Month: October 2023

Original Apple Watch Is Now Obsolete ⇥ macrumors.com

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

All first-generation Apple Watch models released in 2015 were added to Apple’s obsolete products list on September 30, according to an internal memo obtained by MacRumors. As a result, these outdated “Series 0” watches are no longer eligible for repairs or other service at Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Provider locations.

As it happens, one of the original gold Apple Watch Edition models is currently available on Chrono24 — for €7,500. That is a fair bit more than a Reddit user who paid $6,000 USD for one in 2016.

Truly one of the strangest products Apple has ever released.

CRTC Issues Registration Requirements ⇥ cbc.ca

Michael Geist:

The CRTC last week released the first two of what is likely to become at least a dozen decisions involving the Online Streaming Act (aka Bill C-11). The decision, which attracted considerable commentary over the weekend, involves mandatory registration rules for audio and visual services that include far more than the large streaming services. The Commission says the registrations would give it “de minimis information about online undertakings and their activities in Canada, which would give the Commission an initial understanding of the Canadian online broadcasting landscape and would allow it to communicate with online undertakings.” By contrast, the inclusion of registration requirements for a wide range of undertakings, including some podcast services, online news sites, adult content sites, and social media left some characterizing it as a podcast registry or part of “one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes.” So what’s the reality? As is often the case, it is not as bad as critics would suggest, but not nearly as benign as the CRTC would have you believe.

Anis Heydari, CBC News:

It’s a perspective echoed by Canadian podcaster Jesse Brown, publisher of Canadaland, who told CBC News that Friday’s announcement by the CRTC is concerning to him.

“What they’re signalling is, ‘We are going to be regulating the space, but we’re not telling you how.’ That makes it very hard,” he said.

I do not think it is as mysterious as this quote from Brown suggests. The goals of the Online Streaming Act are public information and, while its objectives are laudable for Canadian media producers and publishers and some of its problems have been corrected, it remains a flawed piece of legislation. Not so, however, for the reasons espoused by Elon Musk or the permanently frenzied Glenn Greenwald, who authored that quote at the end of my excerpt of Geist’s article. It is far more nuanced than Twitter’s reality detached commentariat claim.

Apple Memory Holes Promise of OCSP Preference ⇥ micro.duckrowing.com

After Apple released Big Sur in 2020, many users were unable to launch applications for several hours because the Online Certificate Status Protocol check was failing. This quickly became a — misguided, in my opinion — privacy fiasco, culminating in a November 2020 support document on Apple’s website documenting the various Gatekeeper checks. Apple also promised to add a “new preference for users to opt out of these security protections” at some point “over the the next year” [sic].

Nearly two full years after a December 2021 deadline, at the latest, no such preference has appeared — and, now, it is likely one never will.

Fred McCann (via Michael Tsai):

Remember when Apple said they’d add a preference to MacOS to let you opt out of gatekeeper checks within a year back in 2020? They’ve silently removed that language from their website.

This is no AirPower, but it is not often Apple announces something and then quietly reneges on it. I am sure there is a reason — there always is — but this preference was promised and quickly forgotten. Apple improved OCSP security, as it said it would, so why is there no option to opt out, not even on the command line?

Monkey Laundering ⇥ wheresyoured.at

Miles Klee, Rolling Stone:

“Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market” is a new report from dappGambl, a community of experts in finance and blockchain technology. Upon analysis of 73,257 NFT collections, the authors found that 69,795 have a market cap of zero Ether (ETH), the second most-popular cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin. In practical terms, that means 95 percent of NFTs wouldn’t fetch a penny today — a spectacular crash for assets that reached a trading volume of $17 billion amid a frenzied bull market in 2021. The study estimates that some 23 million investors own these tokens of no practical use or value.

This was just one of many articles citing this same report, and they all suck for the same reason. Molly White debunked it, and you should definitely read why it is wrong, but I wanted to highlight this paragraph:

However, what annoys me in particular about this report being laundered into the mainstream news cycle is that Rolling Stone and The Guardian — in their evidently neverending quest to both-sides any issue placed in front of them — are also printing the authors’ optimistic predictions for the NFT industry. A bunch of crypto casino reviewers promoting the rosy future of NFTs probably wouldn’t have made it into multiple mainstream media outlets had it not been for the fact that it was included alongside the eye-catching, but misleading, 95% figure.

Ed Zitron:

NFTs were never a “great investment” or the “future of intellectual property” — they were a vehicle used to extract capital from consumers. They were (and are) a gruesome, exploitative scam, creating just enough collateral and artwork to fool the average person into believing that this was a lasting product, engaging the language of conspiracy theorists and televangelists to tell people that they were “going to make it” and that others would “have fun staying poor.” […]

[…]

The overall exploitation of cryptocurrency is something that should be studied as a symptom of a global state of economic desperation and pain. This horrible industry took root because the average person cannot simply work and thrive — they must hustle, they must suffer, they must find any way they can to make even a modest wealth, and that same desperation makes them susceptible to con artists that promise an easy way out.

Permanently excitable grindset guy Gary Vaynerchuk jumped straight into NFTs and managed to parlay his doodles into the foundation for an entire conference. Last year’s event was promoted in a press release as an “NFT-ticketed super conference” which would “united the Web3 community”, and the press release for this year’s conference similarly highlighted “NFT industry projects” and “Web3 community”. But the 2024 conference was announced in a much lower-key fashion — relatively speaking — without a single mention of NFTs and only one passing reference to “Web3” in Vaynerchuk’s bio. VeeCon is now a “contemporary business conference that is all about ‘the now'”. There are also no mentions of any NFTs or crypto-adjacent things in the conference FAQ, but it does note you will need to buy a ticket for yourself and your baby if you would both like to attend.

The desperation Zitron describes is on full display in the subject of the latest video essay from Dan Olson. I know it is long but it is well worth its entire runtime.

Yet Another Apple Search Engine Rumour ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

John Giannandrea, a former Google executive who now oversees machine learning and AI at Apple, has a giant search team under him. Over the past few years, his group developed a next-generation search engine for Apple’s apps codenamed “Pegasus.” That technology, which more accurately surfaces results, is already available in some Apple apps, but will soon be coming to more, including the App Store itself.

But the best evidence of Apple’s search efforts can be seen in Spotlight, which helps users find things across their devices. A couple of iOS and macOS versions ago, Apple started adding web search results to this tool, pointing users directly to sites that might answer their questions. During different points in time, those results were powered by either Microsoft Corp.’s Bing or Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Siri also uses that technology to offer up web results.

Gurman says Apple has long thought about building a rival to Google search and, if it ever launched it, figures an ad-supported service would “potentially create a revenue stream about the size of the Apple Watch”. Apple’s search engine project is something we have heard about many times before and it highlights the unique tension between Apple and Google.

Even without its own website with a text box, Apple has plenty of search functionality in its own apps, as Gurman writes. It is unclear to me which system apps are taking advantage of this newer, better search engine, but I still run into bizarre errors in Maps, especially, similar to the one posted by Sebastiaan de With.

Also, “Pegasus” is a weird name for an iOS feature, even if it is only for internal use.

Food in Visual Look Up ⇥ macstories.net

Apple:

With Visual Look Up, you can identify and learn about popular landmarks, plants, pets, and more that appear in your photos and videos in the Photos app. Visual Look Up can also identify food in a photo and suggest related recipes.

Meal identification is new to iOS 17, and it is a feature I am not sure I understand. Let us assume for now that it is very accurate — it is not, but work with me here. The use cases for this seem fairly limited, since it only works on photos you have saved to your device.

Federico Viticci, in his review of iOS 17, suggests two ways someone might use this: finding more information about your own meal, or saving an image from the web of someone else’s. One more way is to identify a meal you took a picture of some time ago and may have forgotten what it was. But Visual Look Up produces recipes, not just dish identification, so that suggests to me that this is to be used to augment home cooking. Perhaps the best-case scenario for this feature is that you stumble across a photo of something you ate some time ago, get the urge to re-create it, and Siri presents you with a recipe. That is, of course, assuming it works well enough to identify the meal in the photo.

Viticci:

Except that, well, 🤌 I’m Italian 🤌. We have a rich tapestry of regional dishes, variations, and local cuisine that is hard to categorize for humans, let alone artificial intelligence. So as you can imagine, I was curious to try Visual Look Up’s support for recipes with my own pictures of food. The best way I can describe the results is that Photos works well enough for generic pictures of a meal that may resemble something the average American has seen on Epicurious, but the app has absolutely no idea what it is dealing with when it comes to anything I ate at a restaurant in Italy.

Siri struggles with my home cooking, too, often getting the general idea of the dish but missing the specifics. A photo of a sweet corn risotto yielded suggestions for different kinds of risotto and various corn dishes, but not corn risotto. Some beets were identified as different kinds of fruit skewers or some different Christmas dishes; the photo was taken in August.

In many places, getting the gist of a dish is simply not good enough. The details matter. Food is intensely binding — not just among a country, but at smaller regional levels, too. It is something many people take immense pride in. While it is not my place to say whether it is insulting that Siri identified many distinct curry preparations as interchangeable curries of any type, it does not feel helpful when I know the foods identified are nothing like what was actually in the photo.

Update: Kristoffer Yi Fredriksson emailed to point out how Apple could eventually use food identification in its health efforts; for example, for meal tracking. I could see that. If it comes to pass, the accuracy of this feature will be far more important.

CSAM Detection Organizations Are Like Any Other Business ⇥ balkaninsight.com

Today is fitting a theme so far that is, unfortunately, just about the heaviest thing I publish here, but I have a couple things I think I need to add.

Giacomo Zandonini, Apostolis Fotiadis, and Luděk Stavinoha, for Balkan Insight, investigated how CSAM scanning companies have lobbied in favour of a new law to screen everything — including private messages — for illegal media:

Though registered in the EU lobby database as a charity, Thorn sells its AI tools on the market for a profit; since 2018, the US Department of Homeland Security, for example, has purchased software licences from Thorn for a total of $4.3 million.

[…]

ECLAG [the European Child Sexual Abuse Legislation Advocacy Group], which launched its website a few weeks after Johansson’s proposal was announced in May 2022, acts as a coordination platform for some of the most active organisations lobbying in favour of the CSAM legislation. Its steering committee includes Thorn and a host of well-known children’s rights organisations such as ECPAT, Eurochild, Missing Children Europe, Internet Watch Foundation, and Terre des Hommes.

Another member is Brave Movement, which came into being in April 2022, a month before’s Johansson’s regulation was rolled out, thanks to a $10.3 million contribution by the Oak Foundation to Together for Girls, a US-based non-profit that fights sexual violence against children.

These multimillion-dollar numbers pale in comparison to, for example, the $20 billion Apple makes every quarter in digital services revenue alone. Still, though these are non-governmental mission-orientated organizations, they do have products and services to sell, hence the lobbying efforts.

If the name “Oak Foundation” sounds familiar, that is likely because it also funds the Heat Initiative. That is not a surprise: CSAM prevention causes are among the largest beneficiaries of the Oak Foundation’s grants, representing over 10% of its grant-making in 2022. That is an understandable place to spend a lot of money; who can disagree with efforts to fight among the world’s bleakest genres of crime?

But for anyone who remembers the arguments made in the 2000s justifying wholesale invasions of personal privacy in an effort to combat terrorism, this all feels a bit too familiar, and we know the consequences. I do not buy speculative slippery slope arguments but, in this case, there is no need to: we know this kind of surveillance has poor oversight, expands beyond its initial scope, produces post hoc rationalization for crimes, and leads to escalating competition between nations. That the E.U. is proposing on-device scanning is little comfort when, by design, there is little understanding of how any of these systems work and what their limits are.

The Heat Initiative Is Funded by Dark Money Organizations ⇥ theintercept.com

Last month, a new organization called the Heat Initiative launched an aggressive, high-profile campaign intended to pressure Apple to more comprehensively scan for child abuse materials in users’ messages, photo and video libraries, and iCloud storage. About a week after its debut came Apple’s annual iPhone launch presentation, during which time Heat Initiative flew an airplane banner over Apple Park. Lest you think this is original and clever, the Electronic Frontier Foundation did the same thing in protest of Apple’s then-recently announced plans for locally scanning users’ iCloud-destined photo libraries. It also placed a full-page ad in the New York Times. None of this comes cheap, which may make you wonder where the organization is getting such generous funding.

Sam Biddle, the Intercept:

Something the Heat Initiative has not placed on giant airborne banners is who’s behind it: a controversial billionaire philanthropy network whose influence and tactics have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the right-wing Koch network. Though it does not publicize this fact, the Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse — and political will — of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.

[…]

For an organization demanding that Apple scour the private information of its customers, the Heat Initiative discloses extremely little about itself. According to a report in the New York Times, the Heat Initiative is armed with $2 million from donors including the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, an organization founded by British billionaire hedge fund manager and Google activist investor Chris Cohn, and the Oak Foundation, also founded by a British billionaire. The Oak Foundation previously provided $250,000 to a group attempting to weaken end-to-end encryption protections in EU legislation, according to a 2020 annual report.

Though Biddle highlights Hopewell’s association with causes supporting the U.S. Democratic Party, this does not seem like an argument divided among political affiliations, and I certainly hope it does not slide in that direction. This is a disagreement between people who understand the social and technical risks of what is proposed, and those who earnestly believe those trade-offs are worth it. I understand their objections — I do not think they are naïve — but I will continue to disagree on the basis that personal cloud storage ought to be considered an extension of local storage. Organizations like the Heat Initiative are not much interested in a nuanced discussion.