July 2025 – Page 2

July 22, 2025 ⌥

Apple Intelligence News Summaries Are Back in the Fourth Beta Builds of Apple’s ’26 Operating Systems ⇥ arstechnica.com

Upon installing the new update, users of Apple Intelligence-compatible devices will be asked to enable or disable three broad categories of notifications: those for “News & Entertainment” apps, for “Communication & Social” apps, and for all other apps. The operating systems will list sample apps based on what you currently have installed on your device.

All Apple Intelligence notification summaries continue to be listed as “beta,” but Apple’s main change here is a big red disclaimer when you enable News & Entertainment notification summaries, pointing out that “summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines.” The notifications also get a special “summarized by Apple Intelligence” caption to further distinguish them from regular, unadulterated notifications.

Apparently there are architectural changes to help with reliability, but the only way to know for certain if a generated summary is accurate is to read the original. Then again, there are plenty of cases where human-written headlines are contradicted by the story contained within.

Generated summaries are different — or at least they feel different to me — though it is difficult to articulate why. The best way I can describe it is that it is an interference layer between the source of data and its recipient. This is true for all machine-generated summaries which promise a glimpse of a much larger set of information, but without any accountability for their veracity. While summaries of message threads in Mail are often usable, I have rarely found them useful.

July 21, 2025 ⌥

FT: U.K. Is ‘Seeking a Way Out’ Over iCloud End-to-End Encryption Backdoor, but ‘Has Not Backed Down’ ⇥ ft.com

The Financial Times today published an article by Anna Gross, Tim Bradshaw, and Lauren Fedor, in which the three paint a picture of a complex stalemate between investment interests and the U.K. government’s snooping desires:

Sir Keir Starmer’s government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK’s demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data, two senior British officials have told the Financial Times.

The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including vice-president JD Vance.

The writers go on to describe the tension between U.K. and U.S. authorities, with sources telling them the U.K. definitely wants this capability, but feels the weight of the U.S. administration. Here are two things I think are true:

The U.K. should not be demanding access to iCloud data end-to-end encrypted by Advanced Data Protection — and certainly not worldwide, as it wants. It is terrible on the merits, it will be misused, and it is ridiculous nobody can talk about it directly because of secrecy requirements.
The U.S. continues to abuse its power in worrisome ways. There is no evidence this administration is objecting to the U.K. law on the merits of free speech, given how bad they are on speech in general. There is lots of reason to believe they are simply hostile to any attempts at regulating the massive technology companies that happen to come from the U.S. and reinforce its global power. It is not just the U.K.; the Canadian government pulled a fairly reasonable Digital Services Tax to placate this administration for similar reasons.

Bad faith rationale aside, the U.K. seems to be thinking about retreating from its backdoor efforts, though it has not yet made any moves to do so. Yet Ars Technica, which syndicates the occasional Times story, republished this article under the headline “UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US”. That is not true — not yet, anyway.

And there is reason to be skeptical of the Times’ sourcing on these matters, too. In 2023, its reporters — including Gross, who also worked on this Advanced Data Protection story — were told the U.K. government would no longer demand the breaking of end-to-end encryption in messaging apps. This was only true in the sense the government no longer demanded impossible backdoors, only possible ones. This was not so much rescinding a demand as it was clarifying it.

Until the U.K. formally withdraws the technical capability notice served to Apple — and maybe Google, too — we should assume they are still pushing for a backdoor. And, because of the secrecy rules, if they do rescind it, it seems we will only find out in a leak to the Times or the BBC, without any official acknowledgement any of this took place.

July 21, 2025 ⌥

The Trump Administration Was Lying About Antitrust Enforcement ⇥ techdirt.com

Last time I checked in on how the second Trump administration was going to approach the globally-relevant business of antitrust enforcement, I was cautiously optimistic. Some key trust-busting suits were filed under the first Trump administration and, while sloppy, there seemed to be seeds planted for a continuation of a more active FTC. I knew this administration would be catastrophic, and even my tiny speck of optimism was misplaced.

Josh Sisco, of Bloomberg, in a profile of FTC chair Andrew Ferguson:

His concerns, too, may also be resolved with more novel compromises. In May Ferguson launched an investigation into ad agencies, alleging that they colluded in politically motivated ad boycotts, a bugbear of conservative media and X.com owner Elon Musk in particular.

Shortly after, the FTC signed off on Omnicom Group’s $13.5 billion buyout of rival Interpublic, a tie-up that would create the world’s biggest ad agency. To secure the regulator’s approval, the two groups promised they wouldn’t engage in any such boycotts in the future, but made no economic concessions.

That deal may prove to be a template for the FTC under Ferguson. By focusing attention on the alleged ad boycotts and leaving the underlying businesses untouched, the terms appealed to the MAGA faithful and corporate interests.

Sisco can call this a “novel compromise” all he wants, but this is nothing more than a perverted gift. Under Khan, Ferguson also objected to the FTC’s involvement in regulating non-compete agreements, saying it was an overreach for the commission, but has used his power under the Trump administration to go after transgender care because of course he has.

Karl Bode, of Techdirt, has been keeping tabs on how they have been faring on matters of competition:

That was, unsurprisingly, all bullshit. Six months into Trump’s second term and it has been a nonstop nightmare for consumer protection, corporate oversight, labor law, regulatory independence, and already underwater activist battles against media consolidation and monopoly power.

[…]

The only remaining remnants of Lina Khan’s antitrust legacy has been the fact that the Trump administration hasn’t killed several of her prominent antitrust cases against tech giants like Meta and Google. But again, this isn’t because Trump wants to genuinely rein in corporate power, it’s because he wants to maintain leverage over companies that control the flow of online information.

As I wrote over the weekend, this administration has kneecapped the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, one of the few checks on overreaches by the country’s federal government. All of these things have international implications. That board, for example, is responsible for the court that handles privacy complaints from Europeans. The merger of those two ad agencies means less competition worldwide. But Ferguson has affirmed the key conservative pillars of being supposed victims of the world around them and doing harm to trans people. That is his job, apparently. Being a trustbuster? Not so much.

July 19, 2025 ⌥

French Data Under U.S. Firms Is Not Protected From U.S. Government Access ⇥ brusselssignal.eu

Anne-Laure Dufeal, Brussels Signal:

The [French] Senate report cited Microsoft France’s legal director, Anton Carniaux, as admitting the company could not guarantee that French data it hosted would not be handed over to foreign authorities.

“Carniaux … was asked by the [French Senate] commission to guarantee that French citizens’ data hosted by Microsoft would never be transmitted to foreign authorities without the agreement of the French authorities. He replied: ‘No, I can’t guarantee that,’” the report stated.

Luis Rijo, PPC Land:

The testimony contradicts years of Microsoft’s security assurances regarding European data hosting. Despite implementing encryption and technical safeguards, the company acknowledged that US legislation ultimately supersedes protective measures when federal agencies issue valid data requests.

[…]

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and other hyperscale providers operate under identical legal frameworks, potentially exposing European data to extraterritorial access. The testimony suggests widespread vulnerability in European digital infrastructure built on American technological foundations.

Ben Werdmuller:

Reliance on US services has become a point of vulnerability for everyone. This should be a concern regardless of American leadership; under the current administration, it’s become a frequent topic of conversation for security leaders both inside and outside of the country.

The U.S. set up a new court to handle European complaints, but it is under the umbrella of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board which currently has a single board member, who happens to be a Republican. That is because the other three members of the board — all Democrats — were told to leave after Donald Trump retook the presidency, thus making it non-functional. Is the court hearing cases? That is a good question; the whole thing is one big secret.

July 18, 2025 ⌥

Billionaires Destroyed American News Media on Purpose ⇥ readtpa.com

Parker Molloy:

Think about where Stephen Colbert started. At Comedy Central, he played a character who parodied right-wing media manipulation. His whole schtick was pretending to be a Fox News-style propagandist who twisted facts, attacked critics, and defended power at all costs.

Twenty years later, he’s been silenced by actual media manipulation. Real billionaires wielding real power to protect their real financial interests.

The writers who created The Colbert Report couldn’t have scripted it better. Except this isn’t satire. It’s just what happens now when media companies need government approval for their deals.

Regardless of how much you like Colbert’s take on the Late Show — I do not care for it — the circumstances around its cancellation are suspicious and the implications are alarming. Were Colbert’s jokes truly cutting to the core of the Trump administration? I hardly think so. But it is nevertheless difficult not to see it as an olive branch for merger approval — an implied condition.

(Update: Anonymous sources swore up and down to the New York Times that this was purely a financial decision.)

Via Rusty Foster, who ties together a bunch of threads on this into the title thesis, “billionaires destroyed American news media on purpose”:

When I told my new friend that the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires, he asked an extremely reasonable question, which was: “but why?” And what makes this feel like a conspiracy is that there is no single answer to “why?” Sometimes it’s arrogance, sometimes it’s ideology, sometimes it’s purely money. Often it’s a messy combination of all three.

But if you really want to step back a bit, the reason why is that we have a socioeconomic system that concentrates nation-state level wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals, with virtually no checks on what they can choose to do with it. So if Larry Ellison wants to turn CBS News into Bari Weiss’s Free Press TV, or Jeff Bezos wants to make The Washington Post into an ideological subsidiary of the Cato Institute… what institutions of power will be left to disagree?

In related news, U.S. lawmakers voted to end federal funding for NPR and PBS. Conservatives in Canada are waging a similar campaign to stop funding the CBC, and I hope it fails.

July 18, 2025 ⌥

Apple Sues Jon Prosser and Michael Ramacciotti for a ‘Coordinated Scheme’ to Leak iOS 26 Redesign ⇥ macrumors.com

Jon Prosser’s many videos showing mockups of this year’s redesign on iOS were accurate. Very accurate, in fact — it was easy to surmise he had seen screenshots and videos of what it looked like in the real world. That part was not really in question. What would be, from Apple’s perspective, is if those demonstrations were obtained legitimately, and the company is now arguing they were not.

Eric Slivka, MacRumors:

Apple’s complaint outlines what it claims is the series of events that led to the leaks, which centered around a development iPhone in the possession of Ramacciotti’s friend and Apple employee Ethan Lipnik. According to Apple, Prosser and Ramacciotti plotted to access Lipnik’s phone, acquiring his passcode and then using location-tracking to determine when he “would be gone for an extended period.” Prosser reportedly offered financial compensation to Ramacciotti in return for assisting with accessing the development iPhone.

Apple says Ramacciotti accessed Lipnik’s development iPhone and made a FaceTime call to Prosser, showing off iOS 26 running on the development iPhone, and that Prosser recorded the call with screen capture tools. Prosser then shared those videos with others and used them to make re-created renders of iOS 26 for his videos.

Prosser, for his part, says he “certainly did not ‘plot’ to access anyone’s phone and was unaware of the situation playing out”. He also tweeted what seems to be a Signal screenshot as — I guess — proof, but it is a brief segment of a conversation with only implied context. I am not sure it is a great idea for Prosser to keep talking about this in public or post screenshots of what appears to be a discussion with a source.

The complaint filed by Apple contains a little more information, including a screenshot of a partly-redacted April email tipping the company off. It appears it was sent to several people at Apple, judging by the amount of redactions in the “to” field, and it implicates three others in this leak, though their names are redacted. It also suggests Prosser was sloppy with protecting his source. Finally, the tipster claims someone “has leaked iOS information” before to a party with a redaction almost the same length as the third “involved” party. (Also, at least one of these redactions is trivial to guess if you line up the characters.)

Three days after this email was sent, Prosser published even more comprehensive renders of iOS 26, which were representative of the version shown at WWDC.

There are shades and echoes here of Apple’s 2004–05 lawsuits against several rumour sites — most notably Think Secret, and also Apple Insider and O’Grady’s PowerPage — and their unnamed sources. Despite working my PACER account from every angle, I cannot seem to find Apple’s original complaints.

However, they were summarized by Joseph M. Tartakoff, writing for the Harvard Crimson in 2005:

Apple’s lawsuit alleges that Think Secret is illegally soliciting Apple employees to violate confidentiality agreements and disclosing that information online without Apple’s permission.

Offering tipsters “complete anonymity,” the website contact page urges visitors to submit “news tips” and “insider information.”

Nearly three years later, the lawsuit was settled and Think Secret was shut down.

The details of Apple’s suit against Prosser and Ramacciotti allege the latter took advantage of a friendship. At what stage Prosser was made aware of this and to what extent, if any, he played in pushing Ramacciotti further seems to be a key question. Also, one has to wonder about the difference between what Prosser revealed and Mark Gurman’s obviously well-sourced repeated scoops.

I am also looking forward to Apple trying to explain how it has suffered “damage and loss in an amount to be proven at trial but, in any event, exceeding $5,000 aggregated over a one-year period”. This multitrillion-dollar company was financially injured by a few YouTube videos showing the redesign of its operating system? Sure, okay.

July 17, 2025 ⌥

Does Google Maps Make Money? ⇥ placing.technology

Ingrid Burrington:

So even though there isn’t really a smoking gun here, I think it’s worth playing out what Google Geo being break-even or not-especially profitable means for both Google and for geospatial technology as a sector. Google Maps really warped public perception of the business of geospatial by making what had previously been consumer products totally free to consumers. Why do that — why undercut a revenue source — in order to maintain other revenue sources that aren’t necessarily profitable or certainly not hundreds of billions of dollars profitable?

Burrington’s attempts to answer this question reinforce how much of Google is unsustainable if it were fractured into standalone businesss. Maps, Docs, YouTube, Gemini — it seems unlikely any of these work on their own without the backing of Google’s monopolistic digital advertising business. That is, not just any digital ads, but specifically the vast control Google has over online advertising is, seemingly, what props up products that would otherwise struggle to remain afloat as they grew.

July 17, 2025 ⌥

Airlines Are Using Generative A.I. to Set Individualized Prices ⇥ fortune.com

Bruce Parkinson, TravelPulse Canada, in June 2024:

The WestJet Group has partnered with Tel Aviv-based tech startup Fetcherr to implement what it is calling the industry’s first AI-driven pricing, inventory and publishing engine.

WestJet will implement Fetcherr’s ‘Large Market Model’ technology, described as a “market engine that understands market dynamics, precisely forecasts demand and market trends and generates the best market moves based on the predicted actions of all market variables.”

Alex Cruz, the vice-chair on WestJet’s board, is also on the board at Fletcherr.

Irina Ivanova, Fortune:

By the end of the year, Delta plans for 20% of its ticket prices to be individually determined using AI, president Glen Hauenstein told investors last week. Currently, about 3% of the airline’s flight prices are AI-determined, triple the portion from nine months ago.

Over time, the goal is to do away with static pricing altogether, Hauenstein explained during the company’s Investor Day in November.

North American airlines, including Delta and WestJet, are apparently doing just fine for customer satisfaction, which is surprising. Canada has two major airlines and, because I live west of Ontario, I have to deal with WestJet whenever I go pretty much anywhere. I expect only the basics and still find myself disappointed. But I guess their reputations have enough leeway to permit the kind of dynamic pricing future described with caution in science fiction novels. Or maybe our standards are simply too low.

By the way, in case you are unsure who this dynamic pricing benefits — you are not, but stick with me — it is the airlines. Fletcherr’s co-founder said at a conference last year that the company’s technology generated 10% additional revenue for participating airlines, considerably more than the 4–5% found by the less-sophisticated dynamic pricing examined in a 2022 working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (PDF).

July 16, 2025 ⌥

‘Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor’ ⇥ liberalcurrents.com

Natasha Tiku, Washington Post:

Influential tech investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen recently said universities will “pay the price” for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against supporters of President Donald Trump, according to messages he sent to a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders reviewed by The Washington Post.

The messages the Post obtained were sent after Ben Smith of Semafor exposed other Andreessen group chats. Those chats, according to Smith, were described by current White House official and former Andreessen-Horowitz partner Sriram Krishnan as “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion” — a frank acknowledgement of the power these rich guys have.

Adam Gurri, Liberal Currents:

Since “the Deal, with a capital D” had been broken, Andreesen and his cohorts had no choice but to throw their lot in with Trump, who now is making those dealbreakers pay the price. And it’s going swimmingly, from Andreesen’s point of view. He is no longer bound by the terms of “the Deal,” which required him to pay lip service to “all the fashionable and appropriate social causes” such as human rights and equal dignity.

To his dying day, Andreessen will surely believe that they are the traitors, that he was the one who was betrayed. But the only traitor is Andreessen himself.

Quibble with Gurri’s summary of Netscape’s task as “relatively easy” — Andreessen, Eric Bina, and others “created one piece of software that performed a simple task well enough to deliver to the market, and they successfully achieved mass adoption” is a notable effort but, to steelman Gurri’s argument, considerably less notable than the technical foundation on which it rested. But Andreessen is a quintessential example of pulling the ladder up now that he has reached the top. He got his — his education, his billions, his mansion — and, because he does not want more traffic in his neighbourhood, other people get screwed.

July 15, 2025 ⌥

G/O Media Has Sold Off Just About All Its Sites Eighteen Months After Denying It Was Selling Off All Its Sites ⇥ defector.com

In January 2024, Mark Stenberg reported for Adweek that G/O Media was “shopping around its portfolio of editorial assets” — which normal people call “publications” or “websites” — “in hopes of securing buyers for individual titles”. Stenberg included a statement from G/O Media in which a representative said “[y]our reporting is largely incorrect”.

Jim Spanfeller, CEO of G/O Media, in an “epilogue” published earlier this month, just a year and a half later:

This week the sale of Kotaku to Keleops, the buyers of Gizmodo, was announced. Coming on the heels of Redbrick, a Canadian company, buying both Quartz as well as The Inventory, this leaves G/O Media with just The Root. And while The Root is a wonderful site and a very good business it is now abundantly clear that G/O Media is and has been working towards a full wind down.

No kidding?

I am a little worried for the Root, a publication that deserved better than being hollowed out, and will probably get unceremoniously offloaded to some other private equity firm to run it into the ground like its siblings. But it is the last remaining part of this group after the downfall of G/O was triggered by the company’s demand that Deadspin stick to sports.

That, with time, brought us Defector, where Samer Kalaf writes:

As Defector approaches its five-year anniversary in September, here’s a message for Jim Spanfeller: I’m glad that this still eats at you. You overplayed your hand, and everyone watched you destroy your already flimsy reputation. The unnecessary cost was that you hounded talented people out of their jobs, but many of them have gone on to thrive elsewhere. Meanwhile, what you did to a bunch of beloved publications will be the defining moment of your career, maybe even the defining moment of your parasitic life. I’d say that it’ll be the first line of your obituary, but let’s be honest: No one’s writing one of those for you.

Spanfeller’s hubris can take credit not only for Defector, but also the Autopian and Aftermath, launched by former writers from Jalopnik and Kotaku, respectively. Meanwhile, the Onion is in better hands and is still trying to buy Infowars. Spanfeller’s meddling may have ruined a lot of jobs, but at least his influence over a “future driven in in great part by digital content” — his words — is minimal.

July 15, 2025 ⌥

On A.I. Video Watermarks ⇥ technologymagazine.com

I dropped something about the tiny watermarks used by Google and OpenAI in generated videos, and I wanted to expand on it:

[…] Surely this is a marvel of technical achievement. Google’s technology generates convincing video and synced audio to match. That is incredible. So, why not shout about it? Make that watermark bigger, I say, and make it say what it is — “A.I. generated by Google Veo”, or something similar.

I think I know why Google and OpenAI are not doing this, and I think you do as well. […]

Instead of leaving this hanging, let me answer why I think videos generated by Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora embed subtle visual watermarks instead of more obvious ones.

This is going to sound more cynical than I think it really is, but here goes: both Google and OpenAI are happy to remove that watermark for users of their most expensive paid plans, marketed to professionals who want to use A.I. in their work. Stories like the one I linked to basically serve as advertisements for these subscriptions, even though they are also illustrations of how the technology can be abused. Someone using A.I. in a professional workflow might be less likely to use it in this manner.

But the watermark needs to be small because otherwise people would be less likely to use these services. Even if it was not very obnoxious, it would feel like an advertisement to post videos generated by these tools if they contained a more honest disclaimer of their origins. Hence, the truly incredible feat of generating video and synced audio from a text prompt is buried and, therefore, only comes up when it is being used to further scams, fraud, hatred, or advertisement campaigns.

A Tedious Explanation of Paying for YouTube, Tediously

July 14, 2025 ⌥

Well, they got me. I am now paying for YouTube.

For years, I have used an ad blocker only infrequently on YouTube partly because the ads used to be short and not too disruptive, but mostly because I feel bad for people who make videos for a living. There is basically no alternative to YouTube.

Text is small; I can take this website anywhere I want. I can make my writing as discoverable or as paywalled as I deem makes sense. The same is true, to varying degrees, for images and audio. If someone does not like how their podcast host is behaving, they can move their show. It is not easy but it is doable.

That is not the case for video — at least, not for independent makers in the safe-for-work realm. You might use any number of streaming apps for video from large studios, and perhaps smaller ones too, like Dropout and Nebula. But there is no second YouTube. Even though TikTok and Instagram provide sufficient competition in the mobile short-form format, there is simply nothing else for longer formats in landscape. Sites like Dailymotion are doing so poorly they are deleting videos if they have no activity for about a year. Video makers on alternative sites like Rumble still post clips or copies of their show to YouTube; despite their persistent whining about alleged censorship, their videos are not removed from YouTube, and they know it remains the best platform for discovery.

I began considering a YouTube Premium subscription a couple of years ago when the great Alec Watson mentioned that creators like him get a cut. Which, in hindsight, seems obvious: instead of ad revenue, they get a portion of subscription revenue. But this was and remains unmentioned in YouTube’s marketing. Call it parasocial, non-derogatory, but this is the most compelling argument for why I should pay for YouTube. I support several indies through Patreon, too, but this means I get to be even more supportive without making specific monthly commitments, and I get a better experience.

The experience, by the way, is what pushed me over the edge. Remember how I mentioned “ads used to be short and not too disruptive”? Over the past few years, YouTube has increased the default ad load and duration. Before I had Premium, I was seeing ads every one or two minutes in many videos where the uploader had not changed the ad settings. Being that intrusive is something only YouTube can do because, again, it has no competition.

The process for actually paying for YouTube was bizarrely difficult. Since I already have a music streaming subscription, the Premium Lite option was a good fit for me. However, Google simply would not geolocate me or my personal Google account to Canada, where the Lite option is available. There was no way to correct Google’s assumption about where I was located; it simply did not let me see the Lite registration page, even though the currency was displayed in Canadian dollars.

So I made a new account in my Google Workspace dashboard just for YouTube. It turns out this was a little complicated, too, as I now needed to enable various Google services to make this work: YouTube and Google Pay, at first, and more later.

Then I used Safari’s autocomplete to enter my credit card details, which is where things got real weird. My card’s expiration date and CSC were entered correctly. The number itself was, too, until the last digit, at which point it abruptly changed to something completely different in nearly the same format — instead of four groups of four numbers, it became three groups of four, followed by one group of three. A test card number also encountered the same issue. Today, about a week later, I cannot reproduce it, so it seems like it has been fixed — but, still, strange.

One unfortunate side effect of having a YouTube Premium membership is that I now need to sign into YouTube, which means I am also signed into all Google services. Because I am using a Workspace-type Google account, I have also needed to enabled additional services on the account, like Google Maps. I can work around this by using YouTube in a separate browser and configuring Safari to open all YouTube links in that other browser — but that is not a great experience. I have as much tracking turned off as I am able through Google’s settings, plus Safari has generally better tracking protection. And I really do use frequent site sponsor Magic Lasso Adblock, which truly helps me avoid a bunch of tracking I see in the wild; the difference is obvious in Web Inspector if I refresh a page without having Magic Lasso enabled.

I am still seeing the occasional ad on YouTube on videos where they should not be present. In general, however, this is a night-and-day experience. YouTube has successfully degraded its free experience to the point where it feels like the trial version of paid software. A single meaningful competitor would be a corrective force. Alas, only YouTube is YouTube, and that makes things worse for audiences and video makers alike.

July 13, 2025 ⌥

Elon Musk Gives Himself Another Handshake ⇥ wsj.com

Berber Jin and Becky Peterson, Wall Street Journal:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has agreed to invest $2 billion in his artificial-intelligence company xAI, investors close to the companies said, nearly half of the Grok chatbot maker’s recent equity raise.

This comes just a few months after xAI acquired X, one year after Musk shifted a bunch of Tesla-bound Nvidia GPUs to xAI, and just a few years after he used staff from Tesla to work on Twitter. So, to recap: he has moved people and resources from a publicly traded company to a privately owned one — twice — has used funds from one of his privately owned companies to buy another one of his privately owned companies, and is now using one of his ~~publicly traded~~ privately owned companies to give billions of dollars to (another) one of his privately owned ones.

(Update: SpaceX is privately owned, not publicly traded. Thank you, Matt.)

This feels wrong. This feels like a crime. I am not saying a crime was committed, nor do I know what laws may possibly have been broken here. But it certainly has a flavour of something that must — or, at least, should be — illegal. At the very least, it cannot be helping convince E.U. regulators that Musk’s businesses are, indeed, separate entities.

July 12, 2025 ⌥

The Apple Style Guide Game Show ⇥ youtube.com

Via Myke Hurley, who also serves as host, comes the hot (?) new game show about Apple’s style guide. I thought this was really well done and, also, appropriately absurd. I did not keep track of my own score, but I cannot imagine I did very well after the first round.

One of the peculiarities of the style guide (PDF), comprehensive as it is, is when you stumble across something that is not defined. I have never been able to figure out what to call the bar across the bottom of iOS since the iPhone X, something I again realized when I linked to Craig Grannell’s piece this week. In the official “Designing for iPhone X” video, Apple’s Mike Stern simply calls it “an indicator”. In the iPhone user guide, it is not even given a name; users are simply told to “swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen” to go to the Home screen. “Home indicator” is what Grannell called it, and I have also seen people refer to it as the “Home bar”. But I am not sure it has an official term.

July 12, 2025 ⌥

Racist Job Hunter Is Actually an A.I. Ad for A.I. Recruitement Software ⇥ cbc.ca

David Michael Lamb, Ashley Fraser, and Andrew Kitchen, CBC News:

Most of the videos feature what looks like a white man in his 20s named “Josh,” who speaks to the camera and makes racially charged statements about immigrants and their role in the job market. In fact, “Josh” is created by AI and doesn’t exist.

[…]

It’s part of a trend known as “fake-fluencing.” That’s when companies create fake personas with AI in order to make it look like a real person is endorsing a product or service. The company in this case is Nexa, an AI firm that develops software that other companies can use to recruit new hires. Some of the videos feature Nexa logos in the scene. The company’s founder and CEO Divy Nayyar calls that a “subconscious placement” of advertising.

These videos are not massively popular on TikTok, so I am not sure how effective this is as an advertisement for this company. Perhaps this story is the marketing they were hoping to get. That seems desperate.

In any case, the videos still had the tiny Google Veo watermark in the lower-right corner, and that got me thinking: why are these A.I. video generators being so coy about the origins of their products? Surely this is a marvel of technical achievement. Google’s technology generates convincing video and synced audio to match. That is incredible. So, why not shout about it? Make that watermark bigger, I say, and make it say what it is — “A.I. generated by Google Veo”, or something similar.

I think I know why Google and OpenAI are not doing this, and I think you do as well. In any other industry, hiding or masking the origins of a product raises suspicions. When a clothing company does not want to talk about their factories, we understand why that is a problem. It is the same thing here. Traceability matters in physical goods and digital ones, too.

Oh, and I doubt anyone is calling this trend “fake-fluencing”.

July 11, 2025 ⌥

U.S. Tech Giants Face Pressure Over Data Sovereignty ⇥ restofworld.org

Damilare Dosunmu, Rest of World:

Developing nations are challenging Big Tech’s decades-long hold on global data by demanding that their citizens’ information be stored locally. The move is driven by the realization that countries have been giving away their most valuable resource for tech giants to build a trillion-dollar market capitalization.

[…]

South Africa is the only African country where Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have built their own data centers, adding to a market valued at $2.28 billion in 2023, according to market research firm Arizton Advisory & Intelligence. […]

It is difficult for me to believe each of the two-hundred-ish worldwide states will have an entirely localized data centre, even for just the named giants. Also, a requirement for local data storage may be a roadblock for new contenders. But the U.S. has repeatedly blown up any trust the world may have had in allowing it to steward all our data, so it is unsurprising to see moves in the direction of more sovereignty. Sure makes the internet feel less connected than it used to be, though.

July 11, 2025 ⌥

Canada Should Build Public Cloud Infrastructure Rather Than Relying on U.S. Tech Giants ⇥ policyalternatives.ca

Paris Marx, in an article for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a progressive think tank:

As [Prime Minister Mark] Carney looks to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States, we can’t ignore the extent of our technological dependence — and the cloud is a great place to start. Carney’s statement during the election suggested he would look to Canadian companies to supply more of the computation and storage needs of the federal government, but he should be far more ambitious.

Instead of simply encouraging the buildout of a private Canadian cloud, the government should invest in the expansion of a public cloud — built and run by a Crown corporation with public financing to serve government needs, but potentially to expand beyond that too. The government already has data centres of its own, but in recent decades it’s more often looked to the private sector to supply more of its computational needs instead of developing in-house capacities as it did with older forms of information technology.

This would be a hard sell to the public, but it is a very good idea; similarly, we should not cede our physical communications system to private businesses. This seems unlikely under Carney, who is too busy embracing neoliberal fiscal positions to take on such a bold project, but it is the kind of big idea we need to counter U.S. tech dependence.

July 10, 2025 ⌥

Grok Shows How Centralized Tech Can Be Manipulated ⇥ techdirt.com

Mike Masnick, Techdirt, reacting to Grok’s Nazi turn:

We need to take back control over the tools that we use.

Especially these days, as so many people have started (dangerously) treating AI tools as “objective” sources of truth, people need to understand that they are all subject to biases. Some of these biases are in their training data. Some are in their weights. And some are, as is now quite clear, directly in their system prompts.

The problem isn’t just bias — it’s whose bias gets embedded in the system. When a centralized AI reflects the worldview of tech billionaires rather than the diverse perspectives of its users, we’re not getting artificial intelligence. We’re getting artificial ideology.

I am half compelled by this argument, and half concerned. I obviously believe we should be skeptical of how much trust we place in corporations. After all, they have given us ample reason to be suspicious of them.

Even before it was “X”, Twitter did not have the best reputation for quality discussion. And then it was bought by Elon Musk. I still do not believe there is sufficient evidence for bias in users’ feeds during the recent U.S. presidential election, but the anti-“political correctness” written into Grok is a plainly obvious problem. Even so, a new version of Grok was launched this week, which consults Musk’s tweets when it gets stuck on a query. All of this should undermine the little bit of trust anyone might have left in X and xAI.

A company with a much better reputation, historically, is Google. Even though it has faced decades of scrutiny and questions about its secret website rankings, it has generally gotten things more right than not. To be clear, I can point to dozens of times when it has been bad at search — especially in the last five years — but it remains what most people think of when they think of searching the web. Yet, because it feels to some like A.I. works like magic, that reputation is on the line with good criticisms and very dumb ones. The Attorney General of Missouri — the state that nearly prosecuted a journalist for viewing the source of a website — is investigating Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI for being insufficiently supportive of the president’s record on Israel–U.S. relations. The Attorney General approvingly cites Missouri v. Biden, which the state lost.

Yet, even with all this in mind, we need to be able to trust institutions to some extent. This is the part of me concerned about Masnick’s piece. I think it is a great suggestion that we should control our own tools, where anyone can “choose your own values, your own sources, and your own filters”. However, most people are unlikely to do these things. Most of us will probably use something from some big company we do not really trust, but it is what ships with the system or is built into the apps we use most, or whatever. We need to ensure the areas where we have little control are trustworthy, too.

What that probably means is some kind of oversight, akin to what we have for other areas of little control. This is how we have some trust in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the medicine we take, and the planes we fly in. Consumer protection laws give us something to stand on when we are taken advantage of. Yes, there are places where this is done better than others, and I think we should learn from them instead of throwing up our hands and pretending this problem will be solved on an individual basis. To be clear, I am not reading Masnick’s writing as some kind of libertarian fantasy or an anti-regulation screed, nor do I interpret that in Alex Komoroske’s manifesto either. But I also believe there should be some regulation because we need to be realistic about the practical limitations of how much time and effort people will invest into controlling their experience.