, yesterday, one small but important piece of the puzzle arrived.
I asked Google PR if they could share the trial exhibit that @megangrA’s Wired piece referred to (which this tweet responds to ⬇️). Here’s what they shared: […]
When you see the slide, two things are clear:
Based on the template, this slide is probably not from the “Ranking for Research” (PDF) presentation. However, it is possible — Google’s presentations often mix and match slide formatting, and do not even have a consistent display of the company’s own logo.
The title of the slide posted by Kovacevich is “Advertisers benefit via closing recall gaps”. This is a slide about how advertising in Google results can target synonyms and contextually related phrases. It does not appear to relate to “organic” search results at all and, as I mentioned before, is a publicly documented feature.
Thanks to Andy Baio for pointing me to these updates.
Update: In a Twitter thread, Gray is standing by her story — though not in full — and seems to be upset with Wired’s response:
Google demanded Wired take down my op-ed, pointing to a single page I saw in court for only a few seconds. Wired sent it to me, and I said I needed to see all the pages shown in open court. Google didn’t send. Without speaking with me, Wired deleted my op-ed.
[…]
Bottom line, even if semantic matching is a red herring, my op-ed is still solid for its central point. Google Search team and Google Ad team are working together to turn non-commercial queries into commercial queries, which hurts users and advertisers, but makes Google richer.
In a statement to Charlie Warzel, a Google spokesperson denied this kind of cooperation between those teams.
It would not surprise me if aspects of Gray’s interpretation turn out to be true. It seems plausible to me that search and ads rankings could be inappropriately suggestive in ways that financially benefit Google. But the documentation in Gray’s thread does not arrive at that conclusion.
Worse, I also think Gray’s original story has made it harder to understand this. Consider all those U.S. congressional hearings, in which the CEO of a large ad-supported tech company is hauled before representatives, who then allege those businesses sell user data. That only tees up the CEO to respond that they do not, in fact, sell user data, which obfuscates their actually creepy actions. Gray’s article has a similar effect: Google gets to deny a very specific accusation without needing to respond to the more vibes-based claims it contains.
Gray, however, is right in saying the trial continues to have a level of secrecy which makes it difficult to develop a more complete and accurate picture of what Google is actually doing.
In an article for the Verge, Sean Hollister points to glaring gaps in Google’s promise to deliver seven years of real software updates to Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro buyers:
The hole: Google is arbitrarily locking software features behind the Pixel 8 Pro’s $999 paywall, even though the $699 Pixel 8 has the same Google Tensor G3 processor, the same camera, and the same seven-year guarantee.
If Google is already arbitrarily dividing up software features, what’s actually being promised over the next seven years?
Hollister also notes Google’s history of claiming forthcoming Pixel feature updates which do not materialize or under-deliver.
Megan Gray, formerly an FTC attorney and DuckDuckGo general counsel, writing in an op-ed for Wired:
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
This is a stunning claim — and one for which Gray does not cite any evidence, beyond saying the “projector screen [in the courtroom] showed an internal Google slide about changes to its search algorithm”:
This onscreen Google slide had to do with a “semantic matching” overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.
This article was understandably quoted and linked to across the web as its allegations seem to support complaints about a decline in quality of so-called “organic” search results while bolstering rumours that these results are influenced by ad spend.
There are so far no exhibits posted by the U.S. Department of Justice which make this claim. The best match seems to be UPX0204, an internal presentation called “Ranking for Research” (PDF). The version made publicly available is “redacted […] and abridged”, which suggests parts of a longer presentation were shown in court but were deemed too sensitive to show online. Hey, at least Judge Mehta is relaxing the trial’s secrecy a little bit. In any case, the last available page of that exhibit has, as part of a flowchart showing how search works, a “query rewriter”, but there is no suggestion anywhere that it is doing anything more than “interpret[ing the] query”. If I search for “children’s clothing”, I would want to see results from websites selling “kids’ clothing” and “child-sized t-shirts”, for example — “semantic matching” of the type suggested by the quote above.
The government also entered a briefing paper (PDF) prepared for the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority in February 2020 which, on page 18, notes that Google’s ad ranking system “optimize[s] an advertiser’s ability to show its ads in related auctions for similar queries”, citing a Google help article.
My understanding is that at least one other reporter covering this trial is struggling to reproduce Gray’s story, in part because none of the exhibits posted so far seem to support these claims. In addition, Google issued a specific denial to Zoë Schiffer of Platformer:
“Google does not delete queries and replace them with ones that monetize better as the opinion piece suggests, and the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems,” the company told us.
Unless evidence materializes to indicate otherwise, it is hard to believe the accuracy of Gray’s reporting in this circumstance.
Dan Moren’s iCloud account was offline for exactly twelve hours for reasons apparently known to somebody at Apple but which cannot be disclosed to Moren:
Moreover, if this was some kind of scheduled procedure, why not warn affected users ahead of time? The idea that my email — which I rely upon for work — and a slew of other services might be interrupted for essentially an entire workday with no notice whatsoever is technological malpractice. My cable company tells me when it’s doing work in my area and there might be service hiccups, and you can bet that the hosting provider I use for my website communicates whenever there might be something that affects my service.
I wrote earlier about expectations of reliability in a different sense, and this is a whole different level of strange. iCloud has become so much better since its launch and it has fewer unexpected failures, so why are the reasons for one localized to Moren’s account so secretive? Only Apple knows, and it is not saying.
In two announcements, Google has now publicly committed to seven years of software updates for its newest Pixel phones, while Chromebooks will get ten years of updates. The Chromebook promise is almost more impressive — Google says it will not support all features for devices older than those released in 2021, but a model released in, say, 2014 should continue to receive automatic updates through next year. Most important, that means ten years of security fixes. In a world where serious vulnerabilities are being increasingly exploited, knowing that a product will be patched for a decade is a big deal.
Colour me hopeful that this means a little more pressure on Apple to support its own devices even longer. The oldest devices which can run iOS and iPadOS 17 are from 2018, and the iMac Pro from December 2017 is the oldest to support Sonoma. But that is not a commitment — Apple has not promised a specific number of years of software updates as far as I know, only maintaining a specific definition for hardware obsolescence.
Even in software, its reputation for providing support well after a device was introduced is not wholly earned. Apple says “not all known security issues are addressed in previous versions” of operating systems. Nobody expects Apple to keep updating Mac OS X Jaguar, of course, but this precludes the company from continuing to issue security updates even on MacOS Ventura — and I cannot upgrade my iMac beyond that. Apple only stopped selling this computer in March 2019, though it continued refurbished sales well beyond that.
To be fair, we are a long way from the days in which you could expect near obsolescence in computers just a few years old. That is terrific. We have entered an era of mature operating systems in which longtime support is possible and necessary, given how much we all rely on these things.
I also question whether Google will actually fulfill this promise in an ongoing and meaningful way. The company has a unique reputation for announcing new things only to shut them down. A few months ago, it ended its Pixel Pass service, launched with the Pixel 6 in 2021, which was supposed to guarantee subscribers an upgrade to its 2023 phones. It cancelled the program shortly before those phones were even announced, meaning an automatic new device upgrade cannot happen, but the company is giving subscribers a $100 credit.
If Apple publicly committed to software support for a certain number of years, I would believe it, as it has been pretty consistent with its iPhones and iPads — though considerably less so with the Mac. But Google’s history makes me wonder if it has the ability to keep any promise for seven to ten years. If it does, it can change the perception that only Apple’s products receive major upgrades and security patches long after they have shipped. Of course, Apple always has the option of more comprehensively fulfilling its own reputation by making its own promises — and keeping them.
Twitch.tv. Discord.gg. Github.io. Three memorable addresses for three major websites that all have something in common: Their iconic URLs come from small island nations and territories.
I have not thought about domain hacking in a long while. But, thanks to this article, I ended up on Wikipedia’s list of country code top-level domains, and it turns out there are a bunch of these in other languages, too. Antigua and Barbuda’s .ag domain is apparently used by German businesses registered as Aktiengesellschaft corporations. Niue’s .nu is owned by the Swedish Internet Foundation because it means “now” in Swedish, despite Niue being a sovereign country located in the South Pacific; the Niuean government is trying to win back control. Michael Waters, writing in Wired in February 2020, called the use of these domains an expression of digital colonialism, and the use of Libya’s .ly domain by various URL shorteners was widely criticized while the Moammar Gadhafi regime was in charge.
Just a few things worth thinking about when inventing a great domain hack. A domain could be supporting a small nation’s budget, but it may be more troubling.
The challenge here is serious: the longer the lens, the harder it is to keep it steady from your shaky, pathetically unstable human hands. Most people do not take photos the way a tripod does — which means the iPhone camera has to do several things:
[…]
Getting a handheld shot, at night, without a tripod, or really too much effort on my part on a 120mm-equivalent lens is magic. There’s no other word for that, because there’s such complicated technology involved on a hardware and software level that it makes my head spin.
If you are not reading this review every year at least to gaze at de With’s gorgeous images, you are missing out. New York is a photogenic city, but it takes a skilled photographer to see these kinds of framing opportunities — especially with the real and virtual focal lengths available on this iPhone.
