Month: September 2026

FBI Probes Service Selling Tens of Millions of Drivers Licenses ⇥ krebsonsecurity.com

Brian Krebs:

A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.

Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, reports the company in question is IDScan:

You cannot do age or identity verification safely. It always creates some sort of record and that set of records will always become a target. That’s what happened here. And it’s what will happen with any such systems.

Dan Gillmor on Bluesky:

If you support “age verification” online, you are supporting a system that GUARANTEES privacy meltdowns — endangering all of us — because the giant databases of scanned IDs are perpetually hacked by criminals who sell private data.

I am opposed to identity verification, but this argument is not particularly effective for me because there are incredibly low-risk solutions. In Canada, for example, we have an interbank service called Interac that offers an identity verification service. I am not naïve, but I would entirely trust this bank-based system to verify me on a regular basis. In fact, I already do — like many Canadians, I use my banking information to log into government websites. Maybe this relatively safe proxy for a centralized identification system is unique to Canada.

I imagine this argument lands fairly well for lots of people elsewhere, however. The rapid introduction of age verification laws has produced a market for these businesses, but handing your identifying information to some random third-party should terrify you, as it is exactly the behaviour any security expert warns against doing. You have no idea who is able to access that scan of your driver’s license or what they can do with it. And, as it turns out, neither do some of these companies, either.

How Accurate Have Ed Zitron’s Predictions Been? ⇥ danluu.com

Dan Luu, after finding one wrong prediction after another made by Ed Zitron, comparing him to mediocre futurists, and exploring his writing style:

That last sentence really sums up Zitron’s position. “There are so many guys to be mad at the moment”. In this talk, he throws in this jab at Andreesen and blames Andreesen for Meta, Google, and Microsoft pursuing growth. In reality, if Marc Andreesen had never existed, Meta, Google, and Microsoft would almost certainly still be trying to grow so we of course cannot actually blame Andreesen for these companies trying to grow. There’s just this thing that he says is bad, and in his usual style, he pulls some person and says they’re the evil villain that’s to blame for this, and then moves on to the next non sequitur.

Instead of more carefully scrutinizing Zitron’s record, outlets like Vanity Fair are publishing soft interviews with him where he gets to make predictions like “large language models, when you remove all of the insane financialization, it’s probably a $30 billion-a-year industry”. Oh, sure, they ask a single question about wrong predictions since 2024, but he brushes it off by saying he has learned lots in those two years — Luu documents incorrect predictions all the way up until November 2025, after which “most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future” — and ends the interview by saying “[w]hat comes after the A.I. bubble is actually a little scarier”. Ominous.

The beauty of Zitron’s voluminous output, for him, is that there is a vast difference between what he actually writes and what people remember. Financial experts and more reputable journalists have raised plenty of concerns about how much money is being spent on developing this infrastructure, and how highly these companies are valued. But the words Zitron writes are far more incendiary and conspiratorial than many seem to remember. It is frustrating to see his many media experiences filling the role of the A.I. skeptic when there are far more qualified, sober, and accurate options. We have enough boosters; this is an industry that is co-signed by the world’s most powerful economies. We deserve better A.I. criticism in popular media.

About Half of U.S. Smartphone Owners Say They Spend Too Much Time Using It ⇥ pewresearch.org

William Bishop of Pew Research:

Between scrolling, notifications, and messages, smartphones can be hard to put down. Just over half of U.S. adults say they spend too much time on their smartphone, according to a Pew Research Center survey from May and June 2026. About a third of adults say their smartphone use is about right, while just 3% say they spend too little time using these devices.

Notably, 70% of smartphone owners in the U.S. aged 18–29 say they believe they use it too much. I am skeptical of public polling — maybe we are societally more approving of shaming our own device use — but this also tracks with what I hear casually from friends and family. Anecdotally, many people I know have expressed that they want to be on their phones less often.

But the editors of Andreessen Horowitz’s It’s Time to Build newsletter — hosted on Substack, a platform they are investors in — believe this behaviour actually indicates people are very happy. Ruby Thelot, professor of design and media studies at New York University and “astute tech observer”, says the heavy use of social media platforms, like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram — Andreessen Horowitz invested in both, and Marc Andreessen is on Meta’s board; none of this is disclosed — is simply evidence we love them:

People en masse are getting on social media, by choice. From 2016 until now, the number of social media users has grown from 2.5B to close to 6B people. Enshittification isn’t real. It’s three TikToks in a trenchcoat, and, maybe, a book deal. It’s good for discourse but does not describe actual reality and user patterns.

Returning to Instagram. The average daily usage showcases an increase in time spent on Instagram every day as well. Users are coming back for more, in a highly competitive attention arena, year after year.

There is a lot of assumption in these two paragraphs, and I think the “close to 6B people” is worth examining to start. Thelot attributes this statistic in the chart above to Backlinko. It cites no source, but a web search indicates to me this originates with Manochi’s DataReportal, which disclaims “‘user identities’ may not represent unique human individuals” because, as the company explains on the sixth slide of its report, it may count multiple social media accounts or business accounts as individual identities. These are not necessarily people, and Manochi says it is improper to compare figures year over year as Thelot does. (And, to be fair, which Manochi also does on slide 321.)

A lack of rigour is not unique to this data point.

Thelot next shows a chart indicating daily Instagram use rose from 25 minutes in 2017 to nearly 34 in 2026. This is, to Thelot, simply evidence that people like using it and want more. But, to return to the Pew poll above, it seems that people do not feel good about spending more time on their smartphones. Though Pew did not ask (PDF) about social media specifically, roughly half of respondents aged 18–29 said it negatively affects their productivity. And, according to slide 337 of that Manochi report, 30.7–44.0% of people say they use social media to “fill up spare time”, trending higher for younger generations. It is plausible that more younger people are spending increasing amounts of time on social media apps and they do not feel good about it. In other words, the time spent numbers are not a good proxy for enjoyment or value.

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

People need to be on Linkedin to find jobs. Municipalities and news organizations share important updates on social media first. You might be pulled onto Facebook or WhatsApp against your will because your local school or community of parents congregate there. That doesn’t mean they like it. It is possible to hate something with your entire being and still participate in it.

Regardless of whether you call it “addiction” or some kind of compulsive behaviour, it is plausible many people dislike their own actions but struggle to change them. It is also possible these products are designed to take advantage of that to extract more time out of each user.

Apple’s John Ternus Era Begins ⇥ nytimes.com

Kalley Huang, New York Times (gift link)

John Ternus became Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, succeeding Tim Cook, the company’s leader for the last 15 years. The long-anticipated handoff, Mr. Cook has said, will be “perfectly smooth.”

[…]

This summer, Apple hired Nate Gatten from American Airlines to lead government affairs, replacing Kate Adams, who will retire this year. Laura Legros, a hardware engineering vice president and deputy of Mr. Ternus’s before retiring from Apple in 2022, has rejoined the company, three people familiar with her hiring said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Ms. Legros, who reports to Mr. Ternus, could act as his adviser and emissary to various parts of the company, the three people said.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple’s Phil Schiller is no longer going to run the App Store or oversee product events, reports Bloomberg. Schiller isn’t leaving Apple, but he is narrowing his responsibilities and working on unspecified projects.

Employees at Apple told Bloomberg that 66-year-old Schiller appears to be taking another step toward retirement.

Cook and Ternus each sent pretty anodyne company-wide memos about the transition. Cook’s tenure was the longest of any CEO in Apple’s history and he was the one who turned it from a successful company into a global behemoth.

The thing I have liked about Apple — one of the things that made me a longtime customer and someone who writes about the company — is that it has historically been a very simple kind of business: it designs products and sells them to people, mostly. Every one of its peers is a more complicated business. They often balance the needs of massive institutional and government customers, advertisers, or two-sided marketplaces.

That change began in the latter years of Jobs’ tenure and accelerated under Cook. Most software, including operating systems, was accounted for as part of device purchases, and was turned into a software-as-a-service model. Its subscription-based business became a revenue growth centre, which was important for Wall Street because it was a way to turn the company’s successful but inconsistent device sales into predictable money printers. And there are now ads and upsells throughout the operating systems, which are shown to all users regardless of how much other money they have already given Apple.

Ternus has inherited that Apple. Regardless of how much he gives off the vibe of a cool Californian — by way of Philadelphia — who just cares about the best stuff, he is also selling ad space and making sure more people upgrade to Apple One.