Month: February 2025

One of the odder Apple rumours remaining unresolved is its robotics project.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, in April:

Engineers at Apple have been exploring a mobile robot that can follow users around their homes, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the skunk-works project is private. The iPhone maker also has developed an advanced table-top home device that uses robotics to move a display around, they said.

On first glance, these ideas are weird, right? I can see the appeal of things like these, especially for people with disabilities or who are older. But they do not really fit my expectations of a typical Apple product, which are often designed for mass markets, and to recede into a lived environment instead of being so conspicuous. Yet Gurman followed up in August with news this is something the company is actually interested in.

Then last month, on its Machine Learning Research blog, Apple published a post describing “ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot”, and a companion paper that helps explain the forced acronym. Embedded in the post is a video that, indeed, shows a table-mounted lamp that responds to a user’s gestures. It is really quite something.

This is nominally research about making a robot’s movements less — uh — robotic. The result is a lamp that more than one publication has compared to the charming Pixar intro. It is very cool — but it is still very weird. Apple almost never shows works-in-progress, and what is posted to its research blog does not necessarily correlate to real-world products. Also, I am not accustomed to this much whimsy in anything Apple has released for at least a decade. It is refreshing.

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Joseph Menn, Washington Post:

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.

This order was based on capabilities granted by the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, though the Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, allows the U.K. government to make similarly broad access demands. That there are at least two wide-ranging laws that compel technical workarounds to end-to-end encryption belies the government’s claim of supporting users’ privacy.

I want to nitpick the final sentence I quoted above from Menn’s article:

[…] Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.

Based on its wording, it is possible this is a rephrasing of something Menn was told by a source, so I do not want to put too much weight on it. Menn also discusses the privacy implications to users later in the article. But it does not make sense to think of this as a “defeat for tech companies”. It poisons the well. Tech companies are — correctly — facing more of the kind of scrutiny expected of any world-dominating market leaders. It is not just industry giants and criminals who are concerned about such extraordinary access.

Tim Bradshaw, Lucy Fisher, and John Paul Rathbone, Financial Times, confirmed Menn’s reporting, adding:

The UK Investigatory Powers Act, dubbed the “Snoopers’ Charter” by critics when it was passed in 2016, was updated last year in the final weeks of the Conservative government before July’s election.

Under the legislation, which has been widely criticised by human rights campaigners and privacy activists as well as Silicon Valley tech companies, recipients of technical capability notices are not allowed to acknowledge their existence or warn users that their security had been weakened, unless the Secretary of State grants permission to do so.

Establishing this as a fight between tech companies and governments minimizes the widespread opposition from experts in privacy and security. In turn, that minimizes the effects it will have on actual users. We should expect our information is secured against third-party access. Given the number of companies involved in storing and transmitting user data, there ought to be no difference between a warrant to access someone’s personal data on a drive in their physical possession and one for a server in a data centre. Those legal protections ought to be similarly strong.

However, I wonder if there is any room for compromise. Maybe I will regret writing this. Here is the thing: the higher security offered by Advanced Data Protection only applies to collaborative features in limited cases, but one of those is Notes, which has a substantial feature set these days — a user can embed pictures and attach documents. I think it makes sense if Advanced Data Protection could apply to documents shared with all users within, say, the same iCloud Family. I do not know that it makes sense to extend those protections to a larger and less connected group. I expect there are some limits to the number of users a note can be shared between, given limits on similar iCloud features and Shared Albums, though I could not find any relevant documentation. There are good reasons a group of otherwise disconnected people might want shared access to a very secure document; I can think of use cases among dissidents, activists, and journalists, for example. But I can also see how sharing could lead to abuse.

In any case, the reported demands by the U.K. government are an extraordinary abuse of their own. It has global implications for both U.K. access and, I would venture, access by its allies. As a reminder, U.S. and U.K. spy agencies routinely shared collected data while avoiding domestic legal protections. This order explicitly revives the bad old days of constant access.

Andrew Hoog of NowSecure:

NowSecure has conducted a comprehensive security and privacy assessment of the DeepSeek iOS mobile app, uncovering multiple critical vulnerabilities that put individuals, enterprises, and government agencies at risk. These findings highlight the immediate need for organizations to prohibit the app’s use to safeguard sensitive data and mitigate potential cyber risks.

NowSecure’s most pressing concerns have little to do with the app’s country of origin, and a lot more to do with basic things like HTTP requests:

The DeepSeek iOS app globally disables App Transport Security (ATS) which is an iOS platform level protection that prevents sensitive data from being sent over unencrypted channels. Since this protection is disabled, the app can (and does) send unencrypted data over internet.

Brian Krebs:

Beyond security concerns tied to the DeepSeek iOS app, there are indications the Chinese AI company may be playing fast and loose with the data that it collects from and about users. On January 29, researchers at Wiz said they discovered a publicly accessible database linked to DeepSeek that exposed “a significant volume of chat history, backend data and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details.”

Painfully sloppy work.

Janus Rose, 404 Media:

You can discourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good.

I think it is reasonable to approach the bleak reality in which many now live — or, for some of us, will soon — differently depending on our style. “Posters post”. Some people work things out by brain dumping. Some people — me included — have a brain fried by too much news, too fast, all the time, and we are just trying to cope. None of that is bad or wrong.

However, Rose is correct in writing that information needs to eventually be turned into action. That might look different for different people, but it rarely looks like a sick dunk hinging on a technical definition. I do not think stop posting, start acting is easy, nor is it right for everyone. But we need to recognize there are far more people who, despite disagreements, have common goals in opposition to far-right authoritarians than there are those who agree with them.

Update: Sandy Allen has good advice on what can help.

Ian Parker, the New Yorker:

To build a very large operation that still resembles a boutique one required decades of sustained control. Foster has controlled the work, and controlled his image, and controlled the images made by him: a Foster + Partners project will almost always have its accompanying Norman Foster sketches, often made retrospectively, rather than in the heat of design. They’ll be annotated by Foster, in a spiky hand that some of his colleagues have learned to imitate. These images may show a building’s future users spreading their arms above their heads, in a gesture of joyous abandon that it’s hard to imagine Foster ever having made.

I know I just wrote about the mistakes of idolizing business leaders. True enough, there are some pretty odious people named in this article, and some of Foster’s more aspirational qualities are called into question. This is a great profile nonetheless: well-written, comprehensive, and full of wonderful details.

Parker was, fittingly, also the author of a similarly comprehensive profile of Jony Ive, published ten years ago this month.

Federico Viticci, MacStories, thinking about apps like Tapestry:

My problem with timeline apps is that I struggle to understand their pitch as alternatives to browsing Mastodon and Bluesky (supported by both Tapestry and Reeder) when they don’t support key functionalities of those services such as posting, replying, reposting, or marking items as favorites.

[…]

But: the beauty of the open web and the approach embraced by Tapestry and Reeder is that there are plenty of potential use cases to satisfy everyone. Crucially, this includes people who are not like me. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here because the web isn’t built like that.

I, too, think an all-in-one client would be a nice addition to my home screen. This is the advantage of separating the data layer from its presentation, however — there exists plenty of opportunity for different takes. I am currently testing Flashes, an app which connects to Bluesky or other (hypothetical) AT Protocol systems and shows only photo and video posts. I do not want to follow the same people for both text and photography, but that is okay because Bluesky has enough filtering options to create a different experience in different apps. I could see a similar app pulling together photos from different ActivityPub-based services, too.

Tim”:

Recently I read about a massive geolocation data leak from Gravy Analytics, which exposed more than 2000 apps, both in AppStore and Google Play, that secretly collect geolocation data without user consent. Oftentimes, even without developers` knowledge.

I looked into the list (link here) and found at least 3 apps I have installed on my iPhone. Take a look for yourself!

This made me come up with an idea to track myself down externally, e.g. to buy my geolocation data leaked by some application.

Unfortunately, it is very expensive for a typical person to buy this kind of data. Still, “Tim” spent some time dissecting the HTTPS requests from a single game. You probably will not be surprised by how much is revealed even with App Tracking Transparency preventing access to a user’s advertising identifier, yet it is quite something to see it all displayed like this.

I know advertising is an important revenue stream — often the only revenue stream — for many products and services. This, though, is not just advertising. It is a staggering abuse of trust happening all the time with — in many regions — almost no control or transparency. Absorbing or resharing this much private information should be criminal.

Naz Hamid:

Prior to this, screens were large and encumbered. Classic TVs were housed in cabinets and were more furniture than centerpieces. They’ve become slimmer and larger over the decades but for the most part are still primarily active devices. One turns on a TV to watch something. A TV doesn’t necessarily reach out to you. It’s a consumption device. It generally is turned off.

Now, a small screen, or a larger one as a tablet, sits positioned. A phone is usually on, 24/7, 365 days a year. A person may choose to have it in a cradle propped up for display. Screens and battery have made it such that always-on is a feature, and no longer a decision. It acts as a supposed gateway to connection: access to the broader world as you know it.

This is a great piece, with a bunch of lovely ideas. There are plenty of people I know who say they want to use their phones less often, and have come up with techniques for making their phone time more intentional. If this does not describe you, that is fine; I have no judgement of anyone’s technology use unless their doing so puts me at risk. Please do not use your phone while driving.

These can be little changes, like keeping your phone in your bag or pocket in the elevator, or — as Hamid does — placing it face-down instead of face-up. One change I really appreciate is turning off my history on YouTube, which also blanks its homepage. Because I am logged out and, therefore, cannot see any subscriptions, this change means I need to deliberately search. It means my YouTube use becomes very specific. I never have any guilt about my time on YouTube, but I like the idea of making it an intentional decision instead of an idle one.

Craig Hockenberry, on the Iconfactory’s blog:

The web has always been in a state of flux, but the rate of change around how people connect has accelerated over the past few years. Centralized systems have shown their weakness and siloed content has as much a chance of surviving as “You’ve got mail!”.

Tapestry was built with this change in mind. Your content comes from a lot of different places, and how that data is retrieved from a feed is entirely customizable. Our goal was to put RSS, social media, podcasts, and more into a flexible and easy-to-read timeline. Tapestry syncs this variety of feeds across devices in a way that is seamless, secure, and easy to understand.

I am not sure I want all of these things inside a single app’s timeline. I typically want to treat reading web feeds as a discrete task, for example, and I would use a dedicated podcast client instead. But I like the idea of a merged social media feed. Some people have accounts on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog, while others are on only one of those services. I would often like to see all of them at the same time.

Tapestry reminds me of Twitterrific in a lot of ways, and is conceptually similar to the new Reeder. I do not care for the default font and I am a little peeved the system font is behind a paywall, but it is making me consider a subscription so maybe it is working as intended. What I would really like — and I do not mean to sound ungrateful or demanding — is a MacOS client. There are many excellent Mastodon clients for iOS, and the first-party Bluesky app is good as well. But the MacOS Bluesky client ecosystem is disappointingly weak, especially if you still use an Intel-based model.

The good news is that this is a burgeoning category of apps. That makes me very excited. The material published on social media has been tied for too long to the platforms themselves. That is true in part because of advertising revenue, but also because platform owners do not trust users. Instead of being allowed control over our experiences, we are required to endure the changes du jour. A social web built on open protocols is an opportunity to change all of that. Bring it on.

Mariella Moon, Engadget:

Adobe has updated the Acrobat AI Assistant, giving it the ability to understand contracts and to compare them for you. The company says it can help you make sense of complex terms and spot differences between agreements, such as between old and new ones, so you can understand what you’re signing. With the AI Assistant enabled, the Acrobat app will be able to recognize if a document is a contract, even if it’s a scanned page. It can identify and list key terms from there, summarize the document’s contents and recommend questions you can ask based on what’s in it.

Raise your hand if you would sign a contract — a legally binding document — based on the way an A.I. system understands it. Anyone? If this flags anything at all, you will probably need to check with a lawyer for a reliable opinion, and they cost way more than five dollars per month. No judge is going to sympathize with a misunderstanding because Adobe’s A.I. product summarized it all wrong.

Do you remember the “Twitter Files”?

I completely understand if you do not. Announced with great fanfare by Elon Musk after his eager-then-reluctant takeover of the company, writers like Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, Rupa Subramanya, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss were permitted access to internal records of historic moderation decisions. Each published long Twitter threads dripping in gravitas about their discoveries.

But after stripping away the breathless commentary and just looking at the documents as presented, Twitter’s actions did not look very evil after all. Clumsy at times, certainly, but not censorial — just normal discussions about moderation. Contrary to Taibbi’s assertions, the “institutional meddling” was research, not suppression.

Now, Musk works for the government’s DOGE temporary organization and has spent the past two weeks — just two weeks — creating chaos with vast powers and questionable legality. But that is just one of his many very real jobs. Another one is his ownership of X where he also has an executive role. Today, he decided to accuse another user of committing a crime, and used his power to suspend their account.

What was their “crime”? They quoted a Wired story naming six very young people who apparently have key roles at DOGE despite their lack of experience. The full tweet read:1

Here’s a list of techies on the ground helping Musk gaining and using access to the US Treasury payment system.

Akash Bobba

Edward Coristine

Luke Farritor

Gautier Cole Killian

Gavin Kliger

Ethan Shaotran

I wonder if the fired FBI agents may want dox them and maybe pay them a visit.

In the many screenshots I have seen of this tweet, few seem to include the last line as it is cut off by the way X displays it. Clicking “Show more” would have displayed it. It is possible to interpret this as violative of X’s Abuse and Harassment rules, which “prohibit[s] behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups of people with abuse”, including “behavior that urges offline action”.

X, as Twitter before it, enforces these policies haphazardly. The same policy also “prohibit[s] content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place”, but searching “Sandy Hook” or “Building 7” turns up loads of tweets which would presumably also run afoul. Turns out moderation of a large platform is hard and the people responsible sometimes make mistakes.

But the ugly suggestion made in that user’s post might not rise to the level of a material threat — a “crime”, as it were — and, so, might still be legal speech. Musk’s X also suspended a user who just posted the names of public servants. And Musk is currently a government employee in some capacity. The “Twitter Files” crew, ostensibly concerned about government overreach at social media platforms, should be furious about this dual role and heavy-handed censorship.

It was at this point in drafting this article that Mike Masnick of Techdirt published his impressions much faster than I could turn it around. I have been bamboozled by my day job. Anyway:

Let’s be crystal clear about what just happened: A powerful government official who happens to own a major social media platform (among many other businesses) just declared that naming government employees is criminal (it’s not) and then used his private platform to suppress that information. These aren’t classified operatives — they’re public servants who, theoretically, work for the American people and the Constitution, not Musk’s personal agenda.

This doesn’t just “seem like” a First Amendment issue — it’s a textbook example of what the First Amendment was designed to prevent.

So far, however, we have seen from the vast majority of them no exhausting threads, no demands for public hearings — in fact, barely anything. To his extremely limited credit, Taibbi did acknowledge it is “messed up”, going on to write:

That new-car free speech smell is just about gone now.

“Now”?

Taibbi is the only one of those authors who has written so much as a tweet about Musk’s actions. Everyone else — Fang, Shellenberger, Subramanya, and Weiss — has moved on to unsubstantive commentary about newer and shinier topics.

This is not mere hypocrisy. What Musk is doing is a far more explicit blurring of the lines between government power and platform speech permissions. This could be an interesting topic that a writer on the free speech beat might want to explore. But for a lot of them, it would align them too similarly to mainstream reporting, and their models do not permit that.

It is one of the problems with being a shallow contrarian. Because these writers must position themselves as alternatives to mainstream news coverage — “focus[ing] on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative”, “for people who dare to think for themselves”. How original. They suggest they cannot cover the same news — or, at least, not from a similar perspective — as in the mainstream. This is not actually true, of course: each of them frequently publishes hot takes about high-profile stories along their particular ideological bent, which often coincide with standard centre-right to right-wing thought. They are not unbiased. Yet this widely covered story has either escaped their attention, or they have mostly decided it is not worth mentioning.

I am not saying this is a conspiracy among these writers, or that they are lackeys for Musk or Trump. What I am saying is that their supposed principles are apparently only worth expressing when they are able to paint them as speaking truth to power, and their concept of power is warped beyond recognition. It goes like this: some misinformation researchers partially funded by government are “power”, but using the richest man in the world as a source is not. It also goes like this: when that same man works for the government in a quasi-official capacity and also owns a major social media platform, it is not worth considering those implications because Rolling Stone already has an article.

They can prove me wrong by dedicating just as much effort to exposing the blurrier-than-ever lines between a social media platform and the U.S. government. Instead, it is busy reposting glowing profiles of now-DOGE staff. They are not interested in standing for specific principles when knee-jerk contrarianism is so much more thrilling.


  1. There are going to be a lot of x.com links in this post, as it is rather unavoidable. ↥︎

Jason Snell:

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment — the “vibe in the room” — regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

This is the tenth year Snell has run this; the first was for 2015. Over that time — and you can see this reflected in graphs in the 2024 edition — the reputation of Macs and Apple’s services has soared, Home products and software quality continue to be pretty meh, and developer relations and reception of the company’s societal impact has cratered. The vibe in the room is not great.

I continue to be impressed by how much work Snell puts into this every year. There are some changes to the survey and its reporting this time. Notably, the full commentary from all panellists who wanted to be quoted has been published separately. Maybe you think this is a lot of words, but consider how much sixty-ish commentators would write if you gave them an empty text box to rant in, and I think you will agree we all showed admirable restraint.

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Yesterday, I published a little thing about how Quartz slipped and fell into a toxic stew of A.I. slop. If you have not yet read it, I must say I quite like it. What began as a little link I was going to throw to Riley MacLeod’s article became an exploration of an A.I.-generated article with at least two completely fictional sources, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, that article is still up — unchanged — and it still claims “new tariffs are slated to take effect in early March”.

John Paul Tasker, CBC News:

Trump launched a trade war against Canada earlier Saturday by imposing a 25 per cent tariff on virtually all goods from this country — an unprecedented strike against a long-standing ally that has the potential to throw the economy into a tailspin.

[…]

These potentially devastating tariffs are slated to take effect on Tuesday and remain in place until Trump is satisfied Canada is doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.

Paul Krugman:

I think you have to see “fentanyl” in this context as the equivalent of “weapons of mass destruction” in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. It’s not the real reason; Canada isn’t even a major source of fentanyl. It’s just a plausible-sounding reason for a president to do what he wanted to do for other reasons — George W. Bush wanted a splendid little war, Donald Trump just wants to impose tariffs and assert dominance.

The president posted today that “Canada should become our Cherished 51st State”, effectively saying the tariffs are part of a hostile takeover strategy. And, sure, maybe he does not mean it; maybe if he gets a series of special edition Trump-branded Timbits, he will call the whole thing off. But we are now on the receiving end of economic warfare from the world’s most powerful nation, and an explicit threat of far worse.

Paris Marx:

The stance of the Trump administration only exacerbates the growing recognition that allowing US companies to dominate the internet economy across much of the world was a terrible mistake. The harms that have come of that model — for workers, users, and the wider society — have already shone a spotlight on the problems of importing poorly regulated internet platforms based on American norms and practices. But now more than ever it’s clear that cannot continue, and traditional allies of the United States need to come together not just to take on its tech industry, but to protect themselves from a declining superpower that’s decided it can do whatever it wants — even to those it recently called friends.

I maintain my disagreement with the U.S. requirement that TikTok divest or be banned, and will continue to do so until there is compelling evidence to reconsider. There is currently nothing of the sort. Meanwhile, U.S. tech companies and executives are aligning themselves with this adversarial administration, some more than others. I am not saying we ought to require Canadian versions of Meta’s apps or X. But can users trust their recommendations systems?

It is folly for me, an idiot, to offer geopolitical analysis, so I will anyway. There are a handful of world powers worth worrying about: Russia, and its territorial expansion; China, and its manufacturing dominance combined with human rights abuses. The U.S. has long been on that list for anyone living in Southeast Asia, and Central and South America, formerly, and then the Middle East, and Africa now, too. But those of us in developed nations or who have been allies have had it easy; we have only needed to worry about its potential for demonstrating its power. Now, it has. Yet we are all reading about it using devices running U.S. software. I do not like thinking in these terms — the internet was supposed to be a grand unifier — but here we are.

The downfall of Quartz is really something to behold. It was launched in 2012 as a digital-only offshoot of the Atlantic specifically intended for business and economic news. It compared itself to esteemed publications like the Economist and Financial Times, and had a clever-for-early-2010s URL.1 It had an iPad-first layout. Six years later, it and “its own bot studio” were sold to Uzabase for a decent sum. But the good times did not last, and Quartz was eventually sold to G/O Media.

Riley MacLeod, Aftermath:

As of publishing, the “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom” has written 22 articles today, running the gamut from earnings reports to Reddit communities banning Twitter posts to the Sackler settlement to, delightfully, a couple articles about how much AI sucks. Quartz has been running AI-generated articles for months, but prior to yesterday, they appear to have been limited to summaries of earnings reports rather than news articles. Boilerplate at the bottom of these articles notes that “This is the first phase of an experimental new version of reporting. While we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard.”

MacLeod published this story last week, and I thought it would be a good time to check in on how it is going. So I opened the latest article from the “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom”, “Expected new tariffs will mean rising costs for everyday items”. It was published earlier today, and says at the top it “incorporates reporting from Yahoo, NBC Chicago and The Wall Street Journal on MSN.com”. The “Yahoo” story is actually a syndicated video from NBC’s Today Show, so that is not a great start as far as crediting sources goes.

Let us tediously dissect this article, beginning with the first paragraph:

As new tariffs are slated to take effect in early March, consumers in the U.S. can expect price increases on a variety of everyday items. These tariffs, imposed in a series of trade policy shifts, are anticipated to affect numerous sectors of the economy. The direct cost of these tariffs is likely to be passed on to consumers, resulting in higher prices for goods ranging from electronics to household items.

The very first sentence of this article appears to be wrong. The tariffs in question are supposed to be announced today, as stated in that Today Show clip, and none of the cited articles say anything about March. While a Reuters “exclusive” yesterday specified a March 1 enforcement date, the White House denied that report, with the president saying oil and gas tariffs would begin “around the 18 of February”.

To be fair to the robot writing the Quartz article, the president does not know what he is talking about. You could also see how a similar mistake could be made by a human being who read the Reuters story or has sources saying something similar. But the Quartz article does not cite Reuters — it, in fact, contains no links aside from those in the disclaimer quoted above — nor does it claim to have any basis for saying March.

The next paragraph is where things take a sloppier turn; see if you can spot it:

Data from recent analyses indicate that electronics, such as smartphones and laptops, will be among the most impacted by the new tariffs. Importers of these goods face increased costs, which they are poised to transfer to consumers. A report by the U.K.-based research firm Tech Analytics suggests that consumers might see price hikes of up to 15% on popular smartphone models and up to 10% on laptops. These increases are expected to influence consumer purchasing decisions, possibly leading to a decrease in sales volume.

If you are wondering why an article about U.S. tariffs published by a U.S. website is citing a U.K. source, you got the same weird vibe as I did. So I looked it up. And, as best I can tell, there is no U.K. research organization called “Tech Analytics” — none at all. There used to be and, because it was only dissolved in October, it is possible Tech Analytics could be a report from around then based on the president’s campaign statements. But I cannot find any record of Tech Analytics publishing anything whatsoever, or being cited in any news stories. This report does not exist.

I also could not find any source for the figures in this paragraph. Last month, the U.S. Consumer Technology Association published a report (PDF) exploring the effects of these tariffs on U.S. consumer goods. Analysis by Trade Partnership Worldwide indicated the proposed tariffs would raise the price of smartphones by 26–37%, and laptops by 46–68%. These figures assumed a rate of 70–100% on goods from China because that is what the president said he would do. He more recently said 10% tariffs should be expected, and that could mean smartphone prices really do increase by the amount in the Quartz article. However, there is again no (real) source or citation for those numbers.

As far as I can tell, Quartz, a business and financial news website, published a made-up source and some numbers in an article about a high-profile story. If a real person reviewed this story before publication, their work is not evident. Why should a reader trust anything from Quartz ever again?

Let us continue a couple of paragraphs later:

The automotive sector is also preparing for the impact of increased tariffs. Car manufacturers and parts suppliers are bracing for higher production costs as tariffs on imported steel and aluminum take hold. According to a February report from the Automobile Manufacturers Association of the U.S., vehicle prices might go up by an average of $1,500. This increase stems from the higher costs of materials that are critical to vehicle manufacturing and assembly.

Does the phrase “according to a February report” sound weird to you on the first of February? It does to me, too. Would it surprise you if I told you the “Automobile Manufacturers Association of the U.S.” does not exist? There was a U.S. trade group by the name of “Automobile Manufacturers Association” until 1999, according to Stan Luger in “Corporate Power, American Democracy, and the Automobile Industry”.2 There are also several current industry groups, none of which are named anything similar. This organization and its report do not exist. If they do, please tell me, but I found nothing relevant.

What about the figure itself, though — “vehicle prices might go up by an average of $1,500”? Again, I cannot find any supporting evidence. None of the sources cited in this article contain this number. A November Bloomberg story cites a Wolfe Research note in reporting new cars will be about $3,000 more expensive, not $1,500, at the same proposed rate as the White House is expected to announce today.

Again, I have to ask why anyone should trust Quartz with their financial news. I know A.I. makes mistakes and, as MacLeod quotes them saying, Quartz does too: “[w]hile we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard”.

This is the first article I checked, and I gave up after the fourth paragraph and two entirely fictional sources of information. Maybe the rest of the Quartz Intelligence Newsroom’s output is spotless and I got unlucky.

But — what a downfall for Quartz. Once positioning itself as the Economist for the 2010s, it is now publishing stuff that is made up by a machine and, apparently, is passed unchecked to the web for other A.I. scrapers to aggregate. G/O Media says it publishes “editorial content and conduct[s its] day-to-day business activities with the UTMOST INTEGRITY”. I disagree. I think we will struggle to understand for a long time how far and how fast standards have fallen. This is trash.


  1. Do not look at your address bar right now. ↥︎

  2. Yes, it is the citation on Wikipedia, but I looked it up for myself and confirmed it with a copy of the book. Pages 155–156. ↥︎