The technical accomplishments of Sora 2 are laudable and, frankly, extraordinary. Just watch the first two minutes of the live-streamed announcement, or the examples from six minutes onward. If the ability to turn a few words into all kinds of video — from photorealistic to animated — with sound does not blow your mind, I do not know what will. If I went back in time to just ten years ago to show this to myself, I would have assumed my future self came from far, far in the future.
But OpenAI, like many of its peers, is not super interested in bragging about how clever this technology is in the videos its product generates. Videos made with Sora include a “Sora” watermark that moves to a different location around the margins every few seconds, making it more difficult but not impossible to crop. But nowhere does it say “A.I. generated” on the video. And why not? Surely OpenAI ought to be proud of its achievements.
The wildest thing to me about the Sora app is that it is a social network. It looks like TikTok. You can follow users and scroll through videos in a “For You” stream-of-unconsciousness. Mine is full of several videos gutting the soul of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and replacing it with whining about the barest of restrictions enacted by OpenAI.
The social impact of this — and the new Vibes feed in Meta’s A.I. app — is a realization of an “A.I. television” that will, surely, have grave consequences because the most popular A.I. services care way too about growth and proving their own cleverness. Sure, there are guardrails and limitations. But, as Hank Green says in a righteously ranty video, “the friction matters”.
This technology may, to some extent, break down the barriers involved in making video, but we should not pretend that is the objective here, or even halfway considered by any of these A.I. companies. They want to make gimmicks. They want to do the problems of the last twenty years of social media, but all of it is fake, and they want to call that “innovation”. I will echo Green’s call: give me a single reason why this should exist.
I don’t think the problem is really Tim Cook or whoever at Apple made the ICEBlock decision last week. The current situation is just the symptom of a decision made long ago: for Apple to be a choke point for app distribution. If your solution to government overreach is to depend on the right person being in charge, who will say no, you’ve already lost.
A well articulated argument. As if to prove Tsai’s point, one of the apps Apple removed has nothing to do with the alleged safety concerns for ICE officers.
Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.
With this particularly corrupt U.S. administration, it is hard not to see Apple’s complicity in the context of other official matters in the United States and abroad. Is it using fealty as a bargaining chip? Or is it just spineless in the face of domestic pressure without corporate-friendly justification? And which one is more concerning or embarrassing?
The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people.
Just a quick reminder: Client-side scanning is not only error-prone nonsense, but would also be illegal from the outset. This is because an obligation to monitor chats to the planned abstruse extent is disproportionate and would also contradict the European Court of Justice. Indiscriminate scanning of all chat communication content represents the most serious infringement of fundamental rights imaginable, eclipsing even the brazen idea of data retention.
The Trump administration’s ambitions have little to do with safeguarding free expression from tyranny. If they did, the administration would not be searching for cherry-picked examples of content removed under the DSA. Instead, they are using tech policy at the State Department as a tool in their project to reshape the post-war international order in Trump’s image — at the expense of the transatlantic alliance and, potentially, the lives and liberties of activists in authoritarian settings who formerly accepted grants from the US government.
One of the problems with the world tech industry being consolidated in the United States is the country’s ability to use it as leverage against reasonable laws and local standards. This has been the case for decades, but it is more worrisome as tech companies have become sprawling behemoths dominating a range of markets, and — obviously — with this particular president in the White House.
The actual calculation is dead simple. When converting signal strength to bars, CommCenter loads each threshold from memory and compares until it finds the right range.
[…]
For example, here you need -107 [dBm] or better signal to see 3 bars.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
It did not matter that Doctorow’s original essay is based on something untrue. While there is possibly “a mass exodus [underway from] Facebook” — given the company’s 2024 transition to reporting users of its “family of apps” instead of individual products — in the quarters following Doctorow’s article, Meta posted growing numbers (PDF) of Facebook users. The vibe in Doctorow’s writing was compelling. People started throwing around “enshittification” to describe the worsening of all kinds of online services, and then the analog world, and then everything. Absolutely everything.
The American Dialect Society made “enshittification” its word of the year.
Before all that, however, Doctorow first used “enshittification” to describe Amazon. Now, Doctorow is about to release a new book that manages to stretch this theory to 352 pages. If I sound skeptical, it is because I read an excerpt published in the Guardian, expanding upon the blog post about Amazon that introduced the term. This is a company I entirely believe is deserving of this kind of scorn. Doctorow correctly observes Amazon’s founding premise was to sell products for remarkably low prices, famously sacrificing profitability in its nascent years, a promise that disintegrated as it became the online shopping destination.
Shopping on Amazon sucks now. It sounds, based on Doctorow’s article, like it also sucks to sell on Amazon now, too. But some of Doctorow’s criticisms ring hollow. For example:
Not that you can find lower prices through anything as simple as sorting your search results by price. The merchants that dominate the search listings will play games with quantity to have the result with the lowest price, even if the price per unit is much higher. For example, a four-pack of AAs priced at $3.99 is more expensive per battery than a 16-pack priced at $10 (ie $1 versus $0.63), but sort-by-lowest-price will bury the better deal on the third or fourth page of results.
Amazon’s search engine is pretty terrible, but this is just normal discounts-at-scale stuff. If it were ranked per-unit instead, this 800-count pack would probably rank near the top at just $0.19 each, but then Doctorow might complain about the company putting a $150 box of batteries as one of the lowest-priced items.
Doctorow:
Now Amazon is in the terminal stage. We’re all still stuck to the platform, but we get less and less value out of it. And because we’re all still there, buying Prime and starting (and ending) our purchase planning with Amazon’s enshittified search results, the merchants who rely on selling to us are stuck there, too, earning less and less from every sale.
I am not sure what I am meant to take from the “terminal” diagnosis of Amazon. I agree it all sucks. But there are plenty of thriving businesses that treat their customers with contempt — Adobe, Rogers, Canadian airlines — and I do not see how one of the most valuable and, now, profitable companies on the planet is inching toward death’s door.
I will probably read the book. I am hoping for something more nuanced, but perhaps I am expecting too much when there is a poop emoji on the cover.
Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Under Armour: These companies do not actually spin thread, tan leather, vulcanize rubber, or even put together the shoe. They design prototypes of a product and then facilitate all the actions necessary to make money off it. They pressure supplies and manufacturers at every level of the manufacturing process, send the product all over the world, sell it at a markup. The people in the brand offices coordinate that labor; the people in those factories actually do it. This is globalization, and it encompasses every transaction in the world economy.
To walk the floor at The Materials Show, an industry event that goes down four times a year — there’s two in Portland, home of Nike, Adidas of America, and several other major activewear concerns, and another pair in Boston, the home of New Balance — is to see that grand abstraction made flesh. In the aisles, a parade of designers, materials acquisition people, and executives clad in Activewear Professional go from booth to booth, look at threads and rubbers and leathers, chat with vendors, and take little notes. “The show is about sourcing raw materials, mostly for the footwear industry,” Hisham Muhareb, the founder and owner of The Materials Show, tells me. “Nike, Adidas, Columbia, Reebok, New Balance — their product teams come here and they meet new vendors, meet their old vendors, talk about materials, components, and process.”
So you can see why I needed to be there. […]
I savoured this essay when I first read it a couple of days ago, and it has been sitting with me ever since. It is tremendous. It is the kind of thing that makes me love paying for Defector, maintaining the kind of subscriber relationship a big corporation could only dream about. You might not care much about shoes or apparel, but I think you will appreciate this article anyway.
I promise I will end the gratuitous and uncomfortable self-quoting soon, but there are so many smart replies to what I wrote about Liquid Glass that I feel I need to point you to them.
“So far, Apple justifies this redesign, basically, by saying it is self-evidently good”
This *should* be the justification. In other words, you don’t really need to justify something that’s self-evidently good, only something that’s self-evidently bad. This is the problem — the badness of Liquid Glass — not the lack of justification.
I completely agree. My sentence continues “…self-evidently good for all of its platforms to look the same”. I wish it was obvious why this should be the case, not something that was preemptively defended.
Take, for example, this long article by Jon Friedman of Microsoft announcing the rollout of new application icons:
[…] That’s the paradigm shift; Microsoft 365 has always empowered productivity but the driving force of the UX was often app features or the tools themselves. Today, the driving force is the outcome you desire.
With that paradigm shift come significant changes to the UX discipline itself and how we approach product making. Longer cycles of heads-down development used to be followed by a big reveal of big changes. Today, with model capabilities rapidly emerging and our learning as UX practitioners rapidly advancing — including becoming more technical as a discipline — product evolution is happening in continuous waves. Research shows changes to iconography are almost always received as a signal for product changes and in an era of ongoing, smaller shifts, the icons should reflect that. As such, we embraced the idea of “evolution, not revolution” throughout our design process.
This try-hard justification made me think of Johnson’s post. It is over a thousand words and I do not believe I view these icons differently after finishing it. The new icons are fine — very Microsoft, in that the company has produced some spectacular-looking 3D renders and illustrations completely unrelated to the actual icons I will be seeing on my desktop when this update is released.
Lynn Hunt, in a 2010 essay for Perspectives on History:
[…] You cannot accumulate pages if you constantly second guess yourself. You have to second guess yourself just enough to make constant revision productive and not debilitating. You have to believe that clarity is going to come, not all at once, and certainly not before you write, but eventually, if you work at it hard enough, it will come. Thought does emerge from writing. Something ineffable happens when you write down a thought. You think something you did not know you could or would think and it leads you to another thought almost unbidden.
Someone — I am not sure who — surfaced this essay on Bluesky or Mastodon as I was midway through polishing my piece about Liquid Glass. It was motivating, and the part I quoted above perfectly describes how I felt as I was writing it. I distinctly remember writing this paragraph:
Apple justifies these decisions by saying its redesigned interfaces are “bringing greater focus to content”. I do not accept that explanation. Instead of placing tools in a distinct and separated area, they bleed into your document, thus gaining a similar level of importance as the document itself. I have nothing beyond my own experience to back this up. Perhaps Apple has user studies suggesting something different; if it does, I think it should publicly document its research. But, in my experience, the more the interface blends with what I am looking at, the less capable I am of ignoring it. Clarity and structure are sacrificed for the illusion of simplicity offered by a monochromatic haze of an interface.
It was important to me to try and solve Liquid Glass on the terms Apple offered, and the “greater focus” explanation was something that had been stuck in my head since Alan Dye spoke of it at WWDC. I could not think of why it felt wrong, only that it did not sit right with me. But when I started writing this, the “similar level of importance as the document itself” idea came to me out of nowhere and exactly reflects how I feel. It is a far better explanation than anything I had consciously thought about, and I doubt I would have arrived there without writing it down.
Obviously, writing is something that speaks to me, Hunt, and many others. Each person may arrive at thoughts and ideas in different ways. For me, though, any time I am stuck on a problem where writing could play any role, it is most often the tool I use to turn scattered questions into something coherent. I have no authority to give advice, so here is some anyway: next time you are stuck on something — maybe a problem at work, or a question at home — try writing it out.
Google on Friday joined Apple in removing from its online store apps that can be used to anonymously report sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other law-enforcement authorities.
Apple on Thursday night said it was removing ICEBlock and other similar apps from its App Store that are used to track authorities.
Apple’s move came after direct pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi, and amid controversy over the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement of immigration law with ICE agents and other authorities.
“I am incredibly disappointed by Apple’s actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” Joshua Aaron told 404 Media. “ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple’s own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.”
If you believe ICE is simply a law enforcement agency operating within the normal protocols of the justice system — and, by extension, that law enforcement behaviour is generally reasonable and trustworthy — apps that allow people to anonymously report sightings could be seen as targeted harassment. I could understand why Apple might remove such an application in that high-trust environment. However, if you believe ICE is a hostile expression of state power — the flimsy justifications used to identify ostensibly undocumented immigrants, the suspension of due process, and the domestic surveillance machine paint a pretty bleak picture — then apps allowing people to protect themselves against this power seem are justifiable.
The U.S. government does not have the authority to demand the removal of these lawful apps. But it does have the authority to make Apple and Google pay dearly if they do not comply. Perhaps Apple finds its products will be implicated in higher tariffs, or the antitrust cases against both companies will have stiffer penalties. Apple knows how to work with authoritarian states, which I do not mean as a compliment, and it is applying the same playbook here.
At least with Google’s devices, sideloading is an option. Apple’s platform control is both a guarantee and a liability. I write this with the best of intentions: ICEBlock’s platform exclusive design has now become a problem for it. The best way to make these kinds of apps resilient is to put them on the web, though I am unsure how reliable push notifications are in web apps on iOS.
Adam Engst, TidBits, had some very kind things to say about my Liquid Glass piece. I also liked Engst’s attempt to answer the question of “why?”:
Why now? The answer may partly lie in available processing power. The balance between usability and aesthetics has always been informed by technical capabilities. Consider a few dates from Apple’s history: […]
Twenty-five years after alpha channels began appearing in our user interfaces, I think many of us have taken for granted the soft shadows and smooth corners enabled by translucent pixels. Back then, there were plenty of people who were worried about the performance impact of all these effects, just as there are now about Liquid Glass. I get it; I am not arguing that opinion is wrong or misguided.
Personally, however, I know my computer has capabilities wildly disproportionate to my actual use. Sometimes I will actually use that performance, but not most of the time. If a little bit of the M1 Pro in this Mac can go toward the stuff I see every day, I think that is a fair trade-off. If my iPhone can draw real-time lens distortion and chromatic aberration, that rocks. I think that is worth exploring.
To do this, we used a crowdsourced database of AI hallucination cases maintained by the researcher Damien Charlotin, which so far contains more than 410 cases worldwide, including 269 in the United States. Charlotin’s database is an incredible resource, but it largely focuses on what happened in any individual case and the sanctions against lawyers, rather than the often elaborate excuses that lawyers told the court when they were caught. Using Charlotin’s database as a starting point, we then pulled court records from around the country for dozens of cases where a lawyer offered a formal explanation or apology. Pulling this information required navigating clunky federal and state court record systems and finding and purchasing the specific record where the lawyer in question tried to explain themselves (these were often called “responses to order to show cause.”) We also reached out to lawyers who were sanctioned for using AI to ask them why they did it. Very few of them responded, but we have included explanations from the few who did.
A May 2024 Stanford study found A.I. legal research tools would invent case law in one-sixth to one-third of searches.
What is striking about 404’s reporting is how many of these lawyers simply disclaim responsibility. I know few people want to admit to being lazy and incautious, but the number of these expensive professionals who blame their assistants instead of taking responsibility for their own filings is shameful.
The UK government has issued a new order to Apple to create a backdoor into its cloud storage service, this time targeting only British users’ data, despite US claims that Britain had abandoned all attempts to break the tech giant’s encryption.
[…]
Apple made a complaint to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over the original demand, backed by a parallel legal challenge from Privacy International and Liberty, another campaign group. That case was due to be heard early next year but the new order may restart the legal process.
When U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced in August that “the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’”, I stressed the ambiguity in her statement. I had no additional information, but the wording of her tweet was vague.
Reporters like Tripp Mickle, at the New York Times, and Annabelle Timsit and Joseph Menn, of the Washington Post, were too eager to claim the U.K. would wholly abandon its pursuit of customer data. Neither allowed for different interpretations of Gabbard’s tweet. Journalists like these have sources who could have offered clarity. It is unclear in either article whether they did reach out to their contacts; if they did, their stories were misleading even with — or perhaps because of — that information.
Anyway, this sucks. I do not think Advanced Data Protection is coming back to the U.K. any time soon.
On Liquid Glass
A brief, throat-clearing caveat: while I had written most of this pre-launch, I was unable to complete it by the time Apple shipped its annual round of operating system updates. Real life, and all that. I have avoided reading reviews; aside from the excerpt I quoted from Dan Moren’s, I have seen almost nothing. Even so, I am sure something I have written below will overlap with something written by somebody else. Instead of trying to weed out any similarities, I have written this note. Some people hire editors.
The Name
Here is a question: does anybody know what we were supposed to call the visual interface design direction Apple has pursued since 2013? For a company that likes to assign distinct branding to everything it makes, it is conspicuous this distinct visual language never had a name.
To be fair, iOS’s system theme was not branded from when it was first shown in 2007. It inherited some of the Aqua qualities of Mac OS X, but with a twist: the backgrounds of toolbars were a muted blue instead of the saturated “Aqua” blue or any of Mac OS X’s window themes. The system font was Helvetica, not Lucida Grande. It was Aqua, but not exactly. Even after 2013’s iOS 7, a massive redesign intended, in part, to signal higher level changes, no name was granted. The redesign was the rebrand. The system spoke for itself.
In MacOS, meanwhile, the “Aqua” branding felt increasingly tenuous to me following the system-wide redesigns of Yosemite — which Craig Federighi said “continue[d] this evolution” — and Big Sur.
Now, then: Liquid Glass.
The name is remarkably apt — definitely Apple-y, and perfectly descriptive of how the material looks and feels. In most contexts, it looks like slightly deep and modestly bevelled glass in either clear or slightly frosted finishes. Unlike familiar translucent materials that basically just blur whatever is behind them, Liquid Glass distorts as though it is a lens. It even, in some cases, displays chromatic aberration around the edges.
And then you start to move it around, and things get kind of strange. It can morph and flex when tapped, almost like pushing a drop of mineral oil, and it glows and enlarges, too. When a button is near enough to another, the edges of the tapped button may melt into those of the proximate one. When you switch between views, buttons might re-form into different buttons in the same area.
That alone fulfills the “liquid” descriptor, but it is not the first time Apple has used the term. Since 2018, it has described high-resolution LCD displays with small bezels and non-zero corner radii — like the one on my MacBook Pro — as “Liquid Retina displays”. One might reasonably wonder if there is a connection. I consulted my finest Apple-to-English decoder ring and it appears Apple is emphasizing another defining characteristic of the Liquid Glass design language, which is that each part of the visual interface is, nominally, concentric with the bezel and corner radius of a device’s display. Am I reaching too hard? Is Apple? Who can say?
Apple’s operating systems have shared a familial look-and-feel, but Liquid Glass is the first time they also share a distinct name and specific form. That seems to me like a significant development.
My experiences with Liquid Glass have been informed by using iOS 26 since June on my iPhone 15 Pro, and MacOS 26 Tahoe since July on my 14-inch MacBook Pro. For a redesign justified on its apparent uniformity across Apple’s product lineup, this is an admittedly narrow slice of use cases, and I am sure there will be dozens of other reviews from people more immersed in Apple’s ecosystem than I presently am. However, I also think they are the two platforms telling the most substantial parts of the Liquid Glass story. The Mac is Apple’s longest-running platform and users have certain specific expectations; the iPhone is by far Apple’s most popular product. I do not think my experience is as comprehensive as those with access to more of Apple’s hardware, but I do think these are the two platforms where Apple needs to get things right.
I also used both systems almost exclusively in light mode. I briefly tested them in dark mode, but I can only describe how the visual design has changed in my day-to-day use, and that is light mode all the time.
The Material
The first thing you should know about the Liquid Glass material is that it is not exactly VisionOS for the Apple products you actually own. Sure, Apple may say it was “[i]nspired by the depth and dimensionality of VisionOS”, but it is evolved from that system’s frosted glassy slabs with slightly recessed text entry fields. This is something else entirely, and careful observers will note it is a visual language coming to all of Apple’s platforms this year except VisionOS. (Well, and the HomePod, if you want to be pedantic.)
The second thing you need to know is that it is visually newsworthy, but this material barely alters the fundamentals of using any of Apple’s devices, which makes sense. If you were creating a software update for billions of devices you, too, would probably think twice about radically changing all those environments. Things looking different will assuredly be a big enough change for some people.
The Liquid Glass material is most often used in container components — toolbars, buttons, menus, the MacOS Dock — but it is used for its own sake for the clock numerals on the Lock Screen. I think this will be its least controversial application. The Lock Screen clock is kind of useful, but also kind of decorative. (Also, and this is unrelated to Liquid Glass, but I cannot find another place to put this: the default typeface for the clock on the Lock Screen now stretches vertically. I like the very tall numerals and the very cool thing is that it vertically compresses as notifications and Live Activities are added to your Lock Screen.) If you do not like the glassy texture on the clock, you can select a solid colour. Everyone can be happy.
That is not the case elsewhere or for other components.
Translucency has been a standard component in a visual interface designer’s toolbox for as long as alpha channels have been supported. It was already a defining characteristic of Apple’s operating systems and has been since the introduction of Aqua. Translucency helps reduce the weightiness of onscreen elements, and can be used to imply layering and a sense of transience. But there is a key problem: when something in a user interface is not entirely opaque, it is not possible to predict what will be behind it.
Obviously.
Less obvious is how a designer should solve for the legibility of things a translucent element may contain, particularly text. While those elements may have specific backgrounds of their own, like text used in a button, there is often also plain text, as in window titles and copy. Icons, too, may not have backgrounds, or may be quite small or thin. The integrity of these elements may not be maintained if they are not displayed with sufficient contrast.
An illustration of decreasing contrast as background opacity and colours change. The rectangles are white at 60% opacity.
However, the impression of translucency is usually at odds with legibility. Say you have a panel-type area containing some dark text. The highest contrast can be achieved by making the panel’s background white. There is no way to make this panel entirely white and have it be interpreted as translucent. As the opacity of the panel’s background drops, so does the contrast whenever it appears over anything else that is not itself entirely white.
So designers have lots of little tricks they can play. They can decorate the text with outlines, shadows, and glows, as Microsoft did for various elements in Windows Vista. This works but is not particularly elegant, especially for text longer than a few words. Designers also blur the background, a common trick used in every major operating system today, and they adjust the way the foreground inherits the tones and shades of the background.
Windows Vista. Notice the white glow behind the text in application title bars, and the blurred background elements. (Image from the OpenGL Pipeline Newsletter.)
The Liquid Glass texture is more complex than Apple’s background materials or Microsoft’s Acrylic. It warps and distorts at the edges, and the way it blurs background layers is less diffuse. There are inset highlights and shadows, too, and all of these effects sell the illusion of depth better. It is as much a reflection of the intent of Apple’s human interface designers as it is a contemporary engineering project, far more so than an interface today based on raster graphics. That it is able to achieve such complex material properties in real-time without noticeably impacting performance or, in my extremely passive observations, battery life, is striking.
I do not think all these effects necessarily help legibility, which is as poor as it has ever been in translucent areas. The degree to which this is noticeable is dependent on the platform. In iOS 26, I find it less distracting, I think largely because it exists in the context of a single window at a time (picture-in-picture video being the sole exception). That means there is no expectation of overlapping active and inactive windows and, so, no chance that something overlapping within a window’s area could be confused with a different window overlapping.
Legibility problems are also reduced by how much is moving around on a display at any time. Yes, there are times when I cannot clearly read a text label in an iOS tab bar or a menu item in MacOS, but as soon as I scroll, legibility is not nearly as much of an issue. I do not wish to minimize this; I think text labels should be legible in every situation. But it is better in use than the sense you might get from the still screenshots you have seen in this article and elsewhere.
Apple also tries to solve legibility by automatically flipping the colour of the glass depending on the material behind it. When the glass is overtop a lighter-coloured area, the glass is light with dark text and icons; when it is on top of a darker area, the glass is dark with light-coloured text and icons. If Apple really wanted to improve the contrast of the toolbar, it would have done the opposite. These compensations do not trigger immediately so, when scrolling through a document containing a mix of lighter and darker areas, there is not as much flashing between the two states as you might expect. It is Apple’s clever solution to a problem Apple created.
With all the places the Liquid Glass texture has been applied in MacOS, you might believe it would make an appearance in the Menu Bar, too, since that has sported a translucent background since Leopard. But you would be wrong. In fact, in MacOS 26, the Menu Bar often has no background at all. The system decides whether the menu titles and icons should be shown in white or black based on the desktop picture, and then drops them right on top of it. Occasionally, it will show a gradient or shadow, sometimes localized to either side of the menu bar. Often, as with the other uses of translucency, legibility has been considered and I have not had difficulty reading menu items — but, also like the other translucent elements, this would never be a problem if the menu bar had a solid background.
Here is the thing, though: Liquid Glass mostly — mostly — feels at home on the iPhone. Yes, Apple could have avoided legibility problems entirely by not being so enamoured of translucency, but it does have alluring characteristics. It is a very cool feeling of true dimensionality. It is also a more direct interpretation of the hardware on which these systems run, the vast majority of which have gloss-finish glassy screens. Glass onscreen feels like a natural extension of this. I get it. I do not love it, but I feel like I understand it on the iPhone far more than I do on my Mac.
The animations — the truly liquid-feeling part of this whole thing — are something better seen as they are quite difficult to explain. I will try but do not worry: there are visual aids coming. The buttons for tools float in glassy bubble containers in a layer overtop the application. Now imagine those buttons morphing into new bubbly buttons and toolbar areas as you move from one screen to another. When there are two buttons, they may become a unified blob on a different screen. For example, in the top-right of the Library section of the Music app, there is an account button, and a button labelled “⋯” which shows a menu containing only a single “Edit Sections” item. Tapping on “Playlists” transforms the two button shapes into a single elongated capsule enclosing three buttons. Tapping “Artists” condenses the two into a single sorting button. Tapping “Genres” simply makes the two buttons fade away as there are no buttons in the top-right of this section.
Though these animations are not nearly as fluid as they were first shown, they seem like they help justify the “liquid” part of the name, and are something Apple has enough pride in to be called out in the press release. Their almost complete absence on MacOS is therefore notable. There are a handful of places they appear, like in Spotlight, but MacOS feels less committed to Liquid Glass as a result. When menus are summoned, they simply appear without any dramatic animation. Buttons and menus do not have the stretchy behaviour of their iOS counterparts. To be sure, I am confident those animations in MacOS would become tiresome in a matter of minutes. But, so, if MacOS is better for being less consistent with iOS in this regard, that seems to me like a good argument against forcing cross-platform user interface unification.
The System
Strictly speaking, Liquid Glass describes only this material, but the redesign does not begin and end there. Apple has refreshed core elements across the entire system, from toolbars and buttons to toggle controls and the Dock. And, yes, application icons.
I have already written about the increasing conformity of app icons within MacOS which has brought them into complete alignment with their iOS counterparts, down to the number of dots across the top of the Notes icon. If there are any differences in icons on MacOS and iOS for the same system app, they are insignificant. Regardless of how one may feel about this change — personally, aghast — they are changes made in concert with the Liquid Glass personality. Icons are now more than bitmap images at set sizes. They are now multilayer documents, and each layer can have distinct effects applied. The whole icon also appears to have a polished edge which, by default, falls on the upper-left and bottom-right, as though it is being lit at a 45° angle.
My Home Screen with icons tinted to match the background. When you select tinted icons, iOS provides the option of a colour picker.
If these icons have an advantage, it is that Apple is now allowing more user customization than ever. In addition to light and dark modes, application icons can now be displayed in clear and tinted states. Designers can specify new icons, and iOS will automatically convert icons without an update with mixed results. And, as with the other icon display modes, this also affects widgets on the Home Screen and icons across the system. Clear and tinted both look like frosted glass and have similar dimensional effects as other Liquid Glass elements, though one is — obviously — tinted. I can see this being a boon to people who use a photo as their wallpaper, though it comes at the expense of icon clarity and designer intention.
The party trick on the iPhone’s Home Screen is that each of these layers and the glassy edge respond to the physical orientation and movement of your device. Widgets and folders on the Home Screen also get that shine and they, too, respond to device movement. Sometimes. The shine on the App Library overview page does not respond to motion, but the app icons within a category do. App icons in Spotlight are not responsive to motion, either, and nor are the buttons in the bottom corners of the Lock Screen. The clock on the Lock Screen responds, but the notifications just below it on the very same screen do not. This inconsistency feels like a bug, but I do not think it is. I do not love this effect; I simply think similar things should look and behave similarly.
One of the things Apple is particularly proud of is how the shapes of the visual interface now reflect the shapes in its hardware, particularly in how they neatly nest inside each other. Concentricity is nothing new to its industrial design language. The company has, for decades, designed devices with shapes that nestle comfortably within each other. Witness, for example, the different display materials on the iMac G4 and the position of the camera on the back of the original iPhone. It is not even new in Apple’s software: the rounded corners of application icons mimic the original iPhone’s round corners; the accessory pairing sheet is another example. But accentuating the roundedness of the display corners is now a systemwide mandate. Application windows, toolbars, sidebars, and other elements have been redrawn as concentric roundrects, perfectly seated inside each other and within the rounded rectangle of a modern Apple device’s display. Or, at least, that is the theory.
In reality, only some of Apple’s devices have displays with four rounded corners: Apple Watches, iPhones, and iPads. The displays of recent MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros have rounded corners at the top, but are squared-off at the bottom. Neither the iMac nor either of Apple’s external displays have rounded corners at all. Yet all of these devices have inherited the same bubbly design language with dramatically rounded application windows.
Perhaps I am taking this too literally. Then again, Apple is the one saying application windows are no longer “configured for rectangular displays”, and that they now fit the “rounded corners of modern hardware”. Regardless of the justification, I quite like the roundness of these windows. Perhaps it is simply the newness, but they make applications seem friendlier and softer. I understand why they are controversial; the large radius severely restricts what can be present in the corners, thus lowering the information density of an application window. It seems Apple agrees it is more appropriate in some apps than in others — app windows in System Information and Terminal have a much smaller corner radius.
Still, the application windows which do gain the more generously rounded corners are appreciably concentric to my MacBook Pro’s display corners at default scaling (1512 × 982) and at one tick scaled down (1800 × 1169). But at one tick scaled up (1352 × 878) the corners are no longer concentric to the display corners, and now feel overlarge and intrusive in the application area.
Even on a device with four rounded display corners, this dedication to concentricity is not always executed correctly. My iPhone 15 Pro, for example, has corners with a slightly smaller radius than an iPhone 16 Pro. The bottom corners of the share sheet on my device are cramped, nearly touching the edge of the display at their apex.
Then there are the issues caused by this dedication to concentricity. Look again at that Finder window screenshot above and pay attention to the buttons in the toolbar. In particular, notice how the icon in the item grouping button — the solitary one between the view switcher, and the group that includes the sharing button — looks like it is touching the rounded edge.
Maps on iOS has a different kind of concentricity issue. When the search area is in a retracted state, the container around the search bar does not align with the left and right edges of the buttons above it, in a way that does not feel deliberate. I assume this is because it follows the curves of the display corners with an equal distance on all sides. When it is in an expanded state, it becomes wider than the buttons above it. At least — unlike the Share sheet — its bottom corners are rounded correctly on my iPhone.
I could keep going with my nitpicks, so I shall. The way toolbars and their buttons are displayed on MacOS is, at best, something to get used to, though I have tried and failed. Where there was once a solid area for tools has, in many apps, become a gradient with floating buttons. The gradient is both a fill and a progressive blur, which I think is unattractive.
This area is not very tall, which means a significant amount of the document encroaches into its lower half. In light mode, the background of a toolbar is white. The backgrounds of toolbar buttons are also white. Buttons are differentiated by nothing more than a diffuse shadow. The sidebar is now a floating roundrect. The glyphs in sidebar items and toolbar buttons are near-black. The shapeless action buttons in Finder are grey. Some of these things were present in previous versions of MacOS, but the sum of this design language is the continued reduction of contrast in user interface elements to, I think, its detriment.
Apple justifies these decisions by saying its redesigned interfaces are “bringing greater focus to content”. I do not accept that explanation. Instead of placing tools in a distinct and separated area, they bleed into your document, thus gaining a similar level of importance as the document itself. I have nothing beyond my own experience to back this up. Perhaps Apple has user studies suggesting something different; if it does, I think it should publicly document its research. But, in my experience, the more the interface blends with what I am looking at, the less capable I am of ignoring it. Clarity and structure are sacrificed for the illusion of simplicity offered by a monochromatic haze of an interface.
Even if I bought that argument, I do not understand why it makes sense to make an application’s tools visually recede. While I am sometimes merely viewing a document, I am very often trying to do something to it. I want the most common actions I can take to be immediately obvious. For longtime Mac users, the structure of most apps has not changed and one can rely on muscle memory in familiar apps. But that is more like an excuse for why this redesign is not as bad as it could be, not justification for why it is an improvement.
Then there are the window controls. The sidebar in an application is now depicted in a floating state which, Apple says, is “informed by the ambient environment within the app”, which means it reflects the colours of elements around it. This includes colours from outside the app which, a lot of the time, means the sidebar looks translucent to windows underneath it, which defies all logic. The sidebar reflects nearby colours even if you enable the “Reduce Transparency” setting in Accessibility settings, even though it makes the sidebar look translucent. But then the window controls are set inside this sidebar which, because it is floating, makes it look like these controls do something to the sidebar, not the application window.
Since the sidebar is now apparently overtop a window, stuff can be displayed underneath it. If you have seen any screenshots of this in action, it has probably been of the Music app, because few other applications do this, because why would you want stuff under the sidebar?
Here is the Music app screenshot I am obliged to include.
In the Photos app, it reminds me of a floating palette like Apple used to ship in iPhoto and Aperture. Those palettes allowed you to edit a photo in full-screen on a large display, and you could hide and show the tools with a keystroke. A floating sidebar and a hard gradient of a toolbar is a distracting combination. Whatever benefit it is supposed to impart is lost on me.
Photos running on MacOS 26.
I expected Apple to justify this on the basis that it maintains context or something, but it does not. Its Human Interface Guidelines only say this is done to “reinforce the separation and floating appearance of the sidebar”, though this is not applied consistently. In a column view in Finder, for example, there is a hard vertical edge below the rounded corner of the ostensibly floating sidebar. I am sure there are legibility reasons to do this but, again, it is a solution to a problem Apple created. It reimagined sidebars as a floating thing because it looks cool, then realized it does not work so well with the best Finder layout and built a fairly unrefined workaround.
The bottom right corner of the sidebar in Finder has a hard edge that breaks the impression it is floating.
I am spending an awful lot of words on the MacOS version because I think it is the least successful of the two Liquid Glass implementations I have used. MacOS still works a lot like MacOS. But it looks and feels like someone dictated, context-free, that it needed to reflect the redesign of iOS.
The iOS implementation is more successful since Liquid Glass feels — and I mean feels — like something designed first for touch-based systems. There is an increasingly tight relationship between the device and its physical environment. Longstanding features like True Tone meet new (well, new-ish) shifting highlights that respond to physical device orientation, situating the iPhone within its real-world context. Yet, even in its best implementation on iOS, Liquid Glass looks out of place when it is used in apps that rely on layouts driven by simple shapes and clean lines.
The Clock app is a great example of this clashing visual language. Each of its function is comprised mostly of a black screen, with white numerals and lines, and maybe a pop of colour — the second hand in the stopwatch or the green start button for timers. And then you tap or slide on the toolbar at the bottom to move through the app and, suddenly, a hyper-realistic glassy lens appears.
The Calculator app is another place where the limited application of Liquid Glass feels wrong. The buttons are drawn in some kind of glass texture — they are translucent and stretch in the same way as menus do — but the ring of shimmering highlight is so thin it may as well not exist. Apple does say in its Human Interface Guidelines that Liquid Glass should be used “sparingly”, but it uses the texture everywhere. There are far more generous buttons in Control Centre and on the passcode entry screen that feel more satisfying to press. Also, even though the buttons in Calculator are nominally translucent, the orange ones remain vibrant despite being presented against a solid black background.
This confused approach to visual design is present throughout the system. It has been there for years to some extent — Books has a realistic page flip animation, and Notes retained a paper texture for years after the iOS 7 redesign. But Liquid Glass is such a vastly different presentation compared to the rest of iOS that it stands out. When some elements have such a dynamic and visually rich presentation while others are plain, the combination does not feel harmonious. It feels unfinished.
This MacOS update is not all bad on a design front, to be fair. Sidebar icons now have a near-black fill instead of an application-specific colour; they gain the highlight colour when a particular sidebar item is active. This has the downside of making each application less distinct from each other, but it is a contrast improvement in a user interface that is mostly full of regressions. Also, inactive application windows are more obvious, with mid-grey toolbar items, window widgets, document icons, and window titles. On an iPhone, the biggest user interface good news is a sharp reduction in the number of modal dialogs. They are not entirely banished — not even close — but fewer whole-screen takeovers is good news on today’s larger-screened devices. The second piece of good news is the new design of edit menus that are no longer restricted to horizontal scrolling, and can expand into vertical-scrolling context menus. Also, on the Lock Screen, you can now move the widgets row to the bottom of the screen, and I quite like that.
There are enhancements downstream from the floating controls paradigm reinforced in this Liquid Glass update. In many iOS applications with a large list view — Messages and Mail, for example — the search field is now positioned at the bottom within easier reach. Floating controls do not require the Liquid Glass material; the Safari redesign in iOS 15 now seems like a preview of where Apple has now headed, and it obviously does not use these glassy controls. But I think the reconsidered approach in iOS 26 is more successful in part because the controls have this glassy quality.
There is, in fact, quite a lot to like in Apple’s operating system updates this year that have nothing to do with user interface changes. This is not a full review, so I will give you some quick hits, starting with the new call screening feature. I have had this switched on since I upgraded in June and it is a sincere life improvement. I still get three to six scam calls daily, but now my phone hardly ever notifies me, and I can still receive legitimate calls from numbers not in my contacts. Bringing Preview to iOS is an upgrade for anyone who spends huge chunks of time marking up PDF documents.
Spotlight on MacOS is both way more powerful and way easier to use — if you want to just search for files and not applications, or vice-versa, you can filter it. Oh, and there is now a clipboard history feature which, smartly, is turned off by default.
Oh, and you need to try “Spatial Scene” photos. If you have not tried this feature already, go and do it, especially on your Lock Screen. I have tried it with photos taken on iPhones, pictures shot with my digital camera, and even film scans, and I have been astonished at how it looks and, especially, feels. I have had the best results when I start with portraits from my digital camera; perhaps unsurprisingly, the spatial conversion is only as good as the quality of the source photo. For a good Lock Screen image, especially if you want to overlap the clock, you will want a picture with reasonably clear background separation and with a generous amount of space around the subject. There is a new filter in the Lock Screen image picker with good suggestions for Spatial Scene conversions. Again, you will want to try this.
And there are downsides to the two operating system updates I have used. Both are among the buggiest releases I can remember, likely in part because of the visual refresh. There are functional bugs, there are performance problems, and there are plenty of janky animations. There are so many little things that make the system feel fragile — the Wallpaper section of Settings, for example, has no idea widgets can now be aligned to the bottom of the Lock Screen, so they overlap with the clock. I hope this stuff gets fixed. Unfortunately, even though these operating systems are named for the coming calendar year, Apple will be shifting engineering efforts to the OS 27 releases in a matter of months.
The ‘Why’ Of It All
I kept asking myself “why?” as I used iOS 26 and MacOS 26 this summer. I wanted to understand the rationale for a complete makeover across Apple’s entire line of products. What was the imperative for unifying the systems’ visual interface design language? Why this, specifically?
Come to think of it, why is this the first time all of the operating systems are marketed with the same version number? And why did Apple decide this was the right time to make a dedicated “operating system” section on its website to show how it delivers a “more consistent experience” between devices? I have no evidence Apple would want to unify under some kind of “Apple OS” branding, but if Apple did want to make such a change, this feels like a very Apple-y way to soft-launch it. After all, your devices already run specific versions of Safari and Siri without them needing to be called “Mac Safari” and “Watch Siri”. Just throwing that thought into the wind.
If anything like that pans out, it could explain why Apple sees its products as needing a unified identity. In the present, however, it gives the impression of a changing relationship between Apple’s presentation of how it approaches the design of its products. Public statements for the past twenty-plus years have communicated the importance of letting each product be true to itself. It would be easy to dismiss this as marketing pablum if not for how reliably it has been backed by actual evidence. Yes, lines have become blurrier on the developer side with technologies like Catalyst, and on the user side by allowing iPhone and iPad apps to be run within MacOS. But a nominally unified look and feel makes the erosion of these boundaries even more obvious.
Perhaps I am overthinking this. It could simply be an exercise in branding. Apple’s operating systems have shared a proprietary system typeface for a decade without it meaning anything much more than a unified brand. And it is Apple’s brand that supersedes when applications look the same as each other no matter where they are used. In my experience so far, developers that strictly adhere to Apple’s recommendations and fully embrace Liquid Glass end up with applications having little individual character. This can sometimes work to a developer’s benefit, if their intention is for their apps to blend into the native experience, but some developers have such specific visual styles that an Apple-like use of Liquid Glass would actually be to their detriment. The updates to Cultured Code’s Things are extremely subtle which is, I think, the right call: I want Things to look like Things, not a generic to-do app.
A uniform look-and-feel across not just Apple’s apps and systems, but also third-party apps, is a most cynical answer to the question of why? and, while I do not wish to entirely dismiss it, it would disappoint me if this was Apple’s goal. What I think is true about this explanation is how Liquid Glass across most operating systems makes it possible for any app to instantly feel like it is platform-native, even when it is not.
Or maybe the why? of it all is for some future products, like a long-rumoured touch-screen laptop. This rationale drove speculation last time Apple updated the design of MacOS, and we still do not have touch screen Macs, so I am skeptical.
The frustrating thing about the answers I have given above to the question of why? is that I am only speculating. So far, Apple justifies this redesign, basically, by saying it is self-evidently good for all of its platforms to look the same. This is an inadequate explanation, and it is not borne out in my actual day-to-day use. I think iOS is mostly fine; Liquid Glass feels suited to a whole-screen-app touch-based context. In MacOS, it feels alien, unsuited to a multi-window keyboard-and-pointer system.
I am sure this visual language will be refined. I hope it has good bones since Apple is very obviously committed to Liquid Glass and its sea of floating buttons. But so far, it does not feel ready. I spent the summer using MacOS in its default configuration, aching to turn on “Reduce Transparency” in Accessibility settings. It is not pretty, especially in application toolbars, but it is less distracting because different parts of an application have their own distinct space.
I have tried, in this overview and critique, to be cautious about how much I allow the newness of it to colour my perception. Aqua was a polarizing look when it was introduced in Mac OS X. Leander Kahney, in a December 2000 article for Wired, wrote about longtime users who were downright offended by its appearance in the then-current Public Beta, relying on utilities to “Macify” the Mac. Again, this is from 2000, sixteen years after the Mac was introduced. As of today, Aqua has been around in some form for over nine years longer. But it at least felt like a complete idea; in his review of Mac OS X Leopard, John Siracusa wrote of how it was “a single, internally consistent design from top to bottom”.
These new operating systems do not feel like they are achieving that level of consistency despite being nominally more consistent across a half-dozen platforms. MacOS has received perhaps the most substantial visual changes, yet it is full of workarounds and exceptions. The changes made to iOS feel surface-level and clash with the visual language established since iOS 7. I am hopeful for the evolution of these ideas into something more cohesive. Most software is a work-in-progress, and the user interface is no exception. But all I can reflect upon is what is before me today. Quite simply, not only is it not ready, I am concerned about what it implies about Apple’s standards. Best case scenario is that it is setting up something really great and it all makes sense in hindsight. But I still have to live with it, in this condition, on today’s hardware that is, to me, less of a showcase for Apple’s visual design cleverness and more of a means to get things done. It is not a tragedy, but I would like to fast-forward through two or three years’ worth of updates to get to a point where, I hope, it is much better than it is today.
The Secret Service is lying to the press. They know it’s just a normal criminal SIM farm and are hyping it into some sort of national security or espionage threat. We know this because they are using the correct technical terms that demonstrate their understanding of typical SIM farm crimes. The claim that they will likely find other such SIM farms in other cities likewise shows they understand this is a normal criminal activity and not any special national security threat.
One of the things we must always keep in mind is that press releases are written to persuade. That is as true for businesses as it is for various government agencies. In this case, the Secret Service wanted attention, so they exaggerated the threat. And one wonders why public trust in institutions is falling.
Something I missed in posting about Apple’s critical appraisal of the Digital Markets Act is its timing. Why now? Well, it turns out the European Commission sought feedback beginning in July, and with a deadline of just before midnight on 24 September. That is why it published that statement, and why Google did the same.
Oliver Bethell, Google’s “senior director, competition”, a job title which implies a day spent chuckling to oneself:
Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.
Key parts of the European tourism industry have already seen free, direct booking traffic from Google Search plummet by up to 30%. A recent study on the economic impact of the DMA estimates that European businesses across sectors could face revenue losses of up to €114 billion.
The study in question, though published by Copenhagen Business School, was funded by the Computer & Communications Industry
Association, a tech industry lobbying firm funded in part by Google. I do not have the background to assess if the paper’s conclusions are well-founded, but it should be noted the low-end of the paper’s estimates was a loss of €8.5 billion, or just 0.05% of total industry revenue (page 45). The same lobbyists also funded a survey (PDF) conducted online by Nextrade Group.
Like Apple, Google clearly wants this law to go away. It might say it “remain[s] committed to complying with the DMA” and that it “appreciate[s] the Commission’s consistent openness to regulatory dialogue”, but nobody is fooled. To its credit, Google posted the full response (PDF) it sent the Commission which, though clearly defensive, has less of a public relations sheen than either of the company’s press releases.
In 2023 Lina Khan, then-chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, sued Amazon over using (PDF) “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions” and “knowingly complicat[ing] the cancellation process”. Some people thought this case was a long-shot, or attempted to use Khan’s scholarshipagainst her.
Earlier this week, the trial began to adjudicate the government’s claims which, in addition to accusing Amazon itself, also involved charges against company executives. It was looking promising for the FTC.
The FTC notched an early win in the case last week when U.S. District Court Judge John Chun ruled Amazon and two senior executives violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by gathering Prime members’ billing information before disclosing the terms of the service.
Chun also said that the two senior Amazon executives would be individually liable if a jury sides with the FTC due to the level of oversight they maintained over the Prime enrollment and cancellation process.
The Federal Trade Commission has secured a historic order with Amazon.com, Inc., as well as Senior Vice President Neil Lindsay and Vice President Jamil Ghani, settling allegations that Amazon enrolled millions of consumers in Prime subscriptions without their consent, and knowingly made it difficult for consumers to cancel. Amazon will be required to pay a $1 billion civil penalty, provide $1.5 billion in refunds back to consumers harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices, and cease unlawful enrollment and cancellation practices for Prime.
As usual for settlements like these, Amazon will admit no wrongdoing. The executives will not face liability, something Adam Kovacevich, head of the Chamber of Progress, a tech industry lobbying group, said today was a “wild … theory” driven by “Khan’s ego”. Nonsense. The judge in the case, after saying Amazon broke the law, gave credence to the concept these executives were personally liable for the harm they were alleged to have caused.
Based on my initial read, do the executives need to do anything separate from that? Do they pay any fines? Are they being demoted? Are they subject to extra monitoring? Do they need to admit any guilt whatsoever? The answers, as far as I can tell are no, no, no, no, and no. What’s worse, the order applies to the executives for only three years — seven years less than the company.
Two-and-a-half billion is a lot of dollars in the abstract. CIRP estimates there are 197 million U.S. subscribers to Amazon Prime, which costs anywhere from $7 to $15 per month. For the sake of argument, assume everyone is — on average — on the annual plan of $11.58 per month. It will take barely more than one billing cycle for Amazon to recoup that FTC settlement. The executives previously charged will bear little responsibility for this outcome.
Those million-dollar inauguration “investments”, as CBS News put it, sure are paying off.
The immensely popular social media app TikTok has been collecting sensitive information from hundreds of thousands of Canadians under 13 years old, a joint investigation by privacy authorities found.
[…]
The privacy commissioners said TikTok agreed to enhance its age verification and provide up-front notices about its wide-ranging collection of data.
Off the top, the Privacy Commissioner’s report was limited in scope and did not examine “perceived risks to national security” since they were not related to “privacy in the context of commercial activity” and have been adjudicated elsewhere. The results of national security reviews by other agencies have not been published. However, the Commissioner’s review of the company’s privacy practices is still comprehensive for what was in scope.
TikTok detects and removes about 500,000 accounts of Canadian children under 13 annually. Yet even though the company has dedicated significant engineering efforts to estimating users’ ages for advertising and to produce recommendations, it has not developed similar capabilities for restricting minors’ access.
Despite my skepticism of the Commissioner’s efficacy in cases like these, this investigation produced a number of results. TikTok made several changes as the investigation progressed, including restricting ad targeting to minors:
As an additional measure, in its response to the Offices’ Preliminary Report of Investigation, TikTok committed to limit ad targeting for users under 18 in Canada. TikTok informed the Offices that it implemented this change on April 1st, 2025. As a result, advertisers can no longer deliver targeted ads to users under 18, other than according to generic data (such as language and approximate location).
This is a restriction TikTok has in place for some regions, but not everywhere. It is not unique to TikTok, either; Meta and Google targeted minors, and Meta reportedly guessed teens’ emotional state for ad targeting purposes. This industry cannot police itself. All of these companies say they have rules against ad targeting to children and have done so for years, yet all of them have been found to ignore those rules when they are inconvenient.
Apple issued a press release criticizing the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act in a curious mix of countries. It published it on its European sites — of course — and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, all English-speaking. It also issued the same press release in Brazil, China, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, and Thailand — and a handful of other places — but not in Argentina, India, Japan, Mexico, or Singapore. Why this mix? Why did Apple bother to translate it into Thai but not Japanese? It is a fine mystery. Read into it what you will.
It’s been more than a year since the Digital Markets Act was implemented. Over that time, it’s become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU. It’s exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together. And as new technologies come out, our European users’ Apple products will only fall further behind.
[…]
That’s why we’re urging regulators to take a closer look at how the law is affecting the EU citizens who use Apple products every day. We believe our users in Europe deserve the best experience on our technology, at the same standard we provide in the rest of the world — and that’s what we’ll keep fighting to deliver.
It thinks the DMA should disappear.
Its reasoning is not great; Michael Tsai read the company’s feature delays more closely and is not convinced. One of the delayed features is Live Translation, about which I wrote:
This is kind of a funny limitation because fully half the languages Live Translation works with — French, German, and Spanish — are the versions spoken in their respective E.U. countries and not, for example, Canadian French or Chilean Spanish. […]
Because of its launch languages, I think Apple expects this holdup will not last for long.
I did not account for a cynical option: Apple is launching with these languages as leverage.
The way I read Apple’s press release is as a fundamental disagreement between the role each party believes it should play, particularly when it comes to user privacy. Apple seems to believe it is its responsibility to implement technical controls to fulfill its definition of privacy and, if that impacts competition and compatibility, too bad. E.U. regulators seem to believe it has policy protections for user privacy, and that users should get to decide how their private data is shared.
Apple’s claim of “the same standard we provide in the rest of the world” rings somewhat hollow, given that it often adjusts its technology and services to comply with local laws. The company has made significant concessions to operate in China, doesn’t offer FaceTime in the United Arab Emirates, and removes apps from the still-functional Russian App Store at the Russian government’s request. Apple likely pushed back in less public ways in those countries, but in the EU, this public statement appears aimed at rallying its users and influencing the regulatory conversation.
I know what Engst is saying here, and I agree with the sentiment, but this is a bad group of countries to be lumped in together with. That does not mean the DMA is equal to the kinds of policies that restrict services in these other countries. It remains noteworthy how strict Apple is in restricting DMA-mandated features only to countries where they are required, but you can just change your region to work around the UAE FaceTime block.
The opposition’s shadow finance minister James Paterson has since urged the Australian Labor government to follow suit.
Mr Paterson told Sky News if the US was able to create a “safer version” of TikTok, then Australia should liaise with the Trump administration to become part of that solution.
“It would be an unfortunate thing if there was a safe version of TikTok in the United States, but a version of TikTok in Australia which was still controlled by a foreign authoritarian government,” he said.
I am not sure people in Australia are asking for yet more of the country’s media to be under the thumb of Rupert Murdoch. Then again, I also do not think the world needs more social media platforms controlled by the United States, though that is very clearly the wedge the U.S. government is creating: countries can accept the existing version of TikTok, adopt the new U.S.-approved one, or ban them both. The U.S. spinoff does not resolve user privacy problems and it raises new concerns about the goals of its government-friendly ownership and management.
Do you manage a Patreon page as a “creator”? I do; it is where you can give me five dollars per month to add to my guilt over not finishing my thoughts about Liquid Glass.1 You do not have to give me five dollars. I feel guilty enough as it is.
Anyway, you might have missed an email Patreon sent today advising you that Autopilot will be switched on beginning October 1 unless you manually turn it off. According to Patreon’s email:
Autopilot is a growth engine that automatically sends your members and potential members strategic, timely offers which encourage them to join, upgrade, or retain your membership — without you having to lift a finger.
As an extremely casual user, I do not love this; I think it is basically spam. I am sympathetic toward those who make their living with Patreon. I turned this off. If you have a Patreon creator page and missed this email, now you know.
And if you are a subscriber to anyone on Patreon and begin receiving begging emails next week, please be gracious. They might not be aware this feature was switched on.
I am most looking forward to reading others’ reviews when I am done, which I have so far avoided so my own piece is not tainted. ↥︎
Tonight, I set up a new Apple TV — well, as “new” as a refurbished 2022-though-still-current-generation model can be — and it was not a good time. I know Apple might be releasing a new model later this year, but any upgrades are probably irrelevant for how I have used my existing ten-year-old model. I do not even have a 4K television.
My older model has some drawbacks. It is pretty slow, and the storage space is pitiful — I think it is the 32 GB model — so it keeps offloading apps. What I wanted to do was get a new one and bump the old Apple TV to my kitchen, where I have a receiver and a set of speakers I have used with Bluetooth, and then I would be able to AirPlay music in all my entertaining spaces. Real simple stuff.
Jason Snell, in a sadly still-relevant Six Colors article:
The setup starts promisingly: You can bring your iPhone near the Apple TV, and it will automatically log your Apple ID in. If you’ve got the One Home Screen feature turned on, all your apps will load and appear in all the right places. It will feel like you’ve done a data transfer.
But it’s all a mirage.
One Home Screen is a nice feature, but it’s not an iCloud backup of your Apple TV, nor is it the Apple TV equivalent of Migration Assistant. It is exactly what its name suggests — a home-screen-syncing feature and nothing more.
I went into this upgrade realizing my wife and I would need to set up all our streaming apps again. (She was cool with it.) That is not great, but at least I had that expectation.
But even the “promising” parts of the setup experience did not work for me. When I brought my iPhone near the new Apple TV, it spun before throwing a mysterious error. After setting it up manually, it thought it was not connected to Wi-Fi — even though it was — and then it tried syncing the home screen. Some of the apps are right, but it has not synced all of them, and none of them are in the correct position.
Then I opened Music on my phone to try and AirPlay to both Apple TVs, only to find it was not listed. It turns out that is a separate step. I had to add it to my Home, which again involved me bringing my iPhone into close proximity and tapping a button. This failed the three times I tried it. So I restarted my Apple TV and my phone, and then Settings told me I needed to complete my Home setup. I guess it worked but somehow did not move to the next step. At last, AirPlay worked — and, frankly, it is pretty great.
I know bugs happen about as often as blog posts complaining about bugs. This thing is basically an appliance, though. I am glad Apple ultimately did not make a car.
The U.S. Secret Service dismantled a network of electronic devices located throughout the New York tristate area that were used to conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials, which represented an imminent threat to the agency’s protective operations.
This protective intelligence investigation led to the discovery of more than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites.
That sure is a lot of SIM cards, and a scary-sounding mix of words in the press release:
“[…] telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials […]”
“[…] these devices could be used to conduct a wide range of telecommunications attacks […]”
“These devices were concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the United Nations General Assembly […]”
Reporters pounced. The New York Times, NBC News, CBS News, and even security publications like the Record seized on dramatic statements like those, and another said by the special agent in a video the Service released: “this network had the potential to […] essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City”. Scary stuff.
When I read the early reports, it sure looked to me like some reporters were getting a little over their skis.
For a start, emphasizing the apparent proximity to the U.N. in New York seems to me like a stretch. A thirty-five mile area around the U.N. looks like this — and that is diameter, not radius. If you cannot see that or this third-party website goes away at some point, that is a circle encompassing just about the entire island of Manhattan, going deep into Brooklyn and Queens, stretching all the way up to Chappaqua, and out into Connecticut and New Jersey. That is a massive area. One could just as easily say it was within thirty-five miles of any number of New York-based landmarks and be just as accurate.
Second, the ability to “facilitat[e] anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises” is common to basically any internet-connected device. The scale of this one is notable, but you do not need a hundred-thousand SIM cards to make criminal plans. And the apparent possibility of “shut[ting] down the cellular network in New York” is similarly common to any large-scale installation. This is undeniably peculiar, huge, and it seems to be nefarious, but a lot of this seems to be a red herring.
Despite speculation in some reporting about SIM farm operation that suggests it was created by a foreign state such as Russia or China and used for espionage, it’s far more likely that the operation’s central focus was scams and other profit-motivated forms of cybercrime, says Ben Coon, who leads intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Unit 221b and has carried out multiple investigations into SIM farms. “The disruption of cell services is possible, flooding the network to the degree that it couldn’t take any more traffic,” Coon says. “My gut is telling me there was some type of fraud involved here.”
These reporters point to a CNN article by John Miller and Celina Tebor elaborating on the threat to “senior U.S. government officials”: they were swatting calls targeting various lawmakers. Not nothing and certainly dangerous, but this is not looking anything like how many reporters have described it, nor what the U.S. Secret Service is suggesting through its word choices.
This story of how Full Fact geolocated a viral video claiming to be shot in London is intriguing because it disproves its own headline’s claim that “A.I. helped”.
But in this case, directly reverse image searching through Google took me to a TikTok video with a location marker for ‘Pondok Pesantren Al Fatah Temboro’, in Indonesia.
This is enough information to give the Full Fact team a great start: translated, it is a school in Temboro.
Green:
We found a slightly different compilation of similar videos on Facebook, seemingly from the same area, also with women in Islamic dress, but with more geographical features visible, such as a sign and clearer views of buildings.
Using stills from this video as references, we asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT if it could provide coordinates to the location, using the possible location of the Al Fatah school in Indonesia.
Up to the point where ChatGPT was invoked, there is no indication any A.I. tools were used. After that — and I do not intend to be mean — it is unclear to me why anyone would ask ChatGPT for coordinates to a known, named location when you can just search Google Maps. It is the third one down in my searches; the first two would quickly be eliminated when comparing to either video.
Green:
But this did not match the location of the original video we were trying to fact check—or anywhere in the near vicinity. While we were very confident the video had been filmed in Temboro, we needed to investigate further to prove this.
After this, no A.I. tools were used. ChatGPT was only able to do as much as a basic Google Maps search. After that, Full Fact had to do some old-fashioned comparative geolocation, and were ultimately successful.
And thus we see the positive uses of geolocation by chatbots.
On the contrary, this proved little about the advantages of A.I. geolocation. These tools can certainly be beneficial; Green links to an experiment in Bellingcat in comparison to Google’s reverse image search tools.
I think Full Fact did great work in geolocating this video and deflating its hateful context in that tweet. But a closer reading of the actual steps taken shows any credit to ChatGPT or A.I. is overblown.
Amazon revealed at its annual Accelerate seller conference in Seattle that it is shutting down its long-running “commingling” program — a move that drew louder applause from sellers than any other update of the morning.
The decision marks the end of a controversial practice in which Amazon pooled identical items from different sellers under one barcode. The system, intended to speed deliveries and save warehouse space, had also allowed counterfeit or expired goods to be mixed in with authentic ones, according to The Wall Street Journal. For years, brands complained that commingling made it difficult to trace problems back to specific sellers and left their reputations vulnerable when customers received knockoffs. In 2013, Johnson & Johnson temporarily pulled many of its consumer products from Amazon, arguing the retailer wasn’t doing enough to curb third-party sales of damaged or expired goods.
I had no idea Amazon did this until I complained on Mastodon about how terrible its shopping experience is, and Ben replied referencing this practice, nor did I know it has been doing so for at least twelve years. I am certain I have received counterfeit products more than once from Amazon, and I think this is how it happened.
Rather than because of wifi, the reason this happened is because these so-called AIs are just regurgitating information that has been parsed from scanning the internet. It will have been trained on recipes written by professional chefs, home cooks and cookery sites, then combined this information to create something that sounds a lot like a recipe for a Korean sauce. But it, not being an intelligence, doesn’t know what Korean sauce is, nor what recipes are, because it doesn’t know anything. So it can only make noises that sound like the way real humans have described things. Hence it having no way of knowing that ingredients haven’t already been mixed — just the ability to mimic recipe-like noises. The recipes it will have been trained on will say “after you’ve combined the ingredients…” so it does too.
I would love to know how this demo was supposed to go. In an ideal world, is it supposed to walk you through the preparation ingredient-by-ingredient? If Jack Mancuso had picked up the soy sauce, would it have guided the recipe-suggested amount? That would be impressive, if it had worked. The New York Times’ tech reporters got to try the glasses for about thirty minutes and, while they shared no details, said it was “as spotty as Mr. Zuckerberg’s demonstration”.
I think Walker is too hard on the faux off-the-cuff remarks, though they are mock-worthy in the context of the failed demo. But I think the diagnosis of this is entirely correct: what we think of as “A.I.” is kind of overkill for this situation. I can see some utility. For example, I could not find a written recipe that exactly matched the ingredients on Mancuso’s bench, but perhaps Meta’s A.I. software can identify the ingredients, and assume the lemons are substituting for rice vinegar. Sure. After that, what would actually be useful is a straightforward recitation of a specific recipe: measure out a quarter-cup of soy sauce and pour it into a bowl; next, stir in one tablespoon of honey — that kind of thing. This is pretty basic text-to-speech stuff, though it would be cool if it can respond to questions like how much ginger?, and did I already add the honey?, too.
Also, I would want to know which recipe it was following. A.I. has a terrible problem with not crediting its sources of information in general, and it is no different here.
Also — and this probably goes without saying — even if these glasses worked as well as Meta suggests they should, there is no way I would buy a pair. You are to tell me that I should strap a legacy of twenty years of privacy violations and user hostility to my face? Oh, please.
Data journalists monitored Ticketmaster’s website for seven months leading up to this weekend’s show at Scotiabank Arena, closely tracking seats and prices to find out exactly how the box-office system works.
Here are the key findings:
Ticketmaster doesn’t list every seat when a sale begins.
Hikes prices mid-sale.
Collects fees twice on tickets scalped on its site.
Posing as scalpers and equipped with hidden cameras, the journalists were pitched on Ticketmaster’s professional reseller program.
[…]
TradeDesk allows scalpers to upload large quantities of tickets purchased from Ticketmaster’s site and quickly list them again for resale. With the click of a button, scalpers can hike or drop prices on reams of tickets on Ticketmaster’s site based on their assessment of fan demand.
Ticketmaster, of course, disputed these journalists’ findings. But the very existence of TradeDesk — owned by Ticketmaster — seems to be in direct opposition to Ticketmaster’s obligations to purchasers. One part of the company is ostensibly in the business of making sure legitimate buyers acquire no more than their fair share of tickets to a popular show, while another part facilitates easy reselling at massive scale. The TradeDesk platform is not something accessible by just anyone; you cannot create an account on demand. Someone from Ticketmaster has to set up your TradeDesk account for you.
These stories have now become a key piece of evidence in a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster:
The FTC alleges that in public, Ticketmaster maintains that its business model is at odds with brokers that routinely exceed ticket limits. But in private, Ticketmaster acknowledged that its business model and bottom line benefit from brokers preventing ordinary Americans from purchasing tickets to the shows they want to see at the prices artists set.
The complaint’s description (PDF) of the relationship between Ticketmaster and TradeDesk, beginning at paragraph 84 and continuing through paragraph 101, is damning. If true, Ticketmaster must be aware of the scalper economy it is effectively facilitating through TradeDesk.
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While the prerecorded videos of the products in use were slick and highly produced, some of the live demos simply failed.
“Glasses are the ideal form factor for personal superintelligence because they let you stay present in the moment while getting access to all of these AI capabilities to make you smarter, help you communicate better, improve your memory, improve your senses,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated at the start of the event, but the ensuing bloopers certainly didn’t make it feel that way.
I like that Meta took a chance with live demos but, in addition to the bloopers, Connect felt like another showcase of an inspiration-bereft business. The opening was a more grounded — figuratively and literally — version of the Google Glass skydive from 2012. Then, beginning at about 52 minutes, Zuckerberg introduced the wrist-based control system, saying “every new computing platform has a new way to interact with it”, summarizing a piece of the Macworld 2007 iPhone introduction. It is not that I am offended by Meta cribbing others’ marketing. What I find amusing, more than anything, is Zuckerberg’s clear desire to be thought of as an inventor and futurist, despite having seemingly few original ideas.
If you want reviews of the iPhone 17 — mostly the Pro — from the perspective of photography, two of the best come from Chris Niccolls and Jordan Drake of PetaPixel and Tyler Stalman. Coincidentally, both from right here in Calgary. I am not in the market for an upgrade, but I think these are two of the most comprehensive and interesting reviews I have seen specifically about the photo and video features. Alas, both are video-based reviews, so if that is not your bag, sorry.
Niccolls and Drake walk you through the typical PetaPixel review, just as you want it. The Portrait Mode upgrades they show are obvious to me. Stalman’s test of Action Mode plus the 8× zoom feature is wild. He also took a bunch of spectacular photos at the Olds Rodeo last week. Each of these reviews focuses on something different, with notably divergent opinions on some video features.
The arrangement, discussed by U.S. and Chinese negotiators in Madrid this week, would create a new U.S. entity to operate the app, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the people said.
Existing users in the U.S. would be asked to shift to a new app, which TikTok has built and is testing, people familiar with the matter said. […]
“Asked”?
[…] TikTok engineers will re-create a set of content-recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology licensed from TikTok’s parent ByteDance, the people said. U.S. software giant Oracle, a longtime TikTok partner, would handle user data at its facilities in Texas, they said. […]
And I am sure this will satisfy everyone who has found TikTok’s success alarming. Oracle already has access to TikTok’s source code and — at best — will allow TikTok employees to rewrite it to get a “Made in the USA” stamp. It is possible the recommendations system will be unchanged.
Of course, Chinese investors will still have a stake in the U.S. company and, unless the U.S. company is entirely siloed from TikTok everywhere else, users will still be recommended videos the U.S. government framed as a national security threat. But now the U.S. app will seem suspicious to anyone who has been skeptical of the country’s increasingstate involvement in the tech industry.
Some TikTok users are going to be furious about this. Some people who viewed its Chinese ownership as inherently problematic are not going to be satisfied by this. It is going to make everyone a little bit upset. It is unclear if it will solve any of the pressing concerns, either. From a distance and in summary, what it looks like is the U.S. government panicked over the only massively successful social media app not based in the U.S., then wrested control of the app and gave it to people friendlier to this government. That is too simplified but, also, not inaccurate.
Apple revealed Liquid Glass as part of its WWDC announcement this June, with all the pomp usually reserved for shiny new gear. The press release promised a “delightful and elegant new software design” that “reflects and refracts its surroundings while dynamically transforming to bring greater focus to content.” Today it launches globally onto compatible Apple devices.
If you haven’t encountered it yet, brace yourself. Inspired by visionOS — the software powering the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset — Liquid Glass infuses every Apple platform with a layered glass aesthetic. This is paired with gloopy animations and a fixation on hiding interface components when possible—and showing content through them when it isn’t.
Grannell interviewed several developers for this piece, which is ultimately quite critical of Liquid Glass.
I, too, have thoughts, but life got in the way of completing anything by today’s release. Luckily, there is no shortage of people with opinions about this new material and the broader redesign across Apple’s family of operating systems. I trust you will find their commentary adequate, and I hope you will still be interested in mine whenever I can finish.
Apple has designed extensive rules to try and minimize some of the most distracting impacts of Liquid Glass. For example, if you’re viewing black-on-white content and suddenly scroll past a darker image, the UI widgets will only flip from light to dark mode based on the speed of your scrolling: scroll past it quickly and they won’t flip; it’s only if you slow down or stop with the widgets over the image that they’ll shift into dark mode.
While clever, this also feels remarkably over-engineered to work around the fundamental nature of these devices. It’s a little reminiscent of the old apocryphal story about how the American space industry spent years and millions of dollars designing a pen that could write in space while the Soviets used a pencil. Perhaps they should have used a design that doesn’t require adjusting its look on the fly.
Also, Federico Viticci has published his extraordinary annual review. In addition to the section on design, I am also looking forward to his thoughts in particular on iPadOS 26. Lots to read and lots to discover.
My husband, who grew up in Switzerland, helped me test: He spoke French, which turned into English audio in my ears. I responded in English, and he read the French translation on-screen.
There was a delay between his speech and my in-ear translation, which made the conversation stilted. This is par for the course for real-time translators, including the Google Meet and Google Pixel versions I’ve tried. But the AirPods delay was long and it didn’t always transcribe speech correctly, leading to nonsensical translations. (“Down” became “done,” “smoothie” became “movie,” etc.)
Live Translation is still in beta, so I’ll try it again down the line.
The AirPods Pro 3 are the first AirPods to include a dedicated heart rate sensor.
You can start about 50 different workouts from the iOS 26 fitness app on your iPhone, and your AirPods Pro 3 become the heart rate source, no Apple Watch required. They even sync with Workout Buddy for Apple Intelligence-based workout guidance and Apple Music to launch a workout playlist automatically.
I do not use an Apple Watch, so this feature is compelling for tracking my cycling trips more comprehensively. A similar sensor is in the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2; I wonder if the workout tracking features will work with those, too.
Apple’s AirPods remain, for me, the most difficult product not to buy. I enjoyed my AirPods 2 while they lasted, and using a set of wired headphones afterwards does not feel quite right. But these new models still do not have replaceable batteries. It is hard to write this without sounding preachy, so just assume this is my problem, not yours. I continue to be perplexed by treating perfectly good speaker drivers, microphones, and chips as disposable simply because they are packaged with a known consumable part. The engineering for swappable batteries would be, I assume, diabolical, but I still cannot get to a point where I am okay with spending over three hundred Canadian dollars every few years because of this predictable limitation.
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Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most significant and far-reaching allegations in the case and with today’s decision the case is narrowed significantly. […]
It is hard to believe this absurd dispute has gone on for a year already. Mullenweg frames this as a win because, well, of course he does — and these are pretty serious allegations to have been dismissed. But as Margaret Attridge writes, at Courthouse News Service, the majority of claims have been allowed to stand:
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, a Joe Biden appointee, denied Automattic and Mullenweg’s bid to strike or dismiss claims including defamation, trade libel, unjust enrichment and intentional interference with contractual and economic relations claims.
[…] This is a win not just for us but for all open source maintainers and contributors.
Even if this case ends with a complete victory for Mullenweg and Automattic, his actions have shaken my support of — and faith in — the WordPress ecosystem. The original dispute is something I can understand. Mullenweg’s response, however, remains alarming. Actions do not need to be illegal for them to be wrong.
Apple says on its feature availability webpage that “Apple Intelligence: Live Translation with AirPods” won’t be available if both the user is physically in the EU and their Apple Account region is in the EU. Apple doesn’t give a reason for the restriction, but legal and regulatory pressures seem the most plausible culprits.
This is kind of a funny limitation because fully half the languages Live Translation works with — French, German, and Spanish — are the versions spoken in their respective E.U. countries and not, for example, Canadian French or Chilean Spanish. As written, the most impressive implementation of this feature only works if both parties are outside the E.U. or, if they are within the E.U., neither has an E.U. Apple Account. A U.K. or U.S. resident hoping to speak with a Parisian local? That is not going to work, but the reverse — presumably — would.
Because of its launch languages, I think Apple expects this holdup will not last for long.
Do note the extremely limited language selection at launch, too. Compare the supported Live Translation languages against the Priority Messages in Mail languages just below it on the feature availability page. Canadian English is apparently not worth urgently addressing.
The third theory of Meta doesn’t describe the company as a laughable failure or a great success. This theory says that focusing on business results is beside the point when Meta’s creating something genuinely dark and sinister, something that perverts human nature and takes advantage of some of the most vulnerable people in society. I’m no expert in moral philosophy and ethics. But I feel pretty comfortable using the word evil to describe a company that impersonates real people without their permission in order to build AI sex bots that engage in sexual fantasies with children and lure senior citizens to their deaths.
The fourth theory of Meta is somehow even darker than the third.
As you can probably see, the theories get more cynical and, frankly, a touch conspiratorial. I am a firm believer in a modified version of Johnson’s first theory, which is that Meta is uncool and cringeworthy. That is not wrong, but I think it goes much farther. It is a deeply unfocused and uninteresting company. It jumps from one idea to another but, because it is still so dependent on ad revenue, everything must feed that machine. And personalized advertising is a fundamentally dull and kind of dirty thing no matter how much Meta wants to gussy it up in its marketing materials. That is not enough for Mark Zuckerberg, who is not hosting hour-plus livestreams before cheering crowds to show off ads. That would be a boring time for everyone. He wants the glory of hardware and platforms, but neither one is a meaningful part of what Meta actually does.
When All You Have Is a Robots.txt Hammer
Last year, Robb Knight figured out how Perplexity, an artificial intelligence search engine, was evading instructions not to crawl particular sites. Knight learned that Perplexity’s engine would use an unlisted user agent to scrape summaries of pages on websites where Perplexity was blocked. In my testing, I found the summaries were outdated by hours-to-days, indicating to me the pages were not being actively visited as though guided by a user. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, told Mark Sullivan, of Fast Company, it was the fault of a third-party crawler and denied wrongdoing.
This dispute was, I think, a clear marker in a debate concerning what control website owners have — or ought to have — over access to and interpretation of their websites, an issue that was recently re-raised in an article by Mike Masnick of Techdirt. Masnick explores scraper gating services offered by Cloudflare and Reddit’s blocking of the Internet Archive, and concludes the web is being cleaved in two:
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about LLM/AI tools these days, in terms of how they can be overhyped, how they can be misused, and certainly over who has power and control over the systems. But it’s deeply concerning to me how many people who supported an open internet and the fundamental principles that underlie that have now given up on those principles because they see that some AI companies might benefit from an open internet.
The problem isn’t just ideological — it’s practical. We’re watching the construction of a fundamentally different internet, one where access is controlled by gatekeepers and paywalls rather than governed by open protocols and user choice. And we’re doing it in the name of stopping AI companies, even though the real result will be to concentrate even more power in the hands of those same large tech companies while making the internet less useful for everyone else.
This is a passionately argued article about a thorny issue. I, too, am saddened by an increasingly walled-off web, whether through payment gates or the softer barriers of login or email subscriptions. Yet Masnick misses the mark in ways I think he is usually more careful about.
In the second quoted paragraph above, for example, Masnick laments an internet “governed [less] by open protocols and user choice” than “controlled by gatekeepers”. These are presented as opposing qualities, but they are in fact complementary. Open protocols frequently contain specifications for authentication, allowing users and administrators to limit access. Robots.txt is an open standard that is specifically intended to communicate access rules. Thus, while an open web is averse to centralization and proprietary technologies, it does not necessarily mean a porous web. The open web does not necessarily come without financial cost to human users. I see no reason the same principle should not be applied to robots, too.
Masnick:
This illustrates the core problem: we’re not just blocking bulk AI training anymore. We’re blocking legitimate individual use of AI tools to access and analyze web content. That’s not protecting creator rights — that’s breaking the fundamental promise of the web that if you publish something publicly, people should be able to access and use it.
Masnick is entirely correct: people should be able to access and use it. They should be able to use any web browser they like, with whatever browser extensions and user scripts they desire. That does not necessarily extend to machines. The specific use case Masnick is concerned with is that he uses Lex as a kind of editorial verification step. When he references some news sites, however, Lex is blocked from reading them and therefore cannot provide notes on whether Masnick’s interpretation of a particular article is accurate. “I’m not trying to train an A.I. on those articles”, Masnick writes. “I’m just asking it to read over the article, read over what I’ve written, and give me a sense” if they jibe.
That may well be the case, but the blame for mistrust lies squarely with artificial intelligence companies. The original sin of representatives of this industry was to believe they did not require permission to ingest a subset of the corpus of human knowledge and expression, nor did they need to offer compensation. They did not seem to draw hard ethical lines around what they would consume for training, either — if it was publicly available, it could become part of their model. Anthropic and Meta both relied on materials available at LibGen, many of which are hosted without permission. A training data set included fan-made subtitles, which can be treated as illicit derivative works. I cannot blame any publisher for treating these automated visitors as untrustworthy or even hostile because A.I. companies have sabotaged attempts at building trust. Some seem to treat the restrictions of a robots.txt file as mere suggestions to be worked around. How can a publisher be confident the user-initiated retrieval of their articles, as Masnick is doing, is not used for training in any way?
Masnick is right, however, to be worried about how this is bifurcating the web. Websites like 404 Media have explicitly cited A.I. scraping as the reason for imposing a login wall. A cynical person might view this as a convenient excuse to collect ever-important email addresses and, while I cannot disprove that, it is still a barrier to entry. Then there are the unintended consequences of trying to impose limits on scraping. After Reddit announced it would block the Internet Archive, probably to comply with some kind of exclusivity expectations in its agreements with Google and OpenAI, it implied the Archive does not pass along the robots.txt rules of the sites in its collection. If a website administrator truly does not want the material on their site to be used for A.I. training, they would need to prevent the Internet Archive from scraping as well — and that would be horrible consequence.
Of course, Reddit does not block A.I. scraping on principle. It appears to be a contractual matter, where third-parties pay the company some massive amount of money for access. Anthropic’s recent proposed settlement supposed a price of a billion-and-a-half dollars would sufficiently compensate authors of the books it pirated. M.G. Siegler called this “pulling up a drawbridge” by setting a high cost floor that will lock out insufficiently funded competitors. Masnick worries about the same thing, predicting the ultimate winners of this will be “the same large tech companies that can afford licensing deals and that have the resources to navigate an increasingly complex web of access restrictions”.
To be sure, intellectual property law is a mess, and encouraging copyright maximalism will have negative consequences. The U.S. already has some of the longest copyright protections in the world, and which have unfortunately spilled into Canada thanks to trade agreements. But A.I. organizations have not created a bottom-up rebellious exploration of the limits of intellectual property law. They are big businesses with deep pockets exploiting decades of news, blogging, photography, video, and art. Nobody, as near as makes no difference, expected something they published online would one day feed the machines that now produce personalized Facebook slop.
Masnick acknowledges faults like these in his conclusion, but I do not think his proposed solutions are very strong:
None of this means we should ignore legitimate concerns about AI training or creator compensation. But we should address those concerns through mechanisms that preserve internet openness rather than destroy it. That might mean new business models, better attribution systems, or novel approaches to creator compensation. What it shouldn’t mean is abandoning the fundamental architecture of the web.
The “new business models” and “better attribution systems” are not elucidated here, but the compensation pitch seems like a disaster in the making to me. It is also from Masnick; here is the nut of his explanation:
But… that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better solution. If the tech companies need good, well-written content to fill their training systems, and the world needs good, high-quality journalism, why don’t the big AI companies agree to start funding journalists and solve both problems in one move?
What Masnick proposes is that A.I. companies could pay journalists to produce new articles for their training data. Respectfully, this would be so insubstantial as to be worthless. To train their models, A.I. companies are ingesting the millions of websites, tens of millions of YouTube videos, hundreds of thousands of books, and probably far more — the training data is opaque. It is almost like a perverse version of fair use. Instead of a small amount of an existing work becoming the basis of a larger body of work — like the quotes I am using and attributing in this article — this is a massive library of fully captured information. Any single piece is of little consequence to the whole, but the whole does not work as well without all those tiny pieces.
The output of a single journalist is inconsequential, an argument Masnick also makes: “[a]ny individual piece of content (or even 80k pieces of content) is actually not worth that much” in the scope of training a large language model. This is near the beginning of the same piece he concludes by arguing we need “novel approaches to creator compensation”. Why would A.I. companies pay journalists to produce the microscopic portion of words training their systems when they have historically used billions — perhaps trillions — of freebies? There are other ways I can think of why this would not work, but this is the most obvious.
One thing that might help, not suggested by Masnick, is improving the controls available to publishers. Today marked the launch of the Really Simple Licensing standard offering publishers a way to define machine-readable licenses. These can be applied site-wide, sure, but also at a per-page level. It is up to A.I. companies to adhere to the terms but with an exception — there are ways to permit access to encrypted material. This raises concerns about a growing proliferation of digital rights management, bringing me back to Masnick’s reasonable concern about a web increasingly walled-off and accessible only to authorized visitors.
I am not saying I have better ideas; I appreciate that Masnick at least brought something to the table in that regard, as I have nothing to add. I, too, am concerned about dividing the web. However, I think publishers are coming at this from a reasonable place. This is not, as Masnick puts it, a “knee-jerk, anti-A.I. stance” to which publishers have responded with restrictions because “[i]f it hurts A.I. companies, it must be good”. A.I. companies largely did this to themselves by raising billions of dollars in funding to strip-mine the public web without permission and, ultimately, with scant acknowledgement. I believe information should be freer than it is, that intellectual property hoarding is wrong, and that we are better when we build on top of each other. That is a fine stance for information reuse by fellow human beings. However, the massive scale of artificial intelligence training comes with different standards.
In writing this article, I am acutely aware it will become part of a training data set. I could block those crawlers — I have blocked a few — but that is only partly the point. I simply do not know how much control I reclaim now will be relevant in the future, and I am sure the same is true of any real media organization. I write here for you, not for the benefit of building the machines producing a firehose of spam, scams, and slop. The artificial intelligence companies have already violated the expectations of even a public web. Regardless of the benefits they have created — and I do believe there are benefits to these technologies — they have behaved unethically. Defensive action is the only control a publisher can assume right now.
Apple launched a lineup of new iPhones, AirPods, and Apple Watches today, and many of the announcements seemed to have been leaked. This is typical of the September launches as the scale of the iPhone’s success means more of Apple’s resources are dedicated to its annual release cycle, which means there are more opportunities for leaks, and more incentive for publications to seize upon any tidbit of information. Sometimes, they get it wrong.
Juli Clover, in a pre-presentation rumour roundup for MacRumors:
There have been multiple rumors suggesting that the iPhone 17 Air won’t have the space for a SIM tray, which would prevent it from launching in China. iPhones sold in China are required to have a physical SIM tray, and carriers in the country do not support eSIM technology for smartphones.
The recent battery database leak mentions a variant of the iPhone 17 Air with a SIM tray, so it looks like information suggesting that the iPhone 17 Air won’t be available in China could be inaccurate.
It turns out the iPhone Air is available in China, and it is eSIM-only. In a piece following the presentation, Clover confirmed as much, explaining “China has a requirement that links a user’s ID to their cellular phone, something that’s harder to do with an eSIM over a physical SIM”. This is not, it turns out, synonymous with phones being “required to have a physical SIM tray”.
A last-minute leak from an anonymous account on X has led some iPad users to speculate that Apple might have a surprise in store for this week. A new M5 iPad Pro has been rumored to launch this year, but our expectation was that we wouldn’t see it until October or November. Now, however, it looks like we can’t rule out an announcement tomorrow alongside the iPhone 17.
The speculation in question comes from a fellow 9to5Mac writer who noticed it was the tenth anniversary of the iPad Pro’s introduction. That, combined with the details apparently shared by an anonymous account — but which were neither quoted nor summarized, nor even sourced — led Ryan Christoffel to connect some imaginary dots.
MacRumors was tipped-off in early July to some iPhone information by someone familiar with the details of an ad being created. Joe Rossignol:
The tipster revealed three alleged iPhone 17 Pro features that have not been rumored previously:
An upgraded Telephoto lens with up to 8× optical zoom, compared to up to 5× optical zoom on the iPhone 16 Pro models. The lens can apparently move, allowing for continuous optical zoom at various focal lengths.
An all-new pro camera app from Apple for both photos and videos. This app would compete with the likes of Halide, Kino, and Filmic Pro. It is unclear if the app would be exclusive to the iPhone 17 Pro models.
An additional Camera Control button on the top edge of the devices, for quickly accessing the camera and related settings. This would complement the Camera Control button on the bottom-right edge of all iPhone 16 models.
For the pro camera app, the tipster warned there is a chance Apple is planning a major update to its existing Final Cut Camera app instead of an all-new app.
This tipster was remarkably on-the-money for two of these three claims. Neither was rumoured prior and, though it barely made the presentation, Apple did update Final Cut Camera just as they claimed. Given that clear foreknowledge, I have to wonder what their observation of an “additional Camera Control button” is all about. It is not on these iPhones. Perhaps they got confused by the Action Button that has been present for a few years? I can only guess.
One final thing that only barely made the cut for advanced rumours and turned out to be entirely accurate. Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:
Just hours ahead of the official announcement, a leaker has suggested that the iPhone 17 Air may instead simply be named the iPhone Air.
Mark Gurman called it the “iPhone Air” in an article a couple of weeks ago.
Models across the rest of the lineup are named variations of “iPhone 17”, so the number-less branding of this model is conspicuous. Perhaps Apple intends for it to only stick around a single year, or perhaps the entire line will lose version numbers.
Fred Vogelstein, of Crazy Stupid Tech, interviewed Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera on the occasion of its forthcoming twentieth anniversary:
But Techmeme looks and works exactly the same way as it always has. And it has never been more popular. Traffic is up 25 percent this year, likely driven by the explosion of interest in AI, Rivera says.
[…]
Now the software finds and ranks the stories. But the editors write the headlines. When stories are generated by corporate press releases/announcements, they choose which media outlet’s story is driving the most interesting social media conversations. The software also chews on the API feeds from the big social networks to come up with a list of the most useful conversations. Editors approve all those, however, to prevent duplication.
Since I learned about Techmeme in the late 2000s or early 2010s, I have admired many of its attributes. Its barely-changing design speaks to me, especially with its excellent use of Optima. More than anything, however, is its signature way of clustering related stories and conversations that keeps me coming back. That feature was one of the sources of inspiration for this very website. The differing perspectives are useful beyond a single story or topic; it has been a source of discovery for other websites and writers I should keep an eye on.
The steadiness of the site masks some of the changes that have been made over the years, however. Not too long ago, the community discussion section of any topic was merely a list of tweets. However, since about 2023, I think, it has also incorporated posts from other social networks and message boards. This is a welcome improvement.
Silicon Valley trends may come and go, but I hope Techmeme continues to evolve at its present geological pace.
At the time I wrote about the fundamentally dishonest complaints from Elon Musk about the App Store’s ranking of Grok, a lawsuit had not been filed. Two weeks later, though, Musk followed through.
Elon Musk’s xAI sued Apple and OpenAI on Monday, accusing the pair of an “anticompetitive scheme” to thwart artificial intelligence rivals.
The lawsuit, filed by Musk’s AI startup xAI and its social network business X, alleges Apple and OpenAI have “colluded” to maintain monopolies in the smartphone and generative AI markets.
It accuses Apple of downgrading other AI apps in favor of ChatGPT. While the lawsuit acknowledges iPhones can use other AI engines, it claims that OpenAI competitors don’t get enough promotion.
The lawsuit cites the list of “Must-Have Apps” posted on Sunday, in which OpenAI was the only AI app listed. Also included were Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble. Musk’s lawyers claim that Cook & Co’s statement in the T&Cs that Apple’s store “is designed to be fair and free of bias,” is a lie.
There are many problems one can find in the App Store, Apple’s editorial process, and the way OpenAI seems to be everywhere. I think xAI is a bad plaintiff for this case, however. When I wrote that Musk’s frenzied posting on X was “dishonest”, what I meant was he was inventing or exaggerating controversy to boost the app’s rankings. At the time, it was unclear whether this strategy would work. On the day I published my commentary, Grok was fifth in the U.S. in overall free downloads. The day this lawsuit was filed, it had fallen off the chart, declining steeply since. Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini has climbed from placing in the mid-fifties in mid-August to third place today. Perplexity has grown from placing in the hundreds to twenty-fifth place today. (Sensor Tower does not allow me to create permalinks of those charts, so act fast.)
Of course, even though this information appears to invalidate the lawsuit’s claim (PDF) that “Apple has deprioritized the apps of super app and generative AI chatbot competitors, like the products offered by Plaintiffs, in its App Store rankings to favor OpenAI”, it will simply feed the persecution complex of xAI. And the lawsuit raises a good point: Apple should more urgently open up third-party A.I. integration, something it said it would do. This is going to be painful to watch.
Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said in May that web publishing is not dying. Nick Fox, VP of Search at Google, said in May that the web is thriving. But in a court document filed by Google on late Friday, Google’s lawyers wrote, “The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline.”
This document can be found over here (PDF) and on the top of page five, it says:
The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline and Plaintiffs’ divestiture proposal would only accelerate that decline, harming publishers who currently rely on open-web display advertising revenue.
This is, perhaps, just an admission of what people already know or fear. It is a striking admission from Google, however, and appears to contradict the company’s public statements.
Dan Taylor, Google’s vice president of global ads, responded on X:
Barry – in the preceding sentence, it’s clear that Google’s referring to ‘open-web display advertising’ – not the open web as a whole. As you know, ad budgets follow where users spend time and marketers see results, increasingly in places like Connected TV, Retail Media & more.
Taylor’s argument appears to be that users and time are going to places other than the open web and so, too, is advertising spending. Is that still supposed to mean the open web is thriving?
Also, if you actually read the filing, you will quickly see that Google clearly differentiates between “open web” — no hyphen, no qualifiers — and “open-web display”, with the latter explicitly referring to advertising. There is an entire section about the open web beginning on page 16, concluding with this paragraph:
The divestitures of AdX and DFP would risk accelerating the ongoing shift in spending away from open-web display inventory. Plaintiffs propose to require Google to divest its ad exchange and publisher ad server for open-web display advertising. But they acknowledge — as they must — that Google could continue operating an ad exchange and a publisher ad server for any
other ad format. The outcome would be to incentivize Google to shift the resources it invests in serving open-web publishers to serving publishers who prioritize other formats, like app and CTV, as well as its non-open web properties such as YouTube. And divestiture will also eliminate the efficiencies of integration within Google’s ad tech stack, so that Google’s advertiser customers are likely to see a further decline in their return on investment from open-web display ads. Advertisers will vote with their feet and accelerate the existing trend of shifting spend to non-open web display ad formats. Automated AI-powered tools seeking greatest ROI will make that shift in spend even faster. In short, Plaintiffs’ remedies will harm publishers — particularly smaller publishers reliant on open-web display who have not diversified to other ad formats — by accelerating the decline of the open web.
In context, this sure looks to me like Google is arguing that forcing it to divest AdX and DoubleClick for Publishers will more negatively impact publishers without other advertising revenue streams, thereby worsening the open web. The “accelerating the decline” line is repeated here, though it is phrased ambiguously. This could be read in the way Schwartz has and the way many publishers are feeling — that the open web, as a whole, is in decline. Or it could be read the way Taylor insists Google has meant it, as accelerating the decline of open web advertising. If that is what Google meant, it would be better if it had phrased these references to advertising as clearly as it did in the rest of the document.
A US federal court has told Google to pay $425m (£316.3m) for breaching users’ privacy by collecting data from millions of users even after they had turned off a tracking feature in their Google accounts.
The verdict comes after a group of users brought the case claiming Google accessed users’ mobile devices to collect, save and use their data, in violation of privacy assurances in its Web & App Activity setting.
Heck of a week for Google. Perhaps it should stop doing so much creepy and anticompetitive stuff.
This lawsuit was filed in July 2020 (PDF), and alleged various privacy violations surrounding Google’s “Web and App Activity” control — a known source of confusion — and Google’s data collection through other services like Firebase and Analytics. Perhaps Google should not operate such a sprawling empire of surveillance by both becoming a smaller business and doing less data collection. Alas, it will not do so voluntarily.
Teresa Ribera, the European Commission’s vice president of “Clean, Just, and Competitive Transition”:
Google abused its power by favouring its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of its competitors, online advertisers and publishers.
As a result of Google’s illegal practices, advertisers faced higher marketing costs which they likely passed on to European consumers in the form of higher prices for products and services. Google’s tactics also reduced revenues for publishers, which may have led to lower service quality and higher subscription costs for consumers.
Google’s abusive behaviour therefore had a negative impact on all European citizens in their day-to-day use of the web.
This is illegal under EU competition rules and therefore our decision orders Google to pay a fine of €2.95 billion.
Google now has until early November — or 60 days — to tell the Commission how it intends to resolve that conflict of interest and to remedy the alleged abuse.
The Commission said it would not rule out a structural divestiture of Google’s adtech assets — but it “first wishes to hear and assess Google’s proposal.”
President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to launch a trade investigation to “nullify” what he said were discriminatory fines being levied by Europe against U.S. tech firms such as Google and Apple.
A United States court has also found Google’s dominance of online advertising is an illegal monopoly and will begin arguing over what to do about it later this month. A different U.S. court’s resolution to the search monopoly trial earlier this week was not particularly substantial; its stock went up after the judge announced remedies. Perhaps the advertising case will play out differently in the U.S. but I have my doubts.
Authors revealed today that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion and destroy all copies of the books the AI company pirated to train its artificial intelligence models.
In a press release provided to Ars, the authors confirmed that the settlement is “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.” Covering 500,000 works that Anthropic pirated for AI training, if a court approves the settlement, each author will receive $3,000 per work that Anthropic stole. “Depending on the number of claims submitted, the final figure per work could be higher,” the press release noted.
Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker whose work zeroes in on the intersection between technology, art, and culture, is the author of not one but two books that popped up in LibGen: 2024’s “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture” and 2020’s “The Longing For Less: Living With Minimalism.” Also in found in LibGen was the Italian translation of Filterworld. All in, he could stand to make upwards of $12K!
We asked Kyle: How does the sum of “$3,000 per class work” feel as a number given that his intellectual property was used to train an AI? Low, high, not worth it on principle, or about right?
“It should be a license, really,” he replied. “Because the training never goes away. So it could be $5,000 every 5 years, or $1,000 / year as long as they exist. But the price seems about right, honestly — a decent percentage of most book advances, and about the price of an institutional speaking gig.”
Yet anothercomplication for the fair use arguments of generative A.I. companies, though one which was obviously undermined by using pirated data to begin with. Though I think it makes sense to focus on this case for now, the question looming over this entire case is what precedent it sets. It does not singlehandedly eliminate the fair use argument for training on public information, but what about other illicitly reproduced information ingested into data sets?
Meta and now Apple are being sued in similar cases. If you are a published author, visit the case settlement website to register for your share of the pot.
President Trump on Thursday led leaders of the world’s biggest technology companies in a version of his cabinet meetings, in which each participant takes a turn thanking and praising him, this time for his efforts to promote investments in chip manufacturing and artificial intelligence.
Present at the table were Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, David Sacks, and — immediately to Trump’s right — Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates was also there for some reason. Here is a fun exchange the Journal pulled from all the grovelling:
Trump also addressed Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai about a federal judge’s ruling this week on an antitrust case related to Google’s monopoly in search. The judge levied relatively light penalties and rejected the most significant measures sought by the Justice Department, which filed the lawsuit in 2020.
“You had a very good day yesterday,” Trump said. “Do you want to talk about that big day you had yesterday?”
“I’m glad it’s over,” Pichai said.
“Biden was the one who prosecuted that lawsuit,” Trump said. “You know that, right?”
Beginning this section by reminding readers the suit was filed under the first Trump administration is a kind way of calling out the president’s flexible concepts of time and responsibility.
At least nobody gave him any solid gold statues this time, as far as I know.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta outlined remedies on Tuesday that would bar Google from entering or maintaining exclusive deals that tie the distribution of Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini to other apps or revenue arrangements. For example, Google wouldn’t be able to condition Play Store licensing on the distribution of certain apps, or tie revenue-share payments to keeping certain apps.
Mehta’s full decision (PDF) is written to be read by non-lawyers. Even so, I admit I have only read the introduction — which includes some high-level explanations of the remedies — and skimmed much of the rest. It is a couple hundred pages long for those who want to put in a little more work than I did.
I did notice a potentially interesting deposition referenced on page 21 regarding the relative performance of Google’s A.I. search summaries compared to organic search results. I sure wish a transcript would be published.
The judge will also allow certain competitors to display Google search results as their own in a bid to give them the time and resources they need to innovate.
The judge is allowing Google to continue to pay companies like Apple and Samsung for distribution of its search engine on devices and browsers, but will bar Google from maintaining exclusive contracts.
The latter must be quite the relief to Apple, which gets tens of billions of dollars a year because people use Safari to search with Google, and to Mozilla, which gets to keep existing.
And then there’s Google’s data. Google is the world’s most prolific surveiller, and the company boasts to investors about the advantage that its 24/7 spying confers on it in the search market, because Google knows so much about us and can therefore tailor our results. Even if this is true – a big if – it’s nevertheless a fucking nightmare. Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too. Any remedy worth the name would have required Google to delete (“disgorge,” in law-speak) all that data […]
Some people in the antitrust world didn’t see it that way. Out of a misguided kind of privacy nihilism, they called for Google to be forced to share the data it stole from us, so that potential competitors could tune their search tools on the monopolist’s population-scale privacy violations.
And that is what the court has ordered.
Much like the Microsoft antitrust case that preceded Google’s by a couple decades, the proposed solutions basically treat Google with kid gloves. The judge admitted in the introduction of treating this case with “humility”, having “no expertise in the business of [general search engines], the buying and selling of search text ads, or the engineering of GenAI technologies”. That is true enough. Yet judges are often expected to rule on cases with subject matter about which they have no particular expertise. The judge appears to be comfortable assuming the generative A.I. boom is providing Google with ample competition.
This conclusion ultimately seems as though Mehta is doing something, yet Google has to change very little. It is difficult for me to believe this will be disruptive to Google’s search monopoly. Again, as with the years-ago hesitancy to impose serious conditions on Microsoft or break it up, Google will probably emerge as an even stronger force while technically complying with a ruling finding its monopoly illegal.
Wired and Business Insider have removed news features written by a freelance journalist after concerns they are likely AI-generated works of fiction.
Freedom of expression non-profit Index on Censorship is also in the process of taking down a magazine article by the same author after concerns were raised by Press Gazette. The publisher has concluded that it “appears to have been written by AI”.
Several other UK and US online publications have published questionable articles by the same person, going by the name of Margaux Blanchard, since April.
Tobitt reports at least six publications carried articles with the “Margaux Blanchard” byline. Wired, for its part, published an explanation that, unfortunately, does not make it look very good. For one thing, it is attributed to “Wired Management”, not any specific person. For another, the reason “Blanchard” was busted had nothing to do with the article itself:
Over the next several days, it became clear that the writer was unable to provide enough information to be entered into our payments system. They instead insisted on payment by PayPal or check. Now suspicious, a WIRED editor ran the story through two third-party AI-detection tools, both of which said that the copy was likely to be human-generated. A closer look at the details of the story, though, along with further correspondence from the writer, made it clear to us that the story had been an AI fabrication. After more due diligence from the head of our research desk, we retracted the story and replaced it with an editor’s note.
Wired says it did not fully vet the article before publishing, which seems a little bit obvious. This amount of transparency is admirable, however, in contrast with other publications that have merely replaced articles “by” “Blanchard” with a terse note.
This is obviously a huge mistake on the part of these media organizations. It is embarrassing and silly and all the rest of it, particularly for Wired which has ramped up its political coverage with an aggressive but accurate bent. I also cannot help but feel it is indicative of what is, for lack of better phrasing, our current media climate. Trust in mass media has been declining for years, in part because financial pressures have triggered staffing cutbacks while online news has encouraged faster and voluminous coverage, which means all of this is done with increasing sloppiness thereby feeding declining trust in mass media. I am not making excuses for Wired or Business Insider running an insufficiently checked piece; they should have followed protocols. But a little bit of this problem may be attributable to the corner-cutting that encourages publishing more stories more quickly.
Also, who the hell is behind this “Margaux Blanchard” character anyway?
An internet hoaxer calling themselves Andrew Frelon has claimed responsibility for the fake (likely AI-generated) freelance journalist Margaux Blanchard.
Andrew Frelon is itself a pseudonym and their claims have to be treated with a high degree of scepticism.
“Frelon” is the same person who, earlier this year, claimed to be responsible for the Velvet Sundown A.I. music hoax, only to reveal that statement, itself, was a prank and he had nothing to do with the Velvet Sundown.
Also, we apparently know Frelon’s real name, according to Kevin Maimann, of CBC News:
The Quebec man who pranked journalists and music fans by saying he was behind a wildly successful AI band has revealed his identity as web platform safety and policy issues expert Tim Boucher.
Boucher’s own telling reads to me like the ramblings of someone a little too self-indulgent and self-important. In other words, he could very well be responsible for hijacking the publicity around the Velvet Sundown gag, and attempting to do the same for this “Margaux Blanchard” situation. Do not simply be skeptical; assume this is false until Boucher or “Frelon” provides proof. Press ought to stop giving this doofus the publicity he appears to crave.
The new [Investigatory Powers Tribunal] filing prepared by two judges sets out the “assumed facts” on which the case will be argued at a court hearing scheduled for early next year.
[…]
However, the new IPT filing states the [technical capability notice] “is not limited to” data stored under ADP, suggesting the UK government sought bulk interception access to Apple’s standard iCloud service, which is much more widely used by the company’s customers.
It is routine for law enforcement to request access to individual iCloud accounts, and Apple says it complies to the best of its ability with legal requests. But “bulk interception access” would go well beyond these kinds of targeted requests and reverting to the kind of global surveillance apparatus made public in 2013. The more cynical reader might imagine such a system still exists regardless of operating systems and web browsers defaulting to secure connections in the intervening years. I have not seen evidence of this. I think the Times’ reporting supports the notion that intelligence services can no longer monitor these kinds of communications in bulk as they once did.
The filing also apparently throws cold water on Tulsi Gabbard’s claim that the U.K. is rescinding its demands for an Advanced Data Protection backdoor. Again, the secrecy around this prevents us from gaining specificity or clarity. It even requires the judges to rely on “assumed facts” which, as Bradshaw and Gross write, are “not the same as asserting that [they are] factually the case”, because they cannot confirm the existence of the technical capability notice. Insert your personal favourite dystopian literary reference here.
Emanuel Maiberg, of 404 Media, published a pretty good story with a pretty bad headline. Here is his core argument:
Porn piracy, like all forms of content piracy, has existed for as long as the internet. But as more individual creators who make their living on services like OnlyFans, many of them have hired companies to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices against companies that steal their content. As some of those services turn to automation in order to handle the workload, completely unrelated content is getting flagged as violating their copyrights and is being deindexed from Google search. The process exposes bigger problems with how copyright violations are handled on the internet, with automated systems filing takedown requests that are reviewed by other automated systems, leading to unintended consequences.
Ignoring the titillating associations with porn, this is a new and valuable entry into the compendium of articles about failures in the automatic handling of DMCA complaints. The headline on the article, however, gives no indication of that and is, I think, misleading:
How OnlyFans Piracy Is Ruining the Internet for Everyone
Here are my problems with it:
The piracy itself is not doing anything. It is the automation and mishandling of takedown requests for copyright claims.
This is only slightly related to OnlyFans. It is more broadly applicable to the increasing appeal of solo or independent producers in music, video, podcasting, etc.
If I am being pedantic, it is not the internet which is being ruined, but the web.
This headline is kind of clickbait, but it is also simply inaccurate in describing the subject of the article. I do not often flag issues with headlines, especially since they are typically written by editors instead of reporters. In this case, though, Maiberg is a co-owner of 404 Media, so I am sure he had some say in choosing a headline.
Do not let that criticism steer you away from what is otherwise an excellent article, however. Maiberg interviewed the CEO of Takedowns AI, a platform which used to be involved in generic material removal and reputation management before pivoting to a service focused on OnlyFans piracy specifically. I am linking to the Wayback Machine there because the company’s site is currently offline, perhaps its own attempt at reputation management after Kunal Anand, the CEO, explained what seems to be a loose approach to validating takedown requests.
This is an old problem, as Maiberg acknowledges:
It’s an issue at the intersection of several critical problems with the modern internet: Google’s search monopoly, rampant porn piracy, a DMCA takedown process vulnerable to errors and abuse, and now the automation of all of the above in order to operate at scale. No one I talked to for this story thought there was an easy solution to this problem.
I obviously have no answers here, only two observations. The first is that it shows a limitation of offloading legal processes to corporations. Fair use is, famously, a nebulous concept, and trying to figure out whether a single YouTuber’s video is in violation would take significant time and expense — and this simply is not feasible at YouTube’s scale. Second, automation has made some of this easier — it is harder to find full-length Hollywood films on YouTube than you might expect for a video-based website — while also requiring each party to more carefully check their work.
Earlier this month, Tesla was penalized by a jury when a car’s supervised autonomous vehicle features failed, leading to a collision. When I linked to the CBS News article about the story, this was one of several paragraphs that stood out to me:
The most important piece of evidence in the trial, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, was an augmented video of the crash that included data from the Autopilot computer. Tesla previously claimed the video was deleted, but a forensic data expert was able to recover it.
Years after a Tesla driver using Autopilot plowed into a young Florida couple in 2019, crucial electronic data detailing how the fatal wreck unfolded was missing. The information was key for a wrongful death case the survivor and the victim’s family were building against Tesla, but the company said it didn’t have the data.
Then a self-described hacker, enlisted by the plaintiffs to decode the contents of a chip they recovered from the vehicle, found it while sipping a Venti-size hot chocolate at a South Florida Starbucks. Tesla later said in court that it had the data on its own servers all along.
One supposed benefit of autonomous vehicle technologies is in public safety. That is how the simple features on my car are described and marketed, at least, the most basic of which is front-facing collision detection and automatic braking. Tesla’s system, among the most advanced on any car, failed in this case with tragic consequences. I am not saying my car would have performed any better. But I would view Tesla’s system differently if it began from a base of reliable safety features rather than the implications of a name like “Autopilot”.
One supposed benefit of ever greater data collection — even having several cameras constantly recording — is that we can better understand a collision. However, that only works as well as an automaker is trustworthy. It is hard to know what to make of Tesla’s defence here. Either it did not look very hard — which is bad — or the company actively avoided producing evidence until it became impossible for it to play dumb. I sure hope it is more compliant in future collision investigations. But I have no trust that it will be.
I worry that Tesla will learn the wrong lesson, and will instead be even more evasive. The media strategy at Elon Musk’s companies these days, including for articles about this crash, is to say nothing. Better for them to be silent when trust in media and institutions is perilously low. Not good for anyone else.
The law, HB 1126, requires platforms to implement age verification for all users before they can access social networks like Bluesky. Recently, the Supreme Court justices decided to block an emergency appeal that would have prevented the law from going into effect as the legal challenges it faces played out in the courts. This forced Bluesky to make a decision of its own: either comply or risk hefty fines of up to $10,000 per user.
However, others questioned why a VPN would be the necessary solution here. After all, decentralized social networking was meant to reduce the control and power the state — or any authority — would have over these social platforms.
Bluesky blocked access in Mississippi to avoid collecting more data about its users or risk stiff penalties. It points out the law there is more expansive and requires more data collection than the U.K.’s Online Safety Act. It is even, according to a note on JD Supra, more broad than the Texas legislation on which some of its language was based.
But, as Perez writes, surely the whole point of decentralized networks is their resilience to this kind of overbearing legislation. In a way, I guess they are — you can still use the AT Protocol, which underpins Bluesky, in Mississippi through other personal data servers. The same is true for ActivityPub and Mastodon instances, though Mastodon says it has no way to comply with the Mississippi law. That makes me wonder if individual Mastodon instances must each incorporate age validation. I do not see anything in the sloppy text of the law saying it applies only to services over a certain number of users. It seems to non-lawyer me this means any instance — or any Bluesky PDS — allowing interaction in Mississippi could be liable for penalties.
At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes. After installation, the program includes ‘AI’ (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: ‘new’ and ‘old’.
For comparison, the size of SumatraPDF-3.5.2 installer is 8,246,744 bytes. It has no ‘AI’, no auto-updater (though it can check for new versions, which I find unnecessary, for anyone sane would install it via scoop anyway), and no ads for ‘cloud storage’.
The installed size of the latest version of Acrobat is, on my Mac, 2.18 GB — or, to spell it out as Gromnitsky did, 2,176,053,007 bytes. Of course, over 435 MB of that is because it includes a copy of the Chromium web browser engine. I primarily use this application to view, edit, and add form fields to text-based documents, and to dismiss ads for A.I. features and Adobe services. Gromnitsky is describing only Reader, which is far more limited than Acrobat, even more so than Apple’s own Preview software; you cannot even split a PDF into multiple files with Reader.
If I ever give the impression of being personally attacked when I find a Preview feature no longer works as well as it once did, this is why. Acrobat and Reader are perfect examples of software made without respect for users.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has released new data showing a sharp rise in electronic device searches at border crossings.
From April to June alone, CBP conducted 14,899 electronic device searches, up more than 21 per cent from the previous quarter (23 per cent over the same period last year). Most of those were basic searches, but 1,075 were “advanced,” allowing officers to copy and analyze device contents.
U.S. border agents have conducted tens of thousands of searches every year for many years, along a generally increasing trajectory, so this is not necessarily specific to this administration. Unfortunately, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us, people have few rights at ports of entry, regardless of whether they are a U.S. citizen.
There are no great ways to avoid a civil rights violation, either. As a security expert told the CBC, people with burner devices would be subject to scrutiny because it is obviously not their main device. It stands to reason that someone travelling without any electronic devices at all would also be seen as more suspicious. Encryption is your best bet, but then you may need to have a whole conversation about why all of your devices are encrypted.
The EFF has a pocket guide with your best options.
If you, thankfully, missed Google’s Pixel 10 unveiling — and even if you did not — you will surely appreciate PetaPixel’s review of the Pro version of the phone from the perspective of photographers and videographers. This line of phones has long boasted computational photography bonafides over the competition, and I thought this was a good exploration of what is new and not-so-new in this year’s models.
Come for Chris and Jordan; stay for Chris’ “pet” deer.
After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad – including account management, blogs, and all associated content – will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated.
I have not thought about Typepad in years, and I am certain I am not alone. That is not a condemnation; Typepad occupies a particular time and place on the web. As with anything hosted, however, users are unfortunately dependent on someone else’s interest in maintaining it.
If you have anything hosted at Typepad, now is a good time to back it up.
[…] In 2018, the social-science blog “Data Colada” looked at Metacritic, a review aggregator, and found that more than four out of five albums released that year had received an average rating of at least seventy points out of a hundred — on the site, albums that score sixty-one or above are colored green, for “good.” Even today, music reviews on Metacritic are almost always green, unlike reviews of films, which are more likely to be yellow, for “mixed/average,” or red, for “bad.” The music site Pitchfork, which was once known for its scabrous reviews, hasn’t handed down a perfectly contemptuous score — 0.0 out of 10 — since 2007 (for “This Is Next,” an inoffensive indie-rock compilation). And, in 2022, decades too late for poor Andrew Ridgeley, Rolling Stone abolished its famous five-star system and installed a milder replacement: a pair of merit badges, “Instant Classic” and “Hear This.”
I have quibbles with this article, which I will get to, but I will front-load this with the twist instead of making you wait — this article is, in effect, Sanneh’s response to himself twenty-one years after popularizing the very concept of poptimism in the New York Times. Sanneh in 2004:
In the end, the problem with rockism isn’t that it’s wrong: all critics are wrong sometimes, and some critics (now doesn’t seem like the right time to name names) are wrong almost all the time. The problem with rockism is that it seems increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.
Are you really pondering the phony distinction between “great art” and a “guilty pleasure” when you’re humming along to the radio? In an era when listeners routinely — and fearlessly — pick music by putting a 40-gig iPod on shuffle, surely we have more interesting things to worry about than that someone might be lip-synching on “Saturday Night Live” or that some rappers gild their phooey. Good critics are good listeners, and the problem with rockism is that it gets in the way of listening. If you’re waiting for some song that conjures up soul or honesty or grit or rebellion, you might miss out on Ciara’s ecstatic electro-pop, or Alan Jackson’s sly country ballads, or Lloyd Banks’s felonious purr.
Here we are in 2025 and a bunch of the best-reviewed records in recent memory are also some of the most popular. They are well-regarded because critics began to review pop records on the genre’s own terms.
Here is one more bonus twist: the New Yorker article is also preoccupied with criticism of Pitchfork, a fellow Condé Nast publication. This is gestured toward twice in the article. Neither one serves to deflate the discomfort, especially since the second mention is in the context of reduced investment in the site by Condé.
Speaking of Pitchfork, though, the numerical scores of its reviews have led to considerable analysis by the statistics obsessed. For example, a 2020 analysis of reviews published between 1999 and early 2017 found the median score was 7.03. This is not bad at all, and it suggests the site is most interested in what it considers decent-to-good music, and cannot be bothered to review bad stuff. The researchers also found a decreasing frequency of very negative reviews beginning in about 2010, which fits Sanneh’s thesis. However, it also found fewer extremely high scores. The difference is more subtle — and you should ignore the dot in the “10.0” column because the source data set appears to also contain Pitchfork’s modern reviews of classic records — but notice how many dots are rated above 8.75 from 2004–2009 compared to later years. A similar analysis of reviews from 1999–2021 found a similar convergence toward mediocre.
As for Metacritic, I had to go and look up the Data Colada article referenced, since the New Yorker does not bother with links. I do not think this piece reinforces Sanneh’s argument very well. What Joe Simmons, its author, attempts to illustrate is that Metacritic skews positive for bands with few aggregated reviews because most music publications are not going to waste time dunking on a nascent band’s early work. I also think Simmons is particularly cruel to a Modern Studies record.
Anecdotally, I do not know that music critics have truly lost their edge. I read and watch a fair amount of music criticism, and I still see a generous number of withering takes. I think music critics, as they become established and busier, recognize they have little time for bad music. Maroon 5 have been a best-selling act for a couple of decades, but Metacritic has aggregated just four reviews of its latest album, because you can just assume it sucks. Your time might be better spent with the great new Water From Your Eyes record.
Even though I am unsure I agree with Sanneh’s conclusion, I think critics should make time and column space for albums they think are bad. Negative reviews are not cruel — or, at least, they should not be — but it is the presence of bad that helps us understand what is good.
Echoing IBM, Microsoft in 1985 built its Windows software to run on Intel processors. The combination created the “Wintel era,” when the majority of the world’s computers featured Windows software and Intel hardware. Microsoft’s and Intel’s profits soared, turning them into two of the world’s most valuable companies by the mid-1990s. Most of the world’s computers soon featured “Intel Inside” stickers, making the chipmaker a household name.
In 2009, the Obama administration was so troubled by Intel’s dominance in computer chips that it filed a broad antitrust case against the Silicon Valley giant. It was settled the next year with concessions that hardly dented the company’s profits.
This is a gift link because I think this one is particularly worth reading. The headline calls it a “long, painful downfall”, but the remarkable thing about it is that it is short, if anything. Revenue is not always the best proxy for this, but the cracks began to show in the early 2010s when its quarterly growth contracted; a few years of modest growth followed before being clobbered since mid-2020. Every similar company in tech seems to have made a fortune off the combined forces of the covid-19 pandemic and artificial intelligence except Intel.
For better or worse, the US is now a shareholder in the chipmaker’s success, which makes sense given Intel’s strategic importance to national security. Remember, Intel is the only American manufacturer of leading edge silicon. TSMC and Samsung may be setting up shop in the US, but hell will freeze over before the US military lets either of them fab its most sensitive chips. Uncle Sam awarded Intel $3.2 billion to build that secure enclave for a reason.
Put mildly, The US government needs Intel Foundry and Lip Bu Tan needs Uncle Sam’s cash to make the whole thing work. It just so happens that right now Intel isn’t in a great position to negotiate.
Mann’s skeptical analysis is also worth your time. There is good sense in the U.S. government holding an interest in the success of Intel. Under this president, however, it raises entirely unique questions and concerns.
Tesla was found partly liable in a wrongful death case involving the electric vehicle company’s Autopilot system, with a jury awarding the plaintiffs $200 million in punitive damages plus additional money in compensatory damages.
[…]
“What we ultimately learned from that augmented video is that the vehicle 100% knew that it was about to run off the roadway, through a stop sign, through a blinking red light, through a parked car and through a pedestrian, yet did nothing other than shut itself off when the crash was unavoidable,” said Adam Boumel, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
I continue to believe holding manufacturers legally responsible is the correct outcome for failures of autonomous driving technology. Corporations, unlike people, cannot go to jail; the closest thing we have to accountability is punitive damages.
The crowds are real. Every person you see in the video above started out as real footage of real fans, pulled from video of multiple Will Smith concerts during his recent European tour.
The lines, in this case, are definitely blurry. This is unlike any previous is it A.I.? controversy over crowds I can remember because — and I hope this is more teaser than spoiler — note Baio’s careful word choice in that last quoted paragraph.
A man holds an orange and white device in his hand, about the size of his palm, with an antenna sticking out. He enters some commands with the built-in buttons, then walks over to a nearby car. At first, its doors are locked, and the man tugs on one of them unsuccessfully. He then pushes a button on the gadget in his hand, and the door now unlocks.
The tech used here is the popular Flipper Zero, an ethical hacker’s swiss army knife, capable of all sorts of things such as WiFi attacks or emulating NFC tags. Now, 404 Media has found an underground trade where much shadier hackers sell extra software and patches for the Flipper Zero to unlock all manner of cars, including models popular in the U.S. The hackers say the tool can be used against Ford, Audi, Volkswagen, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, and several other brands, including sometimes dozens of specific vehicle models, with no easy fix from car manufacturers.
The Canadian government made headlines last year when it banned the Flipper Zero, only to roll it back in favour of a narrowed approach a month later. That was probably the right call. However, too many — including Hackaday and Flipper itself — were too confident in saying the device was not able to, or could not, be used to steal cars. This is demonstrably untrue.
The U.S.’ Increasing State Involvement in the Tech Industry
The United States government has long had an interest in boosting its high technology sector, with manifold objectives: for soft power, espionage, and financial dominance, at least. It has accomplished this through tax incentives, funding some of the best universities in the world, lax antitrust and privacy enforcement, and — in some cases — direct involvement. The internet began as a Department of Defense project, and the government invests in businesses through firms like In-Q-Tel.
All of this has worked splendidly for them. The world’s technology stack is overwhelmingly U.S.-dependent across the board, from consumers through large businesses and up to governments, even those which are not allies. Apparently, though, it is not enough and the country’s leaders are desperately worried about regulation in Europe and competition from Eastern Asia.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson sent letters today to more than a dozen prominent technology companies reminding them of their obligations to protect the privacy and data security of American consumers despite pressure from foreign governments to weaken such protections. He also warned them that censoring Americans at the behest of foreign powers might violate the law.
[…]
“I am concerned that these actions by foreign powers to impose censorship and weaken end-to-end encryption will erode Americans’ freedoms and subject them to myriad harms, such as surveillance by foreign governments and an increased risk of identity theft and fraud,” Chairman [Andrew] Ferguson wrote.
These letters (PDF) serve as a reminder to, in effect, enforce U.S. digital supremacy around the world. Many of the most popular social networks are U.S.-based and export the country’s interpretation of permissive expression laws around the world, even to countries with different expectations. Occasionally, there will be conflicting policies which may mean country-specific moderation. What Ferguson’s letter appears to be asking is for U.S. companies to be sovereign places for U.S. citizens regardless of where their speech may appear.
The U.S. government is certainly correct to protect the interests of its citizens. But let us not pretend this is not also re-emphasizing the importance to the U.S. government of exporting its speech policy internationally, especially when it fails to adhere to it on its home territory. It is not just the hypocrisy that rankles, it is also the audacity requiring posts by U.S. users to be treated as a special class, to the extent that E.U. officials enforcing their own laws in their own territory could be subjected to sanctions.
As far as encryption, I have yet to see sufficient evidence of a radical departure from previous statements made by this president. When he was running the first time around, he called for an Apple boycott over the company’s refusal to build a special version of iOS to decrypt an iPhone used by a mass shooter. During his first term, Trump demanded Apple decrypt another iPhone in a different mass shooting. After two attempted assassinations last year, Trump once again said Apple should forcibly decrypt the iPhones of those allegedly responsible. It was under his first administration in which Apple was dissuaded from launching Advanced Data Protection in the first place. U.S. companies with European divisions recently confirmed they cannot comply with E.U. privacy and security guarantees as they are subject to the provisions of the CLOUD Act enacted during the first Trump administration.
The closest Trump has gotten to changing his stance is in a February interview with the Spectator’s Ben Domenech:
BD: But the problem is he [the British Prime Minister] runs, your vice president obviously eloquently pointed this out in Munich, he runs a nation now that is removing the security helmets on Apple phones so that they can—
DJT: We told them you can’t do this.
BD: Yeah, Tulsi, I saw—
DJT: We actually told him… that’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.
The red line, it seems, is not at a principled opposition to “removing the security helmet” of encryption, but in the U.K.’s specific legislation. It is a distinction with little difference. The president and U.S. law enforcement want on-demand decryption just as much as their U.K. counterparts and have attempted to legislate similar requirements.
While the U.S. has been reinforcing the supremacy of its tech companies in Europe, it has also been propping them up at home:
Intel Corporation today announced an agreement with the Trump Administration to support the continued expansion of American technology and manufacturing leadership. Under terms of the agreement, the United States government will make an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock, reflecting the confidence the Administration has in Intel to advance key national priorities and the critically important role the company plays in expanding the domestic semiconductor industry.
The government’s equity stake will be funded by the remaining $5.7 billion in grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act and $3.2 billion awarded to the company as part of the Secure Enclave program. Intel will continue to deliver on its Secure Enclave obligations and reaffirmed its commitment to delivering trusted and secure semiconductors to the U.S. Department of Defense. The $8.9 billion investment is in addition to the $2.2 billion in CHIPS grants Intel has received to date, making for a total investment of $11.1 billion.
Despite its size — 10% of the company, making it the single largest shareholder — this press release says this investment is “a passive ownership, with no Board representation or other governance or information rights”. Even so, this is the U.S. attempting to reassert the once-vaunted position of Intel.
This deal is not as absurd as it seems. It is entirely antithetical to the claimed free market capitalist principles common to both major U.S. political parties but, in particular, espoused by Republicans. It is probably going to be wielded in terrible ways. But I can see at least one defensible reason for the U.S. to treat the integrity of Intel as an urgent issue: geology.
Near the end of Patrick McGee’s “Apple in China” sits a section that will haunt the corners of my brain for a long time. McGee writes that a huge amount of microprocessors — “at least 80 percent of the world’s most advanced chips” — are made by TSMC in Taiwan. There are political concerns with the way China has threatened Taiwan, which can be contained and controlled by humans, and frequent earthquakes, which cannot. Even setting aside questions about control, competition, and China, it makes a lot of sense for there to be more manufacturers of high-performance chips in places with less earthquake potential. (Silicon Valley is also sitting in a geologically risky place. Why do we do this to ourselves?)
At least Intel gets the shine of a Trump co-sign, and when has that ever gone wrong?
Then there are the deals struck with Nvidia and AMD, whereby the U.S. government gets a kickback in exchange for trade. Lauren Hirsch and Maureen Farrell, New York Times:
But some of Mr. Trump’s recent moves appear to be a strong break with historical precedent. In the cases of Nvidia and AMD, the Trump administration has proposed dictating the global market that these chipmakers can have access to. The two companies have promised to give 15 percent of their revenue from China to the U.S. government in order to have the right to sell chips in that country and bypass any future U.S. restrictions.
These moves add up and are, apparently, just the beginning. The U.S. has been a dominant force in high technology in part because of a flywheel effect created by early investments, some of which came from government sources and public institutions. This additional context does not undermine the entrepreneurship that came after, and which has been a proud industry trait. In fact, it demonstrates a benefit of strong institutions.
The rest of the world should see these massive investments as an instruction to build up our own high technology industries. We should not be too proud in Canada to set up Crown corporations that can take this on, and we ought to work with governments elsewhere. We should also not lose sight of the increasing hostility of the U.S. government making these moves to reassert its dominance in the space. We can stop getting steamrolled if we want to, but we really need to want to. We can start small.
“Any publicly funded immunization in B.C. can be provided at no cost to any Canadian travelling within the province,” a statement from the ministry said.
“This includes providing publicly funded COVID-19 vaccine to people of Alberta.”
[…]
Alberta is the only Canadian province that will not provide free universal access to COVID-19 vaccines this fall.
The dummies running our province opened what they called a “vaccine booking system” earlier this month allowing Albertans to “pre-order” vaccines. However, despite these terms having defined meanings, the system did not allow anyone to book a specific day, time, or location to receive the vaccine, nor did it take payments or even show prices. The government’s rationale for this strategy is that it is “intended [to] help reduce waste”.
Now that pricing has been revealed, it sure seems like these dopes want us to have a nice weekend just over the B.C. border. A hotel room for a couple or a family will probably be about the same as the combined vaccination cost. Sure, a couple of meals would cost extra, but it is also a nice weekend away. Sure, it means people who are poor or otherwise unable will likely need to pay the $100 “administrative fee” to get their booster, and it means a whole bunch of pre-ordered vaccines will go to waste thereby undermining the whole point of this exercise. But at least it plays to the anti-vaccine crowd. That is what counts for these jokers.
Jane Mundy, writing at the imaginatively named Lawyers and Settlements in December:
A former Apple executive has filed a California labor complaint against Apple and Jay Blahnik, the company’s vice president of fitness technologies. Mandana Mofidi accuses Apple of retaliation after she reported sexual harassment and raised concerns about receiving less pay than her male colleagues.
The Superior Court of California for the County of Los Angeles wants nearly seventeen of the finest United States dollars for a copy of the complaint alone.
But along the way, [Jay] Blahnik created a toxic work environment, said nine current and former employees who worked with or for Mr. Blahnik and spoke about personnel issues on the condition of anonymity. They said Mr. Blahnik, 57, who leads a roughly 100-person division as vice president for fitness technologies, could be verbally abusive, manipulative and inappropriate. His behavior contributed to decisions by more than 10 workers to seek extended mental health or medical leaves of absence since 2022, about 10 percent of the team, these people said.
The behaviours described in this article are deeply unprofessional, at best. It is difficult to square the testimony of a sizeable portion of Blahnik’s team with an internal investigation finding no wrongdoing, but that is what Apple’s spokesperson expects us to believe.
The social networking app is now home to more than 400 million monthly active users, Meta shared with Fast Company on Tuesday. That’s 50 million more than just a few months ago, and a long way from the 175 million it had around its first birthday last summer.
What is even more amazing about this statistic is how non-essential Threads seems to be. I might be in a bubble, but I cannot recall the last time someone sent me a link to a Threads post or mentioned they saw something worthwhile there. I see plenty of screenshots of posts from Bluesky, X, and even Mastodon circulating in various other social networks, but I cannot remember a single one from Threads.
I’m certainly aware that many readers venture outside the Apple ecosystem for certain devices, but I’ve always assumed that most people would opt for Apple’s device in any given category. TidBITS does focus on Apple, after all, and Apple works hard to provide an integrated experience for those who go all-in on Apple. That integration disappears if you use a Mac along with a Samsung Galaxy phone and an Amazon Echo smart speaker.
Let’s put my assumption to the test! Or rather, to the poll. […]
It is a good question; you should take this quick poll if you have a couple of minutes.
This will not be bias-free, but I also have a hard time assuming what kind of bias will be found in a sample of an audience reading TidBits. My gut instinct is many people will be wholly immersed in Apple hardware. However, a TidBits reader probably skews a little more technical and particular — or so I read in the comments — so perhaps not? Engst’s poll only asks about primary hardware and not, say, users’ choice in keyboards or music streaming services, so perhaps it will be different than my gut tells me.
Apple today announced the expansion of its Self Service Repair and Genuine Parts Distributor programs to Canada, providing individuals and independent repair professionals across the country broader access to the parts, tools, and manuals needed to repair Apple devices.
As with other regions where Self-Service Repair is available, manuals are available on Apple’s website, but none of the listed parts and tools are linked to the still-sketchy-looking Self-Service Repair site.
There does not seem to be a pricing advantage, either. My wife’s iPhone 12 Pro needs a new battery. Apple says that costs $119 with a Genius Bar appointment, or I can pay $119 from the Self-Service store for a battery kit plus $67 for a week-long rental of all the required tools. This does not include a $1,500 hold on the credit card for the toolkit. After returning the spent battery, I would get a $57.12 credit, so it costs about $10 more to repair it myself than to bring it in. Perhaps that is just how much these parts cost; or, perhaps Apple is able to effectively rig the cost of repairs by competing only with itself. It is difficult to know.
One possible advantage of the Self-Service Repair option and the Genuine Parts Program is in making service more accessible to people in remote areas of Canada. I tried a remote address in Baker Lake, Nunavut, and the Self-Service Store still said it would ship free in 5–7 business days. Whether it would is a different story. Someone in a Canadian territory should please test this.
U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, in a tweet that happens to be the only communication of this news so far:
Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.
As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a “back door” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.
It is unclear to me whether Gabbard is saying the U.K.’s backdoor requirement is entirely gone, or if it means the U.K. is only retreating from requiring worldwide access (or perhaps even only access to U.S. citizens’ data). The BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are all interpreting this as a worldwide retreat, but Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Guardian say it is only U.S. data. None of them appear to have confirmation beyond Gabbard’s post, thereby illustrating the folly of an administration continuing to make policy decisions and announcements in tweet form. The news section of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is instead obsessed with relitigating Russian interference in the dumbest possible way.
Because of the secrecy required of Apple and the U.K. government, this confusion cannot be clarified by the parties concerned, so one is entrusting the Trump administration to communicate this accurately. Perhaps the U.K. availability of Advanced Data Protection can be a canary — if it comes back, we can hope Apple is not complicit with weakening end-to-end encryption.
When I watched Tim Cook, in the White House, carefully assemble a glass-and-gold trophy fit for a king, it felt to me like a natural outcome of the events and actions exhaustively documented by Patrick McGee in “Apple in China”. It was a reflection of the arc of Cook’s career, and of Apple’s turnaround from dire straits to a kind of supranational superpower. It was a consequence of two of the world’s most powerful nations sliding toward the (even more) authoritarian, and a product of appeasement to strongmen on both sides of the Pacific.
At the heart of that media spectacle was an announcement by Apple of $100 billion in domestic manufacturing investment over four years, in addition to its existing $500 billion promise. This is an extraordinary amount of money to spend in the country from which Apple has extricated its manufacturing over the past twenty years. The message from Cook was “we’re going to keep building technologies at the heart of our products right here in America because we’re a proud American company and we believe deeply in the promise of this great nation”. But what becomes clear after digesting McGee’s book is that core Apple manufacturing is assuredly not returning to the United States.
Do not get me wrong: there is much to be admired in the complementary goals of reducing China-based manufacturing and an increasing U.S. role. Strip away for a minute the context of this president and his corrupt priorities. Rich nations have become dependent on people in poorer nations to make our stuff, and no nation is as critical to our global stuff supply as is China. One of the benefits of global trade is that it can smooth local rockiness; a bad harvest season no longer has to mean a shortage of food. Yet even if we ignore the unique political environment in China and its government’s detestable treatment of Uyghur peoples — among many domestic human rights abuses — it makes little sense for us to be so dependent on this one country. This is basically an antitrust problem.
At the same time, it sure would be nice if we made more of the stuff we buy closer to where we live. We have grown accustomed to externalizing the negative consequences of making all this stuff. Factories exist somewhere else, so the resources they consume and the pollution they create is of little concern to us. They are usually not staffed by a brand we know, and tasks may be subcontracted, so there is often sufficient plausible deniability vis a vis working conditions and labour standards. As McGee documents, activist campaigns had a brief period of limited success in pressuring Apple to reform its standards and crack down on misbehaviour before the pressure of product delivery caught up with the company and it stopped reporting its regressing numbers. Also, it is not as though Apple could truly avoid knowing the conditions at these factories when there are so many of its own employees working side-by-side with Foxconn.
All the work done by people in factories far away from where I live is, frankly, astonishing. Some people still erroneously believe the country of origin is an indicator of whether a product is made with any degree of finesse or care. This is simply untrue, and it has been for decades, as McGee emphasizes. This book is worth reading for this perspective alone. The goods made in China today are among the most precise and well-crafted anywhere, on a simply unbelievable scale. In fact, it is this very ability to produce so much great stuff so quickly that has tied Apple ever tighter to China, argues McGee:
Whereas smartphone rivals like Samsung could bolt a bunch of off-the-shelf components together and make a handset, Apple’s strategy required it to become ever more wedded to the industrial clusters forming around its production. As more of that work took place in China, with no other nation developing the same skills, Apple was growing dependent on the very capabilities it had created. (page 176)
Cook’s White House announcement, for all its patriotic fervour, only underscores this dependency. In the book’s introduction, McGee reports “Apple’s investments in China reached $55 billion per year by 2015, an astronomical figure that doesn’t include the costs of components in Apple hardware” (page 7). That sum built out a complete, nimble, and precise supply chain at vast scale. By contrast, Apple says it is contributing a total of $600 billion over four years, or $150 billion per year. In other words, it is investing about three times as much in the U.S. compared to China and getting far less. Important stuff, to be sure, but less. And, yes, Apple is moving some iPhone production out of China, but not to the U.S. — something like 18% of iPhones are now made in India. McGee’s sources are skeptical of the company’s ability to do so at scale given the organization of the supply chain and the political positioning of its contract manufacturers, but nobody involved thinks Apple is going to have a U.S. iPhone factory.
So much of this story is about the iPhone, and it can be difficult to remember Apple makes a lot of other products. To McGee’s credit, he spends the first two-and-a-half sections of this six-part book exploring Apple’s history, the complex production of the G3 and G4 iMacs, and the making of the iPod which laid the groundwork for the iPhone. But a majority of the rest of the book is about the iPhone. That is unsurprising.
First, the iPhone is the product of a staggering amount of manufacturing knowledge. It is also, of course, a sales bonanza.
In fact, among the most riveting stories in the book do not concern manufacturing at all. McGee writes of grey market iPhone sales — a side effect of which was the implementation of parts pairing and activation — and the early frenzy over the iPad. Most notably, McGee spends a couple of chapters — particularly “5 Alarm Fire” — dissecting the sub-par launch sales of the iPhone XR as revealed through executive emails and depositions after Apple was sued for allegedly misleading shareholders. The case was settled last year for $490 million without Apple admitting wrongdoing. Despite some of these documents becoming public in 2022, it seems nobody before McGee took the time to read through them. I am glad he did because it is revealing. Even pointing to the existence of these documents offers a fascinating glimpse of what Apple does when a product is selling poorly.
Frustratingly, McGee does not attribute specific claims or quotations to individual documents in this chapter. Virtually everything in “5 Alarm Fire” is cited simply to the case number, so you have to go poking around yourself if you wish to validate his claims or learn more about the story.1 It may be worthwhile, however, since it underscores the unique risk Apple takes by releasing just a few new iPhones each year. If a model is not particularly successful, Apple is not going to quietly drop it and replace it with a different SKU. With the 2018 iPhones, Apple was rocked by a bunch of different problems, most notably the decent but uninteresting iPhone XR — 79% fewer preorders (PDF) when compared to the same sales channels as the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus — and the more exciting new phones from Huawei and Xiaomi released around the same time. Apple had hoped the 2018 iPhones would be more interesting to the Chinese market since they supported dual SIMs (PDF) and the iPhone XS came in gold. Apple responded to weak initial demand with targeted promotions, increasing production of the year-old iPhone X, and more marketing, but this was not enough and the company had to lower its revenue expectations for the quarter.
That Cook called this “obviously a disaster” is, of course, a relative term, as is the way I framed this as a “risk” of Apple’s smartphone release strategy. Apple still sold millions of iPhones — even the XR — and it still made a massive amount of money. It is a unique story, however, as it is one of the few times in the book where Apple has a problem of making too many products rather than too few. It is also illustrative of increasing competition from Chinese brands and, as emails reveal (PDF), trade tensions between the U.S. and China.
The fundamental heart of the story of this book is of the tension of a “proud American company” attempting to appease two increasingly nationalist and hostile governments. McGee examines Apple’s billion-dollar investment in Didi Chuxing, and mentions Cook’s appointment to the board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management. This is all part of the politicking the company realized it would need to do to appease President Xi. Similarly, its massive spending in China needed to be framed correctly. For example, in 2016, it said it was investing $275 billion in China over the following five years:
As mind-bogglingly large as its $275 billion investment was, it was not really a quid pro quo. The number didn’t represent any concession on Apple’s part. It was just the $55 billion the company estimated it’d invested for 2015, multiplied by five years. […] What was new, in other words, wasn’t Apple’s investment, but its marketing of the investment. China was accumulating reams of specialized knowledge from Apple, but Beijing didn’t know this because Apple had been so secretive. From this meeting forward, the days in which Apple failed to score any political points from its investments in the country were over. It was learning to speak the local language.
One can see a similar dynamic in the press releases for U.S. investments it began publishing one year later, after Donald Trump first took office. Like Xi, Trump was eager to bend Apple to his administration’s priorities. Some of the company’s actions and investments are probably the same as those it would have made anyhow, but it is important to these autocrat types that they believe they are calling the shots.
Among the reasons the U.S. has given for taking a more hostile trade position on China is its alleged and, in some cases, proven theft of intellectual property. McGee spends less time on this — in part, I imagine, because it is a hackneyed theme frequently used only to treat innovation by Chinese companies with suspicion and contempt. This book is a more levelheaded piece of analysis. Instead of having the de rigueur chapter or two dedicated to intellectual property leaving through the back door, McGee examines the less-reported front-door access points. Companies are pressured to participate in “joint ventures” with Chinese businesses to retain access to markets, for example; this is why iCloud in China is operated not by Apple, but by AIPO Cloud (Guizhou) Technology Co. Ltd.
Even though patent and design disputes are not an area of focus for McGee, it is part of the two countries’ disagreements over trade, and one area where Apple is again stuck in the middle. A concluding anecdote in the book references the launch of the Huawei Mate XT, a phone that folds in three which, to McGee, “appears to be a marvel of industrial engineering”:2
It was only in 2014 that Jony Ive complained of cheap Chinese phones and their brazen “theft” of his designs; it was 2018 when Cupertino expressed shock at Chinese brands’ ability to match the newest features; now, a Chinese brand is designing, manufacturing, and shipping more expensive phones with alluring features that, according to analysts, Apple isn’t expected to match until 2027. No wonder the most liked comment on a YouTube unboxing video of the Mate XT is, “Now you know why USA banned Huawei.” (pages 377–378)
The Mate XT was introduced the same day as the iPhone 16 line, and the differences could not have been more stark. The iPhone was a modest evolution of the company’s industrial design language, yet would be familiar to someone who had been asleep for the preceding fifteen years. The Mate XT was anything but. The phones also had something in common: displays made by BOE. The company is one of several suppliers for the iPhone, and it enables the radical design of Huawei’s phone. But according to Samsung, BOE’s ability to make OLED and flexible displays depends on technology stolen from them. The U.S. International Trade Commission agreed and will issue a final ruling in November which is likely to prohibit U.S. imports of BOE-made displays. It seems like this will be yet another point of tension between the U.S. and China, and another thing Cook can mention during his next White House visit.
“Apple in China” is, as you can imagine, dense. I have barely made a dent in exploring it here. It is about four hundred pages and not a single one is wasted. This is not one of those typical books about Apple; there is little in here you have read before. It answers a bunch of questions I have had and serves as a way to decode Apple’s actions for the past ten years and, I think, during this second Trump presidency.
At the same time, it leaves me asking questions I did not fully consider before. I have long assumed Apple’s willingness to comply with the demands of the Chinese government are due to its supply chain and manufacturing role. That is certainly true, but I also imagine the country’s sizeable purchasing power is playing an increasing role. That is, even if Apple decentralizes its supply chain — unlikely, if McGee’s sources are to be believed — it is perhaps too large and too alluring a market for Apple to ignore. Then again, it arguably created this problem itself. Its investments in China have been so large and, McGee argues, so impactful they can be considered in the same context as the U.S.’ post-World War II European recovery efforts. Also, the design of Apple’s ecosystem is such that it can be so deferential. If the Chinese government does not want people in its country using an app, the centralized App Store means it can be yanked away.3
Cook has previously advocated for expressing social values as a corporate principle. In 2017, he said, perhaps paraphrasing his heroesMartin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, “if you see something going on that’s not right, the most powerful form of consent is to say nothing”. But how does Cook stand firmly for those values while depending on an authoritarian country for Apple’s hardware, and trying to appease a wanna-be dictator for the good standing of his business? In short, he does not. In long, well, it is this book.
It is this tension — ably shown by McGee in specific actions and stories rather than merely written about — that elevates “Apple in China” above the typical books about Apple and its executives. It is part of the story of how Apple became massive, how an operations team became so influential, and how the seemingly dowdy business of supply chains in China applied increasingly brilliant skills and became such a valuable asset in worldwide manufacturing. And it all leads directly to Tim Cook standing between Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in the White House, using the same autocrat handling skills he has practiced for years. Few people or businesses come out of this story looking good. Some look worse than others.
The most relevant documents I found under the “415” filings from December 2023. ↥︎
I think it is really weird to cite a YouTube comment in a serious book. ↥︎
I could not find a spot for this story in this review, but it forecasts Apple’s current position:
But Jobs resented third-party developers as freeloaders. In early 1980, he had a conversation with Mike Markkula, Apple’s chairman, where the two expressed their frustration at the rise of hardware and software groups building businesses around the Apple II. They asked each other: “Why should we allow people to make money off of us? Off of our innovations?” (page 23)
Sure seems like Jobs was able to revisit this when Apple created its rules for developing apps for the iPhone and subsequent devices. McGee sources this to Michael Malone’s 1999 book “Infinite Loop”, which I now feel I must read. ↥︎
Over the past week, I’ve been working to track down the new owner of MacSurfer’s Headline News, a beloved site that shut down in 2020 and has recently had somewhat mysterious revival. Fortunately, after some digging that didn’t really lead anywhere, I received an email from its new owner, Ken Turner, and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions about the new project.
Turner sounds like a great steward to carry on the MacSurfer legacy. Even in an era of well-known aggregators like Techmeme and massive forums like Hacker News and Reddit, I think there is still a role for a smaller and more focused media tracking site.
I am uncertain what the role of BackBeat Media is in all this. I have not heard from Dave Hamilton or anyone there to confirm if they even have a role.
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Members of a law enforcement group chat including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies inadvertently added a random person to the group called “Mass Text” where they exposed highly sensitive information about an active search for a convicted attempted murderer seemingly marked for deportation, 404 Media has learned.
[…]
The person accidentally added to the group chat, which appears to contain six people, said they had no idea why they had received these messages, and shared screenshots of the chat with 404 Media. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation.
This is going to keep happening if law enforcement and government agencies keep communicating through ad hoc means instead of official channels. In fact — and I have no evidence to support this — I bet it has happened, but the errant recipients did not contact a journalist.
Five years ago, Apple and tech news aggregator MacSurfer announced it was shutting down. The site was still accessible albeit in a stopped-time state, and it seemed that is how it would sit until the server died.
In June, though, MacSurfer was relaunched. The design has been updated and it is no longer as technically simple as it once was, but — charmingly — the logo appears to be the exact same static GIF as always. I cannot find any official announcement of its return.
It looks like Macsurfer is coming back, but I can’t find any details or who’s behind it? I really hope it’s not AI slop or someone trying to make a buck off nostalgia like iLounge or TUAW.
I had the same question, so I started digging. MxToolbox reveals a txt record on the domain for validating with Google apps, registered to BackBeat Media. BackBeat’s other properties include the Mac Observer, AppleInsider, and PowerPage. A review of historical MacSurfer txt records using SecurityTrails indicates the site has been with Backbeat Media since at least 2011, even though BackBeat’s site has not listed MacSurfer even when it was actively updated.
I cannot confirm the ownership is the same yet but I have asked Dave Hamilton, of BackBeat, and will update this if I hear back.
Update: Dave Hamilton confirmed via email that BackBeat does not have ownership over the new MacSurfer.
Two presentations I watched recently and I wish to share:
A couple of months ago, Deviant Ollam posted a copy of his CackalackyCon 2025 talk — nearly two hours about high-security safes and vaults from the Cold War to present day.
Earlier this week, Micah Lee posted the video of his DEF CON 33 talk about the “Signalgate” leaks of chats about war plans and the fallout thereof.
Both talks are worth your time. There is something about presentations at hacker conferences I find more compelling than just about anywhere else. These speakers are clearly passionate and skilful presenters of esoterica, and I could not imagine anyone else in their role.
The viral Tea app, which lets women post anonymously about men, has a new rival: TeaOnHer. In a gender flip, the new app is for men.
TeaOnHer is largely a copy of the original, but for men instead of women. Its description in Apple’s App Store is nearly identical to that of the other Tea app, which is officially called Tea Dating Advice.
TeaOnHer was designed for men to share photos and information about women they claim to have been dating. But much like Tea, the dating-gossip app for women it was trying to replicate, TeaOnHer had gaping holes in its security that exposed its users’ personal information, including photos of their driver’s licenses and other government-issued identity documents, as TechCrunch reported last week.
[…]
The flaws we found appear to be resolved. TechCrunch can now share how we were able to find users’ driver’s licenses within 10 minutes of being sent a link to the app in the App Store, thanks to easy to find flaws in the app’s public-facing backend system, or API.
As of writing, TeaOnHer is the second most popular free app in the U.S. iOS App Store, and Tea is third.
Unlike data exposed by Tea, which was spread all over the web, I cannot find any reports of data from TeaOnHer being reposted more widely. That is probably because it is a new app. But it is also, surely, a reflection of the gender makeup of each app, and who is more likely to be targeted.
The top two stories on Techmeme right now are lies. What I mean by that is not that the reporters are lying, but that the stories themselves are fundamentally dishonest because of who and what they are about. The first is by Katherine Blunt, of the Wall Street Journal:
Artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant’s web-search dominance.
Perplexity’s offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion. The company told The Wall Street Journal that several investors including large venture-capital funds had agreed to back the transaction in full.
Perplexity will not be buying Chrome. Someone there is very good at getting press, but this is ridiculous.
Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday his artificial intelligence startup xAI would take legal action against Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of breaching antitrust regulations in managing App Store rankings.
“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform X.
The whole gimmick was revealed less than two hours later when Musk, quote-tweeting one of his drooling sycophants, started a campaign to increase its App Store popularity. I have no idea if it is working. It was not among the top free apps last Tuesday, but entered the chart on Wednesday; by Friday, it was number eight. On Sunday, it was number five. All of this happened pre-campaign. It has stayed in the number five slot probably in part because the App Store rankings are not immediate. Also, maybe ChatGPT is just really popular and well-known.
I cannot find a relevant lawsuit. I do think Apple should enforce its App Store rules since Grok is so unmoderated. This whole story is built on a foundation of lies to create what is effectively a viral marketing campaign for the permanently aggrieved.
Data brokers nationwide must register in California under the state’s Consumer Privacy Act, which allows Californians to request that their information be removed, that it not be sold or that they get access to it.
After reviewing the websites of all 499 data brokers registered with the state, we found 35 had code to stop certain pages from showing up in searches.
I am surprised just 35 were this sketchy — less than 10%. By my count of the Markup’s further reporting, 15 of those have since removed this restriction.
The core problems of data brokers remain, however: they are opt-out, not opt-in; and most people have not heard of them. The Markup acknowledges legislation in California attempting to address half this problem by creating a single opt-out demand. But that leaves these privacy-hostile businesses as defaulting to opted-in, and it does not do a whole lot of good for people outside California.
And the thing I love the most about sticking with tools for the long run is that you get to know the people behind them, and you learn to appreciate those individuals and what they do. That is especially true in my case because most of the tools I use are built by either small teams or single developers.
Entirely agreed.
There is quite a difference between my choosing to be a longstanding customer, and those businesses which take advantage of their position or dominance to create recurring revenue, particularly through subscriptions. I hate to sound like this, but there once was a time developers actively tried to build those kinds of client relationships through good service, quality products, and agreeable pricing. It seems that is happening less frequently. So much software now feels entirely disposable or, frustratingly, lacking in sufficient competition to become essentially a tax on the work we do.
Indie software is where the best stuff keeps happening. It is heartbreaking for it to feel so fragile.
Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will only be able to index the Reddit.com homepage, which effectively means Internet Archive will only be able to archive insights into which news headlines and posts were most popular on a given day.
Surely, this has something to do with Reddit’s decision to license the data created by its users, as Peters writes, but it also puts the Internet Archive in an uncomfortable middle seat with a massive trove of third-party data. Unfortunately for many publishers, the Archive seems to be perfectly happy with scrapers and is unbothered if its collection is used to train artificial intelligence. While the Wayback Machine preserves a copy of a website’s robots.txt file, any publisher serious about restricting A.I. training on their material must also block the Internet Archive for fear this could happen to them. That would be a terrible loss for all of us.
Every time someone floats the idea that Apple should acquire Perplexity to “supercharge” its AI efforts, I get whiplash, not just from the sheer strategic laziness of the suggestion, but from the deeper cultural misalignment it completely ignores. The very idea is a perplexing thought.
On the same day this past June, Alex Kantrowitz floated the idea of Apple acquiring Perplexity, and then Bloomberg published two articles claiming Apple and Meta each held discussions about an acquisition. This was around the same time the company was raising more money. I think Perplexity is very good at keeping this rumour afloat regardless of its likelihood or legitimacy. Masna is right: it feels like a poor fit, and it is unclear to me what Apple would gain beyond a crappy merch store.1
Watch Apple buy it anyway.
This is barely important, but it sold a bag of coffee beans without disclosing in the listing that it is flavoured. Only if you scroll through the pictures will you see the side of the bag stating it contains “coffee flavored coffees contain natural and artificial flavoring”. Careless to heart. ↥︎
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The goals of art and commerce are basically opposite. Art fills our soul; it gives us emotional life. I have rarely heard anyone describe commerce similarly.
At its most ideal, the business of art enables more of it in greater variety, while allowing those who create it a reasonable living. This has rarely been the case. There are hundreds of years of unbelievably wealthy patrons building their cultural cachet by supporting artists of their particular taste and at their behest. More recently, recording contracts are routinely described as “brutal”, “a raw deal”, “predatory”, and “exploitative”. That has been generally true for all artists, but has been particularly pronounced for marginalized — and, to be more even specific, black — artists since the recording industry’s origins.
In “Mood Machine”, released earlier this year, Liz Pelly adds an additional complicating question: what is the relationship between art and commerce when massive data collection becomes routine?
The origins of streaming music may be found first in piracy and later in Rhapsody, but Spotify is where modern streaming platforms truly began. While Spotify’s founders tend to describe a noble birth, Perry points to a 2015 interview with co-founder Martin Lorentzon in which he describes the idea to build a targeted advertising platform first. How it would acquire users was an open question — “[s]hould it be product search? Should it be movies, [or ‘Godfather’], or audiobooks? And then we ended up with music”. That is not necessarily a bad thing. What is bad, though, is that Spotify reportedly began with an unlicensed library and made money on the back of it. That combination does not sound to me like the result of a love of music.
Sadly, the interesting storytelling does not reliably continue. Admittedly, part of the reason for this is my personal distaste for Pelly’s style of writing, something which I would not normally mention — surely not everyone is a fan of my writing style, either — but feel compelled to do so for how intrusive I found it. Far too many sections and chapters in this book end in a tedious turn of phrase: “Under the gaze of streaming surveillance, the exchange is never truly one-to-one;”; “It makes sense that as the digital world has grown to feel more like a shopping mall, it is also sometimes the very companies making music for shopping malls that are flooding its soundtrack”. Another part of the problem is the way this book is organized. Each chapter reads like an individual essay dedicated to a specific problem with Spotify — algorithmic suggestions, vibe-based playlists, and changing business terms, to name a few. What that looks like in practice is a great deal of repetition. I count at least seven chapters, of eighteen, dedicated to background and unfocused listening.
Part of the problem, however, is that Pelly has been documenting these phenomena for years in articles published at the Baffler. I am familiar with the extraordinary amount of “chill” music, trendy sound palettes, the relationship between mood-based music and targeted advertising, and the comparisons to Uber because these articles were all published a minimum of six years ago. That I remember these articles is sometimes a testament to Pelly’s reporting; at other times, it reminds me of things I previously found questionable but could not quite articulate why.
One thing I remember from one article, for example, is its attempt to define a “Spotify sound”. This was revisited in the book in the “Streambait Pop” chapter (page 82):
By the time of Spotify’s IPO in 2018, it seemed that the peak playlist era had produced an aesthetic of its own. That year, one pop songwriter and producer told me that [Billie] Eilish had become a type of poster child for what was being called a “Spotify sound,” a deluge of platform-optimized pop that was muted, mid-tempo, and melancholy. He told me it had become normal for him to go into a session and hear someone say they wanted to write a “Spotify song” to pitch around to artists: “I’ve definitely been in circumstances where people are saying, ‘Let’s make one of those sad girl Spotify songs.’ You give yourself a target,” he said. It was a formula. “It has this soft, emo-y, cutesy thing to it. These days it’s often really minimal and based around just a few simple elements in verses. Often a snap in the verses. And then the choruses sometimes employ vocal samples. It’s usually kind of emo in lyrical nature.”
Pelly’s argument is built primarily around the works of Charlotte Lawrence, Sasha Sloan, and Nina Nesbitt, none of which I am familiar with. But their music — “Normal” and “Psychopath” are both named in the article — sound like a lot of pop music trends of the time: a blend of genres that emerges kind of beach-clubby, pretty breathy, and electronics-heavy but not particularly danceable. Pelly quotes an indie rock label owner calling it “emotional wallpaper”.
In re-reading Pelly’s “streambait” article for this piece, I found this paragraph a good distillation of many arguments made throughout the book:
Musical trends produced in the streaming era are inherently connected to attention, whether it’s hard-and-fast attention-grabbing hooks, pop drops and chorus-loops engineered for the pleasure centers of our brains, or music that strategically requires no attention at all—the background music, the emotional wallpaper, the chill-pop-sad-vibe playlist fodder. These sounds and strategies all have streambait tricks embedded within them, whether they aim to wedge bits of a song into our skulls or just angle toward the inoffensive and mood-specific-enough to prevent users from clicking away. All of this caters to an economy of clicks and completions, where the most precious commodity is polarized human attention — either amped up or zoned out—and where success is determined, almost in advance, by data.
Much like the similar essays in “Mood Machine”, very little of this feels like it is directly traceable to Spotify or streaming generally. There has long been pop music that is earwormy, and pop music that is kind of a silence-filler. When radio was more influential, the former could be found on the contemporary hit radio station and the latter on any number of adult contemporary variants.
Coalescing around a particular sound is also not a Spotify phenomenon. The early 1990s brought an onslaught of Nirvana imitators, and the late 1990s polished the sound so hard it removed any trace of edge and intrigue it once held. The early-2000s dominance of Coldplay made way for the mid-2000s Timbaland production craze, which led to a wave of late-2000s dance and club pop, which was followed in the early-2010s by Americana revival. This is the power of radio. Or, it was the power of radio, at least. You could describe any of the chart-topping songs in similar terms as Pelly uses for “streambait”: “attention-grabbing hooks”, “chorus-loops engineered for the pleasure centers of our brains”, and “chill-pop-sad-vibe playlist fodder”. Should this be blamed on the precise listener analytics dashboard available to artists on Spotify? I am not sufficiently convinced.
Pelly describes a discussion she had with two teenagers outside an all-ages venue as they struggled to describe the “aesthetic rap” show they were attending, a genre which seems to be a slower and spacier take on rage (page 118):
The kids I spoke to outside Market seemed genuinely enthused. But as I headed home, I was struck by how palpably it seemed that most of those conversations were more concerned with a niche vibe fandom — which no one could even really explain — than the artists themselves.
I cannot imagine this is a new phenomenon. Some people develop a deep fascination with music and seek releases from specific artists. But plenty are only looking for a sound and a vibe. It is why retailers and magazines gave away sampler CDs in the mid-2000s scratching a generic indie rock itch.
What Pelly keeps describing in these chapters is a kind of commodification of cool, none of which is new or unique to Spotify. It is the story of popular culture writ large: things begin as cool for a small group, are absorbed into broader society, and are sold back to us by industry. This most often happens to marginalized communities who find community in vocabulary, music, visual art, and dance, and then it gets diluted as it becomes mainstreamed.
As noted, Pelly dedicates considerable space in the book to chill playlists — “‘Chilled Dance Hits,’ ‘Chilled R&B,’ and ‘Chilled Reggae’ were all among Spotify’s official playlist offerings, alongside collections like ‘Chillin’ on a Dirt Road,’ ‘lofi chill,’ and ‘Calm.'” (page 45). This is partly not the fault of Spotify; YouTube expanded the availability of live streams in 2013 and it resulted in plenty of samey chill hop stations. In a 2018 New York Times article about these nonstop live-streams, Jonah E. Bromwich writes:
Channels like College Music, ChilledCow, Chillhop Music and others are unlikely to have a broad impact on the music industry. But they represent an underground alternative to the streaming hegemony of Spotify and Apple Music. The industry commentator Bob Lefsetz said that while the stations were not likely to become a lucrative endeavor, they were a way for members of the public to seize power back from cultural gatekeepers.
Instead of being predominantly inspired or encouraged by Spotify, it is possible the growth of the background music genre is something the company is instead taking advantage of — and take advantage it did.
Whether on YouTube or Spotify, the beat-makers behind these tracks are loosely inspired by artists like J Dilla, but they have coalesced around a distinctly hazy and slowed-down instrumental palette. That these tracks are deliberately indistinct has led to Spotify commissioning low-royalty generic tracks and, as Pelly writes, this passivity is an area “where the imminent A.I. infiltration of music was most feasible: the replacement of lean-back mood music” (page 132).
All told, it sure sounds like Spotify aligned its recommendations to compel users into filling silence with music featureless enough it could be replicated by what are, in effect, stock tracks. If this was a deliberate strategy to allow Spotify to have lower royalty expenses, it has had a mixed effect. Setting aside the ongoing popularity of big pop stars like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber — I would love to know how much of Spotify’s revenue is sent to those two artists alone — the rise of streaming also coincided with the explosion of in-your-face K-pop groups, renewed interest in rock music, and revivals of funk and disco. These are not the kinds of passive listening genres Pelly seems so concerned with.
That is not to say Spotify plays no influence in what is popular. Just as what was made popular on the radio brought a wave of imitators, so too is the case for an era where streaming is where most people listen to music. None of this is new. A streaming listener’s context is often quite similar to a radio listener’s, too. Pelly’s exploration of the chilled-out Spotify playlist and lean-back listener reads, to me, with considerable disdain. But that kind of passive listening was common in the radio days. People put music on in the car and at work all the time. My parents used to put a C.D. on when they were cooking dinner. I do not think they were captivated in that moment by the sounds of Genesis or the Police. I was listening to music while reading this book and writing this article. Sometimes, an album will get played as a background to other tasks; any musician is surely aware of this.
Perhaps you, too, are now seeing what I began to understand. What Pelly keeps gesturing at throughout this book — but never quite reaches — is that the problems Spotify faces are similar to that of any massive two-sided platform. Pick your case study of any of the large tech companies and you can find parallels in Spotify. It has hundreds of millions of subscribers; everything it does is at vast scale.
It has privacy problems. Pelly dedicates a chapter to “Streaming as Surveillance”, pointing to Spotify’s participation in the data broker and ad tech economy. Spotify suggests its ads can be targeted based on users’ moods correlated with playlist and song data. This, like so many other ad tech sales pitches, is likely an inflated claim with only limited success. Yet it is also a little creepy to consider it is what Spotify aspires its ad product to be.
Spotify, like many others, faces moderation problems. Spotify does not want to put too many limits on what music is accepted. In the best of circumstances, this makes it possible for a nascent artist to rise from obscurity and start a career. But there are financial incentives to gaming the system. There are people who will follow trends, and even commit outright fraud manually or with A.I.-generated material. This is true for other broadly available revenue machines — Google Ads and YouTube are two that immediately spring to mind. In an attempt to disincentivize these behaviours and reduce Spotify’s costs, the company announced in November 2023 it would stop paying royalties for tracks with fewer than one thousand annual streams. Pelly writes this “was part of a campaign waged by Universal Music Group to revamp streaming in its favor” (page 155). When Spotify rolled out this new royalty structure, UMG CEO Lucian Grainge bade good riddance to “merchants of garbage […] no one actually wants to listen to” (page 157). How much it actually hurts low-effort spammers is a good question, but it impacts legitimate indie artists — what Grainge calls “garbage” — for whom Spotify now presents no advantage over piracy.
I would not be so presumptuous as to say that is what this book ought to have been but, as a longtime reader of Pelly’s articles about the subject, I was frustrated by “Mood Machine”. It is the kind of book I wish would be taken apart and reassembled for better flow and a more coherent structure. Spotify and the streaming model have problems. “Mood Machine” identifies many of them. But the money quote — the one that cut through everything for me — is from an anonymous former Spotify employee (page 167):
“If Spotify is guilty of something, they had the opportunity at one point to change the way value was exhanged in the music industry, and they decided not to,” the former employee told me. “So it’s just upholding the way that things have always been.”
We treat art terribly. It is glamorous and alluring, but it is ultimately a plaything of the rich. The people who make money in art, no matter the discipline, are those responsible for its distribution, management, and sale. Those creating the actual work that enriches our lives too often get the scraps, unless they have enough cachet to dictate the terms in their favour.
Spotify is just another layer in the chain; another place that makes far more money than artists ever will. An artist understands they are signing up for a job with unpredictable pay, but Spotify’s particular structure makes it even more opaque.
The four biggest audio streaming platforms — Spotify, YouTube, Tencent, and Apple Music are the top-down force pushing culture in a particular direction, a level of influence Clear Channel’s executives could have only hoped for in its heyday. Streaming can help people learn about music they have never heard before. But it is not very effective as an artistic conduit. It is an ad-supported platform operating at global scale, much like a handful of other large tech companies, and it faces similar problems.
Yet none of them are as essentially tied to the distribution of art as is Spotify. It is a shame it did not create something to upend the status quo and made more artists more money. I guess part of the reason for that could be because its co-founders saw music as one of several interchangeable user acquisition strategies to sell advertisements — you know, for the love of art and music.
Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year. Additionally, average click quality has increased and we’re actually sending slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago (by quality clicks, we mean those where users don’t quickly click back — typically a signal that a user is interested in the website). This data is in contrast to third-party reports that inaccurately suggest dramatic declines in aggregate traffic — often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search.
What “relatively stable” means is not explained and, incredibly, not a single number is used in this press release about quantifiable data. However, even giving Google an unearned benefit of the doubt, the company also says people “are searching more than ever”. If more searches are being done but the number of clicks is “relatively stable”, it effectively confirms a dropping click-through rate. None of this counters or disproves publishers’ findings of declining Google referral traffic. Even if aggregate traffic from Google has not dropped significantly, it is not clear it is going to the same places in similar amounts.
A big problem Google has is that it closely guards everything related to search, ostensibly to reduce gaming its ranking factors, and it is not a trustworthy narrator. It intuitively makes sense for A.I. Overviews to damage search traffic. We just do not know for which websites and by how much, and Reid’s post provides no clarity.
Reid:
The web has existed for over three decades, and we believe we’re entering its most exciting era yet. […]
As of the day this was published, exactly 34 years since the first website was launched.
Apple today announced a new $100 billion commitment to America, a significant acceleration of its U.S. investment that now totals $600 billion over the next four years. Today’s announcement includes the ambitious new American Manufacturing Program (AMP), dedicated to bringing even more of Apple’s supply chain and advanced manufacturing to the U.S. Through AMP, Apple will increase its investment across America and incentivize global companies to manufacture even more critical components in the United States.
Is someone keeping track of the results of these commitments? Please let me know.
“Today, we’re proud to increase our investments across the United States to $600 billion over four years and launch our new American Manufacturing Program,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “This includes new and expanded work with 10 companies across America. They produce components that are used in Apple products sold all over the world, and we’re grateful to the President for his support.”
Call it whatever you want, but Cook now finds himself trying to appease the presidents of both the United States and China. The goals of each are in opposition, yet either one could make a move imperilling Apple. When his time at Apple ends, Cook may wish to be remembered as a diplomat, but that word will always carry the vibe of euphemism.
Apple has been updating some classic Mac icons during the macOS Tahoe beta, upsetting some longtime Mac users who prefer the original look. In beta 5, Apple changed the design of the built-in Mac storage icon, which you’ll notice if you have it on your desktop.
I want to put a finer point on the problem with this icon: it is not a mere aesthetic preference or a reaction to change, but a simple acknowledgement that this icon is not good. It has a generic quality, a lack of personality. The perspective does not make sense, either. It is just a sad grey box without any connection to literal data storage on a modern Mac, the “Macintosh HD” label beside it on the Desktop, or any object in the real world. It feels like a first draft. I know we are still in the beta process, but I have little confidence it will progress much beyond what we see now.
The next major version of Ghost has arrived, and our 6.0 release is packed full of more upgrades and improvements than you can shake a stick at.
The headline feature is integration with the modern social web, including ActivityPub and the AT Protocol, but I think the most impressive thing is integrated cookie-less first-party analytics. This will allow some Ghost publishers to dispense with invasive third-party providers.
If Ghost added MarsEdit support, I would be awful tempted to switch from WordPress. I would rather use a platform that seems to care fundamentally about words on a webpage more than being a do-it-all CMS.
This year, eleven candidates compete for World Wide Web glory. Who will win? Will it be the cheeky Internet Roadtrip? The thoughtful Fifty Thousand Names? The absurd Traffic Cam Photo Booth? You can vote for your favourite until 1 September.
In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs.
Over time, these existing URLs saw less and less traffic as the years went on – in fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month.
As such, we will be turning off Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this may impact you.
While we previously announced discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs after August 25, 2025, we’ve adjusted our approach in order to preserve actively used links.
We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received.
This sounds like a big change, but it is a very small one — according to Google’s statistics, the ongoing support affects less than 1% of all shortened links. If you used Google’s URL shortener and have not actively been looking for goo.gl links since last year’s announcement, your links are probably going to stop working this month, and you might not know where they redirect.
Also, even though Google says it is “discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs”, this is not true either. Google continues to use that domain for shared links created from its own apps like Maps and Photos. It says in its post from last year those links will continue to work. I think this is the original sin of this URL shortener and why the company is reluctant to keep supporting it. Google should never have used the same domain for trusted links it created and untrusted URLs from users. This is a problem that can be solved by, say, an interstitial notice of where the short URL is redirecting, but I think Google just wants to wash its hands of the whole thing regardless of the impact it will have.
Now, with these older iOS devices in particular, battery life is what it is, and I don’t always remember to keep them all charged at all times. It happens with my Mac laptops as well. Whenever I revive one of these devices, if it’s still able to access iCloud and other Apple ID-related services, I get a notification on all my other Apple devices that a certain device has now access to FaceTime and iMessage.
The wording in this notification has changed for the worse in more recent versions of Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS. […]
The alert doesn’t actually mean that the the device was added in the user sense. Most of the time the device was already in my account, but a software update or something meant that Apple needed to do some kind of key refresh. It feels like I’m being interrupted for an implementation detail.
I do not see this as frequently as, it seems, Mori or Tsai — I do not have a stable of old devices I rotate between, nor am I a software developer. When I do, it is almost never because I have purchased a new device. It is usually because of, as Tsai writes, a software update or perhaps adding a travel SIM, so it is poorly confirming something I already know in an interruptive and ambiguous way. Occasionally, the software update was installed automatically, so I am surprised by the alert on a different device but have no way of understanding what happened. Then I think about what I should actually do with this information, particularly with the revised wording of this alert:
Your Apple ID and phone number are now being used for iMessage on a new Mac.
If you recently signed in to “[Device Name]”, you can ignore this notification.
[OK]
What do I do now? That is rhetorical; I understand I would search it. (I also asked Siri on iOS 26 — you know, the one with the product knowledge — and it, too, searched Google.) But what does a normal person do now? This is scary and unhelpful, yet the user interface says in the same breath it might be irrelevant.
It reminds me a little of the often-wrong map in the dialog box for two-factor authentication. These are features ostensibly to promote greater security but they only erode users’ awareness if they are not designed with more precision and care.
LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.
This follows the now-familiar playbook we’ve seen from Meta, YouTube, and others. Meta rewrote its policies in January to allow content calling LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” and portraying trans identities as “abnormal.” YouTube quietly scrubbed “gender identity” from its hate speech policies, then had the audacity to call it “regular copy edits.” Now LinkedIn is doing the same cowardly dance.
Any one of these platform changes is dispiriting and upsetting; that it is part of a pattern to, I guess, avoid scrutiny from a government demanding subservience is pretty obvious. But there is something about it being LinkedIn — the lukewarm social network for middle management to broadcast their “work” — that makes it a specific kind of evil. Now professional connections can harass people for who they are. Appalling.
Also, worth a reminder that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and profile information can be integrated into Microsoft 365.
The Vagueness and Vagaries of ‘Personal Superintelligence’
Mark Zuckerberg is not much of a visionary. He is ambitious, sure, and he has big ideas. He occasionally pops into the public consciousness to share some new direction in which he is taking his company — a new area of focus that promises to assert his company’s leadership in technology and society. But very little of it seems to bear fruit or be based on a coherent set of principles.
For example, due to Meta’s scale, it is running into limitations on its total addressable market based on global internet connectivity. It has therefore participated in several related projects, like measuring the availability of internet connectivity worldwide with the Economist, which has not been updated since 2022. In 2014, it acquired a company building a solar-powered drone to beam service to people in more remote locations; the project was cancelled in 2018. It made a robot to wrap fibre optic cable around existing power lines, which it licensed to Hibot in 2023; Hibot has nothing on its website about the robot.
It is not just Meta’s globe-spanning ambitions that have faltered. In 2019, Zuckerberg outlined a “privacy-focused vision for social networking” for what was then Facebook, the core tenets of which in no way conflict with the company’s targeted advertising business. Aside from the things I hope Facebook was already doing — data should be stored securely, private interactions should remain private, and so on — there were some lofty goals. Zuckerberg said the company should roll out end-to-end encrypted messaging across its product line; that it should add controls to automatically delete or hide posts after some amount of time; that its products should be extremely interoperable with those from third-parties. As of writing, Meta added end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger and Instagram, but it is only on by default for Facebook. (WhatsApp was end-to-end encrypted by default already.) It has not added an automatic post deletion feature to Facebook or Instagram. Its apps remain stubbornly walled-off. You cannot even sign into a third-party Mastodon app with a Threads account, even though it is amongst the newest and most interoperable offerings from Meta.
Zuckerberg published that when it was advantageous for the company to be seen as doing its part for user privacy. Similarly, when it was smart to advocate for platform safety, Zuckerberg was contrite:
But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough. We didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking through how people could use these tools to do harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, hate speech, in addition to developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake.
Then, when it became a good move to be brash and arrogant, Zuckerberg put on a gold chain and a million-dollar watch to explain how platform moderation had gone too far.
To be clear, Meta has not entirely failed with these initiatives. As mentioned, Threads is relatively interoperable, and the company defaulted to end-to-end encryption in Facebook Messenger in 2023. It said earlier this year it is spending $10 billion on a massive sub-sea cable, which is a proven technology to expand connectivity more than a solar-powered drone could.
But I have so far not mentioned the metaverse. According to Zuckerberg, this is “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it”, and it was worth pivoting the entire company to be “metaverse-first”. The company renamed itself “Meta”. Zuckerberg forecasted an “Altria moment” a few years prior and the press noticed. In announcing this new direction in 2021, Zuckerberg acknowledged it would be a long-term goal, though predicted it would be “mainstream in the next five to ten years”:
Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.
Granted, it has not been even four years since Zuckerberg made these announcements, but are we any closer to his company’s vision becoming mainstream? If you broaden the definition of “metaverse” to include all augmented and virtual reality products then, yes, it appears to be a growing industry. But the vision shown at Connect 2021 is scarcely anywhere to be found. We are not attending virtual concerts or buying virtual merch at virtual after-parties. I am aching to know how the metaverse real estate market is doing as I am unaware of anyone I know living in a virtual house.
As part of this effort, Meta announced in May 2022 it would support NFTs on Instagram. These would be important building blocks for the metaverse, the company said, “critical for how people will buy, use and share virtual objects and experiences” in the virtual environment it was building. Meta quickly expanded availability to Facebook and rolled it out worldwide. Then, in March 2023, it ended support for NFTs altogether, saying “[a]ny collectibles you’ve already shared will remain as posts, but no blockchain info will be displayed”.
Zuckerberg has repeatedly changed direction on what his company is supposed to stand for. He has plenty of ideas, sure, and they are often the kinds of things requiring resources in an amount only possible for a giant corporation like the one he runs. And he has done it again by dedicating Meta’s efforts to what he is calling — in a new manifesto, open letter, mission statement, or whatever this is — “personal superintelligence”.
I do have to take a moment to acknowledge the bizarre quality of this page. It is ostensibly a minimalist and unstyled document of near-black Times New Roman on a white background — very hacker, very serious. It contains about 3,800 characters, which should mean a document barely above four or five kilobytes, accounting for HTML tags and a touch of CSS. Yet it is over 400 kilobytes. Also, I love that keywords are defined:
<meta name="keywords" content="Personal
Superintelligence, AI systems improvement,
Superintelligence vision, Mark Zuckerberg
Meta, Human empowerment AI, Future of
technology, AI safety and risks, Personal
AI devices, Creativity and culture with
AI, Meta AI initiatives">
Very retro.
Anyway, what is “superintelligence”? is a reasonable question you may ask, and a term which Zuckerberg does not define. I guess it is supposed to be something more than or different from artificial intelligence, which is yesterday’s news:
As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.
He decries competitors’ ambitions:
This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well.
I am unsure what to make of this. It is sorely tempting to dismiss the whole endeavour as little more than words on a page for a company deriving 98% of its revenue (PDF) from advertising.1 If we consider it more seriously, however, we are left with an ugly impression for what “valuable work” may consist of. Meta is very proud of its technology to “generate photorealistic images”, thereby taking the work of artists and photographers. Examples of its technology also include generating blog posts and building study plans, so it seems writing and tutoring are not entirely “valuable work” either.
I am being a bit cheeky but, with Zuckerberg’s statement entirely devoid of specifics, I am also giving it the gravitas it has earned.
While I was taking way too long to write this, Om Malik examined it from the perspective of someone who has followed Zuckerberg’s career trajectory since it began. It is a really good piece. Though Malik starts by saying “Zuck is one of the best ‘chief executives’ to come out of Silicon Valley”, he concludes by acknowledging he is “skeptical of his ability to invent a new future for his company”:
Zuck has competitive anxiety. By repeatedly talking about being “distinct from others in the industry” he is tipping his hand. He is worried that Meta is being seen as a follower rather than leader. Young people are flocking to ChatGPT. Programmers are flocking to Claude Code.
What does Meta AI do? Bupkiss. And Zuck knows that very well. You don’t do a company makeover if things are working well.
If you are solely looking at Meta’s earnings, things seem to be working just fine for the company. Meta beat revenue expectations in its most recent quarter while saying the current quarter will also be better than analysts thought. Meta might not be meeting already-low analyst expectations for revenue in its Reality Labs metaverse segment, but the stock jumped by 10% anyhow. Even Wall Street is not taking Zuckerberg seriously as an innovator. Meta is great at selling ads. It is not very exciting, but it works.
Back to the superintelligence memo, emphasis mine:
We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible. That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source. Still, we believe that building a free society requires that we aim to empower people as much as possible.
Meta is committed to open source AI. I’ll outline why I believe open source is the best development stack for you, why open sourcing Llama is good for Meta, and why open source AI is good for the world and therefore a platform that will be around for the long term.
[…]
There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. I think governments will conclude it’s in their interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer.
No mention of being careful, no mention of choosing what to open source. Zuckerberg took an ostensibly strong, principled view supportive of open source A.I. when it benefitted the company, and is now taking an ostensibly strong, principled view that it requires more nuance.
Zuckerberg concludes:
Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I’m excited to focus Meta’s efforts towards building this future.
On this, I kind of believe him. I believe the company has the resources and reach to make “personal superintelligence” — whatever it is — a central part of Meta’s raison d’être, just as Malik says in his article he has “learned not to underestimate Zuckerberg”. The language in Zuckerberg’s post is flexible, vague, and optimistic enough to provide cover for whatever the company does next. It could be a unique virtual assistant, or it could be animated stickers in chats. Whatever it is, this technology will also assuredly be directed toward the company’s advertising machine, as its current A.I. efforts are providing “greater efficiency and gains across our ad system”. Zuckerberg is telling investors imagine what we could do with superintelligence.
The key issue here is the same as the OpenAI training issue: people don’t believe these companies when they say that they aren’t doing something.
One interesting difference here is that in the Facebook example people have personal evidence that makes them believe they understand what’s going on.
With AI we have almost the complete opposite: AI models are weird black boxes, built in secret and with no way of understanding what the training data was or how it influences the model.
Meta has pulled off a remarkable feat. It has ground down users’ view of their own privacy into irrelevance, yet its services remain ubiquitous to the point of being essential. Maybe Meta does not need trust for its A.I. or “superintelligence” ambitions, either. It is unfathomably rich, has a huge volume of proprietary user data, and a CEO who keeps pushing forward despite failing at basically every quasi-visionary project. Maybe that is enough.
Do note two slides later the company’s effective tax rate dropping from 17% in Q3 and Q4 2023 to just 9% in Q1 2025, and 11% in the most recent quarter. Nine percent on over $18 billion in income. ↥︎
Have you ever wondered what bops powerful figures are listening to on Spotify? You’d be amazed what you can get with a profile search — but just in case you want them all in one place, there’s the Panama Playlists, a newly published collection of data on the musical listening habits of politicians, journalists, and tech figures, as curated by an anonymous figure.
Silly name aside, I am glad to finally have a privacy-related concern that is not actually so bad. Yes, some people confirmed to Lopatto that they were unaware they were sharing their playlists publicly, but at least it is not private data per se. And it gives us a relatively non-creepy peek into the lives of the rich and famous. For example, Marc Benioff has a terrible “High Energy Party” playlists into which he has dumped whole albums with seeming disregard to vibe consistency or quality — it is simply a massive amount of songs from the Black Eyed Peas, Metallica, and Beatles tribute bands, plus one lonely song by the Doors. The art of the playlist is dead.
5,090 days after 24 August 2011 is today. The Cook era is now as long as the Jobs renaissance era.
Just as it is baffling to consider how much time Cook has officially led Apple — I have not included the two times when he temporarily took on the role for reasons of Jobs’ health — it is hard for me to believe the same amount of time has now passed which solidified so much of today’s Apple. You already know the highlights: the iMac, Mac OS X, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. All that and more happened between September 1997 and August 2011.
Apple was given new life under Jobs’ leadership. That relatively small group of people set the groundwork for it to become, under Cook, the giant it is today. I thought it was worth marking the day this era has overtaken the last.
Our apps deserve more love than we can currently give. We’re looking to find new homes for our side products – many of which have storied histories and loads of happy & loyal customers.
It does not sound like this includes Linea Sketch, Tapestry, Tot, or Wallaroo, but I am not sure it is limited to the smaller free apps like Clicker or Fontcase, either.
This sure is a worrisome sign for the Iconfactory. Unfortunately, the trends of the past many years have not been kind to studios like theirs, and a future of thoughtless generative design and enforced mediocrity is ominous. I wish them only the best.
You all know I love the default Tiger desktop picture. It is a perfect shade of blue, and just the right balance of visual interest and neutrality. Sadly, it was only ever released at a maximum size of 2560 × 1600 pixels — slightly smaller, even, than the resolution of today’s 13-inch MacBook Air. I filed a radar many years ago asking Apple to release a high-resolution version without result. However, there are two great third-party options.
Hector Simpson made an excellent set a few years ago that has received colour scheme updates all the way through MacOS Sequoia.
Keir Ansell also published a set with his own take on a range of mostly blues and grey. Ansell has just added a variant based on the colour scheme of the MacOS Tahoe desktop picture.
I love both sets and, if you are as enthusiastic about this era of Mac OS X wallpapers as I am, I think you will too. Simpson’s set is $4 and Ansell’s is $5, though the standard Aqua variant is free.
I should also mention Stephen Hackett’s excellent high-res gallery of Mac desktop pictures, including upscaled versions of older images. Aside from Tiger, I am partial to the Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion space pictures.
Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.
“Yes, if you sent Tea App your face and drivers license, they doxxed you publicly! No authentication, no nothing. It’s a public bucket,” a post on 4chan providing details of the vulnerability reads. “DRIVERS LICENSES AND FACE PICS! GET THE FUCK IN HERE BEFORE THEY SHUT IT DOWN!”
This is ghastly. It seems possible Tea did not do even the most basic step of stripping location metadata from submitted photos.
A second, major security issue with women’s dating safety app Tea has exposed much more user data than the first breach we first reported last week, with an independent security researcher now finding it was possible for hackers to access messages between users discussing abortions, cheating partners, and phone numbers they sent to one another. Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of Tea’s users.
Lots of apps have insecure or poorly secured cloud data buckets, and their data gets leaked, and that really sucks. Given the function of Tea and the deserved reputation of 4chan, however, this seems to be driven by motivations greater than a typical breach. In my head, it aligns with the politically motivated breaches of university data.
It is entirely possible this is nothing more than hackers getting lucky, and they were not picking Tea specifically. Fine. Tea should have anticipated the possibility it is a greater target because of the function it serves.
During our early stages of development, we required selfies and IDs as an added layer of safety to ensure that only women were signing up for the app. In 2023, we removed the ID requirement.
Security is dependent in no small part on norms. Understanding how to spot a phishing email, not to share one’s two-factor authentication code, or how to recognize a scam call are all examples of norms that bolster security. Yet when people are increasingly encouraged to share their most sensitive information — photo IDs, Social Security numbers, face scans — across websites and apps, they will begin to feel comfortable doing so. Offering up sensitive data could become a reflexive act like agreeing to terms of service documents. However, people cannot be sure how this data will be stored and used. In this case, Tea could not have been adhering to its privacy policy regarding its data storage, which before now might have assuaged fears of people concerned how their information might be stored or used. Some companies may store and use sensitive data in safer ways, but users do not have the ability to vet this. Even companies using better security practices can face hacks.
R Street is a think tank that stands for “free markets and limited, effective government”, so they will not say this, but privacy legislation would help protect users from these kinds of abuses. It was probably a bad idea for Tea to be collecting so much personal information in the first place. Yet this kind of data is routinely used in some industries, and it is unrealistic to expect individuals to figured out and monitor the privacy practices of individual services. Policies that limit data collection and retention, along with public auditing or other compliance-checking methods, can allow us to be more confident and provide remedies for bad practices and misuse.
Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.”
[…]
Substack said that the alert was issued by mistake. “We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received,” a spokesperson told User Mag. “In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused. We have taken the relevant system offline, diagnosed the issue, and are making changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
One way for a social media platform administrator to reduce the likelihood people will erroneously receive notifications for Nazi stuff is by disallowing Nazi stuff on their social media platform. Sadly, I do not think that is the change Substack is committing to making.
Thomas Germain, BBC News, covered the Pew report about the relationship between Google’s A.I. Overviews and click-through traffic:
Pew says it’s confident in its research. “Our findings are broadly consistent with independent studies conducted by web analytics firms,” [Pew’s Aaron] Smith says. Dozens of reports show AI Overviews cut search traffic as much as 30% to 70% depending on what people are Googling. [Amisive’s Lily] Ray says she’s personally seen this in data from hundreds of websites.
But Google tells the BBC you should disregard this, because it’s bad research, biased data and meaningless anecdotes. The company says web traffic fluctuates for many reasons, and AI Overviews link to a wider variety of sources and create new ways to discover websites. Google’s spokesperson says the clicks from AI answers are also higher quality because people spend more time on the sites they visit.
I will continue to harp on this report. I think it is going to be foundational, yet I do not think it is robust enough to sustain the number of articles and conclusions that will be derived from it. The same is also true of a lot of third-party research into Google’s search engine. A decline of 30% in click-through rates is significant, but 70% is catastrophic. It is hard to see how these are both valid results.
This research is also more complex than these headline findings. Take the report showing a 70% reduction in click-through rates when an A.I. Overview is present. That is true — it is a reduction from 2.94% to 0.84% — but the next finding is a near-doubling of the click-through rate when a link is a source in the A.I. Overview compared to if it is not. Not only does this appear to contradict Pew’s findings, it is also described as an “incremental” change despite click-through figures being as similarly small as the previous finding.
The overall trend seems undeniable, however — A.I. Overviews are generally clobbering search referral traffic. Publishers are aware of ebbs and flows in search referral traffic. A.I. Overviews are not having that kind of middling effect. I appreciate Germain’s yadda-yadda framing of Google’s response here; if it wishes to dispute the overall trend, Google should provide evidence.
Germain:
Ironically, Google’s own AI disagrees with its PR department. If you ask Google Gemini, it says AI Overviews hurt websites. […]
I get the joke but I wish it was not included in this article because it plays into myths of how generative A.I. works. Germain is smart enough to know Gemini is just parroting news articles about the subject. And if it did not, it would be deeply suspicious! If questions to Gemini only showed Google P.R.-approved responses, that would be much worse.
Several Reddit communities dedicated to sharing news and media from conflicts around the world now require users in the UK to submit a photo ID or selfie in order to prove they are old enough to view “mature” content. The new age verification system is a result of the recently enacted Online Safety Act in the UK, which aims to protect children from certain types of content and hold platforms like Reddit accountable if they don’t.
One formative memory from my childhood is when I saw nightly news broadcasts about the Bosnian war. I was too young to understand it, though I remember seeing gruesome footage of bloodied bodies. I have considered that maybe this is something I should not have been exposed to, and I have also considered it is how I have grown up having a glimpse of the horrors. However, a mix of broadcast standards and my parents’ decisions is how I saw that footage. None of that changes in the post-verification era. Broadcasters will continue to show this footage, and children and teenagers will continue to see it in their homes. But they will be carded when they try to learn more on the web.
Contrary to the beliefs of one moderator of one of these subreddits, this does not seem to be motivated by burying evidence of the atrocities of war. This is the predictable overreach of Reddit choosing to require age verification to view any “not safe for work” subreddit, because of course Reddit is not going to be sensitive to context. It is not right; it is what is least expensive because it requires little additional moderation or underlying technical changes. Reddit could implement different types of NSFW labelling, but that also increases its risk of legal liability if something is improperly labelled.
The Unknown Effect of Google A.I. Overviews on Search Traffic
Pew Research Centre made headlines this week when it released a report on the effects of Google’s A.I. Overviews on user behaviour. It provided apparent evidence searchers do not explore much beyond the summary when presented with one. This caused understandable alarm among journalists who focused on two stats in particular: a reduction from 15% of searches which resulted in a result being clicked to just 8% when an A.I. Overview was shown, and finding that just 1% of searches with an Overview resulted in a click on a citation in that summary.
Beatrice Nolan, of Fortune, said this was evidence A.I. was “eating search”. Thomas Claburn, of the Register, said they were “killing the web”, and Emanuel Maiberg, of 404 Media, says Google’s push to boost A.I. “will end the flow of all that traffic almost completely and destroy the business of countless blogs and news sites in the process”. In addition to the aforementioned stats, Ryan Whitwam, of Ars Technica, also noted Pew found “Google users are more likely to end their browsing session after seeing an A.I. Overview” than if they do not. It is, indeed, worrisome.
Pew’s is not the only research finding a negative impact on search traffic to publishers thanks to Google’s A.I. search efforts. Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan of Ahrefs published, earlier this year, the results of anonymized and aggregated Google Search Console data finding a 34.5% drop in click-through rate when A.I. Overviews were present. This is lower than the 47% drop found by Pew, but still a massive amount.
Ahrefs gives two main explanations for this decline in click-through traffic. First, and most obviously, these Overviews present as though they answer a query without needing to visit any other pages. Second, they push results further down the page. On a phone, an Overview may occupy the whole height of the display, as shown in Google’s many examples. Either one of these could be affecting whether users are clicking through to more stuff.
So we have two different reports showing, rather predictably, that Google’s A.I. Overviews kneecap click rates on search listings. But these findings are complicated by the various other boxes Google might show on a results page, none of which are what Google calls an “A.I.” feature. There are a slew of Rich Result types — event information, business listings, videos, and plenty more. There are Rich Answers for when you ask a general knowledge question. There are Featured Snippets that extract and highlight information from a specific page. These “zero-click” features all look and behave similarly to A.I. Overviews. They all try to answer a user’s question immediately. They all push organic results further down the page. So what is different about results with an A.I. twist?
Part of the problem is with methodology. That deja vu you are experiencing is because I wrote about this earlier this week, but I wanted to reiterate and expand upon that. The way Pew and Ahrefs collected the data for measuring click-through rates differs considerably. Pew, via Ipsos KnowledgePanel, collected browsing data from 900 U.S. adults. Researchers then used a selection of keywords to identify search result pages with A.I. Overviews. Ahrefs, on the other hand, relied on data directly from Google Search Console automatically provided by users who connected it to the company’s search optimization software. Ahrefs compared data collected in March 2024, pre-A.I. rollout, against that from March 2025 after Google made A.I. Overviews more present in search results.
In both reports, there is no effort made to distinguish between searches with A.I. Overviews present and those with the older search features mentioned above, and that would impact average click-through rates. Since Featured Snippets rolled out, for example, they have been considered the new first position in results and, unlike A.I. Overviews in the findings of Pew and Ahref, they can drive a lot of traffic. Search optimization studies are pretty inconsistent, finding Featured Snippets on between 11%, according to Stat, and up to 80% according to Ahrefs.
But the difference is even harder to research than it seems because A.I. Overviews do not necessarily replace Featured Snippets, nor are they independent of each other. There are queries for which Overviews are displayed that had no such additional features before, there are queries where Featured Snippets are being replaced. Sometimes, the results page will show an A.I. Overview and a Featured Snippet. There does not seem to be a lot of good data to disentangle what effect each of these features has in this era. A study from Amisive from earlier this year found the combined display of Overviews and Snippets reduced click-through rates by 37%, but Amisive did not publish a full data set to permit further exploration.
But publishers do seem to be feeling the effects of A.I. on traffic from Google’s search engine. The Wall Street Journal, relying on data from Similarweb, reported a precipitous drop in search traffic to mainstream news sources like Business Insider and the Washington Post from 2022 to 2025. Similarweb said the New York Times’ share of traffic coming from search fell from 44% to 36.5% in that time. Interestingly, Similarweb’s data did not show a similar effect for the Journal itself, reporting a five-point increase in the share of traffic derived from search over the same period.
The quality of Similarweb’s data is, I think, questionable. It would be better if we had access to a large-scale first-party source. Luckily, the United States Government operates proprietary analytics software with open access. Though it is not used on all U.S. federal government websites, its data set is both general-purpose — albeit U.S.-focused — and huge: 1.55 billion sessions in the last thirty days. As of writing, 44.1% of traffic in the current calendar year is from organic Google searches, down from 46.4% in the previous calendar year. That is not the steep decline found by Similarweb, but it is a decline nevertheless — enough to drop organic Google search traffic behind direct traffic. I also imagine Google’s A.I. Overviews impact different types of websites differently; the research from Ahrefs and Amisive seems to back this up.
Google has, naturally, disputed the results of Pew’s research. In an extended comment to Search Engine Journal, the company said Pew “use[d] a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic”, adding “[we] have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic”. What Google sees as flaws in Pew’s methodology is not disclosed, nor does the company provide any numbers to support its side of the story. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has even claimed A.I. Overviews are better for referral traffic than links outside Overviews — but, again, has never provided evidence.
Intuitively, it makes sense to me that A.I. Overviews are going to have a negative impact on click-through rates, because that is kind of the whole point. The amount of information being provided to users on the results page increases while the source of that information is minimized. It also seems like the popular data sources for A.I. Overviews are of mixed quality; according to a Semrush study, Quora is the most popular citation, while Reddit is the second-most popular.
I find all of these studies frustrating and it is not necessarily the fault of the firms conducting them. Try as hard as the search optimization industry has, we still do not have terrifically reliable ways of measuring the impact each new Google feature has on organic search traffic. The party in the best possible position to demystify this — Google — tends to be extremely secretive on the grounds it does not want people gaming its systems. Also, given the vast disconnect between the limited amount Google is saying and the findings of researchers, I am not sure how much I trust its word.
It is possible we cannot know exactly how much of an effect A.I. Overviews will have on search trafic, let alone that of “answer engines” like Perplexity. The best thing any publisher can do at this point is to assume the mutual benefits are going away — and not just in search. Between Google’s legal problems and it fundamentally reshaping how people discover things in search, one has to wonder how it will evolve its advertising business. Publishers have already been prioritizing direct relationships with readers. What about advertisers, too? Even with the unknown future of A.I. technologies, it seems like it would be advantageous to stop relying so heavily on Google.
