Canadian Alleges Legal Intimidation by U.S. Homeland Security Over Social Media Posts ⇥ cbc.ca

Chris Iorfida, CBC News:

A Canadian is fighting back in U.S. federal court over what he says is an attempt by the Department of Homeland Security, through Google, to seek “vast swaths of information” about his personal life following social media posts critical of Donald Trump’s administration.

[…]

On Jan. 30, the Canadian X user disparaged ICE in a post that received nearly 96,000 views, according to this week’s complaint.

[…]

The complaint at hand, however, states that John Doe was not seeking entry to the U.S. and has not done so since 2015.

The only details we have of this case are as alleged in the complaint (PDF) and the partially redacted summons (PDF), and they are incomplete. The tweet in question is not quoted, the account is not named, and, though there are enough clues that I tried to track it down, X’s search feature sucks, so I have no idea what it said. Perhaps there is another reason the Department of Homeland Security is trying to obtain details of the Gmail account; perhaps, too, the government was not aware it was targeting a Canadian. (Though, if it were targeting a U.S. resident for their speech, is that any better? Probably not!)

One thing that remains unclear is how the government obtained this email address. Iorfida writes of a previous case:

In the first Trump administration, CBP issued a summons to Twitter in 2017 requesting information regarding the account of a user on Twitter, which the company objected to.

It would be unsurprising if X was entirely compliant with the government’s request.

What is shocking to me is that the U.S. government is apparently going after someone whose X posts, according to the complaint, “have received tens of thousands of views or more; collectively, his posts have received well over 100,000 views”, and this single tweet might represent around half that total. I do not intend to be mean, but those are not the numbers of a notable X account. Officials in the most powerful country in the world are apparently going after some random Canadian for an unmemorable and basically unpopular tweet.

Reddit Joins Other Social Media Platforms in Worsening Its Website and Pushing Visitors to Apps ⇥ arstechnica.com

Nate Anderson, Ars Technica:

The block seemed curious, given that Reddit began as a website, and websites generally want traffic. Few are in the practice of turning traffic away.

But some services, including X and Instagram, aggressively push users toward apps—or at least toward being logged in to them.

I reached out to the company to ask what was going on. According to a spokesperson, “We recently started running a test for a small subset of frequent logged-out mobile users that prompts them to download the app after visiting the site. These users are already familiar with Reddit and we’ve seen that the experience is much better for them in the app. The app offers a more personalized experience and users can more easily find communities that match their interests.”

Like other major social media platforms, this turns Reddit into a walled garden. Presumably, this is in part of the company’s aggressive strategy to license users’ posts for A.I. training, plus encouraging user growth. It sucks that the open web is getting torn apart because commercial websites are incentivized to direct people to apps where large-scale scraping is a bigger challenge. This whole thing used to feel so quaint.

U.K. Age Verification on iOS 26.4 Appears to Be Passed to Websites, Not Just Apps ⇥ 404media.co

Samantha Cole, 404 Media:

Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub and other major porn sites, announced today that in the UK, iPhone and iPad users will be able to access its sites again, ending an over three month ban that Aylo initially enacted because of the region’s age verification law.

As of Tuesday, following the iOS 26.4 rollout in the UK, users on the new operating system can visit Pornhub and Aylo’s other sites from their iPhones.

Frustratingly, there is no explanation as to how Aylo’s websites are getting information from this iOS 26.4 API, the documentation for which is only for native apps. I may have missed something obvious, but the only mention I could find of this capability is in a February AppleInsider article. Also I could not find a way to trigger this verification step, even after changing my iPhone’s region, so I cannot test whether it is being passed through an HTTP header — which I presume it is — or another method.

Lawful-Access Bill Could Threaten Encryption, Deter Investment, Chamber of Commerce Warns ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Marie Woolf, the Globe and Mail:

In a letter to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree and Justice Minister Sean Fraser, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce says that, as currently drafted, Bill C-22 “presents considerable risks to Canadian businesses, investment and the integrity of data systems.”

[…]

But the letter expresses concern that, as currently worded, the bill could be used to “require companies to create a back door, which would place encrypted systems at risk.” It says Canada should embrace strong encryption to catalyze growth of the Canadian tech sector.

Under the previous parliamentary session, the Consumer Privacy Protection Act was halted after 136 committee meetings. The current Canadian government is still arguing for updates to the Privacy Act, even as it pushes this hostile bill, but it has not resumed efforts to pass the CPPA.

‘Knowledge Fight’ Is Over ⇥ patreon.com

Dan Friesen, writing on the “Knowledge Fight” Patreon page:

As discussed in today’s podcast episode, Dan and Jordan have decided that they had reached what they felt was the end of the show.

Sometimes, periodical media is created with an elaborate plan or story arc. Often, though, there is no predetermined structure and, especially in the case of reactive or commentary media, the next entry feels almost inevitable. Until it stops. Then we get to feel what our world is like without it and, if it leaves a void, it is a sign it was valued. The end of “Knowledge Fight” leaves a big void.

I will miss this show deeply. Friesen has a particular knack for assessing the world of Alex Jones and other conspiracy broadcasters as what they are: performers. Horrible and dangerous people, to be sure, but acting primarily in service of a performance. Holmes, his co-host, was a good foil for this show in his pure reaction to the inherent horror in this media. If everything goes to plan, a recording of an upcoming live show will be out later this month, and then it is done. What a run.

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The Proxy Battle Over A.I. Policy Is Brewing ⇥ wired.com

Lydia Moynihan, New York Post:

“You have this huge ecosystem pushing AI doomerism with zero regard for the consequences — the main one being that America will fall behind in the global AI race,” Nathan Leamer, executive director of Build American AI, told me. “And they genuinely don’t seem bothered by it.”

And according to a report released this week from the Bull Moose Project, doomers have been spending a fortune.

A tight network of donors, with former Facebook executive Dustin Moskovitz’s Coefficient Giving at the center, has already spent $5.9 billion and has $37.8 billion more publicly pledged, according to the report.

They have given out more than $611 million in donations to candidates (99.8% of whom are Democrats), dark money groups and so-called AI safety organizations such as Future of Life Institute, the report adds.

It is the Post, so you expect a degree of bad faith, but this is deceptive even for them.

The Bull Moose Project is one of several organizations sharing an address and financial connections with the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is overseen by the president’s former chief of staff, and to which the president gave $1 million. The Bull Moose Project’s website promotes a “plan to rejuvenate America” and, in the “American Revitalization” section, illustrates this with a lovely painting of a person launching a canoe beside a float plane. This is maybe only funny to me, but I had to track down that image — hotlinked from Pinterest — and it is a painting by Ross Buckland, who was born in Calgary and now lives in Ontario. I am pretty I recognize the mountain peaks as part of the Canadian Rockies.

Anyhow, its report largely concerns the political spending of Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and various other executives, board members, and associated parties. It is so all-consuming it begins to look like a red string board, and is similarly difficult to follow. But it sounds ominous. There is a page dedicated to “the China connection”, but it is pretty weak.

Also, you will note that, instead of citing academics or subject matter experts, Moynihan favourably quotes the executive director of Build America [sic] AI. But Moynihan does not note the group’s funding sources nor explain anything more about it.

Emily Wilkins, CNBC:

The [Leading the Future] PAC, which has said it would support both Democratic and Republican candidates, is also connected to advocacy group Build American AI, which launched a $10 million campaign to push a uniform national AI policy.

Contributors to Leading the Future include private equity firm Andreessen Horowitz, Open AI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel Founder Ron Conway and AI software company Perplexity.

Laura J. Nelson, Wall Street Journal:

While Congress hasn’t passed a comprehensive law for the fast-growing technology, some states have begun discussing or passing regulations rooted in concern about the need for more AI safeguards.

They include policies championed by nonprofit groups tied to the effective-altruism movement, a broad social and moral philosophy that has become divisive in Silicon Valley owing in part to its focus on potential worst-case scenarios in AI development. Pro-AI forces call them “doomers.”

An effort to punch back against Leading the Future went public Tuesday: an organization called Public First that plans to back candidates from both parties through two super PACs. The group, which is organized under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code and isn’t required to disclose its donors, is aiming to raise at least $50 million.

Anthropic gave $20 million to Public First.

Taylor Lorenz, Wired:

Marketing agencies are pitching influencers deals such as $5,000 per TikTok video to amplify Build American AI’s messaging about how China’s technological rise should be seen as a threat. The goal, according to a staffer from SM4, the influencer marketing agency running the campaign on behalf of Build American AI, is to subtly shift public debate by framing China’s AI advancement as a serious risk to the safety and well-being of Americans.

Lorenz learned about this because, she says, SM4 pitched her on the campaign. Leading the Future, which runs Build American AI, raised $125 million last year and it is spending it on this.

These influencers are being used to help settle an argument, among some of the world’s richest and least-likeable people, over whether OpenAI (its position backed by Build American AI and Bull Moose Project) or Anthropic (through Public First) should get to write A.I. policy and regulations. Apparently, “neither” is not an option. To its credit, that report from the Bull Moose Project correctly notes the ongoing “proxy war over A.I. policy”, though it stops short of admitting the part it plays.

What both sides appear to agree on is that they must treat A.I. from China as a threat. Those of us elsewhere, however, likely find both threatening, albeit for different reasons.

Dispute Over Fate of Kenyan Workers Who Were Exposed to Intimate Meta Ray-Bans Recordings ⇥ bbc.com

Chris Vallance, BBC News:

In February, workers at the company, Sama, told two Swedish newspapers they had witnessed glasses users going to the toilet, and having sex.

Less than two months later, Meta ended its contract with Sama, which Sama said would result in 1,108 workers being made redundant.

Meta says it’s because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects. A Kenyan workers’ organisation alleges Meta’s decision was caused by the staff speaking out.

It is abhorrent yet common to treat essential contractors and employees as disposable. Over a thousand people will be out of a job yet still be haunted by what they have been exposed to.

Elections Alberta Investigating Provincial Elector List Published by Separatist Activists ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Carrie Tait and Chen Wang, the Globe and Mail:

Alberta’s separatist campaign has access to personal information belonging to 2.9 million residents, data that closely resembles the province’s most recent list of electors, raising questions about a potential breach of privacy and violation of election laws.

The already sanctioned organization behind this claims all this data is from public sources, but Elections Alberta is convinced it is a genuine elector list used illegally.

Wallis Snowdon, CBC News:

Court heard that an Elections Alberta investigation examined the public, searchable database and determined the list was legitimately provided to the Republican Party of Alberta, a provincial party founded in 2022 that supports Alberta independence.

[…]

Court heard that each electoral list legitimately released by Elections Alberta includes a certain number of fictitious — or “salted” — names. These unique entries on each electoral list allow investigators to trace each dataset back to their source in the event of a breach.

I was able to easily register and view my own record, which had information I have not seen before in data I have requested from brokers and other semi-public sources. The canvassing tool was pulled offline as I was reviewing its architecture.

It is notable that these pro-separatist goobers have to resort to setting up front organizations with scant public information about their leadership and funding, and allegedly obtaining lists of registered electors. These people are very loud on the internet and at rallies, but they use sketchy and underhanded organizing tactics.

Update: It appears Jeremy Appel was first to report this story.

Adobe’s ‘Modern’ User Interface Is Just Webpages ⇥ unsung.aresluna.org

Marcin Wichary did a wonderful job of poking through a few of the dialog boxes revised by Adobe in recent versions of Photoshop and — surprise, surprise — they are not good in lots of pretty rudimentary ways:

I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For Photoshop here, nothing I see indicates any change in course or clientele – and yet all of these good moments in UI that used to help me out no longer exist.

Plus, all those transgressions are solved problems. Those issues are not buried in pages of heavily litigated patents, or in seven collective brains of world-class interface designers whose driveways are presently occupied by cash-filled trucks sent over by frontier companies. This isn’t some long lost art that requires archaeologists to decipher. This feels like carelessness and laziness in face of basic UI engineering; in a likely internally-motivated effort to refresh the interface, the team threw an entire nursery worth of babies with the bathwater.

If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React.

This is loathsome.

There are people out there who will insist it is unfair to blame the tools and that bad user interfaces can be built in entirely native languages, too, which is true. Also, Adobe’s interface has always been unique and not quite at home on either MacOS or Windows. Maybe it really is possible to build a web app that feels platform native. But I have never used one — not once — and for this mess to be increasingly used in the industry-standard professional suite of creative tools is maddening.

There are good reasons why Adobe is ridding itself of allies, and this is one of them. I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it does not matter. Wichary has it right. These are fundamental principles of user interface design that Adobe is ignoring because its internal tooling has taken precedence.

See Also: Michael Tsai’s link roundup.

Artemis II Photo Timeline ⇥ artemistimeline.com

Here is something wonderful. Hank Green took all the amazing photos (previously) shot for the Artemis II mission, combined them with the schedule provided by NASA, and made an interactive timeline of it all. It is really quite nice.

It is also a tribute to publicly available data. Though the timeline includes some videos published to Instagram and YouTube, the vast majority are images from Flickr. NASA usually uploads them with EXIF data intact, and Flickr preserves it. NASA also provided the mission schedule and, even better, has a public API for the position of the Orion spacecraft at any given time. Which means Green was also able to correlate the photos with where they were taken along the craft’s trajectory.

I Kind of Fixed My iCloud Photos Problem and All I Got Was Two Blog Posts and Probably Years Off My Life

An advantage of publishing my problems with wide circulation is that sometimes people will be very helpful in their comments and emails.1 Plenty of people kindly suggested alternatives and ways to correct the problems I was having and, after many days’ work, I think I am on better footing.

But first, it is my fault as a writer that it seems I did not differentiate clearly enough the two related issues I have experienced with iCloud Photos. The first problem is that it is very easy to get images into an iCloud-stored photo library, but extremely difficult to extract them. This issue is compounded by a lack of transparency and data verification. The second problem is that it is necessary to commit to a lifetime of storage if one uses a third-party cloud option.

The software suggestions I received are manifold. The first is a category comprising a bunch of self-hosted options, of which the most popular seems to be Immich. This would solve the problem of a long-term commitment to a third-party provider, but it requires me to be a hobbyist data centre technician and I cannot handle more things on my to-do list. Yes, I have looked at the documentation and it seems straightforward enough. No, I still do not want to take this on. Perhaps one day, but not now.

I am, in fact, happy to pay someone to deal with that for me. Apple should be doing a better job of it than I ever could. Its data centres, whether first-party or third-party, surely have redundancies upon redundancies, and a level of data validation I simply cannot compete with. My dispute with this is not about third-party storage per se. Rather, it is how shoddy an experience it is to move photos out of iCloud and, also, my inability to verify that everything is as safe and secure as it should be.

But I was pointed to two pieces of software I can use that made my life easier and got me onto more stable footing. The first is Parachute Backup (MacOS 15 or later), which created a backup of my entire iCloud photo library and, soon, will also be backing up everything else I have in iCloud, for good measure. This is good software; I like it a lot. But I will provide a couple of caveats up-front if you are attempting a similar strategy.

Most obviously, it will download everything, which means you need a disk big enough to hold a discrete copy of everything you store in iCloud. That could be expensive right now. I bought a 2 TB external Samsung SSD a few years ago for $400, and it is currently nearly $800 on Amazon. But I do hoard old hard disks and I found a 2 TB one I could clear up.

You are also going to need patience. Not only will it take time to download, depending on your internet connection and the amount of stuff you have in iCloud, Parachute does not have any built-in bandwidth controls from what I could see. I am sure I could have found a way to limit it, but I just let it run. It took five days.

But now I am pretty sure I have a local copy of everything in iCloud. This is the feeling I should get from having “download originals to this Mac” switched on — which I have for several years — but that is apparently not a reliable preference. Also, this copy of my photo library is meaningfully organized in a date-based directory tree instead of some abstruse collection of randomized folders.

The other piece of software to which I owe my newfound sense of calm is PowerPhotos. Despite being hands-down the most frequent software recommendation from readers, it never came up in my earlier searches. I guess I was not using the correct keywords. In any case, it is an excellent application. Because I did the full Parachute backup, I felt comfortable with PowerPhotos modifying my library and generally doing its thing. It lets me easily drag photos from my primary iCloud-connected library to my archive, and its duplicate image finder is way better than the one in Photos.

What that means is that I can now confidently maintain that archive photos library. It is not worth the increase in iCloud storage costs for me to carry all of my tens of thousands of photos everywhere I go. For me, it is definitely worth the cost of these two software licenses to have more control.

(Also, an extra nice thing about PowerPhotos is that it has been around for ages, and old versions of the software remain available for download. The latest ones do not work on my iMac, but 2.x versions do, and a license key unlocks them all the same.)

I am receiving nothing by pointing you to either of these applications. I paid for both myself. However, I heard from the new owner of Parachute shortly after I published my article with a license for each of the Mac and iOS versions. I do not usually accept codes and I bought my own license anyhow, so I asked if I could give those codes away. I only have one of each to give out and they are only valid for another couple of days, so shoot me an email and let me know which one you want. (Update: Both licenses have been claimed.)

  1. It also means some other people will be spectacularly unhelpful. Here is a free tip: if your immediate reaction to someone having a problem with a service they are using as marketed is to blame them, consider whether you are actually being a smug jerk. (Ten points to you if you figure out which comment, specifically, encouraged me to write this footnote.) ↥︎

The Case for Canadian Digital Sovereignty ⇥ begiant.ca

Mathew Ingram wrote, for Be Giant, an interesting profile of Gander and other digital sovereignty efforts in Canada and the E.U., which I think is an evenhanded exploration of the excitement and pitfalls. For example, Gander’s founder Ben Waldman notes the de facto requirement to use U.S.-based payment systems on iOS:

There have been some major hurdles along the way, he concedes, which helps explain why Gander didn’t meet its initial goal of launching last October. One challenge was the idea of verifying users. It was suggested that they be asked to send a toonie to the company via the Interac network, but there was a risk that Apple might not approve the new app if payments were made outside its App Store. So the current plan is to have users verify their identity using Interac or Canada Post, both of which allow you to do so without sending your personal information over the internet.

I am not anti-U.S., but I am in favour of identifying singular dependencies.

‘How Europe Regulated Itself Into American Vassalage’ ⇥ economist.com

Stanley Pignal, the Economist (here is a gift link from someone, somewhere):

Here is an uncomfortable truth for hand-wringing policymakers in Paris, Berlin and beyond: Europe’s dependency on America Inc is in no small part Europe’s own fault. Decades of over-regulating the old continent’s economy left businesses there unable to compete with American firms, which went on to trounce European ones even in their own backyards. What Europeans could not build quickly for themselves, due to a thicket of regulations, they often imported just as quickly from abroad. That forcing businesses to jump through endless regulatory hoops would put a burden on Europeans was always understood: meeting ambitious green targets, protecting privacy, preventing bank meltdowns or achieving other necessary goals was always going to carry a cost. But the extent to which it also left Europeans in hock to foreigners — for now mostly America, but also increasingly China—has only belatedly become clear.

This is by no means a new argument; it is one the Economist makes constantly, including in a similar article two months ago, and Pignal in a previous column in October. Yet it is worth considering, nevertheless, that too much regulatory oversight has hampered Europe’s ability to compete with the United States. This is a possibility.

I find it telling, however, that Pignal cannot cite a specific example of this. Each paragraph contains an example of some regulation — limitations on the extractive economics of credit card interchange fees, environmental policies, and so on — and they all seem pretty reasonable. Pignal’s closing paragraph is all about how much he agrees with regulating A.I. and antitrust. But the limp conclusion is that it is the combination of sensible policies that has left Europe in an uncompetitive position with the comparatively lax regulatory environment of the U.S., where the highest court has repeatedly ruled against the authority of regulatory agencies.

It is unclear what E.U. regulators ought to do with Pignal’s feedback. It seems very easy to say there are too many regulations and too much red tape. It seems much more difficult to explain which part of the environment, human and animal safety, customer rights, privacy, or good business behaviour must be sacrificed in the name of international competition.

FOIA Documents ‘Scrubbed’ From Intelligence Agency Website ⇥ bloomberg.com

A strange thing happened last May: the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s FOIA page, which had previously contained a generous list of released documents, was censored. When I asked the agency what was up with that, they told me the site was “currently under construction in order to enhance and streamline the user experience”, with “temporary downtime of certain pages and content”. It turns out that was nonsense, hence my use of “censored” above.

Jason Leopold, in his “FOIA Files” newsletter at Bloomberg:

But an ODNI official told FOIA Files that the removal of the FOIA page was not connected to the Tren de Aragua intelligence assessment released to Harper. Instead, the website overhaul was prompted after another agency flagged a document released during the Biden administration that the official claimed had been improperly posted to ODNI’s FOIA reading room. (The official would not describe the document or say if it was retroactively classified.)

The emails I obtained, which have been partially redacted, reference a “document,” the title of which was blacked out, that sparked ODNI’s aggressive response.

If there was a single erroneously released document, it surely would not necessitate the removal of so many documents. One of the few ones remaining in the reading room is, oddly enough, the partially redacted email exchange (PDF) released to Leopold in which Madeline Meeker asks for the page to be “completely scrubbed”. No request logs have been posted since January 2025 under the “most transparent administration in history”.

Dutch Broadcaster Confirms Identity of Someone Running an Alberta Separatist YouTube Channel ⇥ bnr.nl

Aäron Loupatty, BNR (in Dutch, as interpreted by Safari’s translation feature):

Because Canadian media have taken it out so big, Youp now says he is changing course. “This came out of nowhere for us. It is clear what it has brought about. If I had known earlier that this was a problem, I would have adjusted the content accordingly.’ Contrary to what the universities claim, Youp says there is no coordinated network that wants to fuel separatist sentiments in Alberta. According to him, many of the videos are created precisely because channels look away from each other, but there is no collaboration there.

“Youp” is Youp Licher, who was originally identified by CBC News. I have no reason to disbelieve him in claiming that this is simply a financial play, and not a deliberate effort to meddle in Alberta politics.

One of the YouTube channels in question — the Canadian Reporter — has accumulated around 15.5 million total video views since it was created on May 1 last year. Using an approximate number of 44,000 daily views with Social Blade’s earnings estimator suggests a range of USD $3,960–$63,360 in annual revenue from ads alone. That is a huge range, to be sure, but even the lowest number is a successful side hustle for how little work actually goes into this stuff.

More traditional media organizations — BNR and CBC News being two examples — attempted to separate the business side of what they do from the news side. Paying writers based on clicks used to be a noteworthy exception, but then traffic bonuses became part of the compensation package at some outlets. It eventually paved the way for the YouTube-native model of almost entirely traffic-based compensation. Historically powerful human gatekeepers have been replaced by the singular platform of YouTube, which means anyone can make money and possibly a living if they have a large enough audience. A fandom parlays into other revenue streams, of course; Canadian Reporter sells paid subscriptions on YouTube from $1.50–$10.50 per month, and has a “Buy Me a Coffee” link in the bio albeit with just two subscribers.

In the way this new economy has pushed out the old, it is unfortunately fitting that one of the inadvertent faces of one of these channels is Matt Berry. Berry made an audition tape without knowing how it was going to be used because he had a profile on freelance talent site Upwork. But Berry is no long-term freelancer. He was, until 2021, the award-winning music director at X92.9, Calgary’s alternative rock station. I cannot find any comment from the station’s owner as to why he was among those laid off at the time, but it feels a little on-the-nose that a former broadcaster found his likeness being used without permission to market some clickbait A.I.-generated videos and boost someone else’s AdSense revenue.

(Thank you to reader Sanel for sending me this link.)

Dutch YouTubers Behind Alberta Separatist Videos, Finds CBC News ⇥ cbc.ca

Eric Szeto, et al., CBC News:

CBC News identified three individuals in the Netherlands whose digital trail links them to accounts that hired actors to appear on the YouTube channels. Two of them attended the same online course that teaches customers how to create “faceless” YouTube channels that generate passive income for the creators, who remain in the shadows.

Turns out it was not a VPN connection after all.

Oracle Laid Off (Tens of?) Thousands of People in March ⇥ theregister.com

O’Ryan Johnson, reporting for the Register at the end of March:

Oracle laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday as it ramps spending on AI infrastructure projects internally and with major technology partners.

[…]

Oracle employs about 162,000 people, with 58,000 of those in the US and approximately 104,000 internationally. If the rumored cuts of 30,000 are correct, it would amount to 18 percent of the company’s workforce.

Hugh Langley and Ashley Stewart, Business Insider:

Employees started receiving notifications early Tuesday. The cuts appear to have affected employees globally, but the full extent of the layoffs could not be immediately learned.

“After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change,” copies of the notification email viewed by Business Insider stated. “As a result, today is your last working day.”

This is possibly tens of thousands of people whose lives have been upended after getting an email. They had plans. Since those layoffs, Larry Ellison’s net worth has grown by about $45 billion.

Meta Drops the Other Shoe, Announces Thousands of Layoffs for Next Month ⇥ ft.com

Hannah Murphy, Financial Times:

Meta will cut 10 per cent of its staff next month, or about 8,000 jobs, as the social media platform reduces its workforce to offset chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s AI spending spree.

[…]

Meta also said that it was no longer filling 6,000 positions that it had initially planned to hire for, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Not the 20% reported by Reuters last month, but a huge number nevertheless. This is in addition to a thousand people laid off in January and hundreds more in March. That is a lot of lives upended — a lot of people who relocated, made plans, bought houses, and made commitments they might no longer be able to fulfill — because Meta hired too aggressively, and is now running a “marvel of financial engineering” to build data centres.

The Disappearance of the Public Bench ⇥ placesjournal.org

Gabrielle Bruney, Places:

Benches aren’t just disappearing from large railroad stations, but also from subways, parks, plazas, sidewalks, and esplanades. Public transit systems in Philadelphia, Chicago, Anaheim, and New York City have lost benches, as have the entrance to Seattle’s Pike Place Market, a National Park plaza in Washington, D.C., a thoroughfare of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a boulevard dedicated to Korean veterans in Nashville, and a tiny riverfront park in Janesville, Wisconsin. Some of these seats were replaced with armatures for perching or leaning, but most were not. There is no firm data on how many benches have been removed in total, nor when the trend precisely started. But anecdotal evidence suggests that in the past decade, across the United States, hundreds of places to sit in public have quietly disappeared.

This is New York-centric and U.S.-heavy, but it is something I have also noticed around me, too. A bench is one of the few places you can sit and spend time for free. Their absence in so many public places is notable for what it says about who we consider part of the public.

Joanna Stern Launches ‘New Things’ ⇥ thenewthings.com

Joanna Stern left the Wall Street Journal and is going independent with her new thing called New Things, and I like this overarching editorial question:

But while writing my new book, I AM NOT A ROBOT — where I used AI in as many parts of my life as possible for a year — I realized Is this a good product? isn’t the main question to ask anymore. The bigger question is: Who is this tech for? Wall Street? Greedy CEOs? AI agents? Actual humans? I want it to be for humans. And I want to cover it that way too: as a human living with it, using it, testing it and trying to make sense of what it’s doing to our lives.

After all, tech is not really about products and services; it never has been. It is what they do for us and what they — or the companies that created them — expect of us.

The Online Spam Campaign to Support Alberta Separatism ⇥ thetyee.ca

Charles Rusnell, the Tyee:

A network of 20 inauthentic YouTube accounts has racked up nearly 40 million views by peddling lies, grievance, division and narratives normalizing the prospect of Alberta’s secession and annexation by the United States.

“Because these channels offer no identifying information to real humans or organizations, nor ties to the secession movement in Alberta, we are flagging this phenomenon as a potential covert influence operation produced by unknown actors pursuing unclear objectives,” states a report released today by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network.

The authors of the report “cannot confirm this network’s origin or intent, and the available evidence is inconclusive on both counts”, but it is notable to me that the official X accounts of two of the most-viewed channels, the “Canadian Reporter” and “David Fraser”, say they are either based in or connected via the Netherlands App Store. This seems to me like the product of a VPN, but it is notable they did not even mask their origin and pretend to be in Canada.

This sucks. Our province is such a political catastrophe that we are being exploited from — probably — abroad and close to home. It is unclear to me how much of an effect the YouTube network identified by these researchers would have; many of the channels have video view counts of well under a hundred. And even though a few of these channels appear to be taking off, they are surely eclipsed by a home-grown industry of people who seem to pump out daily videos broadcasting their conspiracy theories and separatist fairytales. I easily found a bunch of separatism-promoting channels — “Fight for Canada”, “PJ the Belt”, “John Bolton”, and “Igor Ryltsev” — each with millions of total lifetime video views. They are loud and probably a minority, but they are probably more likely to tilt a referendum, and that is frightening.

Breaking Up Is Hard for E.U. ⇥ politico.eu

Mathieu Pollet and Anouk Schlung, Politico:

Sensing a change in the air, Big Tech firms have wasted no time rolling out offerings meant to soothe — and cash in on — Europe’s unease.

Over the past year, U.S. hyperscalers have rushed to build products with EU-based governance structures and local operators, while doubling down on technical and legal safeguards. “Our industry, frankly, is doing a lot to address [the concerns] insofar as possible,” said Guido Lobrano, the director general for Europe of tech lobby ITI.

But critics have been dismissing their attempts as “sovereignty washing.” “Marketers realized it sells. Trump was a great salesman for this idea,” said Philippe Latombe, a centrist member of the French parliament.

The red alert push for digital sovereignty is really only about a year-and-a-half old, at most, and it is remarkable what E.U. countries have been able to achieve in that time. Yet it is a fraught and challenging operation, regardless. These big U.S.-based companies are deeply embedded into everything we do and a clean break was never going to be possible, in large part because it is not designed to be easy. That is not to say it is deliberately designed to be difficult — despite the consumer-level evidence offered by Amazon’s Prime cancellation procedure — only that there are few incentives to help users leave.

Meta Tells U.S. Staff It Is Going to Start Surveilling Their Every Digital Move for A.I. Training ⇥ reuters.com

Katie Paul and Jeff Horwitz, Reuters:

Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and ​keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.

If this were happening at any other company, it would be an alarming violation of workers’ expectations. But since it is Meta, I am sure employees, even those who are captive, will be reassured by the pinky promise limited scope in using this information.

That Was Tim, This Is Ternus ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

Oh, and Cook will apparently be taking one very specific job with him to the boardroom, according to the press release:

Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to read between those lines. Cook is keeping one of the stickiest jobs he’s had to do the last decade for himself, for now: connecting with the representatives of various governments in ways that advantage Apple, whether that’s easing China’s worries about Apple’s focus on diversifying its supply chain, or convincing the Trump administration that Apple is investing in the U.S. while also needing tariff relief. Not only does Cook have the personal connections there, but it’s a messy business that perhaps Ternus is best insulated from — for now.

The Tim Cook story at Apple is an almost poetic arc. Upon arrival, he fundamentally overhauled the way its products would be made, primarily by moving manufacturing to Japan, Taiwan, and China. This groundwork is what allowed him to transform the company when he arrived as CEO, growing it into a global behemoth and working within China to create the best and most precise electronics manufacturing chain anywhere. And that became a problem for him. The Chinese government was able to use that as leverage, and the tie-up became politically untenable in the United States, too. Cook’s precise supply chain management directly led to his appeasement of strongmen.

Tim Cook Is Stepping Down as Apple CEO in September, to Be Replaced by John Ternus ⇥ apple.com

With today’s news, we can settle a score. In November, four reporters for the Financial Times wrote that Apple was “stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year”:

An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September, the people said.

Then, in his Bloomberg newsletter a week later, Mark Gurman reported:

[…] Based on everything I’ve learned in recent weeks, I don’t believe a departure by the middle of next year is likely. In fact, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in the time frame outlined by the FT. Some people have speculated that the story was a “test balloon” orchestrated by Apple or someone close to Cook to prepare Wall Street for a change, but that isn’t the case either. I believe the story was simply false.

There are correct elements in both stories: the Times accurately reported that Apple was “preparing for its longtime leader to step down as early as next year”, while Gurman was ultimately right to claim Cook would not leave by midyear. Gurman also had the scoop that John Ternus was the CEO-in-waiting. But, in spirit, I would argue the Times story was more correct than Gurman’s response, which continued:

Yes, Apple will eventually have a new leader. And, yes, it’s probably Ternus. But unless there is some unexpected event that forces Cook to step down sooner than planned, that moment is not at hand. […]

While “as soon as next year” gives the paper a lot of room — anything can happen “as soon as next year” — its sources correctly assessed Tim Cook’s time as CEO was ending. And, despite Gurman responding to the report as though it were “imminent” event, the word does not appear once in the Times’ story. The Times was not running a “test balloon” and the story certainly was not false.

Grievance Poisoning in the First Degree ⇥ hamiltonnolan.com

Hamilton Nolan:

Anyhow, today, Palantir has gone mildly viral by posting on Twitter, “Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief.” Followed by 22 bullet points that sum up the book’s arguments. At last, a version of the book that tech people can read! The instant reaction to this bullet point list among non-tech people was “Wow, this is some fascist shit.” Which is true. But I want to make an even more rudimentary point that is, I think, a very important piece of context: This is not a coherent set of arguments at all. It is not a philosophy. It is not a set of intelligible ethics. Rather, it is a list of angry reactions to being yelled at — given a somber voice and dressed up as some sort of wondrous work of intellect.

One of the “popular highlights”, sourced from Kindle users, on the book’s Amazon page is the phrase “[t]he result is a culture in which those responsible for making our most consequential decisions — in any number of public domains, including government, industry, and academia — are often unsure of what their own beliefs are, or more fundamentally if they have any firm or authentic beliefs at all”. But does Karp or, by extension, Palantir?

The Wild Geese Chase ⇥ garbageday.email

Last week, Wired published a pretty terrible piece from John Semley, which was given the headline “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop”. It is purportedly an investigation into the way a particular marketing company manages to make its musician clients popular, but what it actually becomes is a puff piece for that marketing company, albeit accidentally.

Ryan Broderick:

The blowback against WIRED’s report has been pretty immense. McLamb had to put out a statement on X, writing “It’s important to me to say that I do not consider Geese to be a ‘psy-op’ and [told WIRED] as much.” Music critic Anthony Fantano wrote on X, “One of the most stupid, irresponsible, and vapid headlines/pieces I’ve read from wired. Shame.” And journalist Max Read wrote on Bluesky, “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.” Which is exactly the problem here.

The seemingly sudden popularity of Geese in the past year-ish is not that surprising because it was not actually that meteoric. The band was playing festivals five years ago; the record it released last year, “Getting Killed”, was the band’s fourth. To call it a “psyop”, as Wired’s headline writer decided, is so inaccurate it is basically a lie.

Adobe Has Rid Itself of Its Allies ⇥ petapixel.com

Jaron Schneider, PetaPixel:

Thirteen years ago, I sat in an amphitheater in Los Angeles as Adobe announced that it would be shifting from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud. I remember being skeptical, but I was also willing to give Adobe the benefit of the doubt. After all, it created a beloved line of tools.

[…]

I was giving Adobe every benefit of the doubt, because I wanted to see this work. I think it’s important to recognize why I felt that way and what has changed in the last five years.

This follows the critical takes from Macworld and AppleInsider about Apple’s App Store policies as an industry voice pushing back on corporate behaviour. I have no idea if articles like these raise alarm bells for executives and decision-makers — but they should.

I have a quibble with Schneider’s article:

Adobe’s product is largely blameless. The product is, for the most part, not just good — it’s great. The promises Adobe made 13 years ago have been largely upheld from a product perspective. But it’s not enough to just make a good product, especially when you’re catering to artists.

I think Adobe has actually shipped worse products as a result of this strategy — and, for once, I will avoid making it all about bugs, of which there are many. Adobe’s applications are more capable than they ever have been, but they are also often worse for professionals in actual use as a direct result of the company’s software-as-a-service model. Nearly every application contains upsells or supposedly helpful alerts that are actually ads for other Adobe services. These promotions are particularly aggressive in pushing artificial intelligence tools. Even software as relatively simple as Acrobat cannot help but promote its ability to summarize a two-page document, and then suggest you store it with Adobe’s cloud service instead of sending it as an attachment.

This stuff gets in the way of professionals trying to do their job. Adobe was pressured into adding a “Quiet Mode” in Photoshop to hide most of these things, but not all of them, and only in Photoshop. It only underscores how much Adobe views its software as something it gives people permission to use, instead of tools it makes to help people get their work done.

AppleInsider Says Apple Sent It ‘Essentially the Same Email … 29 Times’ About App Store Scams in Ten Years ⇥ appleinsider.com

William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele, AppleInsider:

After we reported less than four days ago about the fraudulent apps, Apple got back to us. They repeated the same talking points that they always do when an app gets pulled after it steals money from users, or some other nefarious deed.

And, as always, it’s information surrounding the issues that we are not allowed to quote, and not allowed to say who said it to us.

We have always adhered to those terms, even when others have not, or others were allowed to quote and gave a named Apple PR source. We did do an email search on the verbatim quotes we got in the last few days, looking for repetition over the last 10 years at AppleInsider on what they said to us.

Essentially the same email was sent to us 29 times over the last decade. The emails used verbatim quotes 17 times over that timespan.

Whether App Store scams are “getting far, far worse and more prevalent”, as Gallagher and Wuerthele claim without evidence, is immaterial to whether apps like Freecash and a fraudulent version of Ledger Live should have gotten past what Apple claims are a “thorough review” of “the highest standards for privacy, security, and content”. These specific apps needed to be caught; Freecash was caught by Wired months before Apple decided to remove it.

Gallagher and Wuerthele make some good arguments in this piece. Yet it also comes across as an admission that AppleInsider has done its part in its professional relationship with Apple. Its writers ran anonymous quotes, paraphrased key information delivered on background, and favouring Apple’s view or delivering it uncritically. I am not saying AppleInsider is shilling for Apple, but I do think, as an Apple-specific news site, there is a mutually beneficial relationship it recognizes to some extent. They get comments from the company’s selective communications staff and previews of embargoed reports. Perhaps this is a coincidental stance. I am glad it is recognizing it has been receiving the same carefully worded statement for years, at least.

Launching Strava With a Hotel Keycard ⇥ youtube.com

Tom Babin, of the excellent Shifter channel on YouTube, shared a very clever trick of using Shortcuts with an NFC chip — perhaps using a hotel keycard you forgot to return — to launch Strava or Komoot. I am terrible at remembering to track typical rides like my commute so I set this up and tucked the card into my wallet. Perhaps that will help.

Meta Must Face Youth Addiction Lawsuit by Massachusetts, Court Rules ⇥ reuters.com

Nate Raymond, Reuters

Meta Platforms must face a lawsuit ​by Massachusetts’ attorney general alleging the company designed its Instagram social media platform to addict children, the state’s top court ruled on Friday.

[…]

Writing for the unanimous court, Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt said ​the lawsuit brought by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell does not seek to hold Meta liable for content created by its ​users — which Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 generally shields companies from — but targets the company’s conduct.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center:

In this case, as in many recent ones, the Court found that Section 230 does not prohibit claims alleging the companies designed their platforms harmfully and lied about their activities. Meta pushed its typical Section 230 test, claiming the law preempts any claim premised on Meta’s publishing activity. But the Court corrected Meta: Section 230 only applies to claims seeking to hold Meta liable for the harms springing directly from user-generated content they post. Meta’s design decisions, by contrast, are its own responsibility.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

This ignores a long list of precedents — and the explicit statements of Section 230’s authors — establishing that the law was designed to protect platforms from being sued over any editorial decision-making, including how content is presented. To put this in perspective, it’s like saying that someone could sue, say, the evening news based on where they placed a story (top of the show or bottom?) and that the impact of how it was presented is somehow unrelated to the content itself. That makes no sense. But it’s the way this court has interpreted 230.

Eric Goldman:

Even if this opinion doesn’t outright eliminate Section 230 in Massachusetts, it’s a sign of how 230 workarounds keep proliferating, contributing to the swiss cheese-ification of Section 230. When the bubbles in the swiss cheese become too large, the cheese wedge lacks structural integrity and falls apart. That is where 230 is heading, if it’s not already there.

Goldman is a lawyer and is worried about cases like these; the recent child safety cases in California and New Mexico also caused great concern.

To me, a non-lawyer, much of the actual text of the ruling (PDF) explaining why this lawsuit was not immediately turfed on Section 230 grounds seems pretty reasonable. For example, the judge says “[u]nder the default settings, Meta enables approximately forty types of notifications” for the Instagram app, which the government alleges “is designed to overwhelm young users and compel them repeatedly to reopen Instagram”. We can argue whether this is a meaningful thing for a government to police or if it is just another example of Meta resorting to tacky growth-hacking techniques instead of trusting their product is sufficiently compelling on its own. (Most days when I open Instagram in my browser, it puts a red badge over the notifications tab and suggests I have one new follower. I do not; I never have. It lies to me every time, presumably because it knows most people, including me, will usually click on that, thereby increasing a number on a dashboard somewhere.)

The government also raises issue with autoplay, infinite scrolling, live videos, and disappearing stories as potential vectors for harm. Whether this is true or false is immaterial to whether someone should have legal standing to make the argument in court. I, a non-lawyer, do not see why Section 230 should insulate companies from their product design choices simply because they occur on the internet. There is a tantalizing reference to Meta “deliberately manufacturing a delay between” a user refreshing their feed and new posts being displayed to, supposedly, heighten anticipation. Whether this is as described is something that can be scrutinized in court — but only if the government is allowed to make that case.

It entirely makes sense to me for a company like Meta to face no legal liability for the substance of a user’s post, like if an Instagram user baselessly accuses someone of a crime in a video they post. It is the person making that claim who should face legal consequences. But extending this legal moratorium to all facets of a platform containing user-generated material seems — as a non-lawyer with only a little bit of background knowledge — too far. I trust experts, but I am not following their logic that this would effectively repeal Section 230 and all the ways in which it has given birth to the modern web.

One thing is certain: given that many internet companies are headquartered in the United States, it is wild that a single ruling by a court in Massachusetts — a tiny state with a population of about seven million — could conceivably change the way the web works for just about everyone around the world.

Macworld: ‘Use Apple’s App Store at Your Own Risk’ ⇥ macworld.com

Reece Rogers, Wired, in January:

In the first month of 2026, Freecash has rocketed to popularity among US users. This week it reached the number two position on Apple’s free iOS download charts, nestled between ChatGPT and Gemini. The bump in downloads coincides with a spree of ads promoting the Freecash app.

[…]

While Freecash does actually pay out money to users, it’s not for scrolling social media. The app’s business model is centered around getting new users to play mobile games and then providing the players with monetary rewards. Those promises of direct payments to scroll aimlessly on TikTok sound too good to be true, because they are.

The app’s privacy policy also permits broad data collection as users install the ad-supported games it funnels them into.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, this week:

On Monday, after being contacted by TechCrunch for comment, Apple pulled Freecash from its App Store. As of Monday afternoon, the app was still listed in the Google Play store. (It has since been removed).

Oliver Knight, CoinDesk:

A fake version of Ledger Live distributed via Apple’s App Store has been linked to at least $9.5 million in crypto theft, with victims now coming forward describing devastating losses, including entire retirement funds wiped out “in an instant.”

One victim, posting on X under the handle @glove, said he lost 5.9 BTC – his entire savings accumulated over a decade – after downloading what he believed was the official Ledger app while setting up a new computer.

That is not “glove”; it is “G. Love”, of G. Love and Special Sauce fame.

David Price, Macworld:

There are two facts which unite these two apps. First, Apple allowed them on to the App Store when it absolutely should not have done. Second, when problems emerged, it let them stay there longer than it had any business doing. And these raise major concerns about the way the App Store is run, and the rationale behind Apple’s stewardship of the market for apps on its products.

Apple also left Grok and X on the App Store even after it was turned into a factory for abusive images. In a January letter to three U.S. Senators, Apple said xAI’s first attempt at fixing this problem was insufficient, and required it make more extensive changes or the apps would be removed from the App Store, according to David Ingram of NBC News. (I should stress that this article is hard paywalled, but the audio player at the top has an A.I. voice readout of its full text. My interpretation is based on that.)

Price calls the App Store “rotten” — is there any other word? — and says Apple should “give iPhone users the freedom to install from other places. Or just stop pretending the App Store monopoly is about anything other than revenue” if it cannot effectively police its wares. I imagine Apple would argue it enforces its rules all the time and sometimes things just get through.

But that kind of response only reveals the scale of the store and, consequently, the problem: nobody can effectively govern this many items, especially when they are all user-submitted. Walmart has a few hundred thousand individual products, while Costco has about four thousand and says most supermarkets have in the range of tens of thousands. The App Store is ungovernable at this size, and high-profile incidents like the ones above only reinforce that sentiment.

Live Nation Is an Illegal Monopoly, Jury Finds ⇥ bbc.com

Alanna Durkin Richer and Larry Neumeister, reporting for the Associated Press last month:

The Justice Department touted a tentative settlement of its antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation Entertainment on Monday as a victory for consumers that would end an illegal monopoly over live events in America, but over two dozen states planned to keep fighting the companies in court.

Noah Shachtman, writing for the New York Times:

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly Live Nation controls the live music business and how directly that control hurts fans. Let’s say you were one of the thousands of people who went to see Megan Thee Stallion’s most recent show in Charlotte, N.C. Some fees went to Ticketmaster, which Live Nation owns. Some of the purchase price went to the venue, then called the PNC Music Pavilion, which is operated by Live Nation. Some went to the tour’s promoter: Live Nation again. Another slice went to Megan and her team, which includes her managers, who work at a company co-owned by, you guessed it, Live Nation.

Competitors charge high fees, too, but Live Nation is different because of its vertical integration. The company “offers every service in the chain,” Judge Subramanian noted, “save — for now, perhaps — the job of the artists themselves.”

Archie Mitchell and Kali Hays, BBC News:

Live Nation, the entertainment giant which owns Ticketmaster, has been illegally operating as a monopoly and overcharging fans, a federal jury has found.

The verdict followed four days of deliberations in a seven-week trial in New York City that could have a major impact on the music industry.

The concert venue and music festival owner could be forced to divest parts of its business or even split from Ticketmaster, an outcome former Attorney General Merrick Garland called for when he filed the lawsuit in May 2024.

The U.S. Department of Justice debased itself with last month’s settlement, personally requested by the expert dealmaker himself, and this verdict seals how embarrassing it was. It was bananas that governments worldwide permitted the acquisition of Ticketmaster by Live Nation in the first place, let alone all the other parts of the entertainment and event industry controlled by this single company. Break it into little pieces.

WebXRay Audit Finds Opt-Out Tracking Requests Are Not Honoured ⇥ globalprivacyaudit.org

WebXRay is a tool built by a former Google privacy engineer to audit websites for specific violations that may be legally actionable. The company markets its product to litigators finding privacy violations for lawsuits, and to businesses trying to understand their own compliance.

A recent audit by the company of popular websites indicates most still track users even when they opt out:

More concerning is that Cookie Choice Banners certified by Google fail to prevent Google from setting cookies after users opt out with a globally standard signal.

[…]

The California AG has endorsed Global Privacy Control (GPC) as the mechanism for consumers to exercise this right at scale. Under regulation, businesses must honor it. In 2022, the AG fined Sephora $1.2M for ignoring GPC. In 2025, Disney paid $2.75M — the largest CCPA settlement ever.

Google, Meta, and Microsoft all provided statements to 404 Media disputing its findings.

This report is split into two parts: Global Privacy Control and cookie banners, and I will begin with the latter. What is at best an attempt to put privacy controls in users’ hands is a burden and, according to WebXRay, does not work in most cases. Three providers audited by the company, all certified by Google and anonymized in this report, still permitted tracking in 77–91% of cases when users declined tracking cookies.

The irritation of these banners was supposed to be solved by the Global Privacy Control, which is more-or-less a replacement for the Do Not Track spec with actual legal obligation. But GPC is not yet a browser-level preference in Chrome or Safari. Also, this audit found tracking cookies from Microsoft were set 50% of the time when the GPC opt-out signal was set, Meta cookies were set 69% of the time, and Google’s were set 86% of the time.

I assume the numbers are not either 100% or 0%, as I would expect for out-of-the-box code, because some website developers must have customized their implementation to be legally compliant. That should be unnecessary. If we are going to make users responsible for carefully managing their privacy — which should also be unnecessary, but one thing at a time — they should at least work properly.

A Hospitality Industry Without Hospitality ⇥ 404media.co

There was once a time when the hospitality industry was staffed by people who were at least nominally interested in the comfort and happiness of their guests. Yes, of course it was also about making money — like any job — but the reason someone would be a guest’s point of contact in a restaurant or hotel was because they were pretty good at service. That still exists, but they are now competing with people who hate everything about their guests except the money they bring.

Joseph Cox, of 404 Media, looked at a bunch of large language model platforms that help automate guest interactions for Airbnb owners:

Airbnb told 404 Media it does allow certain hosts to use tools that can reply on their behalf outside of a host’s typical hours, and 404 Media found several companies offering the tech, suggesting this host’s use of AI to talk to guests is not an outlier.

The first one Cox mentions is HostBuddy AI, and I do not think his brief overview does justice to this thing. Their minute-long promo video is nauseating. “Running short-term rentals should be rewarding, not exhausting,” the voiceover begins, “but guest messages never stop”. As someone who has been in the service industry, though not in a hotel, I have sympathy for the exhaustion that comes with answering constant requests. But guess what? That is the job. That is the whole point of this industry.

A charitable view of a tool like this one is to think about what role newer technologies could play in delivering good answers immediately to rote questions, so staff can spend their time on things that require more thought. (At 44 seconds in, the HostBuddy video has an extremely helpful chart illustrating the benefits of this.) But, as Cox writes, Airbnb hosts do not stand behind A.I. responses and reserve the right to override them. HostBuddy itself disclaims responsibility for its accuracy. Meanwhile, on its pricing page, HostBuddy says one of the features it offers is a custom tone and delay in messages, “to match your brand voice and operational workflow”. Neither of these things do a good job of using the benefits of a computer to help guests. Instead of sterile accuracy, a generative A.I. model synthesizes a maybe-correct answer; also, the only reason I can think of for delaying an A.I. response is to mask its origin. These features get in the way of what computers can do really well.

Also on its pricing page, HostBuddy says operator-users can “[r]estrict specific information based on reservation phases to ensure sensitive data like property addresses is only shared with appropriate guests”. A hotel does not need to hide its address. In that video, HostBuddy brags about being scalable for hosts “whether you manage one property or a thousand”, which kind of gets to the heart of the problem: Airbnb has professionalized hospitality for people who do not actually want to be in this business. Just as how Ticketmaster used to enable professional ticket scalpers, tools like HostBuddy and the multi-property management platforms Airbnb “partners” with reveal the lies these businesses are built on. Ticketmaster’s resale system was not helping you find tickets offered by fans who can no longer make the event; it was full of people exploiting demand. Airbnb is not full of couches and spare rooms; it is a series of individual hotel rooms hiding in a city’s regular housing stock.

Apple Removes Old iWork Apps for MacOS ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Apple has just made a change to its iWork lineup on the Mac, removing the old versions of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers from the App Store and leaving just the newer builds that support Apple Creator Studio.

If the alternative is displaying two versions of each app, I think this is the correct decision, but it feels spiteful that it is difficult to find older versions even if your system is incompatible with the most recent ones.

When I search “Pages” on my iMac running the latest supported version of MacOS, which is not the most recent, the results page only shows the newest iWork apps. The individual app page has a banner at the top reading “Requires macOS 15.6 or later”, but I do not know what this means. Is my iMac compatible? I cannot remember which MacOS version it is running. If I scroll to the app details, it sure looks like it is compatible. Apple says it “Works on this iMac” and, if I click on that, it repeats the information about requiring MacOS 15.6. Yet, if I click the download button, it gives me an error and says I need to update because it is running Ventura, which is MacOS 13. But will I remember that? No, I will not.

To find the version of Pages that actually does work on my iMac, I have to dig around in my purchases — which cannot be searched — and find “Pages 14.5”. It seems like Apple is doing something funny on the back-end because I also have the new Pages with the cloud download icon beside it, which I apparently bought in June 2017.

This is messy and silly. I know Apple officially stopped supporting this Mac long ago, but the least it could do is clearly show whether an app actually works on my iMac, and to prioritize search results that are actually compatible.

The Internet Archive Is Increasingly Restricted by Publishers ⇥ wired.com

Kate Knibbs, Wired:

A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.

This problem was so foreseeable that I foresaw it. It is just one of many ripple effects of artificial intelligence that affect all of us regardless of whether it changes our employment prospects, in ways large and small. I see way more CAPTCHAs and rate limiting now than I ever have, and I do not think that is coincidental. The web and its services are becoming less useful for most of us precisely because it is the only way comparatively powerless media organizations have any leverage over well-funded and amoral A.I. firms.

Photos from Artemis II ⇥ flickr.com

I wrote that last post while watching four people re-enter Earth from outer space, successfully splashing down in the right spot in the ocean at the forecasted time. It blows my mind that their view two hours prior had the Earth at great distance. Every flight I take will feel weak and silly after watching this.

This was a complex effort requiring international cooperation. The propulsion unit was made by Airbus, and one of the astronauts is Canadian. But the bulk of the effort is that of the United States and NASA. This is the world’s superpower at its best.

NASA has put a few hundred photos on Flickr with some awesome views — and I must emphasize how the word “awesome” undersells these images. I am using this one as the wallpaper on my iMac right now, and it feels like a pretty good use of a big, high-resolution display.

The Growing Push for Digital Sovereignty ⇥ thewalrus.ca

Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:

France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.

The government of Schleswig-Holstein, in Germany, migrated last year off Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, while the International Criminal Court announced it was switching to openDesk.

Vass Bednar, the Walrus:

Kimberly Prost probably thinks about it every day. The Canadian International Criminal Court judge has been sanctioned by the Donald Trump administration since August 2025 for authorizing investigations into alleged war crimes by American personnel in Afghanistan, as well as cases related to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Those sanctions mean that when Prost goes on vacation, she needs to phone hotels in advance to explain why she can’t pay for her stay with a credit card.

Prost is navigating a financial shadow ban because global commerce moves through an Americanized network. In 2025, Visa and Mastercard controlled 96 percent of Canada’s credit card market. We have a strong domestic debit system with Interac, but even that independence is eroding: Visa and Mastercard have partnered with Interac on co-badged cards, while many consumers pay with Apple-issued iPhones or use terminals run by American companies, such as Chase, Global Payments, Square, and Stripe.

Bednar references “Underground Empire” by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, a book about the coercive technical and bureaucratic power of the United States. I read it last year and I, too, recommend it. About a year before, I read “The Brussels Effect” by Anu Bradford, which covers the ripple effect of European Union regulations worldwide. I think reading both books is an interesting study in contrasts.

Kalyeena Makortoff, the Guardian, in February:

UK bank bosses will hold their first meeting to establish a national alternative to Visa and Mastercard, amid growing fears over Donald Trump’s ability to turn off US-owned payment systems.

The meeting, chaired by Barclays’ UK chief executive, Vim Maru, will take place this Thursday and bring together a group of City funders that will front the costs of a new payments company to keep the UK economy running if problems were to occur.

If these sovereignty efforts produce a domestic wall instead of greater international cooperation, it will be fairly disappointing. But it is not surprising that governments able to do so are looking at the power of the United States and recognizing how irresponsibly it is being used.

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Adobe Is Mucking With Users’ /etc/hosts Files ⇥ reddit.com

LordPan1492 on Reddit is, I think, the first person to have spotted this:

We notices since last week Friday that some devices has altered hosts files. Adobe still says that everything in the host file referring Adobe should be removed (to remove all license avoidance lines). But I know have 3 lines added to the hosts file, and I think if I’m starting to remove them, they will be re-added later.

## Adobe Creative Cloud WAM - Start ##

166.117.29.222 detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com

## Adobe Creative Cloud WAM - End ##

User thenickdude, in response, with more detail in a second post:

They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed, from on their website.

Michael Tsai is among many people who have found the same is true on their Macs. For whatever reason, my hosts file has not been mucked with by Adobe.

In his headline, Tsai says this is “for their analytics”, but I do not think that is right. I spent a little time digging into this today and, while I have nothing concrete, I expect this is for integrations between web apps and the company’s desktop apps. In Adobe Express — free web apps for a handful of common image and PDF editing tasks — there are at least two JavaScript files containing references to a ccdDetectUtil, presumably standing for “Creative Cloud Desktop detection utility”. If the user has the desktop apps installed, it appears to suggest the Express app, too, and I am guessing this also powers a thing where you can update a Creative Cloud desktop app by clicking a button on the web.

I could not get any of this stuff to trigger, even by manually adding the entry to my /etc/hosts file. Also, this is not a defence of Adobe. There should be no tolerance for this kind of meddling with system files. If Adobe wants to have these kinds of integrations, that is what a custom URL protocol is for.

Autonomous Car Companies Will Not Tell U.S. Senator How Often a Human Driver Intervenes ⇥ wired.com

Aarian Marshall, Wired:

All the companies that responded to the senator’s office say they use remote assistants — humans charged with responding to autonomous vehicles when they get confused, stuck, or in emergencies. The programs, experts say, are an important part of any autonomous vehicle company’s safety considerations, a backstop for a technology that’s becoming safer by the year but will continue to run into new situations on the road indefinitely.

In a report also released Tuesday, Senator Markey said the new details were not enough. “Every autonomous-vehicle company refused to disclose how often their AVs require assistance from [remote assistants]—hiding key information from the public about their AV’s true level of autonomy,” he wrote. “This information is critical for lawmakers, regulators, and the public to understand the potential safety risks with AVs.”

The report (PDF) is not comprehensive but it is worth reading, along with the responses sent (PDF) by each company. Of them, Tesla is the only one to say human assistants can directly drive an otherwise autonomous car at speeds of up to 16 kilometres per hour (10 miles per hour).

I am not sure what to make of wording across the letters, which feels carefully calibrated to avoid disrupting the marketing of these services while acknowledging the need for safety drivers. I do not think Tesla’s remote driving capability is inherently a bad idea because some incidents will need the skills of a real person. But, surely, someone sitting at a desk in an office park halfway across the country is not exactly the best person to be driving that car except for a precise situation which has been engineered so that a person sitting at a desk is, in fact, the only capable driver of that car. Like, I play Gran Turismo but I do not think I would do a very good job of getting a Tesla out of a ditch with a joystick or whatever.

Anyway, sure would be nice to know how often a person needs to intervene, but I bet none of these companies are going to willingly disclose that unless they all do. Nobody is going to move first.

Spotify Is Adding Controls to Turn Off Videos ⇥ digitalmusicnews.com

Ashley King, Digital Media News:

Spotify is introducing new video controls that enable users to turn off video content, including music videos or video podcasts, as well as Canvas looping visuals. The toggles will be available for both personal and Family Plan accounts.

“More than 70% of Spotify users say more video content would enhance their experience on Spotify, but not every listener wants the same experience,” Spotify said in a statement. “By putting control directly in users’ hands, it’s now easier to switch without friction.”

If Apple is looking for features to copy, this can be near the top of the list. Many albums have videos tucked at the end of the track list and it is a downright jarring experience when playback switches from audio, especially in the desktop app where a video player pops up out of nowhere.

The Speed of Writing Code Is Probably Not the Problem ⇥ andrewmurphy.io

Andrew Murphy:

The speed of writing code was never your problem. If you thought it was, the gap between that belief and reality is where all your actual problems live. The competitive advantage doesn’t go to the team that writes code fastest. It goes to the team that figured out what to build, built it, and got it into users’ hands while everyone else was still drowning in a review queue full of AI-generated PRs that nobody has the time or the energy to read.

Via Elizabeth Ayer:

The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.

There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.

All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because 👏 code 👏 creation 👏 is not 👏 the problem.

Nilay Patel, making a tangentially related point on Bluesky:

I keep saying “there are no great consumer AI products” and people keep replying to me with like model capability updates and wild OpenClaw setups and I really fear Software Brain is irreversible

The iPhone was a consumer product so great that enterprises were forced to adopt it! That’s the bar, not the other way around.

I completely agree with Murphy’s argument from a professional perspective. Though I write limited code these days, I want to understand it by developing it myself. The bottleneck there is a quality-based one. I need to know what I am building, and what bugs I have created so that I may create something better. I cannot get that through generated code because, as for anything automatic, I will stop being attentive.

But for personal projects, the bottleneck is absolutely a function of available time. Little side projects sit there until I have ample time to solve them. For example, MarsEdit has a lovely little bookmarklet that will start a new post containing the highlighted text. For years, I had been meaning to modify it to Markdown-encode any emphasized text and set links in my preferred reference style. My JavaScript skills being quite rusty, I knew that was going to require ample time that I did not want to spend. So last year, I threw it at ChatGPT, and it did an admirable job of updating it to my needs.

I am conflicted about this. I decided to avoid learning something and judge the output solely based on whether it works as expected. And, to Patel’s point, I felt like I was using a corporate tool for some hobbyist project, which is unpleasant. It has solved a point of friction in my workflow — not itself a bottleneck, per se, just something I found a little bit annoying.

Why Is the New York Times Laundering the Reputation of a Sleazy AI Startup? ⇥ futurism.com

Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurism:

On Thursday, the New York Times published a glowing profile of a company called Medvi. The basic premise of the piece is that a single guy named Matthew Gallagher had used AI to rapidly build a pharmaceutical enterprise that’s on track to do nearly $2 billion in sales this year, while hiring only a skeleton crew of humans to operate the vast AI-powered venture. According to the NYT, it’s a stunning achievement that heralds a new era of business; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who predicted the rise of this kind of company back in 2024, told the newspaper that he’d “like to meet the guy” behind the project.

“A $1.8 billion company with just two employees?” the NYT rhapsodized. “In the age of AI, it’s increasingly possible.”

The NYT’s tech coverage is generally pretty solid. But the framing of its story, and what it left out, left us pretty stunned. That’s because back in May of last year, we ran our own investigation of Medvi — and not only was what we found far more disturbing than the NYT’s credulous story let on, but the situation has gotten even worse since then.

The Times should be retracting this story. Instead, when I opened its app this morning, it was featuring the story in its “In Case You Missed It” section.

The Dizzying Contrast in the Past Week or So ⇥ theatlantic.com

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic:

There is something disorienting, horrible, and somehow fitting in the timing of all of this. That one man with the means to do it would threaten destruction of a part of our planet at the same moment its beauty and fragility are on full display. We are, in this tense moment, living with our own overview effect. Four are watching from afar. But the rest of us are watching too — left to reckon with our own place on the pale blue dot, reminded of all the ways we might die, and all the reasons for which to live.

The effect of toggling between news about Artemis II — which, yes, may not be as scientifically rigorous as one might hope, yet is undeniably a very cool event — and an objective threat of genocide has squeezed me to feel ways I did not know I could at the same time.

A.I. Responses Under the Influence of Marketers ⇥ theverge.com

Microsoft’s Defender Security Research Team:

Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters (MITRE ATLAS® AML.T0080, AML.T0051).

These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.

Microsoft redacted the names of websites currently using this technique but, with the information they provided, it was trivial for me to find a dozen examples — yet, somehow, not the one in the screenshot. I am not saying Microsoft was faking this, only that it is already common enough that this one example was drowned out by a bunch of others.

Rand Fishkin, SparkToro:

Google alone was responsible for 73.7% of all desktop searches across the 41 domains we analyzed in the US in Q4 2025 (as noted, the graph is not to scale or none of the other label names would be visible). That’s obviously huge, but it’s also far lower than how their market share is usually reported (e.g. Statcounter, whose methodology puts them at 90%+, or our prior, more limited analyses with similar numbers) and higher than what they tried to use in their antitrust defense (i.e. data from Evercore ISI, an “equities research firm”).

Perhaps more fascinating and unexpected are the other domains with more search activity than ChatGPT: Amazon, Bing, and YouTube. Three domains where search marketers historically have put limited effort compared to the onslaught of dollars flooding the “we need to rank in ChatGPT!” space.

Nevertheless, marketers are eager to manipulate it from the start.

Both of the above links are from a fabulous report by Mia Sato, of the Verge (gift link), who also wrote about ads in ChatGPT:

The ads were intrusive, the complaints went, and suspect, given that the example hot sauce ad appeared to be related to the preceding conversation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed artificial intelligence can take over human jobs, cure cancer, and surpass human intelligence — and instead, people complained, he gave users banner ads?

But it appears that what people were really upset about was that a bubble had burst, that the chatbot they used for relationship advice, career coaching, therapy, and homework suddenly seemed vulnerable to manipulation. Unlike the rest of the internet, ChatGPT conversations felt private, safe from the clutches of brands and marketers chasing conversions. The reality, of course, is that it’s been happening all along.

Now that normal search results are all junked up with mostly — but not always — accurate A.I.-generated summaries, and all the links to A.I.-generated nonsense, and the alternatives are the large language models that generate all this stuff in the first place, what does searching the web look like in a few years’ time? Does Google get a handle on this, or do we have to constantly answer CAPTCHAs to search properly? This is not a Google-only problem; alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Kagi are good — often very good, in fact — but DuckDuckGo’s results are also full of generated garbage, and both lack Google’s more extensive historical records.

OpenAI Bought a Livestream No One Watches ⇥ garbageday.email

OpenAI’s Fidji Simo:

I’m excited to share that we’ve acquired TBPN. This acquisition brings a team with strong editorial instincts, deep audience understanding, and a proven ability to convene influential voices across tech, business, and culture.

OpenAI and TBPN jointly promise to retain the show’s independence while OpenAI is, according to its press release, “excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team”.

Alex Valdes, CNet:

TBPN launched in October 2024 and has been compared to ESPN in how it covers tech — two guys at a big desk with news, analysis, commentary and banter about topics such as AI, crypto, startups and the defense industry. The show’s two hosts and co-founders, Jordi Hays and John Coogan, have had some of tech’s biggest names in studio — OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, to name some.

Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day:

Now, Technology Brother #1, Coogan, has written about their desire to remain niche. “If TBPN hits 10M subscribers, something has gone very wrong,” he wrote on LinkedIn last month. “From the very beginning we knew our core audience size: about 200,000 founders, executives, and position players in tech and finance. It may seem small but we were building for a very specialized audience.”

Call me delusional, but I cannot imagine many founders and executives have the ability to watch a three-hour daily livestream. I will not spoil it too much, but Broderick’s theory is pretty reasonable: OpenAI bought it for its nominal authenticity, however manufactured it is.

The New Yorker Profiles Sam Altman ⇥ newyorker.com

Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spent a year and a half investigating Sam Altman for the New Yorker and, in particular, the many people around him who say he lies habitually and cannot be trusted. This feels like it could be a personal attack but, in the hands of Farrow and Marantz, it is carefully adjudicated including through several on-the-record conversations with Altman. Unfortunately, like many people who have been accused of similar behaviour, Altman cannot seem to remember much when confronted with these accusations.

This reads at times like a petty drama of infighting, in large part because this is a horribly insular club of ultra-wealthy people who simultaneously treat the technology they are working to create as having all the power of nuclear weapons, yet with all the growth potential of a hot new social network. Everyone is nominally an intellectual engaged in thoughtful research. Yet it is difficult to take anyone seriously.

Farrow and Marantz:

[…] After [Ilya] Sutskever grew more distressed about A.I. safety, he compiled the memos about [Sam] Altman and [Greg] Brockman. They have since taken on a legendary status in Silicon Valley; in some circles, they are simply called the Ilya Memos. Meanwhile, [Dario] Amodei was continuing to assemble notes. These and the other documents related to him chart his shift from cautious idealism to alarm. His language is more heated than Sutskever’s, by turns incensed at Altman — “His words were almost certainly bullshit” — and wistful about what he says was a failure to correct OpenAI’s course.

Neither collection of documents contains a smoking gun. Rather, they recount an accumulation of alleged deceptions and manipulations, each of which might, in isolation, be greeted with a shrug: Altman purportedly offers the same job to two people, tells contradictory stories about who should appear on a live stream, dissembles about safety requirements. But Sutskever concluded that this kind of behavior “does not create an environment conducive to the creation of a safe AGI.” Amodei and Sutskever were never close friends, but they reached similar conclusions. Amodei wrote, “The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself.”

These guys are obsessed with artificial general intelligence in concept and seem to think of the world in those terms. Between that and the palling around they do with similarly rich and disconnected colleagues, I cannot imagine any of them can be trusted with developing these technologies in ways that are beneficial for the rest of us — even if they are being honest.

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Hello, World ⇥ defector.com

Barry Petchesky, Defector (gift link):

NASA shared another photo Wiseman took, a slice of Earth peeking in the Orion’s window. No human has seen the Earth look this small since 1972. Low-earth orbit, where every single crewed space mission since Apollo has operated, tops out at around 1,000 miles above Earth’s surface. The International Space Station orbits a mere 250 miles up. Orion is currently about 95,000 miles away.

It is a wonderful photograph.

Microsoft-Owned LinkedIn Allegedly Fingerprints Visitors and Scans Installed Chrome Extensions ⇥ browsergate.eu

There is an E.U. organization called Fairlinked that is a “trade association and advocacy group for commercial LinkedIn users”, and it recently released a report about serious privacy concerns with LinkedIn:

Microsoft Corporation’s LinkedIn is running a massive, global, and illegal spying operation on every computer that visits their website.

[…]

Because LinkedIn knows each visitor’s name, employer, and job title, every detected extension is matched to an identified individual. And because LinkedIn knows where each user works, these individual scans aggregate into detailed profiles of companies, institutions, and government agencies, revealing which software tools their employees use without the organization’s knowledge or consent.

Fairlinked raises two major points of contention: a script on LinkedIn allegedly fingerprints visitors and, if they use a Chromium-based browser, it also compares a known list of browser extensions against the extensions the visitors has installed.

When this was first documented in 2017 by Dan Andrews, LinkedIn was scanning for 38 extensions. One of which was Daxtra Magnet, which “references your recruitment database, such as Taleo, Bullhorn, Salesforce, Adapt, etc. and automatically checks it for a match to an online candidate profile that you are looking at”. Two weeks prior, Andrews writes, LinkedIn was scanning for 28 extensions. Then, when Mark Percival explored this behaviour in February 2026, LinkedIn was now identifying 2,953 extensions. It is now at over 6,200. Some of them are comparable to Daxtra Magnet in that they make use of LinkedIn data specifically, while others are completely irrelevant to the site, or recruiting or job hunting in general.

This is very obviously a severe privacy violation because it can and probably does tie back to named and identified individuals. The amount and type of information collected by this system is ripe for abuse. This is very bad.

However, this campaign is being waged by an industry group that has its own privacy problems. Fairlinked is promoting a lawsuit filed against LinkedIn by Teamfluence, which makes software that allows users to bypass LinkedIn’s daily connection request limits, build up their contacts database, and run automations based on who visits their company or individual profiles. In one example, Teamfluence says it can automatically retrieve the email and phone number of anyone who clicks “like” on a LinkedIn post; in another example, it allows companies to detect website visits from prospective clients’ offices. This product enables spam or, to put it nicely, unsolicited outreach at scale. And, yes, Teamfluence is distributed as a browser extension.

Fairlinked has no documentation of its member groups and barely any of its leadership. One of its board members is an “S. Morell”, and it just happens that Teamfluence was founded by someone named Steven Morell. Another board member is “J. Liebling” and, unsurprisingly, a Jan-Jakob Liebling is an executive at Teamfluence.

There, too, are a bunch of companies that have made their business on the back of LinkedIn data. This is not comparable to Teamfluence or Daxtra Magnet, but it is worth underscoring an entire industry that thrives on this data. LinkedIn has been on a tear trying to curtail it. Just last year, the company sued two companies — ProxyCurl and ProAPIs — to force them to stop scraping its site. This has been going on for years. A massive 2019 leak of “enrichment” data from People Data Labs at least partly originated from LinkedIn scraping. The same year, a U.S. court found it was legal for hiQ Labs to scrape LinkedIn, a decision that was reaffirmed in 2022 after a brief detour through the U.S. Supreme Court. However, LinkedIn was allowed to reinforce its terms of service and could restrict scraping.

Again, to be clear, mass scraping does not appear to be a practice Teamfluence is engaged in. In the E.U., LinkedIn is considered a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act and, so, must meet certain obligations of interoperability. That seems quite reasonable. However, the personal and identifiable data held by LinkedIn is basically a world of organizational charts masquerading as a bleak social network. Allowing for interoperability could also open the doors for greater exploitation of user data without adequate individual control. I wish none of this existed.

I am so glad I do not work in an industry where having a LinkedIn profile is basically an obligation.

Google Search Is More Useful if You Know Its Advanced Operators, to a Point ⇥ cardcatalogforlife.substack.com

Hana Lee Goldin:

The search bar you already have is more capable than that arrangement requires you to know. With the right syntax, it becomes a precision instrument: narrow by domain, by date, by file type, by exact phrase. We can pull up archived pages, surface open file directories, and even find what people said in forums instead of what brands want us to find. None of it requires a new tool or a paid account. The capability has been there the whole time.

Advanced search operations are something Google does better than any competitor. DuckDuckGo has its bangs and I like them very much, but Google has a vast catalogue able to be searched with such precision — to a point. If you use these advanced search operators, get ready to see a lot of CAPTCHAs. Google will slow you down and may even block you temporarily if you use it too well.

Upgrade Presents: The Origin of Apple ⇥ relay.fm

The newest episode of “Upgrade” is a wonderful retelling of a very particular history (also available as a video):

Jason and Myke tell the story of Apple’s origin. It emerged from the unique environment of the Santa Clara valley suburbs of the ’70s thanks to the particular genius of its two co-founders and some surprising help they got along the way.

Though I was familiar with much of this, I cannot think of many better people to tell it than Jason Snell. I have already seen one thinkpiece after another about what a fifty year-old — ish — Apple means in the grand scope, and there is definitely a place for that. Today’s Apple is a long way from this origin story, of course, but what a story it is.

This gives me an excuse to explain why I am fascinated by this one computer company. Though this story is great, that is not why, nor is it the history of successfully bringing the graphical user interface to the market, nor the ’90s–’00s turnaround. Those are all parts of it. But the main reason I am fascinated by Apple is that it has built such a distinct identity for itself. It has not always stuck to it but, if anything, I think that helps reinforce the existence of an Apple-y identity. Some might attribute that to a particular way of marketing itself which, while true, also emphasizes how important that identity is: when its messaging does not match the products, services, experience, or expected corporate behaviour, it is noticeable.

This is all a bit mythical, to be sure. The garage-era Steves probably would not imagine Apple celebrating its fiftieth birthday by being the second most valuable corporation in the world, nor would they think it would hire Paul McCartney for its employee party. To me, one of those things feels more Apple-y than the other. It feels right for the company to celebrate with a music legend; it probably does not need to be quite so rich or powerful to do that, though. Apple has long been a really, really big corporation, and that — in itself — does not feel very Apple-y to me. That, too, is fascinating.

Apple’s Supposed A.I. Strategy Shift Is the Company’s Normal Strategy

Mark Gurman, last week in Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. plans to open Siri to outside artificial intelligence assistants, a major move aimed at bolstering the iPhone as an AI platform.

The company is preparing to make the change as part of a Siri overhaul in its upcoming iOS 27 operating system update, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The assistant can already tap into ChatGPT through a partnership with OpenAI, but Apple will now allow competing services to do the same.

This is not unexpected. In the Apple Intelligence introduction at WWDC 2024, Craig Federighi said “we want you to be able to use these external models without having to jump between different tools”, and that they were “starting” with ChatGPT. Gurman points this out and also notes Federighi’s teased Google Gemini integration. Tim Cook, in an October 2025 earnings call, said much the same. (Gurman also notes that this integration is “separate from Apple’s work with Google to rebuild Siri using Gemini models”, but “the news initially weighed on shares of Google”, which I am sure is exactly the reason for them dropping 3.4% and nothing to do with an existing weeklong slide but, then again, I do not work at Bloomberg so who the hell am I to say?)

Gurman, in his “Power On” newsletter over the weekend, further explored what he calls Apple “doubl[ing] down” on a “revamped A.I. and Siri strategy”:

That reality is shaping the company’s new approach, set to be unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8. Rather than engaging in an AI arms race, Apple is focusing on its core strengths: selling highly profitable hardware and making money off the services that run on it.

Historically, Apple’s software — iMessage, Maps and Photos, for example — has been about driving product sales rather than generating revenue in their own right. Rivals, in contrast, are aggressively monetizing AI through subscriptions and premium apps. Apple understands that few, if any, users will pay for Siri or its other AI technology. The opportunity to turn Apple Intelligence into a moneymaker has effectively passed.

What would have been more newsworthy here is if Apple’s A.I. strategy were anything other than building software exclusively for its proprietary hardware. This does not sound like a “revamped” strategy; it sounds like Apple’s whole deal. If it can use Apple Intelligence or Siri in the future, it certainly might; it is putting ads in Apple Maps after all. Services is a money-printing machine with less risk. But it is still a hardware company.

This part made me double-take and wonder if I missed something. In February 2024, following Apple’s cancellation of its car project, Gurman predicted that hardware would continue to be Apple’s primary business “for now”, as though that will change in the near future. This has been constant since Apple Intelligence was announced at WWDC that year.

What one could argue has been a change of strategy is the rumoured development of a chatbot; Gurman called it a “strategic shift” when he broke the news. But that, too, is somewhat inaccurate in two ways: Gurman’s description of it is as an overhauled version of Siri that will let people do normal Siri stuff — setting timers, end of list — plus some of the features Apple announced in 2024 but has not yet shipped which, confusingly, were also first set to ship in an update to iOS 26 without the wholly new version of Siri but also depending on Gemini. Got it?

But even that is not much of a strategy shift. Gurman tweeted in May 2024 — before WWDC and the debut of Apple Intelligence — that “Apple isn’t building its own chatbot but knows the market wants it so it’s going elsewhere for it. It’s the same playbook as search.” So, again, it is just borrowing from its ages-old playbook. It will continue to have proprietary stuff that ostensibly works seamlessly across a user’s Apple-branded hardware, allow installation of third-party add-ons, and rely on Google for some core functionality. How, exactly, is this a “revamp”?

Anyway, here is what Gurman wrote in January after the Gemini announcement and before the first build of iOS 26.4 was released:

Today, Apple appears to be less than a month away from unveiling the results of this partnership. The company has been planning an announcement of the new Siri in the second half of February, when it will give demonstrations of the functionality.

Whether that takes the form of a major event or a smaller, tightly controlled briefing — perhaps at Apple’s New York media loft — remains unclear. Either way, Apple is just weeks away from finally delivering on the Siri promises made at its Worldwide Developers Conference back in June 2024. At long last, the assistant should be able to tap into personal data and on-screen content to fulfill tasks.

Apple today shipped the first build of iOS 26.5 to developers without any sign of those features. While they may come in a later build, Juli Clover, of MacRumors, speculates they have been kicked to iOS 27.

Does not seem like much has changed at all.

I Regret the Blood Pact I Have Made With iCloud Photos

Sometimes, I do not recognize a trap until I am already in it. Photos in iCloud is one such situation.

When Apple launched iCloud Photo Library in 2014, I was all-in. Not only is it where I store the photos I take on my iPhone, it is where I keep the ones from my digital cameras and my film scans, and everything from my old iPhoto and Aperture libraries. I have culled a bunch of bad photos and I try not to hoard, but it is more-or-less a catalogue of every photo I have taken since mid-2007. I like the idea of a centralized database of my photos, available on all my devices, that is functionally part of my backup strategy.1

But, also, it is large. When I started putting photos in there eleven years ago with a 200 GB plan, I failed to recognize it would become an albatross. iCloud Storage says it is now 1.5 TB and, between the amount of other stuff I have in iCloud and my Family Sharing usage, I have just 82 GB of available space. 2 TB seemed like such a large amount of space until I used 1.9 of it.

Apple’s next iCloud tier is a generous 6 TB, but it costs another $324 per year. I could buy a new 6 TB hard disk annually for that kind of money. While upgrading tiers is, by far, the easiest way to solve this problem, it only kicks that can down that road, the end of which currently has whatever two terabytes’ worth of cans looks like.

A better solution is to recognize I do not need instant access to all 95,000 photos in my library, but iCloud has no room for this kind of nuance. The iCloud syncing preference is either on or off for the entire library.

Unfortunately, trying to explain what goes wrong when you try to deviate from Apple’s model of how photo libraries ought to work will become a bit of a rant. And I will preface this by saying this is all using Photos running on MacOS Ventura, which is many years behind the most recent version of MacOS. It is not possible for me to use the latest version of Photos to make these changes because upgraded libraries cannot be opened by older versions of Photos. However, in my defense, I will also note that the version on Ventura is Photos 8.0 and these are the kinds of bugs and omissions inexcusable after that many revisions.

So: the next best thing is to create a separate Photos library — one that will remain unsynced with iCloud. Photos makes this pretty easy by launching while holding the Option (⌥) key. But how does one move images from one library to the other? Photos is a single-window application — you cannot even open different images in new windows, let alone run separate libraries in separate windows. This should be possible, but it is not.

As a workaround, Apple allows you to import images from one Photos library into another — but not if the source library is synced with iCloud. You therefore need to turn off iCloud sync before proceeding, at which point you may discover that iCloud is not as dependable as you might have expected.

I have “Download Originals to this Mac” enabled, which means that Photos should — should — retain a full copy of my library on my local disk. But when I unchecked the “iCloud Photos” box in Settings, I was greeted by a dialog box informing me that I would lose 817 low-resolution local copies, something which should not exist given my settings, though reassuring me that the originals were indeed safe in iCloud. There is no way to know which photos these are nor, therefore, any way to confirm they are actually stored at full resolution in iCloud. I tried all the usual troubleshooting steps. I repaired my library, then attempted to turn off iCloud Photos; now I had 850 low-resolution local copies. I tried a neat trick where you select all the pictures in your library and select “Play Slideshow”, at which point my Mac said it was downloading 733 original images, then I tried turning off iCloud Photos again and was told I would lose around 150 low-resolution copies.

You will note none of these numbers add or resolve correctly. That is, I have learned, pretty standard for Photos. Currently, it says I have 94,529 photos and 898 videos in the “Library” view, but if I select all the items in that view, it says there are a total of 95,433 items selected, which is not the same as 94,529 + 898. It is only a difference of six items but, also, it is an inexplicable difference of six.

At this point, I figured I would assume those 150 photos were probably in iCloud, sacrifice the low-resolution local copies, and prepare for importing into the second non-synced library I had created. So I did that, switched libraries, and selected my main library for import. You might think reading one Photos library from another stored on the same SSD would be pretty quick. Yes, there are over 95,000 items and they all have associated thumbnails, but it takes only a beat to load the library from scratch in Photos.

It took over thirty minutes.

After I patiently waited that out, I selected a batch of photos from a specific event and chose to import them into an album, so they stay categorized. Oh, that is right — just because you are importing across Photos libraries, that does not mean the structure will be retained. There is no way, as far as I can tell, to keep the same albums across libraries; you need to rebuild them.

After those finished importing, I pulled up my main library again to do the next event. You might expect it to retain some memory of the import source I had only just accessed. No — it took another thirty minutes to load. It does this every time I want to import media from my main library. It is not like that library is changing; it is no longer synced with iCloud, remember. It just treats every time it is opened as the first time.

And it was at this point I realized the importer did not display my library in an organized or logical fashion. I had expected it to be sorted old-to-new since that is how Photos says it is displayed, but I saw photos from many different years all jumbled together. It is almost in order, at times, but then I would notice sequential photos scattered all over.

My guess — and this is only a guess — is that it sub-orders by album, but does no further sorting after that. This is a problem for me given a quirk in my organizational structure. In addition to albums for different events, I have smart albums for each of my cameras and each of my iPhone’s individual lenses. But that still does not excuse the importer’s inability to sort old-to-new. The event I spotted early on and was able to import was basically a fluke. If I continued using this cross-library importing strategy, I would not be able to keep track of which photos I could remove from my main library.

There is another option, which is to export a selection of unmodified originals from my primary library to a folder on disk, and then switch libraries, and import them. This is an imperfect solution. Most obviously, it requires a healthy amount of spare disk space, enough to store the selected set of photos thrice, at least temporarily: once in the primary library, once in the folder, and once in the new library. It also means any adjustments made using the Photos app will be discarded — but, then again, importing directly from the library only copies the edited version of a photo without any of its history or adjustments preserved.

What I would not do, under any circumstance — and what I would strongly recommend anyone avoiding — is to use the Export Photos option. This will produce a bunch of lossy-compressed photos, and you do not want that.

Anyway, on my first attempt of trying the export-originals-then-import process, I exported the 20,528 oldest photos in my library to a folder. Then I switched to the archive library I had created, and imported that same folder. After it was complete, Photos said it had imported 17,848 items, a difference of nearly 3,000 photos. To answer your question: no, I have no idea why, or which ones, or what happened here.

This sucks. And it particularly sucks because most data is at least kind of important, but photos are really important, and I cannot trust this application to handle them.

There is this quote that has stuck with me for nearly twenty years, from Scott Forstall’s introduction to Time Machine (31:30) at WWDC 2006. Maybe it is the message itself or maybe it is the perfectly timed voice crack on the word “awful”, but this resonated with me:

When I look on my Mac, I find these pictures of my kids that, to me, are absolutely priceless. And in fact, I have thousands of these photos.

If I were to lose a single one of these photos, it would be awful. But if I were to lose all of these photos because my hard drive died, I’d be devastated. I never, ever want to lose these photos.

I have this library stored locally and backed up, or at least I though I did. I thought I could trust iCloud to be an extra layer of insurance. What I am now realizing is that iCloud may, in fact, be a liability. The simple fact is that I have no idea the state my photos library is currently in: which photos I have in full resolution locally, which ones are low-resolution with iCloud originals, and which ones have possibly been lost.

The kindest and least cynical interpretation of the state of iCloud Photos is that Apple does not care nearly enough about this “absolutely priceless” data. (A more cynical explanation is, of course, that services revenue has compromised Apple’s standards.) Many of these photos are, in fact, priceless to me, which is why I am questioning whether I want iCloud involved at all. I certainly have no reason to give Apple more money each month to keep wrecking my library.

I will need to dedicate real, significant time to minimizing my iCloud dependence. I will need to check and re-check everything I do as best I can, while recognizing the difficulty I will have in doing so with the limited information I have in my iCloud account. This is undeniably frustrating. I am glad I caught this, however, as I sure had not previously thought nearly as much as I should have about the integrity of my library. Now, I am correcting for it. I hope it is not too late.

  1. It is no longer the sole place I store my photos. I have everything stored locally, too, and that gets backed up with Backblaze. Or, at least, I think I have everything stored locally. ↥︎

Bill C–22 Gives Canadian Authorities Additional Warrantless Powers ⇥ ottawacitizen.com

Gabriel Hilty, Toronto Star:

Speaking alongside Chief Myron Demkiw on Thursday at Toronto police headquarters, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, will “create a legal framework for modernized, lawful access regime in Canada,” something that police forces have been requested “for decades.”

The bill is Prime Minister Mark Carney government’s second push to pass expanded police search powers into law. An earlier proposal on lawful access was met with widespread concerns over potential overreach.

Paula Tran, Ottawa Citizen:

“The bill effectively lowers the standard that police have to meet. Sure, law enforcement says they’re happy, but that means they need less evidence and need to do less work to get the information about subscribers, and I don’t think that’s that’s a good thing. It’s the lowest standard in Canadian criminal law,” [Michael] Geist said.

[…]

Bill C-22 also proposes new legislation that would compel telecommunication companies to store and retain client metadata, like device location, for a year and to make it available to law enforcement and CSIS with a warrant. The metadata can be used to track a person’s live location in case they pose a national security threat or are considered to be in danger.

OpenMedia is running a campaign to email Members of Parliament, though I am suspicious these form letter campaigns actually work. It is a bare minimum signal since it requires almost no commitment. My M.P. is usually opposed to anything proposed by this government, since he is in the official opposition, but his reaction to this bill’s much worse predecessor is that it contained “the most commonsensical security changes we need to make in Canada”. I expect I will be writing him and, when I do, I will be sure to adjust OpenMedia’s form letter. If you are writing to your M.P., I suggest you do the same if you can spare the time.

Wealthsimple Clears Regulatory Hurdle to Bring ‘Prediction Markets’ to Canada ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Meera Raman, Globe and Mail:

Wealthsimple is seeking to offer prediction trading in Canada, a controversial type of betting on real-world events that has surged in popularity in the past year, and has been largely banned in this country.

[…]

The approval for Ontario-based Wealthsimple permits it only to offer contracts tied to economic indicators, financial markets and climate trends, the company confirmed – not sports or elections, which are among the most popular uses of prediction markets in the United States.

Interactive Brokers launched here last April. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

A Different Perspective on the ‘Design Choices’ Social Media Company Verdicts ⇥ techdirt.com

Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, unsurprisingly opposes the verdicts earlier this week finding Meta and Google guilty of liability for how their products impact children’s safety. I think it is a perspective worth reading. Unlike the Wall Street Journal, Masnick respects your intelligence and brings actual substance. Still, I have some disagreements.

Masnick, on the “design choices” argument:

This distinction — between “design” and “content” — sounds reasonable for about three seconds. Then you realize it falls apart completely.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine Instagram, but every single post is a video of paint drying. Same infinite scroll. Same autoplay. Same algorithmic recommendations. Same notification systems. Is anyone addicted? Is anyone harmed? Is anyone suing?

Of course not. Because infinite scroll is not inherently harmful. Autoplay is not inherently harmful. Algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful. These features only matter because of the content they deliver. The “addictive design” does nothing without the underlying user-generated content that makes people want to keep scrolling.

This sounds like a reasonable retort until you think about it for three more seconds and realize that the lack of neutrality in the outcomes of these decisions is the entire point. Users post all kinds of stuff on social media platforms, and those posts can be delivered in all kinds of different ways, as Masnick also writes. They can be shown in reverse-chronological order in a lengthy scroll, or they can be shown one at a time like with Stories. The source of the posts someone sees might be limited to just accounts a user has opted into, or it can be broadened to any account from anyone in the world. Twitter used to have a public “firehose” feed.

But many of the biggest and most popular platforms have coalesced around a feed of material users did not ask for. This is not like television, where each show has been produced and vetted by human beings, and there are expectations for what is on at different times of the day. This is automated and users have virtually no control within the platforms themselves. If you do not like what Instagram is serving you on your main feed, your choice is to stop using Instagram entirely — even if you like and use other features.

Platforms know people will post objectionable and graphic material if they are given a text box or an upload button. We know it is “impossible” to moderate a platform well at scale. But we are supposed to believe they have basically no responsibility for what users post and what their systems surface in users’ feeds? Pick one.

Masnick, on the risks of legal accountability for smaller platforms:

And this is already happening. TikTok and Snap were also named as defendants in the California case. They both settled before trial — not because they necessarily thought they’d lose on the merits, but because the cost of fighting through a multi-week jury trial can be staggering. If companies the size of TikTok and Snap can’t stomach the expense, imagine what this means for mid-size platforms, small forums, or individual website operators.

I am going to need a citation that TikTok and Snap caved because they could not afford continuing to fight. It seems just as plausible they could see which way the winds were blowing, given what I have read so far in the evidence that has been released.

Masnick:

One of the key pieces of evidence the New Mexico attorney general used against Meta was the company’s 2023 decision to add end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger. The argument went like this: predators used Messenger to groom minors and exchange child sexual abuse material. By encrypting those messages, Meta made it harder for law enforcement to access evidence of those crimes. Therefore, the encryption was a design choice that enabled harm.

The state is now seeking court-mandated changes including “protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors.”

Yes, the end result of the New Mexico ruling might be that Meta is ordered to make everyone’s communications less secure. That should be terrifying to everyone. Even those cheering on the verdict.

This is undeniably a worrisome precedent. I will note Raúl Torrez, New Mexico’s Attorney General and the man who brought this case against Meta, says he wants to do so for minors only. The implementation of this is an obvious question, though one that mandated age-gating would admittedly make straightforward.

Meta cited low usage when it announced earlier this month that it would be turning off end-to-end encryption in Instagram. If it is a question of safety or liability, it is one Meta would probably find difficult to articulate given end-to-end encryption remains available and enabled by default in Messenger and WhatsApp. An executive raised concerns about the feature when it was being planned, drawing a distinction between it and WhatsApp because the latter “does not make it easy to make social connections, meaning making Messenger e2ee will be far, far worse”.

I think Masnick makes some good arguments in this piece and raises some good questions. It is very possible or even likely this all gets unwound when it is appealed. I, too, expect the ripple effects of these cases to create some chaos. But I do not think the correct response to a lack of corporate accountability — or, frankly, standards — is, in Masnick’s words, “actually funding mental health care for young people”. That is not to say mental health should not be funded, only that it is a red herring response. In the U.S., total spending on children’s mental health care rose by 50% between 2011 and 2017; it continued to rise through the pandemic, of course. Perhaps that is not enough. But, also, it is extraordinary to think that we should allow companies to do knowingly harmful things and expect everyone else to correct for the predictable outcomes.

Apple Discontinues the Mac Pro ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Chance Miller, of 9to5Mac, serving here as Apple’s official bad news launderer:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

Mark Gurman reported last year that it was “on the back burner”.

The Mac Pro was, realistically, killed off when the Apple Silicon era ended support for expandability and upgradability. The Mac Studio effectively takes its place, and is strategically similar to the “trash can” Mac Pro with all expandability offloaded to external peripherals. Unfortunate, but I think it was dishonest to keep selling this version of a “pro” Macintosh.

Meta Loses Two Landmark Cases Regarding Product Safety and Children’s Use; Google Loses One ⇥ latimes.com

Morgan Lee, Associated Press:

A New Mexico jury found Tuesday that social media conglomerate Meta is harmful to children’s mental health and in violation of state consumer protection law.

The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial. Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety. The jury determined Meta violated parts of the state’s Unfair Practices Act on accusations the company hid what it knew [about] the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and impacts on child mental health.

Meta communications jackass Andy Stone noted on X his company’s delight to be liable for “a fraction of what the State sought”. The company says it will appeal the verdict.

Stephen Morris and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times:

Meta and Google were found liable in a landmark legal case that social media platforms are designed to be addictive to children, opening up the tech giants to penalties in thousands of similar claims filed around the US.

A jury in the Los Angeles trial on Wednesday returned a verdict after nine days of deliberation, finding Meta’s platforms such as Instagram and Google’s YouTube were harmful to children and teenagers and that the companies failed to warn users of the dangers.

Dara Kerr, the Guardian:

To come to its liability decision, the jury was asked whether the companies’ negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to KGM [the plaintiff] and if the tech firms knew the design of their products was dangerous. The 12-person panel of jurors returned a 10-2 split answering in favor of the plaintiff on every single question.

Meta says it will also appeal this verdict.

Sonja Sharp, Los Angeles Times:

Collectively, the suits seek to prove that harm flowed not from user content but from the design and operation of the platforms themselves.

That’s a critical legal distinction, experts say. Social media companies have so far been protected by a powerful 1996 law called Section 230, which has shielded the apps from responsibility for what happens to children who use it.

For its part, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is standing up for beleaguered social media companies in an editorial today criticizing everything about these verdicts, including this specific means of liability, which it calls a “dodge” around Section 230.

But it is not. The principles described by Section 230 are a good foundation for the internet. This law, while U.S.-centric, has enabled the web around the world to flourish. Making companies legally liable for the things users post will not fix the mess we are in, but it would cause great damage if enacted.

Product design, though, is a different question. It would be a mistake, I think, to read Section 230 as a blanket allowance for any way platforms wish to use or display users’ posts. (Update: In part, that is because it is a free speech question.) From my entirely layman perspective, it has never struck me as entirely reasonable that the recommendations systems of these platforms should have no duty or expectation of care.

The Journal’s editorial board largely exists to produce rage bait and defend the interests of the powerful, so I am loath to give it too much attention, but I thought this paragraph was pretty rich:

Trial lawyers and juries may figure that Big Tech companies can afford to pay, but extorting companies is certain to have downstream consequences. Meta and Google are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence this year, which could have positive social impacts such as accelerating treatments for cancer.

Do not sue tech companies because they could be finding cancer treatments — why should I take this editorial board seriously if its members are writing jokes like these? They think you are stupid.

As for the two cases, I am curious about how these conclusions actually play out. I imagine other people who feel their lives have been eroded by the specific way these platforms are designed will be able to test their claims in court, too, and that it will be complicated by the inevitably lengthy appeals and relitigation process.

I am admittedly a little irritated by both decisions being reached by jury instead of a judge; I would have preferred to see reasoning instead of overwhelming agreement among random people. However, it sends a strong signal to big social media platforms that people saw and heard evidence about how these products are designed, and they agreed it was damaging. This is true of all users, not just children. Meta tunes its feeds (PDF) for maximizing engagement across the board, and it surely is not the only one. There are a staggering number of partially redacted exhibits released today to go through, if one is so inclined.

If these big social platforms are listening, the signals are out there: people may be spending a lot of time with these products, but that is not a good proxy for their enjoyment or satisfaction. Research indicates a moderate amount of use is correlated with neutral or even positive outcomes among children, yet there are too many incentives in these apps to push past self-control mechanisms. These products should be designed differently.

Meta Laid Off Several Hundred People Today ⇥ cnbc.com

Ashley Capoot and Jonathan Vanian, CNBC:

Meta is laying off several hundred employees on Wednesday, CNBC confirmed.

The cuts are happening across several different organizations within the company, including Facebook, global operations, recruiting, sales and its virtual reality division Reality Labs, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named because they are confidential.

Some impacted employees are being offered new roles within the company, the person said. In some cases, those new positions will require relocation.

“Several hundred” employees is a long way off from the numbers reported earlier this month. Perhaps Reuters got it all wrong but, more worryingly for employees, perhaps those figures were correct and this is only the beginning.

Talking Liquid Glass With Apple ⇥ captainswiftui.substack.com

Danny Bolella attended one of Apple’s “Let’s Talk Liquid Glass” workshops:

Let’s address the elephant in the room. If you read the comments on my articles or browse the iOS subreddits, there is a vocal contingent of developers betting that Apple is going to roll back Liquid Glass.

The rationale usually points to the initial community backlash, the slower adoption rate of iOS 26, and the news that Alan Dye left Apple for Meta. The prevailing theory has been: “Just wait it out. They’ll revert to flat design.”

I shared this exact sentiment with the Apple team.

Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding onto this position. They made it emphatically clear that Liquid Glass is absolutely moving forward, evolving, and expanding across the ecosystem.

Unsurprising. Though I expect a number of people reading this will be disappointed, I cannot imagine a world in which Apple would either revert to its previous design language or whip together something new. It is going to ride Liquid Glass and evolve it for a long time; if history is a good rule of thumb, assume ten years.

In theory, this is a good thing. Even on MacOS, I can find things I prefer to its predecessor, though admittedly they are few and far between. This visual design feels much more at home on iOS. The things that cause me far more frustration on a daily basis are the unrelenting bugs across Apple’s ecosystem, like how I just finished listening to an album with my headphones and then, when I clicked “play” on a new album, Music on MacOS decided it should AirPlay to my television instead of continuing through my headphones. That kind of stuff.

Regardless of whatever one thinks the visual qualities of Liquid Glass, the software quality problem is notable there, too. We are now on the OS 26.4 set of releases and I am still running into plenty of instances with bizarre and distracting compositing problems. On my iPhone, the gradients that are supposed to help with legibility in the status bar and toolbar appear, disappear, and change colour with seemingly little relevance to what is underneath them. Notification Centre remains illegible until it is fully pulled down. Plus, I still see the kinds of graphics bugs and Auto Layout problems I have seen for a decade.

I hope to see a more fully considered version of the Liquid Glass design language at WWDC this year, and not merely from a visual perspective. This user interface is software, just like dedicated applications, and it is chockablock full of bugs.

Bolella, emphasis mine:

I plan to share an article soon where I break down the exact physics, z-axis rules, and “Barbell Layouts” of this hierarchy. But the high-level takeaway from the NYC labs is crystal clear: maximize your content, push your controls to the poles, and never let the interface compete with the information.

If you say so, Apple.

OpenAI to Discontinue Sora App, Video Platform ⇥ wsj.com

Berber Jin, Wall Street Journal:

CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.

OpenAI is not shutting this down because it has ethical qualms with what it has created, despite good reasons to do just that. It is because it is expensive without any clear reason for it to exist other than because OpenAI wants to be everywhere.

If you are desperate for a completely synthetic social media feed, Meta’s Vibes is apparently still around. Users are readily abusing it, of course, because that is what happens if you give people a text input box.

Update: In a tweet, OpenAI has confirmed it is shutting down Sora. But, while it originally announced “We’re saying goodbye to Sora”, it changed that about an hour later to read “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app“, emphasis mine. The Journal has not changed its report to retract claims about shutting down the platform altogether, though, while OpenAI continues to promote Sora API pricing.

Ads Are Coming to Apple Maps Later This Year ⇥ apple.com

Apple, in a press release with the title “Introducing Apple Business — a new all‑in‑one platform for businesses of all sizes”, buried in a section tucked in the middle labelled “Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps”, both of which are so anodyne as to encourage missing this key bit of news:

Every day, users choose Apple Maps to discover and explore places and businesses around them. Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

The way they are “clearly marked” is with a light blue background and a small “Ad” badge, though it is worth noting Apple has been testing an even less obvious demarcation for App Store ads. In the case of the App Store, I have found the advertising blitz junks up search results more than it helps me find things I am interested in.

This is surely not something users are asking for. I would settle for a more reliable search engine, one that prioritizes results immediately near me instead of finding places in cities often hundreds of kilometres away. There are no details yet on what targeting advertisers will be allowed to use, but it will be extremely frustrating if the only reason I begin seeing more immediately relevant results is because a local business had to pay for the spot.

Update: I have this one little nagging thought I cannot shake. Maps has been an imperfect — to be kind — app for nearly fifteen years, but it was ultimately a self-evident piece of good software, at least in theory. It was a directory of points-of-interest, and a means of getting directions. With this announcement, it becomes a container for advertising. Its primary function feels corrupted, at least a little bit, because what users care about is now subservient to the interests of the businesses paying Apple.

Someone Has Publicly Leaked an Exploit Kit That Can Hack Millions of iPhones ⇥ techcrunch.com

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:

Last week, cybersecurity researchers uncovered a hacking campaign targeting iPhone users that used an advanced hacking tool called DarkSword. Now someone has leaked a newer version of DarkSword and published it on the code-sharing site GitHub.

Researchers are warning that this will allow any hacker to easily use the tools to target iPhone users running older versions of Apple’s operating systems who have not yet updated to its latest iOS 26 software. This likely affects hundreds of millions of actively used iPhones and iPads, according to Apple’s own data on out-of-date devices.

This is an entirely different exploit chain to the “Coruna” one which also surfaced earlier this month — so now there are two massive security exploits just floating around in the wild affecting a large number of iPhones. Apple is apparently concerned enough about these vulnerabilities that it is issuing patches as far back as iOS 15 though, disappointingly, only for devices that do not support newer major versions. If you have a device that can run iOS 26, you will be safer if it is running iOS 26.

It is, I should say, pretty brazen for the developers of this exploit chain to call the JavaScript file “rce_loader.js”. RCE stands for remote code execution. It is basically like calling the file “hacking_happens_here.js”.

In a ‘Test’, Google Is Automatically Rewriting News Headlines in Its Search Results ⇥ searchengineland.com

Sean Hollister, the Verge:

Since roughly the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been the bedrock of the web. People loved Google’s trustworthy “10 blue links” search experience and its unspoken promise: The website you click is the website you get.

Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

As I noted when I linked to Hollister’s article about Discover back in December, this is not new in search results; it has been happening for years.

Danny Goodwin, Search Engine Land:

Dig deeper. Google changed 76% of title tags in Q1 2025 – Here’s what that means […]

According to the Google Search Central section on title links, originally published in 2021:

I am not arguing this is good or normal — the examples Hollister shows are extremely poor reflections of the articles in question — but I do not understand why it is only gaining traction now, nor how it meaningfully differs from what Google has been doing all along. It is indeed frustrating.

Many of the results you see in Google Search misrepresent the source material and are misleading. But that has been true for a while — which is a problem unto itself. People should not trust the results they see as represented by Google Search. The visual tone Google has maintained, however, is that it is a neutral directory. The summaries in A.I. Overview are delivered with an unearned dry authority, and the ten links below it are there because of a tense truce between Google’s goals and those of search optimization professionals.

Also, I had no idea that Search Engine Land had been acquired at some point by Semrush which, in turn, was bought by Adobe.

Lobbying Firms Funded by Apple and Meta Are Duelling on Age Verification ⇥ bloomberg.com

Emily Birnbaum, writing for Bloomberg in July:

Meta is also helping to fund the Digital Childhood Alliance, a coalition of conservative groups leading efforts to pass app-store age verification, according to three people familiar with the funding.

The App Store Accountability Act is based on model legislation written by the Digital Childhood Alliance. The lobbying group also publishes marketing pieces, including one (PDF) that calls Apple’s age verification frameworks “ineffective”. Specifically, it points to the lack of parental consent required “for kids to enter into complex contracts”, with “no way to verify that parental consent has been obtained”.

Meta, for its part, requires users to self-report their birthday and click a button that says “I agree” to create an Instagram account. In fairness, the title of that page says “read and agree to our terms” and, on the terms page, Meta does say you need to be 13 years old. This is pretty standard stuff but, if Meta actually cared about this, it could voluntarily implement the stricter controls at sign-up without a legislative incentive.

Though this article was published last year, I am linking to it now because something called the TBOTE Project recently resurfaced these findings and added some of its own in an open source investigation. Unlike similar investigations from sources like Bellingcat, it does not appear that the person or people behind TBOTE have editors or fact-checkers to verify their interpretation of this information. That does not mean it is useless; it is simply worth exercising some caution. Regardless, their findings show a massive amount of lobbyist spending on Meta’s part to try and get these laws passed.

Birnbaum continues:

The App Association, a group backed by Apple, has been running ads in Texas, Alabama, Louisiana and Ohio arguing that the app store age verification bills are backed by porn websites and companies. The adult entertainment industry’s main lobby said it is not pushing for the bills; pornography is mostly banned from app stores.

This is obviously bad faith, but also flawed in the opposite direction: the porn industry wants device-level verification.

Tech CEOs and Investors Are Just Saying Stuff ⇥ businessinsider.com

Jacob Silverman, Business Insider:

The growing bloat of popular tech rhetoric could serve as evidence for how the tech industry, having conquered so much of daily life, work, and entertainment, has begun to exhaust its imaginative capacities. Industry leaders promised that the mammoth capital for AI outlay would lead to the creation of a smarter-than-human intelligence that would serve as a universal solvent, fixing climate change, poverty, and even the problem of death itself. But that horizon — which we are supposed to reach by pumping out more fossil-fuel emissions and destabilizing labor and education — remains impossibly far away.

Gallup’s polling on views of different business sectors has, frustratingly, no ability to permalink to a particular industry and its historical rankings; so, you will need to go down to “Industry and Business Sector Ratings, B Through E” and then click the pagination arrow to get to “Computer Industry” on the second page. Once there, you will find what seem at first glance to be some remarkably stable figures.

Look a little closer, though, and the numbers tell a different story. Summing the “very” and “somewhat” figures for each type of response shows a marked decline in positive reception since a high in 2017, and a steady climb in negative reception. There are lots of reasons for this; many of them I have written about. But I do not think these loudmouth executives are doing the industry any favours by bullshitting their way through interviews and promising nonsense.

That is the data-driven answer. These guys also just sound really stupid when they say stuff like “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human” or “the long-term vision is to […] create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion” or “I bought Twitter […] to try to help humanity, whom I love”. I know I am writing this on a website called Pixel Envy and I am, well, me, but these barons sound comical and dorky.

Adobe Pays Early Termination Fee, or ‘Settlement’, in U.S. Lawsuit Over Hidden Fees ⇥ pcmag.com

When the United States Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice jointly filed a lawsuit in 2024 against Adobe, I commented on the similarities between that complaint and the one against Amazon. Both are about the ease of entering into subscriptions that are later difficult or expensive to leave, both had alleged personal liability by executives — and, now, both have been settled out of court.

Michael Kan, PC Magazine:

Adobe has settled a 2024 lawsuit from the US government that alleged the company used hidden fees to trap users into paying for subscriptions.

On Friday, Adobe “finalized” an agreement with the Justice Department, which accused the software vendor of failing to inform new customers about payment terms or early termination fees. “While we disagree with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter,” Adobe says.

I am sure Adobe has learned its lesson. Let us go and check its work. In its statement, Adobe says it has “made [its] sign-up and cancellation processes even more streamlined and transparent”. Here is how it describes its annual pricing, billed monthly, on its U.S. website:

Fee applies of half your remaining annual commitment if you cancel after Mar 31.

This is not the most direct sentence, but it is an accurate explanation of how much the fee will be, and when that fee takes effect — fourteen days from when I am writing this. It is followed by a little “i” informational icon. Clicking on it will display a callout noting when service will be cut off. For comparison, here is the equivalent disclaimer on its Canadian site:

Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days.

Here, too, there is a little informational icon. When you hover over it, Adobe says the same thing about cancellation, and adds that cancelling will incur an early termination fee. It is the same on the U.K. site.

What is the answer here? Does each country need to sue Adobe for its billing flow to disclose a reasonable amount of information?

Meta Realizes Horizon Worlds on Quest Never Had Legs, Will Shut It Down in June ⇥ communityforums.atmeta.com

A few weeks ago, Meta published an update from Samantha Ryan, of Reality Labs, announced a “renewed focus” and a “doubling down” on virtual reality. It planned to achieve this by “almost exclusively” betting its future on the smartphone Horizon Worlds app.

In an announcement today, Meta shifted its definition of “almost exclusively” to simply “exclusively”:

Earlier this year, we shared an update on our renewed focus for VR and Horizon. We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience. This separation will extend across our ecosystem, including our mobile app. To support this vision, we are making the following changes to streamline your Quest experience throughout 2026.

This opening paragraph is opaque and, though the announcement goes on to explain exactly what is happening, it is not nearly as clear as the email sent to Horizon Worlds users. I really think Meta is looking to exit from its pure V.R. efforts, especially with the sales success of the perv glasses.

As I write this, the Horizon app for iOS is the sixty-ninth most popular free game in the Canadian App Store, just behind Wordscapes and ahead of Perfect Makeover Cleaning ASMR. Nice?

A Roadmap for Currency Symbol Implementation ⇥ blog.unicode.org

The Unicode Consortium would like to remind you to work closely with them if you are introducing a new symbol for your currency:

Such public usage leads to a need for the symbol to be encoded in the Unicode Standard and supported in commercial software and services. Standardization of a new character and subsequent support by vendors takes time: typically, at least one year, and often longer. All too often, however, monetary authorities announce creation of a new currency symbol anticipating immediate public adoption, then later discover there will be an unavoidable delay before the new symbol is widely supported in products and services.

I had no idea so many currency symbols had been introduced recently. Then again, before I read this, I had not given much thought to the one we use: $.

Hephzibah Anderson, for the BBC, in 2019:

The most widely accepted theory does in fact involve Spanish coinage, and it goes like this: in the colonies, trade between Spanish Americans and English Americans was lively, and the peso, or peso de ocho reales, was legal tender in the US until 1857. It was often shortened, so historians tell us, to the initial ‘P’ with an ‘S’ hovering beside it in superscript. Gradually, thanks to the scrawl of time-pressed merchants and scribes, that ‘P’ merged with the ‘S’ and lost its curve, leaving the vertical stroke like a stake down the centre of the ‘S’. A Spanish dollar was more or less worth an American dollar, so it’s easy to see how the sign might have transferred.

Not only the explanation for why all the world’s dollars have the same symbol, but also why we share it with the peso.

A Friendly Wager on the Future of Repairability and Performance ⇥ dithering.passport.online

On a recent episode of “Dithering”, Ben Thompson and John Gruber discuss the Tech Re-Nu teardown of the MacBook Neo and what it reveals about the supposed trade-offs of repairability. Thompson says at about 5:48 into the paywalled episode:

The MacBook Neo is a perfect counterpoint to the iFixit perspective. It’s like: you can get repairability, but what it’s going to cost you is a less capable computer with lower battery life.

And that’s fine. We’re at the stage where these iPhone chips are so good — it’s still a very good computer. But it’s quite handy to have the MacBook Air next to the MacBook Neo. They weigh the same. One has much more performance than the other, and that’s the price.

To summarize: “the price”, it is implied, is that the MacBook Air must be less repairable for it to have good battery life and better performance.

I am less certain. You can complain as I did about the adhesive-attached batteries and unrepairable keyboards in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but the most recent updates are effectively speed increases with few other changes. If Apple would like to bring the same repairability advantages of the Neo to the Air and the Pro, it would do so when it redesigns those computers.1 And I think Apple could bring at least some of those repairability improvements — battery or keyboard, perhaps? — to those products in the next major hardware revision.

Call this a friendly wager which I will only be making in internet points. Also, this might be wishcasting — but I think this is the way the winds are blowing. My impression of Apple’s approach to repairability is that it was not a high priority for a long time — particularly for products nearer the beginning of their development cycle — and that it argued for trade-offs that were ultimately irrelevant. That is not only Apple’s approach; there are plenty of companies with poor track records on this stuff. But a patchwork of right-to-repair legislation around the world is helping make devices easier to fix. Also, if assembly costs are indeed reduced by using screws instead of glue — something I am skeptical of but which Thompson and Gruber posit — surely Apple would want to do the same in other products.

  1. I am giving myself a little exit ramp in this footnote for the MacBook Ultra, or whatever Apple ends up calling the rumoured touch laptop. I assume that thing will be full of glue. ↥︎

Trump Administration to Receive $10 Billion Kickback for TikTok Deal ⇥ wsj.com

Miriam Gottfried and Amrith Ramkumar, Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration is set to receive a roughly $10 billion fee from investors in the recently completed deal to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business, delivering it a windfall for keeping the popular social-media app alive in America.

The payment is part of the agreement through which investors friendly with the administration gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from Chinese parent ByteDance, people familiar with the matter said. It comes in addition to the investments made to create a new entity to run the app in the U.S.

Over five years ago, during the first Trump administration, he floated the possibility of getting “key money” for the U.S. Treasury, something he later bemoaned was apparently illegal. So much for that, where by that I mean respect for the law. This is a 70% commission rate to be given to — well, exactly where it will be booked seems like a mystery because it is not like there is a U.S. Department of Bribery.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian […]

“View from nowhere” journalism means these reporters from the Journal cannot call this naked corruption what it is, nor can they quote someone stating it. They can only gesture toward the obvious while writing the straightest of articles about the wackiest events. Things are going well.

Transport Canada’s Vehicle Headlights Survey ⇥ tc.canada.ca

Transport Canada is running a survey about the brightness of car headlights:

While new headlight technology in vehicles can help drivers see better, they can also cause problems for other road users. Transport Canada wants to learn how headlight glare affects road users and what vehicle or lighting features may influence how people experience it at night.

If you live in Canada and have been momentarily blinded by over-bright and poorly aimed headlights, it is worth taking this brief survey to share your thoughts.

Reuters: Meta Is Planning to Wreck the Lives of 20% of Its Staff Because It Is Spending So Much on Data Centres ⇥ reuters.com

Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman, Reuters:

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs ​that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said.

I do not know what is the right number of staff to run Meta’s operations but, whatever it is, there has to be a better way of figuring it out than by luring tens of thousands of people to work for you with promises of a huge salary and benefits, then upending their lives some time later. They have rent or a mortgage; they might have a family depending on their income; their ability to remain in a country may depend on their having a job. Perhaps it could be beneficial for staff to bargain with their company in a more collective manner.

BuzzFeed’s A.I. Pivot Might End in Bankruptcy ⇥ futurism.com

I know — weird that there is news about Digg and BuzzFeed on the same day in 2026. Anyway.

Victor Tangermann, Futurism:

Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

Just a few months after BuzzFeed announced it was pivoting to A.I. to generate more personalized quizzes, it closed its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division.

Not to worry, though, because it launched a new company called Branch Office, which has an on-trend for last year website, some vague apps, and a name that shares an abbreviation with “body odour”. The announcement comes with a killer quote from BuzzFeed’s CEO:

“We’re accelerating into an era of infinite fake news, slop, personalization bubbles, and cuts at the organizations that actually care about content,” said Jonah Peretti. “We need a solution. Branch Office is that solution.”

An era of “slop”? “Cuts at the organizations that actually care”? Listen to yourself, Peretti.

Digg Reboot Needs to ‘Reset’, Lays Off a ‘Significant’ Amount of Staff ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing site — is laying off a sizable portion of its staff, the company announced on Friday. The startup is not closing, however, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said. Instead, Rose will return to work on Digg full-time as the company tries to find its footing.

Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investing firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his primary focus from here on out.

When this “reboot” was announced about a year ago, I was not optimistic. I feel bad for the staff who took a chance on this experiment, but I will be surprised if it comes back.

Meta Says It Is Removing End-to-End Encryption From Instagram Direct Messages ⇥ about.fb.com

In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg announced his “privacy-focused vision for social networking”.

This did not come out of nowhere. Facebook is a technology firm hostile to user privacy, and media coverage has reflected its poor record. The company had even been pursuing a deal to operate in China and accept that government’s surveillance and censorship demands. So it decided to make some changes. It ended its plan for operating in China — not because it no longer wanted that massive audience, but because it was easier to lobby for a U.S. TikTok ban.

It also decided on six principles for that “privacy-focused vision”, among them:

Encryption. People’s private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — including us — from seeing what people share on our services.

Zuckerberg noted some of the risks for end-to-end encryption, but “[o]n balance,” Zuckerberg wrote, “I believe working towards implementing end-to-end encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do”. As a result, Meta’s Sara Su announced in August 2022 that the company would begin testing it in two key applications:

People want to trust that their online conversations with friends and family are private and secure. We’re working hard to protect your personal messages and calls with end-to-end encryption by default on Messenger and Instagram. […]

To Meta’s credit, Messenger defaulted to end-to-end encryption in December 2023. But the company has never flipped the switch for Instagram.

Earlier this week in a note appended to the top of Su’s post, the company said it was ending this pursuit:

Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. You can keep messaging with end-to-end encryption easily on WhatsApp.

I am not sure if it is worth reading anything into the explicit callout of WhatsApp but not Messenger.

In any case, this is another one of those fleeting Zuckerberg obsessions that is only relevant so long as it serves a media relations purpose. Of course not many people opted into end-to-end encryption — that is the whole point of the power of defaults, and something users should not have to think about. This is not an outright rejection of end-to-end encryption, given Meta’s support in other apps, but it is no longer important because it is a few trends behind.

This is now an artificial intelligence company. Do not ask what “Meta” means. It is not important either.

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Social Media’s Walled Gardens ⇥ mastodon.ar.al

Aral Balkan:

When you post things on Instagram, Facebook, and X, this is what they look like to people who don’t use those platforms.

They are login walls. Sometimes, these platforms will let you see an individual post without having an account or logging in, but very often they do not. This sucks for many reasons, but one thing I remain surprised by is how the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seems completely okay with Meta using Mark Zuckerberg’s login-walled Facebook and Instagram pages to disclose material information about the company.

Sucker ⇥ theatlantic.com

McKay Coppins, the Atlantic (gift link):

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

[…]

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

I rarely think much of anything published in the Atlantic, and I cannot recall the last time I thought something from Coppins was worth recommending, but you should take the time to read this gut-wrenching reflection on the saturation of gambling in sports and, increasingly, media as a whole. I have read and watched countless stories about the fallout from the legalization of gambling in the United States and Canada — in particular, I think CBC News covered it well in an episode of the “Fifth Estate” (that video might be geographically restricted), while Drew Gooden’s video reflected on it from a fan’s perspective. But Coppin lived it.

This comparison is intriguing:

Executives at the major online sportsbooks are quick to trumpet their commitment to “responsible gaming.” But that purported commitment runs up against an economic reality: As much as 90 percent of the sportsbooks’ revenue comes from less than 10 percent of their users. Their apps seem clearly designed, much like TikTok and Candy Crush, to keep users scrolling and tapping in a hypnotic stupor. If your account is nearing empty, DraftKings will offer a “reload bonus” of gambling credits to entice you to deposit more money; if you’ve gone a couple of days without making a wager, you might get a push alert from FanDuel offering a “no sweat bet,” promising to refund a loss with site credits to be used for more gambling.

Social media is commonly compared to gambling. I recently wrote a headline referring to it as a “slot machine for feelings”. Coppins flips that around, pointing to the personalized notifications that lure people back, a feature that was also presented in the “Fifth Estate” documentary. There is no way for your phone to dispense cigarettes or alcohol, but gambling is right there, all the time.

Regardless of whether prohibition was the right call for gambling — and there is compelling evidence for that — I think the advertising and integration into sports and other media must be stopped.

‘This Is Not the Computer for You’ ⇥ samhenri.gold

Sam Henri Gold:

The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you are thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” The people saying this are not wrong. It is also not the point.

Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.

This is such a good essay. It takes me right back to the first computers I used when I was a kid, trying everything and finding whatever limits exist. And they do exist, but they are far beyond what most people will even attempt because technology has far outpaced our typical use. Apple can make a full-on Mac with “a phone chip” because that phone has a display with nearly as many pixels as were in the 30-inch Cinema Display you used to need Apple’s most expensive Mac and a specific graphics card to run.

People are going to use this Mac like a Mac.

TechCrunch: L3Harris, a U.S. Military Contractor, Likely Built ‘Coruna’ iPhone Hacking Toolkit ⇥ techcrunch.com

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch:

A mass hacking campaign targeting iPhone users in Ukraine and China used tools that were likely designed by U.S. military contractor L3Harris, TechCrunch has learned. The tools, which were intended for Western spies, wound up in the hands of various hacking groups, including Russian government spooks and Chinese cybercriminals.

While Franceschi-Bicchierai notes the case of a former L3Harris executive who sold exploits to a Russian company, it remains unclear how this specific toolkit was leaked.

Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its A.I. ‘Expert Review’ Feature ⇥ wired.com

Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly’s parent company Superhuman, on LinkedIn of all places:

Back in August, we launched a Grammarly agent called Expert Review. The agent draws on publicly available information from third-party LLMs to surface writing suggestions inspired by the published work of influential voices.

[…]

After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review while we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented — or not represented at all.

This has been around since August without anyone noticing until recently, which likely means few people used it. Certainly none of the experts, whose likenesses were being used without permission to give advice, had any idea.

Regardless, I do not think this is something Mehrotra or Superhuman can duck out from with a simple my bad.

Miles Klee, Wired:

Superhuman, the tech company behind the writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product.

Good.

MacBook Neo Teardown Reveals a Highly Repairable Laptop ⇥ youtube.com

Earlier this week, I linked to iFixit’s exploration of ways Apple used to prioritize repairability in its laptops. The headline on the article is “How Apple Used to Design Its Laptops for Repairability”, but the <title> tag reveals a more incendiary thesis:

Macbook Neo Shows how far Apple’s repairability design has fallen – iFixit

That is quite the bold statement for an article published just a few days after the MacBook Neo was announced and nearly a week before it became available.

Luckily, the good people at Tech Re-Nu in Melbourne got their hands on a Neo on launch day in Australia, and took it apart. They found modular internals held in place with dozens of screws. They only found adhesive on the back of the trackpad — hardly the end of the world. It is a far cry from the glued-in battery of the MacBook Pro. (Warning: that link goes to a page where Apple has decided to use PNGs for photographs instead of JPEGs, rendering the guide hundreds of megabytes large. Embarrassing.) Tech Re-Nu does not entirely disassemble the Neo, but it is possible to remove the keyboard for repair without replacing the entire top case.

This does not entirely invalidate iFixit’s argument, of course. Apple’s laptops used to have replaceable memory and storage, but none of that can be changed post-purchase. But the Neo is way more repairable than I think iFixit expected it to be. I wish that were true for the other laptops Apple introduced last week, both of which still use adhesive to secure the battery, and seemingly do not permit replacing the keyboard independently of the top case.

Also, it is always worth putting iFixit’s advocacy in the context of a company that also sells parts and tools. A conflict of interest, to be sure, but not invalidating — just something to be mindful of.

Online Age Verification Tools for Child Safety Are Surveilling Adults ⇥ cnbc.com

Barbara Booth, CNBC:

Civil liberties’ advocates warn that concentrating large volumes of identity data among a small number of verification vendors can create attractive targets for hackers and government demands. Earlier this year, Discord disclosed a data breach that exposed ID images belonging to approximately 70,000 users through a compromised third-party service, highlighting the security risks associated with storing sensitive identity information.

[…]

According to Tandy, as more states adopt age-verification mandates and companies race to comply, the infrastructure behind those systems is likely to become a permanent fixture of online life. Taken together, industry leaders say the rapid spread of age-verification laws may push platforms toward systems that verify age once and reuse that credential across services.

The hurried implementation of age verification sounds fairly terrible, counterproductive, illegal in the U.S., and discriminatory, but we should not pretend that we are only now being subject to risky and overbearing surveillance on the web. The ecosystem powering behavioural ad targeting — including data brokers, the biggest of which have reported staggering data breaches for a decade — has all but ensured our behaviour on popular websites and in mobile apps is already tracked and tied to some proxy for our identity.

That is not an excuse for the poor implementation of age verification, nor justification for its existence. If anything, it is a condemnation of the current state of the web that this barely moves the needle on privacy. If I had to choose whether to compromise for commerce or for the children, it would be the latter, but the correct answer is, likely, neither.

Grammarly’s ‘Expert Review’ Feature Presents Fake Advice in the Names of Real Journalists and Authors ⇥ platformer.news

Casey Newton, Platformer:

On Friday I learned to my surprise that I had become an editor for Grammarly. The subscription-based writing assistant has introduced a feature named “expert review” that, in the company’s words, “is designed to take your writing to the next level — with insights from leading professionals, authors, and subject-matter experts.”

Read a little further, though, and you’ll learn that these “insights” are not actually “from” leading professionals, or any human person at all. Rather, they are AI-generated text, which may or may not reflect whichever “leading professional” Grammarly slapped their names on.

Miles Klee, Wired:

As advertised on a support page, Grammarly users can solicit tips from virtual versions of living writers and scholars such as Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson (neither of whom responded to a request for comment) as well as the deceased, like the editor William Zinsser and astronomer Carl Sagan. Presumably, these different AI agents are trained on the oeuvres of the people they are meant to imitate, though the legality of this content-harvesting remains murky at best, and the subject of many, many copyright lawsuits.

I do not think a disclaimer explaining it does “not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities” will sufficiently distance the company from its claim of providing “insights from leading professionals, authors, and subject-matter experts” attributed to the names of people who did not agree to participate in this. Apparently, it is incumbent upon them to opt out by emailing expertoptout@superhuman.com. Most people will obviously not do this — because why would anyone realize they need to opt out? — but especially those who are dead yet are still being called upon for their expertise. Let Carl Sagan rest.

Apple Used to Design Its Laptops for Repairability ⇥ ifixit.com

Charlie Sorrel, of iFixit:

Apple’s MacBooks haven’t always been monolithic, barely repairable slabs of aluminum, glass, and glue. They used to be almost delightful in their repairable features, from their batteries to their Wi-Fi cards. Powerbooks, iBooks, and especially early MacBooks showed what happens when Apple applies its design skills directly to repairability and maintenance, instead of to thinness above all. Today we’re going to take a look at the best repairability features that Apple has ditched.

These four complaints range from the somewhat quaint — swappable Wi-Fi cards — to the stuff I actually miss, which is everything else. RAM and disk upgrades are a gimme since the cost-per-gigabyte (generally) declines over time, and I would love easily swappable batteries. But right now, nearly four years into owning this MacBook Pro, I would also really like to be able to swap in a new keyboard in the future. Not only are the keycaps unintentionally becoming polished, some oft-used keys feel a little mushy. Not much, and barely enough to notice, but I imagine their clickiness will not improve over time.

One quibble, emphasis mine:

[…] I have an old 2012 MacBook Air running Linux. I swapped the HDD for an SSD, maxed out the RAM, and dropped in a new battery, and I see no reason it wouldn’t easily keep rolling for another 10 years.

Unlikely. The 2012 MacBook Air only came with an SSD; a standard hard disk was not an option.

Another Appearance Control Is Coming to Accessibility Settings in iOS 26.4 ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple renamed the prior Reduce Highlighting Effects Accessibility setting to “Reduce Bright Effects,” and explained what it does.

Apple says the feature “minimizes highlighting and flashing when interacting with onscreen elements, such as buttons or the keyboard.

In my testing, this does exactly what you would expect. In places like toolbar buttons — or the buttons in the area of what is left of a toolbar, anyhow — the passcode entry screen, and Control Centre, the glowing tap effects are minimized or removed.

I do not find those effects particularly distracting, and I think turning them off saps some of the life out of the Liquid Glass design language, but I can see why some would be bothered by them. It is not the case that iOS 26 would be better if none of these appearance controls were present, only that they should not be necessary.

Minister for Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Announces ‘Guardrails’ for TikTok Canada Operations ⇥ canada.ca

There are three agreed-upon policies which, in the airy language of a government press release, seem reasonable enough to apply to all social platforms, yet are only relevant to TikTok. The first is exceedingly vague:

TikTok will implement enhanced protection for Canadians’ personal information, including new security gateways and privacy-enhancing technologies to control access to Canadian user data in order to reduce the risk of unauthorized or prohibited access.

There are no details about what the “new security gateways and privacy-enhancing technologies” are, nor why the sole goal is preventing “prohibited access” rather than “exploitative access”.

The second — complying with the recommendations of the Privacy Commissioner — was already underway, and the third is an “independent third-party monitor”, which seems fine.

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Mixing News Coverage and ‘Prediction Markets’ Is a Dangerous Gamble ⇥ theverge.com

Nilay Patel and Liz Lopatto discussed “prediction markets” on the Verge’s “Decoder” podcast; here is Patel’s summary:

Insider trading is supposed to be illegal, and so is operating an unregulated sports book. So you’re now starting to see Kalshi and Polymarket getting hit from both sides of this broader regulatory debate, and 2026 is shaping up to be the year that all of this really comes to a head. To what end? It’s hard to say, especially as these companies cozy up to the Trump administration.

But it’s also becoming increasingly untenable for prediction markets to sit in the middle of the tension between gambling on the news and trying to self-regulate such that they don’t encourage insider trading.

A little under a month after Gallup announced it would stop polling for presidential approval, the Associated Press said it would begin integrating Kalshi bets into its election coverage. As Patel and Lopatto say, however, election betting is among the least problematic news gambling.

The Central Lie of Prediction Markets ⇥ theatlantic.com

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic (gift link):

Prediction markets claim to harness the wisdom of crowds to provide reliable public data: Because people are putting real money behind their opinions, they are expressing what they actually believe is most likely to happen, which, according to the reasoning of these platforms, means that events will unfold accordingly. Many news organizations, and Substack, now have partnerships with prediction markets — the subtext being that they provide some kind of news-gathering function. Some users who distrust mainstream media turn to the markets in place of traditional journalism.

But in reality, prediction markets produce the opposite of accurate, unbiased information. They encourage anyone with an informational edge to use their knowledge for personal financial gain. In this way, prediction markets are the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder.

I had no idea so-called “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket were promoting themselves as forecasters of real information, let alone that anyone believed them. I always assumed “prediction markets” was a euphemism.

A spokesperson for Kalshi told Warzel that betting on current events is a way to “create accurate, unbiased forecasts”, and that is something we can verify. If this were true, bettors should have been able to forecast, for example, the popular vote split of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Polls had Harris and Trump neck and neck, but on election day, 75.8% of Kalshi bettors believed Harris would prevail. There is not much granularity to Kalshi’s charts, but the forecast on Polymarket was favourable to Harris at 5:00 PM on November 5 — election day — and it flips to a Trump lead at the next available data point, 5:00 AM the following day, and well after it was obvious Trump won the popular vote.

This is just a way to gamble on current events, which is tragic and pathetic. We do not need to pretend these sites are anything more substantial than that.

Google and Epic Games Announce Settlement ⇥ theregister.com

Sameer Samat, Google’s president of Android Ecosystem:

Today we are announcing substantial updates that evolve our business model and build on our long history of openness globally.  We’re doing that in three ways: more billing options, a program for registered app stores, and lower fees and new programs for developers.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on X:

Google is opening up Android all the way with robust support for competing stores, competing payments, and a better deal for all developers. So, we’ve settled all of our disputes worldwide. THANKS GOOGLE!

Simon Sharwood, the Register:

Epic Games approved of the changes.

“These changes will evolve Android into a true open platform with competition among stores,” the company stated. “Globally, developers will have choices in how they make payments using Google Play’s payment system and competing payment systems, with reduced fees and the ability to point users outside apps to make purchases.

Epic also said “Google will take steps to support the future open metaverse,” a probable reference to the deal that will see games made with the Unity engine made available within Fortnite.

Neither Sweeney nor Epic Games can express anything less than elation with this outcome in no small part because they signed away their ability to do that. It still amazes me that concession ended up in the final agreement. It seems like the kind of thing that Google’s very expensive lawyers would pitch as leverage with Epic Games’ not-quite-as-expensive lawyers. In an interview with Dean Takahashi, of GamesBeat, it seems like Epic was eager to settle with terms that apply worldwide:

Asked why Sweeney decided to settle rather than litigate in every court in the world, he said, “This is just a really important thing that people should understand. The Epic versus Google court decision in the United States only has effect in the United States. It does nothing about the rest of the world. And the United States is about 30% of Google Play revenue and about 5% of Google Play users.”

He said it was never going to be a complete worldwide solution, and the court, throughout the proceedings, very clearly, said that the court wanted to establish competition among stores and competition among payments without setting prices in the market.

Curiously, not long before this settlement, Google announced it would begin requiring Android developers to be verified for their software to be installable, even by side-loading. I am curious if the combination of these changes meaningfully impacts users’ security or privacy. At a glance, the changes that settled this lawsuit seem like a welcome set of improvements that, sure, was assuredly not an altruistic fight by Epic Games, and will probably result in Sweeney getting even richer.

Regardless, it is notable for these sweeping changes to be brought to Android phones worldwide in the coming years, while Apple’s App Store is a patchwork of region-specific policies difficult for developers to navigate. It is too bad there is not really competition between these stores. Most people who buy smartphones choose the platform as a whole and accept whatever software experience they are provided. They do not need to bother themselves with the business terms of each store. With the improvements to third-party stores on Android, it sets up the possibility for greater competition within that platform. Apple should do the same.

Apple’s New Studio Displays, Plural ⇥ 512pixels.net

In hardware terms alone, Apple has been delivering an incredible run of Macs arguably since 2020, and easily since 2021. There are quibbles, sure — the display notch still bugs some people, the keyboard material wears poorly, and repairability has declined — but these are, overall, pretty sweet machines. The Macs announced this week seem like they will continue that hot streak.

I happen to be in the market for a new Mac, perhaps this year, and I should be spoiled for choice. I kind of am — the Mac Mini and Mac Studio are both alluring. But I am sadly attached to the room offered by my beloved 27-inch iMac, and Apple’s new lineup of displays is a sore point.

Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels:

Yes, those are two different products, but they both feature 27-inch, 5K displays in the same enclosure as the previous Studio Display.

Starting at $1599, the new Studio Display is a slight upgrade to the 2022 model.

[…]

The much more interesting of the pair is the $3299 Studio Display XDR.

Those prices are, respectively, $2,100 and $4,500 in Canada. I am not a stranger to spending a lot of money on a screen — I bought a Thunderbolt Display at $1,000 — but that is a lot of money for even the basest of base models, especially since I have no idea whether the sketchy firmware issues have been resolved.

It is not that these displays are bad — far from it — but it is extraordinary that we are ten years removed from 27-inch Retina iMacs that started at just $200 more than the Studio Display is today. Only recently are we seeing more choice in 27-inch 5K displays at considerably lower prices, though without Apple’s very nice stand and quality of materials. At least the XDR has a seemingly new panel.

Three of the seven models in the Mac lineup require an external display. Apple has two choices: one really advanced one that costs as much as a generously-specced Mac Studio, and another that feels like it is stumbling along.

Anyway, here I go again looking for a sick deal I will not find on a Pro Display XDR. Those things really hold their value. Pity.

Tim Sweeney Is Contractually Prohibited from Criticizing Google’s Developer Terms for Years ⇥ theverge.com

Sean Hollister, the Verge:

But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It’s right there in a binding term sheet for his settlement with Google.

On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and disparage the company, he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google’s app store polices. He can’t criticize Google’s app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them.

The terms (PDF) helpfully clarify that Epic is still allowed to “advocat[e] changes to the policies or practices of […] other companies, including Apple”. This does not mean future criticism of Apple’s business practices — or past criticism, for that matter — is unwarranted or invalid, but it now carries the blunted quality of someone who is not allowed to make the same complaints about Google.

A Toolkit for Hacking iPhones, Possibly Created for the U.S. Government, Has Leaked ⇥ cloud.google.com

Google’s Threat Intelligence Group:

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new and powerful exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023). The exploit kit, named “Coruna” by its developers, contained five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits. The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits, with the most advanced ones using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses.

The Coruna exploit kit provides another example of how sophisticated capabilities proliferate. Over the course of 2025, GTIG tracked its use in highly targeted operations initially conducted by a customer of a surveillance vendor, then observed its deployment in watering hole attacks targeting Ukrainian users by UNC6353, a suspected Russian espionage group. We then retrieved the complete exploit kit when it was later used in broad-scale campaigns by UNC6691, a financially motivated threat actor operating from China. […]

Andy Greenberg, Wired:

Conspicuously absent from Google’s report is any mention of who the original surveillance company “customer” that deployed Coruna may have been. But the mobile security company iVerify, which also analyzed a version of Coruna it obtained from one of the infected Chinese sites, suggests the code may well have started life as a hacking kit built for or purchased by the US government. Google and iVerify both note that Coruna contains multiple components previously used in a hacking operation known as “Triangulation” that was discovered targeting Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in 2023, which the Russian government claimed was the work of the NSA. (The US government didn’t respond to Russia’s claim.)

I am so curious to know how this thing made it outside the carefully guarded digital walls of the U.S. government or a contractor. While a rare event, it is not the first time the classified weapons of espionage have become public.