Rotten in Cupertino ⇥ daringfireball.net

John Gruber wrote an appropriately scathing piece about Apple’s inability to deliver improvements to Siri. It is a much needed perspective from someone who receives press briefings and demos, and is therefore able to better gauge Apple’s likely progress on these features. It is not looking good:

We didn’t get to try any of the Apple Intelligence features ourselves. There was no Apple Intelligence “hands on”. But we did see a bunch of features demoed, live, by Apple folks. In my above hierarchy of realness, they were all at level 1.

But we didn’t see all aspects of Apple Intelligence demoed. None of the “more personalized Siri” features, the ones that Apple, in its own statement announcing their postponement, described as having “more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps”. Those features encompass three main things: […]

There were no demonstrations of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. They were features Apple said existed, which they claimed would be shipping in the next year, and which they portrayed, to great effect, in the signature “Siri, when is my mom’s flight landing?” segment of the WWDC keynote itself, starting around the 1h:22m mark. Apple was either unwilling or unable to demonstrate those features in action back in June, even with Apple product marketing reps performing the demos from a prepared script using prepared devices.

Those are personal context, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions. As Gruber astutely broke down the existing Apple Intelligence features by their degree of reality, I think it is worth picking apart these three, even though Apple is lumping them together under the “more personalized Siri” banner.

The first of these was described by Craig Federighi at the Talk Show Live as comprising data already indexed by Spotlight.1 If this is accurate, that now-pulled commercial in which Bella Ramsey asks Siri “what’s the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?” seems entirely plausible. I can search my phone for a location — say, my barber’s shop — and Spotlight will return previous appointments there. If I ask Siri the same thing, it converts the name of the shop to an address but it cannot find any events past or future, for some reason. (This is true of all types of appointments I tried. I have an upcoming Apple Store appointment and, while it interpreted me correctly when I asked it for upcoming appointments at the store, it could not find one in my calendar.) It is not news that Siri is bad, but there is a kernel of this functionality already present in Siri. It needs to be able to search past appointments, convert “a couple of months ago” into a reasonable date span, and then connect it to other attendees in the event — but all of this is based on data already indexed.

Onscreen awareness and in-app actions both seem far more ambitious. The former is not nearly as dependent on new third-party developer support in the way in-app actions would be. Simon Willison speculates the holdup could be related to security concerns. Gruber assumes — fairly — none of these features work properly. Note how the “Cafe Grenel” ad involves what I take to be the simplest version of personalized Siri, and even that is unable to be shown to the press. While Apple included the “mom’s flight” example in the keynote, it has — thankfully — not shown an ad with anything nearly so complex.

If Apple could demonstrate a more functional Siri, I imagine it would have done so by now. That feels like the bare minimum and it seems not even that modest Spotlight-based improvement is able to be shown. The best case, right now, is that some of these features work, but only some of the time. Yet Apple decided it could present all of them way too early. We can no longer assume Apple’s WWDC presentation is a reflection of reality, nor that its public roadmap is anything more than words on a page — not until someone outside of Apple can say they have seen this work. I do not trust Siri and, right now, I also do not trust Apple to tell me what the status is with Siri, either.

  1. Mind you, this is the same interview in which John Giannandrea says the first thing he told the Siri team is “failure is not an option”. ↥︎

Google Has Also Probably Received a U.K. Backdoor Demand ⇥ wyden.senate.gov

From a letter (PDF) sent by five U.S. lawmakers, linked from a press release issued by Sen. Ron Wyden:

The U.K.’s attempted gag has already restricted U.S. companies from engaging in speech that is constitutionally protected under U.S. law and necessary for ongoing Congressional oversight. Apple has informed Congress that had it received a technical capabilities notice, it would be barred by U.K. law from telling Congress whether or not it received such a notice from the U.K., as the press has reported. Google also recently told Senator Wyden’s office that, if it had received a technical capabilities notice, it would be prohibited from disclosing that fact. The U.K. embassy has also not responded to a recent request from Senator Wyden’s office regarding potential demands from the U.K. to other U.S. companies.

If Google had not received a technical capabilities notice, it would be able to simply say “no”. Because it says it cannot say anything “if it had”, it seems likely it has also been issued a similar demand for access to user data in a decrypted form.

The Slop Refinement of E-Book Scams ⇥ joanwestenberg.com

Joan Westenberg:

Scroll through Instagram for a few minutes, and you’ll be swamped by a parade of sponsored posts promising extraordinary wealth through minimal effort: “PDF farming” generating €25,000 monthly, rebranded ebooks yielding “$4230 in a month,” or selling “thousands of books without writing them.”

These aren’t fringe scams hiding in the shadowy corners of the Internet.

They’re algorithmically amplified, professionally produced advertisements popping up in millions of feeds daily.

This appears to be an updated version of an old scam. Previously, as Dan Olson documented, you would scrape together the ingredients of a “book” from various gig economy servant platforms and, theoretically, sell it through Amazon and its “best-kept secret” Audible. This market is, as Westenberg writes, entirely saturated. So why bother paying people or taking any risk whatsoever when you can just generate every component? A.I. makes a get-rich-quick scheme more efficient. But it still will not work.

“Conspirador Norteño”

Cryptocurrency and related topics have been something of a magnet for deceptive behavior, so it’s not surprising to see an Amazon search for “cryptocurrency” bring up a sponsored listing for a book series by an author with a GAN-generated face. Authors with synthetically generated face images have been an issue on Amazon for some time now, and some of them have served up potentially lethal AI-generated culinary advice. In the case of the sponsored cryptocurrency books, the alleged author is one of a group of three authors with GAN-generated faces published by the same alleged publishing company, Tigress Publishing.

I have previously described Amazon as a “low grade flea market mixed with a liquidation store”. That now seems like high praise. In the five years since I wrote that, it has descended to feeling like one is picking through a scrap heap of products confiscated by customs agents for being dangerous, knockoffs, or stolen.

Gurman: Apple’s Operating Systems to Be Redesigned to ‘Look More Consistent’ ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history, aiming to transform the interface of the iPhone, iPad and Mac for a new generation of users.

The revamp — due later this year — will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple’s various software platforms more consistent, according to people familiar with the effort. That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows and system buttons.

To state a couple of obvious things: first, this is a rumour and should only be treated as such; second, it seems to me the justifications laid out in this article are Gurman’s interpretation, not necessarily descriptive of the actual design. There is no indication Gurman has seen what it will look like.

Gurman’s explanation, though his own, certainly passes my sniff test:

A key goal of the overhaul is to make Apple’s different operating systems look similar and more consistent. Right now, the applications, icons and window styles vary across macOS, iOS and visionOS. That can make it jarring to hop from one device to another.

This is the same thing said by Alan Dye in introducing MacOS Big Sur’s overhaul less than five years ago: “we wanted consistency throughout the ecosystem, so users can move fluidly between their Apple devices”. I do not think this is a worthwhile goal unto itself. It is unclear to me how today’s Apple operating systems are insufficiently consistent in ways that are not beneficial to the user experience. I do not think MacOS, iOS, and VisionOS should all look and work the same because they are all used in completely different ways.

This is also not the first time this rumour has shown up. Last February, Israeli publication the Verifier reported this design was due for iOS 18 — right idea, wrong timeline. Then, in January, Jon Prosser showed a mockup of what he said was the Camera app in iOS 19, saying it “would be weird to just exist there […] in one place. We could be looking at a full redesign”. There is a building expectation for this on iOS and, by extension, iPadOS. Gurman is reporting the same treatment is due for MacOS, too.

This has me excited and worried in similar measure. There are things on all of these products which could use rethinking. This could be the culmination of many years of rethinking every component and interaction to figure out what works best. But I do not think it is worth getting too hopeful for a rethink or even a reintroduction of depth and texture across Apple’s systems. This set of redesigns may be described here as “dramatic” but, given the number of users who depend on these operating systems, I doubt it will be. I do not think much re-learning will be expected, despite Gurman’s belief this will “go well beyond a new coat of paint like iOS 7”.

I am trying not to get too far in my thoughts until I see it for real, but I do not like the sound of more glassy, translucent effects. One of the most common phrases I have used in recent years of filing Apple bug reports is “insufficient contrast”. I am not optimistic that pattern will not continue.

Firefox’s New Terms of Use and Privacy Notice ⇥ mjtsai.com

While I am on the subject of Mozilla, the organization added a terms of use document for Firefox and revised its privacy obligations. It went badly.

Jan Schaumann on Mastodon:

Wait, what? By using #Firefox, I now grant Mozilla “a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use” any data I “upload or input”? That seems, uhm, rather broad. Wtf.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:

Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. […]

Michael Tsai:

This is the same thing Adobe did. It’s not great to put the key information in what is essentially a FAQ that doesn’t seem as legally binding as a ToS. And the clarification says that they can only use the data as described in the Privacy Notice, while the actual Terms of Service say that that Mozilla gets “all rights necessary” including using it as described in the Privacy Notice. So it seems like the Privacy Notice cannot constrain their behavior, but they want us to think it does.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

After fielding user backlash over its new Terms of Use last week, Firefox browser maker Mozilla has rewritten its policy to address issues around the overly broad language it had previously used. Critics said the terms implied Mozilla was asking users for the rights to whatever data they input into the browser or upload, which some worried would be then sold to advertisers or AI companies.

I find Mozilla’s explanations for these changes sufficient, but I also understand why users were worried. The document said what it said. I do not see Mozilla saying these interpretations were legally incorrect. Like Tsai, I also thought first of Adobe’s terms of use update — another entry in a long list of spooky boilerplate permissive language in a contract.

Firefox Users on iOS Have Doubled in France and Germany ⇥ blog.mozilla.org

Christina Petrova, communications manager at Mozilla:

Since the launch of the first DMA browser choice screens on iOS in March 2024, people are making themselves heard: Firefox daily active users in Germany alone have increased by 99%. And in France, Firefox’s daily active users on iOS grew by 111%.

I have confirmed with Petrova these numbers reflect growth in iOS users only. They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another indication that browser choice screens can have a positive effect for smaller browsers and, conversely, also a reminder of the power of defaults.

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U.S. Drops Bid to Make Google Sell A.I. Investments in Antitrust Case ⇥ reuters.com

Josh Sisco and Davey Alba, Bloomberg, earlier this week:

Google is urging officials at President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to back away from a push to break up the search engine company, citing national security concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions.

[…]

Google’s argument isn’t new, and it has previously raised these concerns in public in response to antitrust pressure from regulators and lawmakers. But the company is re-upping the issue in discussions with officials at the department under Trump because the case is in its second stage, known as the “remedy” phase, during which the court can impose sweeping changes on Google’s business.

Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica:

The government’s 2024 request also sought to have Google’s investment in AI firms curtailed even though this isn’t directly related to search. If, like Google, you believe leadership in AI is important to the future of the world, limiting its investments could also affect national security. But in November, Mehta suggested he was open to considering AI remedies because “the recent emergence of AI products that are intended to mimic the functionality of search engines” is rapidly shifting the search market.

Jody Godoy, Reuters:

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday dropped a proposal to force Alphabet’s Google to sell its investments in artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI competitor Anthropic, to boost competition in online search.

[…]

Many of the measures prosecutors proposed in November remain intact with a few tweaks.

For example, a requirement that Google share search query data with competitors now says that Google can charge a marginal fee for access and that the competitors must not pose a national security risk.

The Department of Justice included in its filings today a version of the proposed judgement with revisions shown (PDF). Google’s proposed judgement (PDF) is, rather predictably, much shorter. It sounds like its national security arguments swayed the prosecution, however.

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

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

Gurman:

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

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

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

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

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

Nice.

Apple Confirms Delayed Launch of Personalized Siri Features

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guilherme Pimenta, Valor Econômico:

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Geist and Kumanan Wilson, the Globe and Mail:

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

[…]

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

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

Digg Reboots Again ⇥ torment-nexus.mathewingram.com

Samantha Subin, CNBC:

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

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

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

Mathew Ingram:

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

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

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

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

Ben Werdmuller:

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

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

Wine Prices Raised by Alberta Government ⇥ cbc.ca

Colleen Underwood, CBC News:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Voorhees, MacStories:

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

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

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

Apple:

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

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

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

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

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

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

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

Liam Proven, the Register:

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

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

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

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