Month: March 2025

A Bit of A.I. Siri Followup ⇥ bloomberg.com

Earlier today, in reacting to the news of delayed Siri updates, I noted Mark Gurman had recently reported these features could be released in May, but I doubted it. It turns out I could have been more up-to-date if I had bothered to refresh his author page at Bloomberg.

Gurman:

Bloomberg News reported on Feb. 14 that Apple was struggling to finish developing the features and the enhancements would be postponed until at least May — when iOS 18.5 is due to arrive. Since then, Apple engineers have been racing to fix a rash of bugs in the project. The work has been unsuccessful, according to people involved in the efforts, and they now believe the features won’t be released until next year at the earliest.

Take this with a grain of salt, of course — these could be pessimistic engineers ranting in Gurman’s direct messages, for all we know — but it does seem to match the tone of the statement. Maybe these features come in an early iOS 19 build. Probably, though, they get dragged out to one of the updates next year after Apple — again, according to Gurman’s reporting — may rebuild the features as part of new Siri architecture.

One more little thing, courtesy Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question.

The commercial starred Bella Ramsey who should probably win an award for acting like Siri worked.

Nice.

Apple Confirms Delayed Launch of Personalized Siri Features

Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy, in a statement provided seemingly first to both Stephen Nellis, of Reuters, and John Gruber:

[…] We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.

Unsurprisingly, this news comes on a Friday and is announced via a carefully circulated statement instead of on Apple’s own website. It is a single feature, but it is a high-priority one showcased in its celebrity infused ads for its flagship iPhone models. I think Apple ought to have published its own news instead of relying on other outlets to do its dirty work, but it fits a pattern. It happened with AirPods and again with AirPower; the former has become wildly successful, while the latter was canned.

This announcement reflects rumours of the feature’s fraught development. Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, in February:

The company first unveiled plans for a new AI-infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to customers. But Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Some features, originally planned for April, may have to be postponed until May or later, they said.

Do note how “or later” is doing the bulk of the work in this paragraph. Nevertheless, he seems to have forecasted the delay announced today.

While it is possible to reconcile Apple’s “coming year” timeline with Gurman’s May-or-later availability while staying within the current release cycle, the statement is a tacit acknowledgement these features are now slated for the next major versions of Apple’s operating system, perhaps no sooner than a release early next year. I do not see why Apple would have issued this statement if it were confident it could ship personalized Siri before September’s new releases. That is a long time between marketing and release for any company, and particularly so for Apple.

This is a risk of announcing something before it is ready, something the WWDC keynote is increasingly filled with. Instead of monolithic September releases with occasional tweaks throughout the year, Apple adopted a more incremental strategy. I would like to believe this has made Apple’s software more polished — or, less charitably, slowed its quality decline. What it has actually done is turn Apple’s big annual software presentation into a series of promises to be fulfilled throughout the year. To its credit, it has almost always delivered and, so, it has been easy to assume the hot streak will continue. This is a good reminder we should treat anything not yet shipping in a release or beta build as a potential feature only.

The delay may ultimately be good news. It is better for Apple to ship features that work well than it is to get things out the door quickly. Investors do not seem bothered; try spotting the point on today’s chart when Gruber and Reuters published the statements they received. And, anyway, most Apple Intelligence features released so far seem rushed and faulty. I would not want to see more of the same. Siri has little reputation to lose, so it makes sense to get this round of changes more right than not.

Besides, Apple only just began including the necessary APIs in the latest developer betas of iOS 18.4. No matter when Apple gets this out, the expansiveness of its functionality is dependent on third-party buy-in. There was a time when developer adoption of new features was a given. That is no longer the case.

According to Gurman as recently as earlier this week, a May release is possible (Update: Oops, I should have checked again.), but I would bet against it. If his reporting is to be believed, however, the key features announced as delayed today require a wholly different architecture which Apple was planning on merging with the existing Siri infrastructure midway through the iOS 19 cycle. It seems possible to me the timeline on both projects could now be interlinked. After all, why not? It is not like Siri is getting worse. No rush.

Brazilian Court Requires Apple to Permit Sideloading Within Ninety Days ⇥ valorinternational.globo.com

Guilherme Pimenta, Valor Econômico:

The Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region (TRF-1) has overturned a trial ruling and reinstated an injunction imposed by the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade) on Apple, as part of an investigation into alleged abuse of dominant position in the app distribution market for iOS devices. According to the ruling, the company will have 90 days to implement the changes mandated by the antitrust authority.

Under the previous ruling, overturned in December, Apple had just twenty days to comply. The judge said the new timeline is reasonable given both the “fast-paced dynamic of the technology market” and:

“Apple has already complied with similar obligations in other countries without demonstrating significant impact or irreparable harm to its economic model,” the judge pointed out. “The implementation of structural changes in operating systems, indeed, requires some planning and technical development, which may demand more time than stipulated in the administrative decision,” he considered in the ruling.

The rules are changing worldwide. Apple can make this easy for itself, or it can tediously lose its fights one country at a time.

Canadians’ Health Data Needs Safeguarding Against Our Increasingly Hostile Neighbour ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Michael Geist and Kumanan Wilson, the Globe and Mail:

Given recent turbulent events and the diminishing trust between Canada and the U.S., it is entirely possible that Washington would seek enhanced access to sensitive Canadian data, notably including financial and health data. This data could be invaluable for developing AI algorithms, for instance, a current priority of the Trump administration.

[…]

Mandated data localization requirements would be an important policy response from Canada. While the end goal would be to establish viable Canadian-controlled cloud services ready to compete with U.S. giants, this may be a way off. An interim measure would involve further beefing up Canadian privacy law by ensuring that Canadian health data is encrypted, resides on servers in Canada and is subject to serious penalties for non-consensual disclosures.

I remain steadfastly opposed to trusting the U.S. government with data about non-U.S. citizens. There are some cases where it offers increased protections, but many where it is a risk — now increasing.

Digg Reboots Again ⇥ torment-nexus.mathewingram.com

Samantha Subin, CNBC:

Content aggregator Digg is making a comeback with the help of an unlikely partner: Reddit co-founder and rival Alexis Ohanian.

Ohanian and Digg founder Kevin Rose acquired the platform for an undisclosed sum. The deal is backed by venture capital firms True Ventures, where Rose is a partner, and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The partnership was announced Wednesday in a video post to the company’s X account in which Rose called the partnership a “team-up he would have never imagined 20 years ago.”

Before it was acquired by Money Group, a publisher and advertising company, Digg was previously owned by BuySellAds. No word on how many people were working on the most recent version and whether any of them will continue.

Mathew Ingram:

What I find the most interesting about the Digg 2.0 announcement is something that wasn’t really teased out in any of the coverage I saw, and that is how it represents an attempt by Ohanian to go into competition with Reddit and his former partner Huffman, who took over running the company in 2014 (Ohanian left the board in 2009) and last year took it public with a $9.5-billion IPO. Although the IPO makes it sound like the last few years have been a raging success, Huffman’s tenure at Reddit has been marked by significant controversy, including changes that led to a revolt by some of the platform’s volunteer sub-Reddit moderators — the workforce that is more or less responsible for most of the company’s value. What Ohanian thinks of all this is unknown, because he has kept his thoughts about Reddit private, but the relaunch of Digg suggests he sees an opportunity there, a market niche that could potentially be filled.

I am considerably less optimistic than Ingram. Digg has been relaunched a few times — first as a curated link aggregator, then as a web magazine, with a detour for building a Google Reader-like RSS client. Under BuySellAds, it appeared to fill a Buzzfeed-like best-of-the-web role.

Digg is a valuable domain being passed around to find a sustainable business model.

The Web Was Always About Redistribution of Power ⇥ werd.io

Ben Werdmuller:

The original web was inherently about redistribution of power from a small number of gatekeepers to a large number of individuals, even if it never quite lived up to that promise. But the next iteration of the web was about concentrating power in a small set of gatekeepers whose near-unlimited growth potential tended towards monopoly. There were always movements that bucked this trend — blogging and the indie web never really went away — but they were no longer the mainstream force on the internet. And over time, the centralized platforms disempowered their users by monopolizing more and more slices of everyday life that used to be free. The open, unlimited nature of the web that was originally used to distribute equity was now being used to suck it up and concentrate it in a handful of increasingly-wealthy people.

I imagine this will continue to ebb and flow over time. The vast majority of people still congregate on closed platforms that are begrudgingly loosening their hold thanks to legislative efforts, mostly in Europe. But there does seem to be growing discontent and mistrust.

Wine Prices Raised by Alberta Government ⇥ cbc.ca

Colleen Underwood, CBC News:

The province says the flat rate for wine is going up another 15 cents per 750 ml bottle.

And it’s creating a new ad valorem, or “value added” fee, that will go up as the price of wine goes up, on top of the flat fee.

For example, according to the province, a $25 750 ml bottle of wine will cost another 20 to 40 cents, but a $50 750 ml bottle of wine will cost anywhere from $2.80 to $3.25 more.

This was announced to retailers with basically no warning. The province is using the wholesale per-litre price to assess this additional levy, meaning a standard 750 mL bottle of wine costing over $11.25 from a distributor is considered “high value”. Based on the wholesale prices I have seen from one importer, that would include the vast majority of wine from our neighbours in British Columbia, at a time when they need support after last year’s cold snap.

This is not my usual beat here, but I wanted to highlight some local lies, emphasis mine:

“Changes to the liquor markup system were undertaken with the objective of minimizing the impact to Alberta consumers and support social responsibility as they ensure products with a higher content of alcohol are subject to higher markup rates,” said Brandon Aboultaif, press secretary to the Service Albert and Red Tape Reduction Minister, Dale Nally.

This is nonsense. The markup rate for spirits with 22–60% alcohol by volume, which comprises virtually all “hard” liquor on store shelves, remains identical for major producers and, for qualifying “small manufacturers”, has been reduced (PDF) compared to the previous rates (PDF). The government, according to Underwood, says this wine-specific tax is intended to “address industry concerns, improve equity within the system, and support the growth of Alberta’s liquor manufacturing industry”. Alberta does not have a wine industry; it does, however, make a lot of beer and spirits. What this sounds like, in part, is that wine drinkers are seen as snooty cosmopolitain types, not like good old-fashioned beer and whisky drinkers.

I have little problem in principle with taxing my vices or, say, increasing other taxes to pay for stuff. That is understandable. But I do not appreciate being lied to.

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton Honoured With 2024 Turing Award ⇥ acm.org

The Association for Computing Machinery which — and this is not, strictly speaking, important — ought to have a way cooler logo than it actually does:

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning—one of the most important approaches for creating intelligent systems.

Barto is Professor Emeritus of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Sutton is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta, a Research Scientist at Keen Technologies, and a Fellow at Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute).

The University of Alberta has a good summary of Sutton’s contributions to the field’s development internationally and in this province. Great things can happen when people work together across borders.

Tapbots Reveals ‘Phoenix’ Bluesky Client for Summer Release ⇥ macstories.net

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Tapbots, the makers of Mastodon client Ivory, announced today that they are working on a Bluesky client. The app, which will be called Phoenix, is planned for release this summer.

I have been begging for a decent Bluesky client for MacOS. This looks promising. And, if it has the same system requirements as Ivory, it means I will be able to run it on my ageing Intel iMac. Truly miraculous.

Apple Says Not Every Generation Will See an ‘Ultra’ Chip ⇥ arstechnica.com

Apple:

Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip. The ultimate pro desktop delivers groundbreaking pro performance, extensive connectivity now with Thunderbolt 5, and new capabilities in its compact and quiet design that can live right on a desk. Mac Studio can tackle the most intense workloads with its powerful CPU, Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, higher unified memory capacity, ultrafast SSD storage, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine. It provides a big boost in performance compared to the previous generation, and a massive leap for users coming from older Macs.

The introduction of the M3 Ultra, for which Apple issued an entirely separate press release, is a curious twist. Every other Mac available today updated in the past year uses the M4 generation, mostly because Apple makes essentially two computers: consumer Macs — the iMac, MacBook Air, and the Mac Mini — and its more “pro” Macs, with the M chip architecture generally shared across each these lines. You can quibble with my oversimplification — there is one M4 Pro configuration available for the Mac Mini, and the MacBook Pro now starts with the no-suffix M4 — but it is correct enough to make it conspicuous that the Mac Pro, the Studio’s architectural sibling, was not updated today.

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an “Ultra” tier. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time that Apple has said anything like this in public.

This statement doesn’t totally preclude the possibility of an eventual M4 Ultra — if Apple wanted to put more space in between the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, reserving its best chip for the Mac Pro could be one way to do it. But it does suggest that Apple will skip the M4 Ultra entirely, opting to refresh these gigantic and niche chips on a slower cadence than the rest of its processors.

Seeing the Studio updated today instead of at WWDC gave me hope for a radical Mac Pro update in June. Apple’s statement to Cunningham makes me think that might not be coming.

Cloudflare Blocking Privacy Focused Users From Accessing Third-Party Websites ⇥ theregister.com

Liam Proven, the Register:

According to some in the Hacker News discussion of the problem, something else that can count as suspicious – other than using niche browsers or OSes – is something as simple as asking for a URL unaccompanied by any referrer IDs. To us, that sounds like a user with good security measures that block tracking, but it seems that, to the CDN merchant, this looks like an alert to an action that isn’t operated by a human.

Making matters worse, Cloudflare tech support is aimed at its corporate customers, and there seems to be no direct way for non-paying users to report issues other than the community forums. The number of repeated posts suggests to us that the company isn’t monitoring these for reports of problems.

The more privacy you want on the open web, the more cumbersome it becomes. There are reasons for this — every website is being constantly scraped for A.I. training, mining contact data, and generally abusing the social contract of public access. Administrators, understandably, want to limit the amount of automated traffic. To do so, they depend on tools from the same handful of companies as everyone else. And, if you have taken steps to improve your privacy online, your traffic looks abnormal, which is apparently suspicious.

The open web is becoming ever more complicated. You must frequently confirm your humanity. Google now requires JavaScript just to search, since it is also apparently trying to combat bots and scrapers. Everything, even viewing a relatively basic document, feels degraded unless you abandon control over your experience either on the web or in an app.

Apple Appeals U.K. Backdoor Demand to Investigatory Powers Tribunal ⇥ bbc.com

Zoe Kleinman, BBC News:

Apple is taking legal action to try to overturn a demand made by the UK government to view its customers’ private data if required.

The BBC understands that the US technology giant has appealed to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent court with the power to investigate claims against the Security Service.

Neither the BBC nor the Financial Times, which broke this news, has any details about the appeal, presumably because nobody can talk about this in public through official channels. According to both reports, it is possible this whole thing will be conducted in secret, too.

It looks like I, by way of Mike Masnick, was wrong to believe the only grounds on which Apple could fight this are financial. It turns out there is an appeals process which I could have found at any time — and in even more detail (PDF) — if I had double-checked. That is on me. However, in the first four years appeals were permitted on legal grounds, just two cases (PDF) were heard, with one being dismissed.

The way this is playing out is farcical. Nobody is legally permitted to discuss it, so we have only on-background leaks from Apple (almost certainly, I am guessing) and U.K. intelligence (maybe) to the same handful of reporters. This has advantages for both parties since they can craft a narrative through limited disclosures, but it means the rest of us can only speculate about how long Apple will be permitted to offer uncompromised end-to-end encryption worldwide.

Did the Trump Administration Minimize Russian Cyber Threats? ⇥ zetter-zeroday.com

Stephanie Kirchgaessner, the Guardian:

A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.

Martin Matishak, the Record:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Kim Zetter:

Taken together, the two stories raised alarms that the policy changes would have a drastic impact on U.S. national security and make the country more vulnerable to cyberattacks from Vladimir Putin’s hackers. The Record noted that the order to Cyber Command provided “evidence of the White House’s efforts to normalize ties with Moscow,” and the Guardian quoted a source who said that the change at CISA represented a win for Russia. “Putin is on the inside now,” the source told the Guardian.

Although a number of people on social media seem to believe The Record story corroborates The Guardian story (I won’t call anyone out here), the two stories are reporting different things and are based on different sources.

[…]

I’ll first parse what the two stories said and didn’t say and then look at what has changed since they published.

We all know that reporting during a breaking news cycle is going to contain inaccuracies. When it is the policy of the U.S. government to set in motion a series of these cycles on a seemingly daily basis, it is difficult to get a handle on anything. I appreciate Zetter’s more careful reading and verification with her sources. If you want a better idea of what is — and is not — known about the U.S. cybersecurity posture regarding Russia, her analysis is the one to read.

Potions and Spells ⇥ 8ball.report

Sean Monahan:

People love to quote the third of Arthur C. Clark’s laws — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And almost always with a positive spin. The Disneyfied language makes it sound wondrous. But let’s reconsider the quote with a different word:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from witchcraft.

This is far from the first article aligning new technologies — particularly artificial intelligence — with magical thinking. Just searching some related keywords yields at least three academic papers, plus loads of articles with similar framing. Some include this same Clarke quote for obvious reasons.

Monahan, though, ties it to a broader social condition in which magical thinking is on the rise, and there is something to think about in this. I am not necessarily in agreement — I think this is more of an interesting exercise in language than it is describing a broader trend — but I have also just finished reading “If It Sounds Like a Quack” and, so, my head might be in a funny space.

The U.S. Government Is Apparently Upset About the U.K. iCloud Backdoor Demand ⇥ ft.com

Joseph Menn, Washington Post:

The U.S. Justice Department told Congress in November that there were no major disputes with the United Kingdom over how the two allies seek data from each other’s communication companies.

But at that time, officials knew British authorities were preparing a demand that Apple build a back door to its users’ encrypted data, according to people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal department matters.

There are only two reasons I can see for Biden officials to omit this from their report: first because it was not, in November, a current dispute but a potential future one; and, second, it understood it could not talk about it. Neither seems justifiable.

Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times:

Donald Trump has lashed out at the UK’s demand for Apple to grant secret access to its most secure cloud storage system, comparing the move to “something … that you hear about with China”.

[…]

Earlier this week, Tulsi Gabbard, US director of national intelligence, said any move to force Apple to build a back door into its systems would cause “grave concern” as an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy. Gabbard said she had ordered lawyers and intelligence officials to investigate the matter.

It is amazing to see this particularly despicable U.S. administration arguing for the correct position given its history. To be fair, Tulsi Gabbard is less of a surprise; though she now apparently supports U.S. surveillance programmes, she has a history of questioning privacy overreaches. But the first Trump administration was not at all friendly to end-to-end encryption. According to Menn, then at Reuters, the FBI tried to pressure Apple to kill its plans for end-to-end encryption in iCloud, a feature which would ultimately be launched – in 2022 – as Advanced Data Protection. In 2019, the U.S. was exploring whether it could ban end-to-end encryption entirely and, in 2020, was a co-signatory on a multilateral statement requesting a backdoor as policy.

Thankfully, none of the more extreme U.S. positions on end-to-end encryption has become law. And, while the U.S. is among many in opposing end-to-end encryption, there have been no reports of it compelling service providers to do what the U.K. government is expecting of Apple, though Menn reports the FBI has tried. That is not to say the U.S. would not issue a mandate, nor that we would find out about it. The PRISM program was a backdoor into tech company data maintained secretly for six years before its existence was revealed by Edward Snowden, while Yahoo built (maybe?) a way for it to search users’ email accounts after being compelled of the U.S. government. I do not think anyone should expect ideological or principled consistency from the Trump administration on this matter. There is a history of U.S. officials making these kinds of demands.

Maybe there is a third reason Biden officials did not want to notify Congress after all.

The Digital Packrat Manifesto ⇥ 404media.co

Janus Rose, 404 Media:

While streaming platforms flatten music-listening into a homogenous assortment of vibes, listening to an album you’ve downloaded on Bandcamp or receiving a mix from a friend feels more like forging a connection with artists and people. As a musician, I’d much rather have people listen to my music this way. Having people download your music for free on Soulseek is still considered a badge of honor in my producer/dj circles.

I don’t expect everyone to read this and immediately go back to hoarding mp3s, nor do I think many people will abandon things like Spotify and Amazon Kindle completely. It’s not like I’m some model citizen either: I share a YouTube Premium account because the ads make me want to die, and I will admit having a weakness for the Criterion Channel. But the packrat lifestyle has shown me that other ways are possible, and that at the end of the day, the only things we can trust to always be there are the things we can hold in our hands and copy without restriction.

Yes — a thousand times, yes. These are all effective ways of embracing art. One can stream and buy music, just as one can see movies in theatres and on a phone while sitting on a train. I am not saying the latter is as enjoyable, but I do not think the people involved in making “Twisters” will very much mind.

But I think you should have local copies of the stuff you like. None of these third-party services promise availability. In fact, their legal terms say they are provided on an “as-is” basis, and explicitly deny a warranty of “satisfactory quality” or any “obligation to provide specific content”. The service providers will try, of course, but they cannot make guarantees. Your local, backed-up music library, though? That will almost certainly work.

Inclusive Typefaces ⇥ itsnicethat.com

Harry Bennett, It’s Nice That:

Inclusive Sans is a new typeface from Olivia King that puts accessibility at the forefront. It’s arisen from the type designer’s research into typographic accessibility and readability – from highly regarded traditional guides and papers to more modern approaches to letterform legibility. “A few years ago, I was working on branding projects in the disability and government sectors, where accessibility was always a big focus,” Olivia tells It’s Nice That. Olivia wanted to take things a step further, however, and she and her colleague, Jo Roca, began to explore typographic accessibility at the character level rather than through the typeface as a whole.

Inclusive Sans is a free download through Google Fonts. Via a Brand New case study, I also learned about Atkinson Hyperlegible from the Braille Institute of America. Both are not only reflecting more inclusive principles, they are also quite nice examples of type design.