Month: April 2025

U.S. Judge Rules Apple Is Not in Compliance With Injunction in Epic Games Case

In September 2021, U.S. judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued a judgement in Epic Games’ case against Apple. She mostly sided with Apple but, critically, ruled third-party developers must be permitted to link to external purchasing mechanisms from within their apps.

Even that barest of changes, however, has apparently been too onerous for Apple to comply with in the spirit the court intended. Instead of collecting a typical 30% commission on in-app purchases, Apple said it would take 27% of external purchases made within seven days of someone using an in-app link. This sucks. The various rules Apple implemented, including the different commission rate, have been a problem ever since. In a ruling today, Gonzalez Rogers finds Apple’s measures do not comply with the court’s expectations.

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

Apple willfully violated a 2021 injunction that came out of the Epic Games case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a court filing on Wednesday.

[…]

Rogers added that she referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both [Apple executive Alex] Roman and Apple.

The judge’s order (PDF) is full of withering remarks and findings, like this footnote on the sixth page (citation removed):

Apple’s “entitlement” perspective and mantra persisted beyond the Injunction. For example, Apple’s Communications Director, Marni Goldberg, texted her colleague during the first evidentiary hearings, that “It’s Our F***ING STORE.” Not surprisingly (nor convincingly), she did not “recall” sending those messages.

There are several points like these where the judge makes clear she does not appreciate Apple’s obstinate approach. But the business-related findings are notable, too. For example, this passage on pages 17–18 (citations removed for clarity):

Further, in May 2023, Apple through Oliver and others received feedback from Bumble, a large, well-known developer on Apple’s and Google’s alternative billing programs. Bumble specifically advised Apple that “[p]ayment processing fees average out significantly higher than the 4% fee reduction currently offered by Google in the [user choice billing] program or [the] 3% fee in Apple’s … solution resulting in negative margin for developers.” In other words, Bumble explained to Apple that a “3% discount” was not economically viable for a developer because the external cost of payments exceeds 3%. Apple’s own internal assessment from February 2023 reflects data meriting the same conclusion — that the external costs of payments for developers on link-out purchases would exceed Apple’s 3% discount if it demanded a 27% rate.

The evidence uncovered in the 2025 hearing demonstrated Apple’s knowledge and expectation that the restrictions would effectively dissuade any real developer participation, to Apple’s economic advantage.

To all those who have said Apple’s regulatory and legal responses have amounted to malicious compliance, you appear to be correct. Stripping more formal language, as the judge has done here, reveals how fed up she is with Apple’s petulant misconduct.

Throughout this filing, Phil Schiller comes across very well, unlike fellow executives Luca Maestri, the aforementioned Alex Roman, and Tim Cook. In internal discussions, he consistently sounds like the most reasonable voice in the room — though Gonzalez Rogers still has stern words for him throughout. (For example, Schiller claimed external purchasing links alongside in-app options would make users more susceptible to fraud, even though under Apple’s rules it must review and approve those links. The judge writes “[n]o real-time business documents credit that view”.)

Gonzalez Rogers also has critical words about Apple’s current visual interface design patterns. In a section on page 32 featuring screenshots of possible button styles permissible for developers to provide external links, she writes of a “plain link or button style” not dissimilar to many post-iOS 7-style “buttons”:

Nothing about either example appears to be a “button,” by the ordinary usage and understanding of the word. There is, certainly, an external-link icon next to the call to action and hyperlink, but Apple strains to call either of these strings of text a “button.”

Yet, of a subsequent screenshot featuring one button of this style and another with a rounded rectangle background:

The lower example is readily identifiable as a button.

A final set of passages I would like to point to in this filing is the suspicion of Apple’s intellectual property justification for charging such onerous fees in the first place. Quite a bit of this is repeated from other judgements and filings in this case, but it is quite something to read them all together. For example, in a footnote on page 60 (citations removed for clarity):

[…] Apple also argues that the question of whether Apple’s commission appropriately reflects the value of its intellectual property is not an issue for injunction compliance, and that it is legitimate for a business to promote the value of its corporation for stockholders. Apple misses the point. The issue is that Apple flouted the Court’s order by designing a top-down anticompetitive system, in which its commission played a fundamental role.

For the same reasons, the Court disagrees that requiring Apple to set a commission of zero constitutes and unconstitutional taking. For instance, as described infra Section IV, in the trademark context, “a party who has once infringed is allowed less leniency for purposes of injunction enforcement than an innocent party.” Apple does not have an absolute right to the intellectual property that it wields as a shield to competition without adequate justification of its value. Apple was provided with an opportunity to value that intellectual property and chose not to do so.

On page 21, the judge cites an internal email on the topic:

[T]he team has discussed variations on the commission options with lower rates, but we struggled to land on ironclad pricing rationales that would (1) stand up to scrutinizing comparisons with defenses of the commission and existing discounting approaches in other jurisdictions and (2) that we could substantiate solidly on a bottoms up basis without implicitly devaluing our IP / proprietary technology.

The justification for Apple’s commission is entirely fictional. The company is not expected to, in its words, “give away [its] technology for free”, but it is clearly charging commissions like these simply because it can. It owns the platform and it believes it is entitled to run it in any way it chooses. At Apple’s scale, however, that argument does not fly.

Legal bodies around the world are requiring similar changes, and Apple’s reluctance to rip off the bandage and adopt a single global policy seems increasingly stupid. The longer it drags this stuff out, the worse it looks.

I am sure there are smart people at Apple who believe they are morally and legally correct to keep fighting. But Gonzalez Rogers accused an executive of lying under oath, seems to find the rest of the company’s executive team legally contemptible, and finds the behaviour of the world’s most valuable company to be pretty outrageous. All of this because, according to the company’s internal records on page 42, it might “lose over a billion [dollars] in revenue” if 25% of users chose to use external purchase links and the company collected no commission on them.

Documents Show How Police Track Cars Using Subscription Features ⇥ wired.com

Dell Cameron, Wired:

A cache of more than two dozen police records recently reviewed by WIRED show US law enforcement agencies regularly trained on how to take advantage of “connected cars,” with subscription-based features drastically increasing the amount of data that can be accessed during investigations. The records make clear that law enforcement’s knowledge of the surveillance far exceeds that of the public and reveal how corporate policies and technologies — not the law — determine driver privacy.

On Bluesky, Cameron published a screenshot of what is available by car make and model year “as a treat”. Owners of Ferraris will be delighted to know they are not on this list.

Cameron’s reporting indicates law enforcement is able to obtain information from automakers and cellular network operators. Four years ago, Joseph Cox, then at Vice, reported on capabilities offered by the Ulysses Group, previously linked. Then, last year, Kashmir Hill of the New York Times reported the sharing of data by General Motors to insurance companies and data brokers. Each of these depicts an entirely different avenue by which individual vehicles may be surveilled, stockpiling data which may be produced without a warrant.

In Praise of a Democracy on Paper ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

The Globe and Mail’s editorial board:

There are, of course, practical arguments in favour of the system used for federal elections. Paper ballots cannot be hacked. A hand-count allows for maximum transparency.

But the best reason for a paper ballot is not practical at all. It is more fundamental. A paper ballot gives physical form to democracy. The choice literally sits in a voter’s hand.

I will confess to having an immediately negative reaction to what seems like a saccharine take. Then I thought about it a little bit more and I came around. When everything around us is based on pixels and transistors, the simple action of marking a little bit of paper feels somehow more direct.

And it is not even particularly slow, to boot. We knew within a few hours of polls closing that the Liberal party would get the most votes in a dramatic turnaround over the past few months.

Backblaze Responds to Claims of ‘Sham Accounting’ From Sketchy ‘Research’ Firm ⇥ arstechnica.com

In March, a firm named Morpheus Research published its first report examining Solaris Energy and taking a short position against it. Last week, they published their second report alleging a massive financial scam is brewing at Backblaze. Again, they are shorting Backblaze stock.

There is no information about who is behind Morpheus Research, only an about page saying it is a “team of financial analysts dedicated to exposing fraud and corporate misconduct in financial markets”. That is one clumsy sentence. The domain was only registered in February, and I cannot find any clues about who is behind it aside from a tweet indicating at least some staff used to work at Hidenburg Research before it was shut down earlier this year.

Nevertheless, perhaps it is possible to assess the report on its merits. The facts are not dependent on who is behind it or what interest they have. The gist of its arguments is that Backblaze bet on enterprise storage, but was undercut by a competitor. The company has been consistently unprofitable, and its stock-based compensation program has been undermined by massive sales of shares held by executives. Its current financial reports are, allegedly, fraudulent to some extent.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica:

Ars Technica reached out to Backblaze about its response to concerns about the company’s financials resulting in lost backups. Patrick Thomas, Backblaze’s VP of marketing, called Morpheus’ claims “baseless.” He added:

The report is inaccurate and misleading, based largely on litigation of the same nature, and a clear attempt by short sellers to manipulate our stock price for financial gain.

Thomas also claimed that “independent, third-party reviews” have already found that there have been “no wrongdoing or issues” with Backblaze’s public financial results.

I am worried about this because Backblaze is part of my backup strategy. If it reduces its focus on backups in favour of an enterprise clientele it cannot win, it seems likely both are at risk — assuming Morpheus Research’s findings are in any way accurate. It is possible it arrived at its bet against the company after producing this report; it seems equally possible it created this report to justify a short position by using some cherry-picked quotes. It is a lengthy report that I, like many other readers, do not have time to fully fact-check.

What I do know is I have always been a little bit suspicious of Backblaze. Hacker News commenter klodolph says it well:

I recommend worrying about any service where you don’t pay a fee that scales with usage. This includes Backblaze. Yes, I recommend worrying about Backblaze and I’ve recommended worrying about it for a while.

I have many terabytes backed-up with Backblaze. I entrust it with my precious photos and music collection — the latter was the motivation for my subscription in the first place. But I should have always been more cautious given the company’s flat-rate promise. I simply assumed it would eventually become a tiered system. Now, I feel like I have reason to worry a little more.

Another Papercut from the Always-On Display Feature ⇥ pxlnv.com

In August, I wrote about a number of small usability problems with the iPhone’s Dynamic Island and always-on display features, none of which have been resolved in software updates. Here is another.

Sometimes, I will be listening to a podcast in Overcast, and need to pause it for an extended period of time to work on something else. I cannot listen to words whilst typing different words. The media controls will be displayed on the always-on display. However, when I tap the display, the controls disappear if I have been paused for a long time. I think Overcast has been kicked out of background tasks or something. There are two problems here.

The first is that controls shown on the always-on display do not respond to taps in the same way as when the phone is awake. You might see media controls or a series of tasks, but tapping those controls merely wakes the display; it does not activate the control.

The second problem is the mismatch in the visibility of media controls between changed states.

These are both obvious — to me — user experience issues that should have been resolved when prototype iPhones with this display were being used internally. Yet there are now three years of always-on iPhone models with the same problems. The Apple promise is “seamless integration”, but the display and its software feel like they were developed by two companies who are not on speaking terms.

The Group Chats of the Elite ⇥ semafor.com

Ben Smith, of Semafor, has a scoopy look inside the group chats of elite media and business figures, particularly those who pretend they are not. I often disagree with Smith’s framing — calling Christopher Rufo an “anti-woke conservative activist” and Richard Hanania a “conservative academic” dramatically undersells the vile views held by both — but the article successfully explores the coordination of these people.

One thing is for certain: a Signal group is so much dorkier than a secret society.

Canada’s Tech Executives Are Not Scared of Mark Carney ⇥ disconnect.blog

Paris Marx:

As [Mark] Carney appears set to form government, Canadians must be on guard for the consequences of his alignment with domestic tech CEOs. They may not wield as much power as the billionaires of Silicon Valley, but that does not mean Canada will be immune from short-sighted policy decisions justified in the name of efficiency and innovation that enrich tech executives, while justifying government austerity.

Marx is understandably cautious, a position I welcome. I do not think it is wise to replace the influence one set of oligarchs with another simply because they are domestic. However, given the parallel need to dilute the overwhelming U.S. influence in the industry, we should encourage Canadian businesses while upholding values and ethics. The Carney-led Liberal platform seems like a mixed bag. It will be important for Canadians to keep his government in check.

The Tree Farms Powering Tech Companies’ Carbon Neutral Goals ⇥ technologyreview.com

Apple, earlier this month:

Apple today announced that the company has surpassed a 60 percent reduction in its global greenhouse gas emissions compared to 2015 levels, as part of its Apple 2030 goal to become carbon neutral across its entire footprint in the next five years. The company achieved several other major environmental milestones, including the use of 99 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets and 99 percent recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries. Apple shared this and other progress in its annual Environmental Progress Report, published today.

[…]

Apple’s 2030 strategy prioritizes cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent compared with its 2015 baseline year, before applying high-quality carbon credits to balance the remaining emissions. Last year, Apple’s comprehensive efforts to reduce its carbon footprint — including the continued transition of its supply chain to renewable electricity and designing products with more recycled materials — avoided an estimated 41 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

The phrasing of Apple’s 2030 goals is slightly different than when announced, when it said 25% of its emissions would be offset by “developing innovative carbon removal solutions”. Turns out, that is planting trees.

Gregory Barber, MIT Technology Review:

On a practical level, the answer seemed straightforward. Nobody disputed how swiftly or reliably eucalyptus could grow in the tropics. This knowledge was the product of decades of scientific study and tabulations of biomass for wood or paper. Each tree was roughly 47% carbon, which meant that many tons of it could be stored within every planted hectare. This could be observed taking place in real time, in the trees by the road. Come back and look at these young trees tomorrow, and you’d see it: fresh millimeters of carbon, chains of cellulose set into lignin.

At the same time, Apple and the others were also investing in an industry, and a tree, with a long and controversial history in this part of Brazil and elsewhere. They were exerting their wealth and technological oversight to try to make timber operations more sustainable, more supportive of native flora, and less water intensive. Still, that was a hard sell to some here, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of pasture are already in line for planting; more trees were a bleak prospect in a land increasingly racked by drought and fire. Critics called the entire exercise an excuse to plant even more trees for profit.

This is a long and detailed exploration of how these projects work. I think is worth your time in part because of how captivating it is in words and, indeed, in photographs. I learned plenty.

The Carelessness of Perplexity

Alex Heath, of the Verge, spoke with Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, earlier this week, and they had quite the conversation.

Many publishers have been upset with you for scraping their content. You’ve started cutting some of them checks. Do you feel like you’re in a good place with publishers now, or do you feel there’s still more work to be done?

I’m sure there’s more work to be done, but it’s in a way better place than it was last time we spoke. We are scraping but respecting robots.txt. We only use third-party data providers for anything that doesn’t allow us to scrape.

Heath has no followup, no request for clarification — nothing — so I am not sure if I am reading this right, but I think I am. Srinivas here says that Perplexity’s scraper itself respects website owners’ permissions but, if it is disallowed, the company gets the same data through third-parties. If a website owner does not want their data used by Perplexity, they must disallow its own scraper plus every single scraper that might sell to Perplexity. That barely resembles “respecting robots.txt”.

Again, I could have this wrong, but Heath does not bother to clarify this response.

Perplexity is currently working on its own web browser, Comet, and has signalled interest in buying Chrome should Google be forced to divest it. Srinivas calls it a “containerized operating system” and explains the company’s thinking in response to a question about ChatGPT’s Memory feature:

Our strategy is to allow people to stay logged in where they are. We’re going to build a browser, and that’s how we’ll access apps on behalf of the user on the client side.

I think memory will be won by the company that has the most context. ChatGPT knows nothing about what you buy on Instagram or Amazon. It also knows nothing about how much time you spend on different websites. You need to have all this data to deeply personalize for the user. It’s not about who rolls out memory based on the retrieval of past queries. That’s very simple to replicate.

If you are a money person, there is a logical next step to this, which Srinivas revealed on a small podcast with a couple of finance bros as they ask a question that just so happens to promote one of their sponsors: “how are you thinking about advertising in the context of search? […] Is there a future where, if you search for ‘what’s the best corporate card?’, Ramp is going to show up at the top if they bid on that?”, to which Srinivas responds “hopefully not” before going on to explain how Perplexity could eventually become ad-supported.

Julie Bort, TechCrunch:

“On the other hand, what are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” he explained.

Srinivas believes that Perplexity’s browser users will be fine with such tracking because the ads should be more relevant to them.

“We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and, maybe you know, through our discover feed we could show some ads there,” he said.

These are comments on a podcast and perhaps none of this will come to pass, but anyone can see how this is financially alluring. The “business friendly” but privacy hostile environment of the U.S. means companies like Perplexity can do this stuff with impunity. Its pitch sounds revolting now — exactly how Google’s behaviourally targeted ads sounded twenty years ago.

Perplexity is another careless business. It does not care if a website has specifically prohibited it from scraping; Perplexity will simply rely on a third-party scraper. Perplexity does not care about your privacy. I see no reason to treat this as a problem specific to individual companies, and these technologies do not respect geographic boundaries, either. We need better protections as users, which means more policy-based protections by governments taking privacy seriously.

But this industry is moving too fast. It is a “race”, after all, and any attempts to regulate it are either knocked down or compromised. There is a real need for lawmakers and regulators who care about privacy as a fundamental human right. These companies do not care and will not regulate themselves.

Apple Aims to Source All U.S. iPhones From India by End of 2026 ⇥ ft.com

Michael Acton, Stephen Morris, John Reed, and Kathrin Hille, Financial Times:

Apple plans to shift the assembly of all US-sold iPhones to India as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump’s trade war forces the tech giant to pivot away from China.

The push builds on Apple’s strategy to diversify its supply chain but goes further and faster than investors appreciate, with a goal to source from India the entirety of the more than 60mn iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of 2026.

Obviously this is not fulfilling the stated aim of U.S. tariffs to onshore manufacturing of all kinds of products, including iPhones. But it seems unlikely to substantially lessen our global dependence on supply chains in China, either — in addition to individual parts sourced there, these reporters say factories in China are still responsible for “pre-assembled component sets” which are brought to India for final iPhone assembly.

Google Ends Support for Early Nest Thermostats, Degrading Their Functionality ⇥ arstechnica.com

Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica:

As Google points out, these products have had a long life, and they’re not being rendered totally inoperable. Come October 25, 2025, these devices will no longer receive software updates or connect to Google’s cloud services. That means you won’t be able to control them from the Google Home app or via Assistant (or more likely Gemini by that point). The devices will still work as a regular dumb thermostat to control temperature, and scheduling will remain accessible from the thermostat’s screen.

Google stopped selling the second-generation Nest Thermostat in 2015. A ten-year lifespan may be acceptable by consumer electronics standards, it is not impressive for a thermostat. And, while a typical programmable thermostat might slowly fail on its own accord, it is disconcerting that Google can simply pull the plug on its smart features.

This is, however, a fairly graceful degradation of its functionality, all things considered. Nests will apparently continue to work like a programmable thermostat. Also, after Ecobee ended support for its earliest thermostat models last year, it sounded like newer models’ HomeKit integration would allow smart features to keep working when Ecobee discontinues those, too. It would be better if Google could have done something similar with the Nest. It is not encouraging for the smart home fantasy.

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Making ‘Careless People’ Care ⇥ pluralistic.net

Cory Doctorow:

The important thing about Facebook’s carelessness is that it wasn’t the result of the many grave personality defects in Facebook’s top executives – it was the result of policy choices. Government decisions not to enforce antitrust law, to allow privacy law to wither on the vine, to expand IP law to give Facebook a weapon to shut down interoperable rivals – these all created the enshittogenic environment that allowed the careless people who run Facebook to stop caring.

The corollary: if we change the policy environment, we can make these careless people – and their successors, who run other businesses we rely upon – care. They may never care about us, but we can make them care about what we might do to them if they give in to their carelessness.

This is a prudent conclusion to draw from “Careless People”. It is tempting to wonder if things would be much different with others in charge, but what Meta represents today is not an individualized problem.

Apple and Meta Are Mad Over Minimal E.U. Fines ⇥ ec.europa.eu

The European Commission:

Today, the European Commission found that Apple breached its anti-steering obligation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and that Meta breached the DMA obligation to give consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data. Therefore, the Commission has fined Apple and Meta with €500 million and €200 million respectively.

The two decisions come after extensive dialogue with the companies concerned allowing them to present in detail their views and arguments.

A Financial Times article last month suggested these fines would be “minimal”, but I suppose that is entirely relative. Apple and Meta could have been fined up to 10% of their annual worldwide revenue — earnings which total hundreds of billions of dollars each — so €500 million does, in fact, seem to be “minimal”. And that speaks to the power and size of these corporations. Call it a warning.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:

“The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards,” Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said.

[…]

“Today’s announcements are yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of decisions that are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products, and force us to give away our technology for free,” Apple said. “We have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for. Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way.”

I am halfway through “The Big Myth” and it is striking to read so many of the same complaints from detractors of regulation no matter when or for what issue. Pick any of the past couple-hundred years and it is apparently a regulatory sweet spot, according to industry representatives at the time. These complaints feel derivative.

That does not mean all new regulation is justified, well-considered, or without negative consequences. However, it is not as though either Apple or Meta stumbled into the exact structure they did to comply with their interpretation of the law on paper while evading the Commission’s expectations. Nobody expects either company to “give away [their] technology for free”, in the words of an unnamed Apple spokesperson. One cannot, for example, run iOS apps on non-Apple system, and the company builds the cost of software and updates into each product’s price.

The Anti-Pirate Code ⇥ fedi.rib.gay

Melissa Lewis on Bluesky:

TIL: The 2000s piracy PSA used a font designed by the fantastic Just van Rossum, whose brother Guido created the Python programming language.

[…]

I reached out to van Rossum, and Xband Rough is indeed an “illegal clone” of FF Confidential; it’s just been around forever and is ubiquitous. I have no idea whether the PSA used the original, and felt too shy to ask!

“Rib”:

Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (https://web.archive.org/web/[…]150605_8PP_brochure.pdf).

So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!

They are more like guidelines, you could say.

On the ‘Streaming Is More Expensive Than Cable’ Complaint ⇥ birchtree.me

Matt Birchler:

A social media post flew by today where someone was complaining that they stopped paying $180 for cable and now they’re paying $200 for streaming apps. I see this sort of complaint a lot, and I find myself feeling like I’m taking crazy pills whenever I do: I had cable, I know how bad it was, and the new streaming world seems so much better to me, even if it is creeping up in price.

I always appreciate when people bring evidence to a discussion instead of basing their analysis entirely on vibes. Here, Birchler demonstrates the combined cost of streaming services is, for lots of people in the U.S., less than cable television.

I remember when the cost of cable was a routine complaint. You paid for all these channels, but you only watched a handful of things on three of them — and, so, would it not be better if we could just buy the channels we wanted?

I have nothing to support this, but I strongly suspect the rosy glasses reaction to cable in a streaming world is driven by two things. First, the lack of bundling feels worse. If you were told you could get a “complete streaming package” for $60 per month — including Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, Hulu, Max, Netflix, Paramount Plus, Peacock, and Prime Video — that might sound like a better deal than subscribing to them individually for the same total cost. A single cable subscription made you feel like you were getting everything, while you now need multiple subscriptions if you like to watch a lot of stuff.

Second, as Birchler acknowledges, some stuff still is not available on streaming, and so some people still feel they must add a cable subscription, too. Because most of the big streaming services are owned by the same broadcasters as cable channels, it gives them an opportunity to double-dip.

Canadian Election Coverage and Meta’s Response to the Online News Act ⇥ thelogic.co

Martin Patriquin, the Logic:

More than 25 different Facebook accounts, some with Canadian-themed names, have promoted multiple fake news articles involving political actors, including a three-minute video of a deepfake CBC report fronted by anchor Rosemary Barton, in which a deepfake Musk, appearing on a deepfake Joe Rogan podcast, accuses a deepfake Carney of lying about a non-existent passive income scheme.

The posts are widespread on the Meta-owned platform, with 25 per cent of Canadians saying they’ve seen content on Facebook mimicking legitimate news in the last month, according to the Canadian Digital Media Research Network (CDMRN), which is part of a digital literacy coalition monitoring the federal election campaign.

Leyland Cecco, the Guardian:

More than a quarter of Canadians have been exposed to fake political content on social media that is “more sophisticated and more politically polarizing” as the country prepares to vote in a federal election, researchers have found, warning that platforms must increase protections amid a “dramatic acceleration” of online disinformation in the final weeks of the campaign.

In a new report released on Friday, Canada’s Media Ecosystem Observatory found a growing number of Facebook ads impersonating legitimate news sources were instead promoting fraudulent investment schemes, often involving cryptocurrency.

Rob Brown, reporter for CBC News in Calgary, interviewed Aengus Bridgman of the Media Ecosystem Observatory — previously linked — about Meta’s restriction of news links for Canadian users. This is one effect of the Online News Act, which required Google and Meta to pay news publishers for links on their platforms. Meta, in deciding not to, has effectively permitted only links which do not qualify as “news” to spread among Canadians on its platforms.

Meta may be a belligerent and frustrating company, but the Online News Act remains a blight. In a stopped-clock credit to the Conservatives, they pledge to reverse it, something which all parties ought to consider. We can do better with policies that do not, in practice, discourage the sharing of links to news stories.

The Paid A.I. Hype Guys ⇥ ft.com

Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, Financial Times:

One hint that we might just be stuck in a hype cycle is the proliferation of what you might call “second-order slop” or “slopaganda”: a tidal wave of newsletters and X threads expressing awe at every press release and product announcement to hoover up some of that sweet, sweet advertising cash.

That AI companies are actively patronising and fanning a cottage economy of self-described educators and influencers to bring in new customers suggests the emperor has no clothes (and six fingers).

The (verified) X accounts producing threads of links to bad A.I. products, boosted by dozens of replies from other verified X accounts, are annoying spam, but seem relatively harmless. But the newsletters profiled here are curious.

One is Rowan Cheung’s Rundown AI newsletter, which Cheung bills as the “world’s most read daily AI newsletter”, which is different from the other newsletter in the article, Zain Kahn’s Superhuman AI, the “world’s biggest AI newsletter”. As alluded to by Venkataramakrishnan but not expanded upon, both attract some heavy-hitting sponsors. The Rundown was recently sponsored by Salesforce, HubSpot, Sana, and Writer, while Superhuman’s recent sponsors include companies like HubSpot, Sana, and Writer — no Salesforce.

While Cheung’s newsletter is mostly A.I. boosterism with sponsorships, there is a block near the end of each issue for a sibling product: the Rundown University. The first thing you need to know about it is that it is not a university, obviously. It is online training through individual “courses” offered at $50 apiece with individual lessons on using A.I. tools, some of which — like Gamma and Zapier — happen to have sponsored of the newsletter. Or, if you want access to all the “courses” plus workshops, tutorials, and some kind of group chat, you can get all that for just a penny shy of $1,000 per year. Just above the footer sits a carousel of inspirational quotes about A.I. from people like Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, and Elon Musk. None are actually specific to Rundown “University”, just vibes about the importance of A.I. and its impact. It all feels a bit much.

I am fascinated by the knock-on effects of a hype cycle, and A.I. has produced some magnificent examples — including those above. It is illuminating to search Google for a phrase like intitle:"how" intitle:"is using ai to" and witnessing what is ostensibly breathtaking innovation across industries. A 2023 Guardian story says the “oldest surviving newspaper in the world” — untrue and in spirit only — is using ChatGPT to generate articles from council meeting minutes. According to the Harvard Business Review, construction companies are using large language models to, among other things, summarize documents. Stitch Fix is, according to a disguised ad in Vogue Business, using A.I. to detect trends.

There are countless examples of articles like these illustrating how companies are benefitting from the glow of hype while contributing to it. None of this is to say it is necessarily unearned — maybe detecting money laundering really is more reliable when you run it through A.I. processes. But I remember stories like these in the days when the hot new thing was called “machine learning” or, before that, “big data”. I would not be surprised if these technologies are truly beneficial yet it is hard not to feel the weight of hype and the marketing people behind it all.

Bluesky Verification Is Decentralized in Theory ⇥ steveklabnik.com

Steve Klabnik:

The underlying [verification] protocol is totally open, but you can make an argument that most users will use the main client, and therefore, in practice it’s more centralized than not. My mental model of it is the bundled list of root CAs that browsers ship; in theory, DNS is completely decentralized, but in practice, a few root CAs are more trusted than others. It’s sort of similar here, except there’s no real “delegation” involved: verifiers are peers, not a tree.

This core design allows Bluesky to adjust the way it works in the future fairly easily, they could allow you to decide who to trust, for example. We’ll see how this feature evolves over time.

The way Bluesky described verification made it sound like a centralized service, but it is not. I have corrected my post.

Bluesky Adds Verification Badges ⇥ bsky.social

In a post attributed to the Bluesky Team, the company announced a familiar verification method with a twist:

In 2023, we launched our first layer of verification: letting individuals and organizations set their domain as their username. Since then, over 270,000 accounts have linked their Bluesky username to their website. Domain handles continue to be an important part of verification on Bluesky. At the same time, we’ve heard from users that a larger visual signal would be useful in knowing which accounts are authentic.

Now, we’re introducing a new layer — a user-friendly, easily recognizable blue check. Bluesky will proactively verify authentic and notable accounts and display a blue check next to their names. Additionally, through our Trusted Verifiers feature, select independent organizations can verify accounts directly. Bluesky will review these verifications as well to ensure authenticity.

The domain-based verification Bluesky already implemented was a good start, but incomplete. My profile is connected to my personal domain but, even with that single line of text, there is no obvious indicator. You can see the problem on Bluesky’s own profile which tells you to “check username👆” to confirm it is, indeed, the real one.

Then there is the problem of public personalities. Maybe a musician or actor wants to confirm their profile is really them, but is domain-based verification really the best way for them? Does Pedro Pascal have a dot-com? What about a journalist who could “verify” an account connected to an employer, but they also want a separate personal account? Both ought to be verified, but only one is employer-connected. Then, when they leave that employer, they will need to change their username, and Bluesky does not automatically redirect moved profiles. (Followers, posts, and so forth are moved to the new profile, but any links to posts made under the previous profile are not redirected.)

A verification checkmark is not an offensive idea unto itself, but it comes with a new set of concerns. First, what does it mean? Bluesky says it is for “authentic and notable accounts”, but what that means is not clear. Twitter used to assign itself an authoritative role in determining which accounts fit similar criteria. In doing so, it helped make this badge a bizarre mark of status. Now, Meta and X let you simply buy a badge to confirm an account belongs to the person or organization claimed. If the goal is to avoid controversy with notable figures, surely self-verification and manual profile confirmation achieve those purposes. But a parody account is also legitimate in its own way, right?

Second, while it makes sense to have a quick identifier of accounts susceptible to impersonation, the badge also comes with risks. If such an account is hijacked, for example, its posts carry additional weight.

Bluesky seems like it is trying to solve some of these issues by allowing others to vouch for the authenticity of an account. In theory, this minimizes its own role in being the voice of authority. In its example, the New York Times’ account can verify the authenticity of others’ accounts. But Bluesky still plays a central role in this process — it appears to determine whether an account can become a Trusted Verifier, and its moderators confirm each verification request from third-party verifiers. I take it this latter requirement is necessary because it is not clear to me whether there are any limits to which accounts a Trusted Verifier can approve. Still, it means Bluesky is the final say in which accounts belong to the person or organization claimed.

Update: I was wrong, according to Bluesky technical advisor Jeremy Johnson:

anyone can publish a verify record, any app can choose who to display verifies from. And as this thing bakes a bit we’re going to make it easier to pick different verifiers in our app.

If you were to run your own app view then you definitely don’t have to care at all what Bluesky PBC does here, just collect all the app.bsky.graph.verification records and go ham.

It sounds like I could verify my own accounts — or, indeed, vouch for any account — but it is up to the client how it wants to display that verification attempt. Bluesky itself is only trusting itself and select others for now.